Red Mars(1st book) was great. In fact the psychologist talks about at least 2 different 2-axis grids that relate psychological state/emotion that I have plans on using for a chat bot.

I stopped mid way through the second book Green(?Blue?) Mars. I think it had to do with the book following a character(s) whose story didn't interest me.

The third book I can't comment on being that I haven't read it.

Lots of interesting topics/ideas:
Mars original environment preservation VS. immigration (Mar's natural habitat VS. development/progress/technology)
Longevity treatments for population of: under populated Mars VS. overpopulated Earth
Various habitats: tents, lava tunnels, asteroid/moon, ice
Technologies: automations, ultra-light flight vehicle, rock cars, space elevator

That being said I think I might try to start over and read the whole trilogy.

I agree to the "STICK TO THEM" policy in most cases(there are times when project sap vast amounts of money and still make little to no progress).

However, that being said what I would like to see is a set of 5-10 well outline projects with goals and have the people vote on the projects. No need for the easily influenced politicians to be involved when technology allows you to go directly to the people.

Also these projects could have a built in rule/law that the project could not be canceled until X number of years after started and only if it had missed 50% or more of its deadlines/milestones/goals during that time(allows cancellation for those money sapping unfeasible projects, but protects projects making progress).

Yes we don't want to have the people voting on every little project, but they could easily vote on the "lofty goal" of NASA every 8-10 years.

???: Ares; Constellation; Phase out shuttle

Obama: Privatize LEO; No moon; Heavy lift rocket for Mars & asteroids

Armstrong: Denounces Obama's space plans

NASA: Scales back Constellation program (against a congressional ban)

Senate: Heavy Lifter using old tech(Atlas)

NASA: 5 Million for robot prizes

Senate: Add 1+ shuttle flight(s?); Ares rocket replaced by shuttle rocket + Orion capsule

Accurate?

This is implying that they offer software updates that they charge for in order to fix something that they didn't do right in the first place...

I understand and expect to be charged for large version changes especially when the content changes (iPhone3 -> iPhone4, xp -> win7, Super Mario Galaxy -> Super Mario Galaxy 2), but being charged for security updates and to fix "bugs"(?) in the software seems unreasonable.

download *.xxx

Will it blend?

Fido I told you to stop burying your leftovers in the yard.

...All over the place.

At least there won't be any humans outside of the Earth's protective magnitic field since there will be no more missions to the moon.

Is that Roger Waters on The Dark Side of the Moon?

Skynet sound familiar to anyone?

I went and looked at the downloads for the RDS. I noticed something that contradicts the "free" aspect "freely available to everyone": "You should install Visual Studio (2008 or 2010) before you install RDS." @ MSDN download site for RDS

-admittedly this might mean that if you have both VS2010 and RDS you need to install VS2010 first to not cause installation problems. However, this seems that you need to pay for the $1000+ Visual studios before you can use this "free" RDS.

Sigh.

The new political statement of the 21th century:
"I don't like your point of view so I'm blocking your website from being accessed by the people of my (nation, region, city, ISP users, company, etc.)."


In other news Pakistan is experiencing massive depopulation. When ask why a family was moving the reply was: "I can't do any social networking when they blocked my access to Facebook!"

Agreed

Yesterday's science fiction is today's technology which is obsolete tommorow. - Ok this a qoute or at least a paraphrase of one and I wish I knew who said it.