Quoted for emphasis. Even if the only thing we could extract was water, we could potentially use it for potable water, breathable air, rocket fuel, radiation shielding, hydroponics, cleaning... Basically, it would be difficult to have too much water on any extraterrestrial habitat.

Second to water would be just oxygen itself, which supposedly we can bake out of various oxides if we get it hot enough.

After those two items, it's a toss up, at least until we can do much fancier things. The article suggests extracting and purifying silicon and making simple solar cells out of that, as an example. But water and oxygen will be, by far, the two most important and relatively simple things to extract and use.

We haven't put a lot of thought into it because it doesn't require much. Any corporation's HR department is already well-equipped to draft requirements for that kind of position: 15-20 years of experience building and maintaining extraterrestrial habitats, and able to make solid decisions and perform under intense pressure (or an increasing lack thereof).

This is probably mostly true if you're only speaking of behavior. Obviously my wife and I are the main influence since my kids have never been in day care, but they do soak up habits of other people they trust, especially older kids they look up to. My kids are all well-behaved, even on the three- to four-hour flights we take a few times a year, but my oldest (6) has picked up various bad or annoying habits in the past from his friends. One of his old playdate friends had a very annoying tantrum cry that my son tried once or twice. I had to break out the very rare Dad Voice on that one, and he never did it again. A worse example was his friend in kindergarten...my son would do stupid things on his worksheets (scribble instead of drawing or coloring, just guessing when it came to math and reading), just because that's what his friend would do. We asked the teacher to move him, and it got better, then we happened to move across the country, and now he's doing pretty awesome.

Also, my middle child has always been more difficult in other ways. Only recently have we started to make progress on that front by starting a chore chart, where she can earn stars for things we normally have to fight to get her to do, like picking up her room and eating well.

The novelty of that is falling away, though, when it comes to eating. My wife and I love all kinds of food, and my oldest almost always eats whatever we put in front of him. My youngest (1) eats literally everything we put in front of her, edible or not. The middle one, though... We do try to make what she likes but that changes all the time. She won't touch pizza anymore. As of Monday, she apparently no longer likes ribs. In fact it's probably easier to list what she does like: cereal, white rice, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, and any kind of noodles as long as there isn't too much "stuff" on them (like soup, she won't touch any kind of soup).

Hopefully our one-year-old continues to take after her brother.

Ctrl-Z my friend. Undo works perfectly fine in many web forms (including Gmail) when you accidentally select a bunch of text and overwrite it. My wife almost cried when she thought she lost the text from a huge email to a relative she hadn't seen in a while, but luckily I was there when it happened or else she would have given up.

I just tested it and undo works on Slashdot comment fields on IE, FF, and Chrome on Windows 7, and I know it works in Linux because I use it all the time at home.

Did you see the name they picked? You might as well just skip the middle man and mail Ford Motor Company a few hundred dollars as prepayment for their impending trademark lawsuit.

Thinking requires energy in the form of glucose in the blood, derived from food that we eat. So sustaining critical thinking processes require the consumption of more food, which generally comes from a grocer. They have to truck tons of it in every week, which inevitably belches many tons of CO2 in the air.

Therefore, they only oppose thinking for the purposes of saving the environment for our children. Won't you just think of the children? The best thing you can do is not think about them.

You know, for the children.

Yep, I use vim all the time for scripting tasks and FocusWriter for writing. At first I also used it for the rich text formatting, but I was using hacky scripts to convert it to other formats, e.g. starting OpenOffice in headless mode and converting to HTML...it was hideous. On top of that, changing text to bold and italic was easy enough, but I was doing things like changing three hyphens to em dashes and a specific character sequence to horizontal rules in those scripts because those things weren't easy to put in while I was trying to write.

These days I just write in Markdown and convert it with pandoc, and the HTML and EPUB output is infinitely better. All those special cases like em dashes and horizontal rules are handled correctly by pandoc with the -S (smart) option. Since it's just plain text now I could probably do it in vim, but I'm too lazy to come up with settings to do that since it's all there for free in Focuswriter. It looks just as good in Linux as it does in Windows, too.

This is not to mention that working on the stuff that fascinates you doesn't mean it's all joy. I've found this even in my hobbies: I want to make video games, but there is a lot of tedium involved. At my day job, I've spent days hunting down intermittent software bugs, and just because I do it for rockets and missiles and satellites doesn't make it any more fun than doing it for industrial wastewater management systems.

