It sounds like the plan is for this ship to be the first of several, so the question is how much of that $20 billion investment is for upfront costs (design, shipyard upgrades, construction equipment) that will not be duplicated in subsequent ships. As it is, the first ship looks to probably at least break even or even make a decent profit (provided it works as expected) with bigger profits hopefully to follow. I am sure these numbers have been gone over very carefully. You don't make an investment this large on a whim.

As a space systems engineer, I would agree. There isn't much benefit to putting humans in the Venusian clouds. It adds weight and risk to the mission. They can just as well stay in orbit, controlling a robotic exploration blimp.

This is what's screwy with /.'s habit of pushing Journals to the Masses without specifically being told to do so. My apologies.

To clarify for you and for others, I wanted to set up Google Authenticator on Debian Wheezy. Instructions are pretty simple; I think it took me all of ten minutes to do, from start to finish.

If you're thinking about giving it a shot, the instructions are generic enough to cover many Linux distros. If yours isn't covered, you might be able to figure it out in pretty short order.

Police Unions. Thats what makes it difficult (and expensive).

> carrying out a crime while armed makes the penalty more severe.

Police are always armed when on duty. Just apply the same rules to them as to everyone else.

Essentially *all* Dollars, in a computer or in paper, are just representations of debt. When the Federal Reserve issues paper money, it's backed by Treasury bonds and mortgages. When banks make loans, the loan check is backed by the loan they just made.

> I don't believe that it is absolutely uncountefeitable. I did read the Wiki on it, but I don't think that any item digitally-based is safe. We are on /. after all ;)

Then you don't understand the central invention in bitcoin, an accounting ledger that is public and cannot be altered. In order to counterfeit some bitcoins, you would have insert a transaction into everyone's copy of the ledger, and also have a valid checksum (hash). Without it, every copy of the software will reject the data as invalid. The huge amount of specialized hardware thrown at generating valid hashes prevents anyone else from inserting a spurious one.

> I just hope it does not become publicly accepted. Can someone help convince me that bitcoin is the way to go?

Modern money, like the US Dollar, is just how we keep track of who owes something to others, or is owed something. Mostly the tracking is via bank ledgers, but occasionally it is on paper (as in paper money). Almost every dollar in existence represents a debt, either treasury bonds, mortgages, or other bank loans. Dollars make the debt easily traded in convenient units.

Bitcoin also uses a ledger to keep track. It's a public distributed one, but rather than being based on debt, it's based on work. All the balances are positive. This discourages a government from spending money it doesn't have, and banks from leeching off the rest of us, earning money simply because they create debt, instead of actual work.

Central banks have shown time and time again that they are bad at managing their money supply. Venezuela and Russia are two current examples, but there are literally hundreds of examples through history. Bitcoin's supply is managed by a software algorithm that releases new units at a known rate. It is on automatic pilot rather than the whim of fallible humans. I trust that more.

Most importantly, it's not just NASA -- the NSF and NIH also have above-inflation budget increases, after several years of stark cuts. I was worried that this was going to be cannibalizing one science for another, but that doesn't appear to be the case!

[TMB]

The big drop since 2008 is because solar cell production at that point exceeded silicon ingot needs for electronics. When electronics was the main demand, it was not worth making separate plants for "solar grade" silicon. Electronics grade is much more expensive, because crystal defects make computer chips unusable. They only make solar cells a little less efficient. Nowadays silicon ingots for solar panels is the dominant market. In this graph you can even see a rise in price as silicon got in short supply, followed by the crash as new solar-grade production went into operation:

http://costofsolar.com/managem...

has decided to take money in exchange for allowing "non-intrusive" advertising through its lists, pretty much against the interests of it's users who don't want any ads.

On the contrary. Allowing non-intrusive ads (by default--you can disable this feature in: Preferences) is the best thing any Adblock type program has ever done.

It's actually offering content producers a significant incentive for using ads which are less objectionable to users. The alternative is advertisers benefit by doing worse and worse things, and those who choose to block ads are silent and uncounted. This could help reverse the trend, and keep sites and advertisers honest and decent, and offer counter-incentive to irritation.

Most of those have cloned Cisco's IOS CLI and configuration structure, at least to some extent. Juniper's JUNOS was intentionally NOT written to clone IOS; instead they "invented" their own CLI and configuration structure from scratch. While it has its own warts, JUNOS is vastly superior to IOS ("commit confirm" FTW!).

TIL a troll can have no idea what he's talking about but can somehow manage to find "solipsism" in the dictionary.