That depends. a CD-R will fail over time due to scratches, and chemical/physical decay. The organic dye used as a writing surface typically is rated for only 10 years or so, but most people are unaware of this. I buy taiyo-yuden brand cd/dvd media because they are chemically stable for about 70-100 years if stored properly. Avoid scratches or coat it with a some super polymer and you're golden. Also keep out of sun and microwaves. As to whether you can make a cassette last 70-100 years, how bout you try yours, and I'll try mine, and our grandkids can settle it, eh?

Sorry, it would have helped if you had clarified, perhaps by using a source like this, or spelled it out with capital letters.

technically, according to your logic, it would be a billion floating-point operations PER

You can, and in some places of the world, they do. Oil is mixed with mud and baked in the sun into cookies. This is actual sustenance for the poor in Haiti. See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/01/080130-AP-haiti-eatin_2.html

This is impossible for most people to do, I would guess. I myself graduated from Computer Engineering a year ago. After being immersed in academia for 5 years, there is no way I could have figured out what I wanted to do, as far as my career goes. And I had already had 4 years of internship experience on top of that. I had considered getting a masters, and a Ph.D.

I decided that I would try and pay off some student loans before continuing. One thing He is probably NOT AWARE OF (if he's reading this), is just how much in debt he is... the amount of money they let you borrow is quite high, and getting more in debt from a master's degree is dangerous.

Weapons-grade plutonium is made by refining nuclear waste in a reactor. This process reduces nuclear waste by 95%, but is frowned upon by the major nuclear powers because it produces weapons-grade plutonium, and no one wants to be manufacturing bomb-making material. They've been doing it since the 1940's so its not new or anything. The problem is also that such manufacture is illegal on an international scale.

The article says that P-238 is used as a power source because of the heat is causes during decay. Surely someone could come up with a better power source for these probes than a rare isotope. I'm not even sure than this plutonium could be manufactured by refining nuclear waste, since that process produces P-239.

Yes sir, I do. 18000 mph is 5 miles/sec. What instruments do we have that can measure and track anything like that? If you were in a space craft, and something went past you at that speed, you would not be able to detect it at all. We can join craft together because we already know precisely where everything is, and how fast its going. And to be fair, we do know where a large number of space junk is, so you could in theory set up an operation to manually track down and grab anything that can be tracked from earth.

Okay, objects in geosynchronous orbit have a velocity of 18000 miles/hr or greater, and relative to each other than could even double (but if you were very good, you could match orbits). So, how exactly do you grab one?

That should have been "Nothing to see here. Move along."

heat is light, more or less

I must point out, that this fellow claims to have been publishing on the internet for over 20 years. That means before 1989. How many people here published anything on the internet before 1989? He obviously has a passion for freedom of information, which is a large measure of our protection from the Government (any free people's protection from their Government, actually).