Dear China,
Thank you. I love you. You're the best!
- Fan of space
PS - Please launch a probe to Mars ASAP. Be sure to provide the highest quality live feed of launch and resulting Martian arrival directly to MSNBC and Fox News.

What is being overlooked here, imo, is the factor that drove the Apollo program to such fantastic feats on its relatively short timescale. That type of commitment and effort is _never_ going to be undertaken without the threat of another country topping the US. Barring the type of wake-up-call moment like Sputnik or Gagarin, the necessary desire to get us to the aspirational next level will continue on this iterative path of fits and starts. The key factor that allowed for Mercury -> Gemini -> Apollo was the race to the moon. Right now we have these wishy-washy blurred objectives like wouldn't it be great to visit an asteroid or maybe we'll be walking on Mars in 20 years. F that. We really need a challenger. China. Like the title says, they need to get to Mars. Will them putting something real into orbit do the trick? Is that even attainable given their current launch capabilities (I think so). Until something like that happens, we're doomed to live in this bureaucratic netherworld of pork. The public (I'm guilty too) is too apathetic to realize the country could really use something inspiring like this. Otherwise all the wonderful brainpower out there will continue to funnel into the world of spooky finance transactions... who can blame them!!

I knew it wasn't just the black heli's trying to block out my Boneyard! Something was definitely up w/SiriusXM reception around 6PM EST today... unless it was something else that has nothing to do with the flare. IANAAstrophysicist.

For those of you looking to fill your meme quotient for the day... Yo dawg, we heard you like Google Wave, so we got a real person to wave at you while you wave at your friends from your wave.

This is a blatant advertisement. Who's responsible for letting junk like this through? Has your account been hacked, CmdrTaco (or should we now call you CmdrSPAM)? It's bad enough stories are often duplicates and days/weeks old. This is just sh*tty spam.

Huge fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson as well - check out his new show Nova Science Now. It's a little parochial, but I believe it's intended for a younger audience - it definitely has a good fun factor with solid science qualities. Also love seeing him on Colbert. Total riot!

That's the thing... so they take down the Internets within 30 mins. Does it really matter _that_ much if it's just back up again in a day or so (and after that, now the folks trying to figure out who owns all the bots have much more data to figure out the responsible parties)? Doesn't seem like an event of this nature would be more than a bump in the road or yet another reason to sell some "I survived the Internet B0tst0rmz of 2009" t-shirts. Speaking of that:

1) Gather monster-storm of zombie PCs
2) Take down Internets
3) Sell "I survived the Internet B0tst0rmz of 2009" t-shirts
4) Profit