No no no, you (and another guy just a little ways down) haven't made the most interesting connection yet. This is a fancy gravity assist on steroids, but it would still take millions if not billions of years to get to even one of Milky Way's satellite galaxies, let alone Andromeda. So forget about intergalactic travel for now. Where this becomes more immediately interesting is finding pairs of very close, very large gravity wells within the same galaxy. That makes them into something rather like Mass Effect relays. Just wait for the proper alignment and launch toward the opposite pair at very high speeds, which can only be canceled by a similar gravity well. Alpha Centauri is a binary star system but the stars are quite far away, so I doubt it would work there, which is too bad since something relatively close like that would have been nice for us. Gliese 667 is a triple star system where the two larger ones are 12.6 AU apart, so that's a much better but still might not be close enough (I don't know, haven't done any math).

The above observation is right, but your implied conclusion is wrong. Science always grows to infringe upon what was previously thought to be the domain of some supernatural entity. Explorers are named such because they don't see the unknown and simply accept that it will remain that way. Scientific progress happens precisely because scientists don't reach a point and say, "well, I can't go any further, because obviously [supernatural entity] did it."

In case you and GP haven't thought it through to conclusion, the fact that Science does not include religious-type beliefs is a good thing. Popular understanding of science is already horrible enough in the US due to politics, we don't need schools refusing to teach algebra just because it was first described by a Muslim. Newton is not "given a free pass." To discredit his work in physics and calculus because of his "work" in alchemy would be logical fallacy (probably the most common one: ad hominem). Similarly, we don't throw out Einstein's contributions just because he didn't like what quantum theory implied about the universe.

By the way, Newton saw proof of alchemy in phenomena like Diana's Tree. Without the understanding provided by modern chemistry, seeing it as evidence of life in metals would have seemed pretty plausible back then, I imagine.

Bringing up the rear? Don't sell us short, dude, we execute way more people than some of those places.

There will always be some who want to push the boundaries of science, even if they consume lots of entertainment. I think the fact that we have not encountered intelligent life is probably a combination of three things: advanced civilization being exceedingly rare, interstellar travel remaining impossible or at least exceedingly impractical, and the fact that the Earth seems completely silent beyond 110 light-years away (and those signals degrade so fast they would be noise anyway).

To expand on that first point, consider that it has taken Earthlings over 3.5 billion years to evolve to this point, having pushed through many near extinctions. Granted, other worlds may have enabled intelligent life faster, but that's 25% of the life of the universe, and more than half of that time went by before a multi-celled organism evolved! So of course intelligent life is going to be exceedingly rare. The Milky Way may have 300 billion stars, but a large percentage of those are in a region of space that sees far more potential extinction events than our region of space.

To extrapolate from our current technological position (I know, we are always terrible at doing that) we'll become more and more efficient at extracting, making use of, and recycling closer resources. We'll probably find it just as easy, if not easier to manipulate our own genes to require less energy and survive in a permanent space habitat closer to its home planet than travel to the stars. So it's not difficult to imagine a situation where a civilization will not need to leave its own star system (at least until the star dies, and maybe not even then) outside of probes, especially if no signals distinguishable from cosmic noise ever reach them or their probes. But at that level of technology on those time scales, who knows how artificial intelligence might change the game.

I think some of those numbers are too low. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says 2012 median pay is:
welder - 36K
plumber - 49K
electrician - 50K

I know median isn't the same as average, but this article says plumbers average $51,500, and this one says $52,950. Also, I think a small part of this is due to work location. Obviously not all of it, but every podunk town in the country has welders, plumbers, and electricians, but engineers and social scientists are much more concentrated in cities with higher costs of living. If you look at San Jose, CA, the median plumber salary ($79K) is 60% higher than the national median (see USNews link above), but the mean electrical engineer salary ($121K) is only 30% higher than the national mean.

I'm an engineer, but some of the most rewarding work I've done was at a research lab where I did all kinds of trade-like stuff, like cutting and hanging electrical conduit and pressurized gas lines, a bit of simple PVC water plumbing (replacing a leaky valve here and there), and a bit of carpentry, building test stands and partition walls with metal studs and drywall. We had all manual pipe cutters, threaders, and reamers/deburring tools, too, which are more physically demanding but way more satisfying to use than the automatic stuff. There were the also simple painting or cleaning tasks, too, but that more fun stuff is what I remember most clearly.

It doesn't matter to some people: whether my ancestors evolved from the same creatures as apes did or a fluffy pink unicorn farted them into existence doesn't affect their day-to-day activities (with the possible exception of the occasional worship of said fluffy pink unicorn). Unfortunately, though, it does affect who people elect to represent them, and it does affect how they lead us. The results of this survey imply that, for the foreseeable future, we are going to keep getting into situations where elected officials try to do things like inject non-science into science classes when the science conflicts with their religious beliefs, and shape public policy in ways that conform to their particular religion. And the numbers show we still have a long way to go to fix that.