Meh. SpaceX (or another private company) will have people on Mars long before NASA has the vehicles to do it for ten times the price.

Unfortunately those excellent points are of little use in an argument because most religions are only loosely based on their holy book (despite their claims to the contrary), what matters is the dogma - the officially sanctioned interpretation of the "divine" word. When people say "the book says so", what they really mean is "the dude in the temple says so".

Everyone who doesn't have more money than he needs, yeah. Good for you that you don't need to worry about money, but not everyone is that lucky.

When there are times when you just can't afford to fill the tank of your car, you start to notice how much gas costs. When your flat is the cheapest you could find, you know exactly how much it costs. And so on.

Sorry, but your comment sounds a bit condescending to be honest. "What, people actually know how much they spend, and on what? Why would they pay attention to such trivia?"

When you're desperate for cash anyway, Sir!

Having toyed with the demo, I think the idea is that at first you need to sort of visualize the letters as you type, but you quickly develop muscle memory for that because there are only four keys and the mnemonic is easy and visual. It's not something like Dvorak where you would have a steep learning curve before payoff... But I'd sure be interested to know how non-dictionary words are handled - this is where those alternative keyboards usually fail.

Yeah, none of the videos I could find actually explain how it works. They just keep repeating it's awesome and show people fiddling fuzzily with their screens.

You could have at least tried Ctrl-C (which you should know from DOS) before rebooting :-)

There are surely plenty of people willing to take the chance and go _now_, regardless of those comparatively small risks.

Plus there's good science to be done, and it could lead to new insights for space exploration too.

Indeed it's probably a configuration issue. My now antique dell latitude d600 boots xp sp3 in 30 seconds. Firefox is up and running in 45 seconds, and that machine is quite old.

There is a nice add-on I used before switching back to 3.6, it works well. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

I've decided to stick to FF 3.6 for now, but I know you're right, at some point it will become unusable. I've known situations like that in the past, and have switched to Opera several times, a few months at a time.

I'd love to fly in one of these, and I'd love to see them being adopted massively. As far as I understand Zeppelins were abandoned because of the war and bad mojo after the Hindenburg, in any case they seem to make perfect sense nowadays.

That would be fine, but apparently some people have lost access to other google stuff (gmail, calendar, docs...) after some misunderstanding regarding their identity. That's not acceptable.

[citation needed]