It is images of OTTHER PEOPLE, not just images.

That is pretty much what JPL did.

This is why I believe first manned mission to mars should require staying at least 10-16 years. Hate to say it, but canary in a coal mine. As to these samples, I would think that most microbes on mars are already here. Still I would prefer that extreme caution used and collect these earth or even lunar orbit, and test at iSS.

Offering up a competition to do this is not the way to go. Why? Because a JPL designed approach was already offered up and this is why we are looking at $8-11B to deliver in 15 years.

Need a prize approach in a set of objectives are listed and variable-level prize rewarded based on ranking. Get it done first, and you get $$$, with second getting $. Finally, upon successful return of Up to 1/2 of the samples, they get $ 3B/1B. Finally, limit this to 2-3 groups register for this.

With this approach, it will likely have SX and BO as entities, but it may also produce a 3rd group. This way, a great deal of infrastructure gets quickly developed and will be reused later for Martian/lunar/asteroids missions.

I'm in Canada too! The 'On' part of 'On Route' is a reference to Ontario.

And yeah, the only reason I'm stopping to eat at Innisfil on my way from, say, St. Catharines to North Bay is because insidious corporate advertising is luring me in. Ok, bro.

Well, your comment is instantly dismissible for taking 'I need to hit the bathroom, stretch, and eat' as 'you piss for half an hour,' but an On Route is a rest stop that happens to have a gas station. You go into the On Route itself which has bathrooms, multiple restaurants, some convenience stores, lots of seating, a picnic area....

Hopefully, no federal $ is going into this. Or perhaps federals SHOULD produce some $, but require that all of the cells be made in america, with american, if not western elements.

Seriously, some of it, esp. the early stuff is interesting. A lot of words, poetry. Now? Just junk with a lot of cuss words esp the n-word, and is just garbage.

What 'time' is that, exactly?

My car can do a 500km trip with a single half-hour charging stop. I cannot. I need a break in there to piss, maybe shit, grab some chow, and get a stretch.

In a gas car, I'd be pulling in to an On Route, sitting in the gas line for a few minutes, filling up, parking, then going in to hit the can, grab some chow, and leave.

In my BEV, I pull into the charger, plug in, go in to hit the can, grab some chow, and leave.

For this very standard and usual use case, charging while hitting the can and eating is actually faster than gassing up, hitting the can, and eating.

For people that a) go on long trips two or three times a year, and b) don't want to worry about fast charging on those trips, renting a car for those trips is more cost effective than driving an ICE car year round so that you can satisfy what is, in reality, an edge case.

Like, I'm sure you love using a cube van when you have to move a bunch of stuff, but you're not going to make a cube van your daily driver just in case you need to move a bunch of stuff.

It's both. If China were to shut down their dirty power plants and factories today, you'd have better air pretty damn fast.

But if you're driving on the highway in rush hour traffic for an hour or two a day, surrounded by cars with engine exhaust, you're breathing in all that crap right then and there.

And as more cars move to electric, your local pollution drops, which is good.

We need both local and global pollution sources to drop,

And a hundred years ago, you'd have said 'I live in rural America, and a gasoline pumping infrastructure is largely-nonexistent.'

Actually, you'd have said 'a paved road infrastructure is largely non-existent.'

You'd also have argued the merits of horses versus cars for most of the same arguments you make here.

Which is what many people at the time actually did.

It used to be that we were full of hope, but prepared for the worst. Now, we have a generation that is afraid of everything and prepares for nothing.

Ownership of media was limited BEFORE 1995?6?( give or take ). Before Clinton and GOP pushed a re-write on media ownership, we had some 50-100 companies that owned media (and that was LONG before the explosion with the Internet).IOW, we had competition. Now? Less than 10 companies own American media ( may be 5, I do not recall ).

If we return back to requiring limited ownership (as in how much someone can own), then we would see competition and would see decent media. As it is, we are as bad as China and Russia.

It is LONG past time for us to be able to SUE companies for this, AND to have criminal investigations against the C*O of companies that are breached. Why? Because they are not doing what is needed to protect this data. It is really not that hard to do.