That he thinks the GP has a "pencil-like thingie" and spits out "utility fog".

I saw a presentation on NASA's current thoughts on shielding, but didn't take notes so I can't quote specifics. The shielding choices they listed were water, polyethylene, and liquid hydrogen. The LH2 was the most effective and thinnest shield. A water shield for an Earth-Mars trip was something like 1-3 meters thick and not thought to be practical for launch from Earth. Someone did suggest captured "comet cores" as the best source of a water shield.

The peak in the center of crater Drygalski is an "uplift", which is common in craters. The Wikipedia page on impact craters describes this briefly and has other nice images. These LPI lunar maps helped me identify the crater itself.

Only points straight up? Insert this above your Secondly:

The spacecraft's orbit is too far south to pass over the HAARP site.

The HDU work to-date has focused on developing processes, procedures, and some technologies you'd need to live away from Earth. The first assumption is, "We have a habitat." They're still figuring out where to put lights and bunks before building expensive hardware for tests in near-Earth space. With current Administration/NASA plans, the next step is a Lagrange point and/or asteroid. Mars (and those siting and assembly issues) will have to wait...

Where/when I grew up in Texas, sweetened fizzy water was called "coke". A party host would ask, "What kind of coke do you want?" A perfectly OK answer could be, "Oh, I'll have Sprite."

Checking #6 at the second link, they're clearly using Fortran. After seeing "Xtr" used to condense "Extra", I was surprised to see "idays" and "nweeks" instead of old-timer "idys" and "iwks" in the subroutine. As a Fortran snob, I hope the poor use of indentation and lack of whitespace is simply a result of the conversion to HTML.

This reminds me of the coverage surrounding Madison Priest's "magic box". Do the Google, or check these two articles (sadly no pics in the archived articles).

It means the Slashdot prediction is at least a couple of hours later than the official predictions.

People communicate in Welsh?

(sorry...I've been busy)

Also important are that there are fewer small debris at GEO and the debris-encounter velocities are much lower. There's some interesting stuff in the beginning of NASA's "History of On-Orbit Satellite Fragmentations" (like figures 1.3.2-2 & -2). This and other docs are linked here.

Yup. Apple is in the driver's seat and it's their car. If they don't like what you're doing, they simply push you out the door.

Skynet went online on 1969. It continues to serve the UK military to this day. They're up to series 5, but it doesn't seem self-aware yet.

Heh. That also reminds me of the cartoon where Daffy Duck gives up his prize of "ONE MILLION BOX!"

My monoliths said never to trust your monoliths...