I find that even though the specifics are different, the fundamental skill is the same..problem solving

The steps are the same..clearly identify the problem, look at the tools and materials that are available, then find a solution using what you have to work with

Well, if "what you have to work with" isn't "the skill to use the tools and materials available", then your "fundamental skill" is fundamentally fucking useless. (Not to mention that someone who lacks the "the skill to use the tools and materials available" isn't all likely to have the information needed to find a solution in the first place.) The real world isn't an MBA case study. You need actual skills.

In ballistic mode, it only fine tunes the trajectory - you can't simply 'fire it in the general direction' and fix things up later. You already have to be in the basket, which isn't that large. The basket is larger for glide mode, but it's still not "in the general direction".

(Hint: Quoting from Wikipedia when you don't know jack shit doesn't make you look intelligent when you're replying to someone who does know what he's talking about.)

Instead, you have to store enough energy to fire the thing. I assure you - punching a hole in a capacitor bank charged up to fire one of these will not merely result in an 'arc flash' hazard...

A capacitor bank can be placed inside armor, or at least inside an enclosed volume, with minimal interfaces - historically, the access needed to transfer ammunition into or out of a magazine has been it's Achilles heel.

Imagine a shell that can adjust it's flight path, even slightly, which means you can fire in the general direction you want, then fine tune the aim in flight. (I assume they don't do that now..)

They don't, and even a railgun projectile probably won't either - because the force required to effect a significant change in trajectory (especially in azimuth) is simply too great.

It's not entirely clear what the advantage of a railgun would be

It means you don't have carry propellant for the shells - propellant that's volatile and dangerous to handle and store. (Historically, the vast majority of Naval ordinance casualties are related to the propellant, not the payload.) You reduce the size, weight, and complexity of the handling path as the size and weight of the round decreases. You also reduce the size of the magazines. (Yes, some of the saved space and weight will be spent on whatever provides the energy for the gun.)

Everyone running old specfialized hardware which is not compatible with windows 7 or later feel the pain of the XP end of life.

That is not the pain of XP EoL, it is the self inflicted torture by those who refuse to use free and open source software.

Bullshit. The free and open source software frequently simply doesn't exist for specialized hardware. Period. Not to mention, I find it very unlikely that free and open source will long continue to support XP - Firefox, for example, has already dropped support for everything prior to SP3.

F/OSS is not the universal panacea it's fanboy's would like to have us believe.

The copyright running out on XP wouldn't solve the problem of a lack of support.

Precisely this, support only happens where there is money or self interest in doing so. And the kind of people who've been coasting along on Microsoft's free patches aren't going to suddenly start paying Bob's Computer Support and Lawn Maintenance for patches just because the code was released into the public domain.

access to unfiltered information will make people THINK!

Bullshit. Even a single day of reading /. will rapidly disabuse anyone with any intelligence of that notion.

Hopefully, the recommendation engine will work better than Google's current one on YouTube. Yeah, it's a pretty low bar, but Google's record on building useful UI's is... spotty at best.

That's not much help when your rover is 10km from base.

Seriously, there's so much that's damn difficult about Martian exploration that we *know* we don't know.... that I can't help but laugh when people like Elon Musk or Mars One proposes doing it on the cheap and on a short timeline.

However, I thought that Roku (which I don't have) did exactly that - I seem to remember read they had a cross-channel search of some kind (though I would guess it had some limitations). Does anyone know if that's the case?

Roku does have a cross channel search - but it appears there are some channels which it doesn't search or don't allow themselves to be searched. Crunchyroll is one such. Amazon is another.

From TFS: ""Google's Project Ara, an effort to develop a modular smartphone platform, sounded at first as much like vaporware, but Google is actually making it happen. In an upbeat video, Dave Hakkens (the guy who created the Phonebloks design that appears to be the conceptual basis for Project Ara) visited the Google campus to see what progress is being made on the project."

How is this not vaporware? Kewl magnets and flashy app screens barely qualify as sizzle and are nowhere near steak.

I think the point was something more like, "We don't need to worry about genetic diversity if we can just pack embryos." That way, you can staff the spaceship with an appropriate number of people for making the trip and establishing a colony, and then use the embryos once you hit the point of needing genetic diversity.

Which misses the whole point of the article - you need genetic variation in flight, right from day one.

If you are willing to sacrifice the coolant, an atmosphere as feeble as Mars' shouldn't stop evaporative cooling

They've been using water as a sacrificial coolant for decades, the problem on the Martian surface (as opposed to on orbit) is the evaporation rate (and thus the heat carried away) is slowed just enough to require increasing the surface area of the evaporator to inconvenient dimensions. The physical effort expended in working in a space suit produces a lot of heat - and the suits are very well insulated to control the loss of heat.
 

I wonder how abrasive the dust storms are? There are some pretty decent wind speeds, so you could get away with using big radiators, lightly built, unless the grit eats them.

The windstorms aren't that abrasive, while the wind speeds are high the atmosphere is very tenuous. I think I read somewhere that a 100mph wind on the Martian surface is the equivalent of a 5mph wind on the Earth's surface. (That's why Martian dust is closer to Lunar dust than terrestrial.) The problem is that big (suit) radiators push up the size of the airlocks, cause balance and movement problems, etc.... as it requires some damn big radiators to transfer sufficient heat. (Tenuous atmosphere == very low efficiency transfer.)

ersonally I think it'd make a really interesting reality show. In fact, they could fund the Mars trip like that.

A global hit on the scale of Dr Who would only barely pay the interest and a bit of the principal. You'd need global income on the scale of the Olympics to take a serious bite out of the principal - and you'd need that income for the better part of a decade. Not happening.