If they'd been working with aeroplane technology and keeping up with progress for the 109 years since Kitty Hawk then yes, I think they probably would have a few useful ideas.

Any scientist with a reputation to protect will keep a million miles from anybody with such a request. Can you imagine the ridicule they'd get at their next conference if their colleagues knew they'd been talking about resurrecting dinosaurs? Maybe one day it will be possible to restore a whole organism from remains millions of years old, but right now the technology is very far from achieving that.

Trouble is you need to find a place which has continuously stayed below freezing for the last 65 million years, plus a species of dinosaur which would have lived in such a place. I'm unaware of any woolly-mammoth type dinosaur thought to have lived in a freezing climate. And whilst the last of the dinosaurs was walking the earth, Antarctica had a sub-tropical climate.

Not it didn't. A car can arrive exactly at its destination after hundreds of miles, but not because it set out with incredibly precise steering. Rockets, like cars, but unlike golf balls, can steer.

And that's not the only difference between sport and space-science.

Once you know the key's shape, all bets are off: you don't need fancy tech to make a copy. You can make a key out of metal with just a few hand tools, and it would probably be quicker than 3D printing too. Brass is easy to work and much stronger than plastic.

People get bored easily: even NASA's Apollo programme had trouble sustaining public interest after the first few missions. And yet you will be far more dependent on audiences than Apollo ever was. What do you expect the Mars colonists' lifespans to be, and how will you maintain funding for that length of time?

They'll need lots of power for heat and to electrolyse water to make oxygen, amongst other things. The few watts needed for communications will be the least of their worries.

...which explains why Google recently disposed of its 3D drawing tool, Sketchup. With the rise of algorithms like Photosynth it was inevitable that hand-drawn features would be superseded by automatic analysis. I just hope that Sketchup or tools like it remain available for drawing features which don't exist (yet). Of course there are plenty of 3D CAD programs available, but for those of us who aren't professional draughtsmen, few approach the ease-of-use that Sketchup has.

Indeed, but PC architecture is going in this direction. The powerful and flexible main CPU will remain, but there are more and more devices with their own specialised processors and memory. First graphics cards, then HDDs and other devices followed suit, and now we think nothing of putting microcontrollers in mice, keyboards, even speakers. Perhaps in the future I/O could be handled entirely by the in-memory processors. The more work the CPU can outsource to specialised processors, the faster it's going to get done.

The SPARC64 VIIIfx can carry out 8 floating-point instructions per core per cycle.

88,128 cpus x 8 cores x 2.0e9 cycles/s x 8 flops/cycle = 11.28 petaflops maximum theoretical speed.

Y'know I think they might have taken that into account. My local friendly electronics store is selling 7" displays for $265, three times the cost estimate in TFA.

I can't tell if you're serious. On my car arc-discharge headlamps are a thousand-euro option; goodness knows what BMW will charge for laser-beams.

Meanwhile my oh-so-inefficient filament headlamps consume about 100MJ/year. Accounting for engine and alternator efficiency that's about half a tank of petrol per year, or 500 euros over the lifetime of the vehicle.

Ahhh, it's a money-saving measure. Of course.

There's always a way to elegantly express yourself whilst avoiding the mangled nouveau-English spoken in offices. Try "exploit" or even "use".

Yes please!

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