And who knows, 2880 AC's might get a grasp on statistics. (1:10E6 chance of a global event does not give you 7000 casualties - that's not even wrong.)

That's correct. We have plenty of oil / coal / tar sands / algae. What we need is a coherent discussion on how to get from here to there over the course of, say, a generation. We need some leadership to push the concept.

If it were the Soviet Union it would be a Hero Project. If it were 1930's US it would be another Rural Electrical Association or WPA project. If it were the 60's it would be the manned spacecraft program.

Unfortunately, in the 21st Century US political climate it's most likely to end up as the "War on Power" or something similar.

Exactly this. It would require smart 'everything' (and one hell of a lot of aluminum foil from this crowd). Centralization of a bunch of info. Revamping the transmission grid. Rewiring the cities, towns and hinterlands.

Certainly technically doable. Certainly a political non starter.

Keep saving those AA's. Your gonna need them.

Depending on who you work with, blocking attachments can be very useful. If you have users that will click on anything, yes you need to block attachments.

Unfortunately, we have users that will click on anything. But yes, security is a process.

I have one word for you: Godzilla.

Of course. Perfectly simple. Perfectly simple to secure a 10,000 gallon tank of diesel oil in the face of a 20 foot high cascade of water and debris capable of knocking entire buildings off their foundations. And that after a magnitude 9 earthquake. Totally simple.

Surprised I am to find that wee bits of assorted chemicals were dumped into the environment after the disaster. Most surprised.

No brainer, indeed.

It's Obama's fault.

It DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE where Apple stores credit card / serial number / address info. Look folks, it's pretty obvious. Any government larger than, say, North Korea, has the contacts, money and power to get any consumer or personal information running across their territory. Britain, France, Germany, hell even Portugal or Texas (well maybe not Texas).

So, all you can hope for, be you Chinese or American, Swiss or Tongan, is that your friggen Credit Card stays away from some clown in Eastern Europe who wants to make a quick buck. That's ALL you can hope to do.

You put something on a computer hooked to the Internet - it's not private anymore. End of story.

Look you. It's hard to be a fanboi around here. First it was Apple, then Jobs had to go and die on us. Then it was Google which somehow managed to go all Evil in the space of a few years.

There always were a few twisted folk who thought Gates was the second coming but we mostly ignored them except to use them as the butt of some pretty nasty jokes.

Who else? Nokia? Blackberry? Motorola? H-P ???????

So 'ol Elon shows up in a cool car and a rocketship. Man, that's pretty close to God hood around here. Car AND Rocket Scientist analogies.

He's all we've got.

If you're looking for facts, don't go to a psychiatrist. Solace, understanding, compassion, drugs maybe. But not facts.

Indeed. Caffeine is remarkably safe an effective, if not incredibly powerful. Coca leaves are also quite safe. Cocaine and amphetamines not so much. Of course, then one gets into the murky question of how much you let individuals control and take responsibility for their actions. I give the US another generation before pretty much everything is either on the table for everyone to snort or everything the other side of the classic triumvirate (alcohol, tobacco and firearms, oops, coffee) will get you tossed in jail.

Nobody (outside Slashdot and other highly reputable bits of the Internet) really questions whether ADD exists.

Many people wonder about a number of aspects of the problem:

- Where the break between normal and abnormal is. Like most biological issues, this behavior is on a continuum. Where do you intervene?
- Which leads to the question of diagnostic accuracy and efficiency.

We know that amphetamine class drugs are helpful in real ADD. But these drugs (like virtually all drugs) have risks and benefits. Since amphetamines carry significant risks, who do you treat and how long. It is also clear than non-pharmeceutical approaches can work, but these are typically labor and time intensive. How do you manage this?

So there is plenty to discuss within the framework of diagnosis and treatment of the disease. But it most certainly exists.

It's there though. To be fair, NASA does have a fair amount of in house engineering although a hell of a lot less than in the glory days. But the big projects have always been through contractors.

NASA was more like the general contractor on a construction site - an architect designed things, structural engineers designed things, construction crews built it - but somebody had to organize it. And, with the Saturn V / Apollo stack, they had to organize the most complex device ever created. Took some work, it did. Especially when you consider the level of automation available then. Most engineers still used slide rules when Apollo 11 took off.

The 'basics' to Mars have hardly been proven. Actually, what SpaceX is doing is bootstrapping up on 'simple' things - getting something to LEO. That's been proven to work. Then going to Mars (perhaps). But you have to start doing relatively straightforward stuff before you can do the esoteric - at least in meatspace engineering.

But, as you say, NASA's job was pushing at frontiers. That's actually what NASA was doing in Mercury - Gemini - Apollo. Then the military with their 'we-want-it-don't-much-care-how' attitude that brought you the Shuttle Kludge pushed in and pretty much trashed the Shuttle (and, ironically reincarnated it as the XB-37). Then it started costing real money and Congress got their fingers in it. The results were predictable.

NASA is in a bit of a bind. They still do a lot of basic research and even applied research (mostly in aeronautics vs. space) but the marquee projects have taken huge hits and management has been beat up at multiple levels. Remember, the big thing with the Apollo program wasn't so much the tech. It was getting all of those bits of tech rolled up into a project that could launch the most complex device ever created and get parts of it back. We've completely lost that management structure. It can be argued that modern engineering and computer science makes that investment in human management unneeded - that's what Musk is really trying to prove - that a small company can put all of the bits and pieces together to do something it took NASA tens of thousands of people to do.

I'm a bit doubtful but I wish him all of the luck - at least he's doing something.

Ack. No.

I like OS X / iOS but I get supremely pissed off at Apple's tendency to 'hide' things so the UI looks 'uncluttered'. Yes, you can run an Internet search on the function, but the thesis here is that you write your own documentation, not have Google do it for you.