Everything I've ever heard is that landing on the Moon is much easier then Mars. We've actually landed a small spacecraft that held 2 people along with their life support, their spacecraft + fuel to leave the Moon and even threw in a rover for them to go for a Sunday drive.
With Mars, there is enough gravity to make landing by rocket impractical and too little atmosphere to be useful for aerobraking. So far we've landed little packages by using airbags and the largest package, a SUV sized rover was a bitch that involved parachutes, rockets and even a sky crane.
So we've landed a 16,400 kg package on the Moon a couple of times (first ones were only 15,200 kg) while we've landed a 1000 kg package on Mars.
As for the Moon not having volcanoes, it probably did, just that it cooled down fairly quick as all volcanoes are long extinct. Lava tubes have been spotted on the Moon IIRC.
The big advantage of the atmosphere of Mars, besides giving some protection, is that it allows erosion so the dust is nicely rounded unlike moon dust that is jagged. The dust may still be a problem due to its fineness (very dry)

Most nuclear reactors produce electricity through basic heat engines so you need a heat sink. Probably need a whole new design. This would be true for the Moon and Mars

There's been about 8 successful landings on Venus. True that they all failed in a short length of time due to heat and pressure.
I always liked the story of the first attempted landing, Due to not realizing just how thick the atmosphere was the probes batteries died before it landed.

Venus doesn't have a magnetic field like the Earth does, whether due to lack of a molten core, lack of convection or the more likelihood that it is not spinning is currently unknown. This is one of the main reasons that Venus lost its hydrogen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

The Supreme court seems to have a very lenient interpretation of the constitution.

Where in the Constitution does it say that the rights outlined only apply to US citizens, besides political rights such as voting and holding some offices?

Didn't Jesse James also have some honour?

Copyright has been extended in such a way as to re-copyright works that had entered the public domain.
Perhaps we should be lobbying for copyright to be extended further backwards so all those dead people will be more motivated. At least it might show the stupidity of endless copyright if anyone using stories based on Shakespeare had to pay his estate.

By highly regulated, I guess you mean that once in a while the bureau of weights and measures checks the accuracy of the pumps (they used to also check for gas leakage from the tanks but no more) and I guess you really believe that Esso, Chevron, Petrol Canada, Husky Oil and Shell make razor thin profits? Every gas station is owned by on of those 6 oil companies here so when they can as a unit raise prices, it increases profits.
It's much like the ISP business rather then a free market. Free markets need multiple players playing on a level playground including not using the government to subsidize your business.
Now I understand in other parts of the world there is still such a thing as independent gas stations who compete but not here.

Saturn would be better then Jupiter if we ever wanted to mine a gas giants atmosphere, much less radiation.

The fact that the Greater Vancouver area (GVRD) has a 15 cent per litre extra tax is public knowledge. Other costs are going to the same or higher as you get closer to Vancouver where you're really lucky to find a house for less then a million dollars

The problem is in the details. They do believe in small government and "free" market capitalism.

Yes, that is what our government claims to be about, less government (oversight) and more free market capitalism, they're the Conservatives. They've been reducing the size of government so fast that we have no idea what they're doing, eg today a report on how the military police handled the suicide of a service man came out, very damning. Solution from the small government people, no more public investigations.
They want to run more oil tankers through the Port of Vancouver so they closed the oil spill response office and the coast guard (coast guard only was called out about 300 hundred times a year).
Of course they're enlarging spying on the people, introducing legislation to preemptively lock up potential terrorists and so on.
The idea of small government is good but when the parts that serve the people are done away with in favour making everything a secret and giving certain businesses all the government help that is possible as well as declaring anyone against those businesses a terrorist who should be unconstitutionally locked up...
As for collusion, I'm sure it is just coincidence that every gas station raises and lowers their prices in lockstep and within minutes of each other and investigating for collusion goes against the small government mantra, same with keeping records about the lobbyists.

Every time the price of the raw product goes up, it goes up at the pump with the oil companies claiming that the price is dependent on the price of the raw product.
Here in Canada its the government that is highly controlled by the oil companies, at least with the current government.

Canada (outside Vancouver) actually, and I can't afford to buy a different vehicle or move to where there is transit so my income depends on gasoline whereas I can swap bananas for other fruit easily.