Range safety has said they didn't have time to push the button, it broke up before they knew there was enough of a problem to use the destruct.

Which is what? You know that vacuum is a very good insulator, right? You basically have to radiate your heat away.

The range guys were asked if they pressed the button. They said they didn't have time to, it broke up before they had a chance to order a destruct.

That was referring to the docking adapter (one of two) being sent up this mission.

Orbital speed or GTFO. Hyperbolic flights are for chumps and tourists.

And it takes a lot of energy to hover. And energy takes space and weight to store it. And it takes more energy to hover the additional weight that stores the energy, etc. Well, gosh, maybe it is Star Wars-style after all!

Where is Zefram Cochrane when we need him?

So are you saying that he's a trans-Martian?

That's nice. And what will you do once you get there? Play some awesome networked FPS games?

The moon seems to have very little of use to us, moon dust is nasty sandpaper that sticks to everything and will probably give you silicosis of the lung, plus the lower gravity is worse for human bodies. (And if you say Helium-3 fusion, you are a complete and total space nutter idiot. We're not even near basic fusion yet, and He3 is not the easiest fuel to fuse.) It's a dead rock full of nothing but basalt. And even more important, the latency is low enough that we can easily control robotic missions from down here. Why go to all the expense of sending humans when we haven't even put rovers on it since the last Apollo mission? It's a total tourist trap. "My parents went to the moon and all I got was this T-shirt."

At least Mars has some amount of H2O and CO2 to work with. The perchlorates might be poisonous to Earth life, but at least you don't need a hard-vacuum space suit to go walking around outside. Both places are harsh environments, but Mars is a lot less so.

I think the real question is which one is more likely to have elements other than organics and rocks. In other words, is there gold in them thar hills?

Basicially, he is The Man Who Sold Mars.

I just got an update downloaded like two days ago for 18.0.0.160 and hadn't installed it yet. Now it's already two numbers obsolete? And the number one use of this festering pile is to deliver ads that take over your page and scream at you.

My wheelie bins are BOTH blue. The only difference is that the recycling one has a gray lid with the word "RECYCLING" stamped on top. I keep worrying that if I only put out the recycling bin, the regular garbage truck will empty it, thus wasting my effort to keep track of the recyclables. So I make sure to put out the trash bin too even when it's nearly empty.

Soda can aluminum isn't just aluminum, its a special alloy of mostly aluminum that is optimized for the can stamping process. So it's worth more than plain aluminum. I figured out that they pay about 2-3 cents a can at recycling centers. And that's in a state that doesn't have a bottle deposit tax. On my way to work in the morning, which is near a recycling center, I often seen people walking along the street with two or three enormous five-foot tall garbage bags full of cans (presumably un-crushed or they'd be too heavy for a bag that size).

Also, tell me that simply melting cans down isn't easier and cheaper than electrolytically ripping the aluminum atoms out of the ore with lots of heat and electricity. Seriously, aluminum atoms like to bond with shit very tightly. Before we had that, aluminum was a rare metal on par with silver, even though it's one of the most common elements in the earth's crust.

That cracked.com link also points out a general problem with the general level of human stupidity. (a person is smart, people are dumb)

(etc.) People also put the stupidest crap into the Goodwill donation bins. I know because they have a "salvage outlet" store here where they take the stuff the either doesn't sell or they don't want to take the time to put it on a regular store shelf, and put into enormous bins for people to go all shark feeding frenzy over. Though at least they don't go as far as stuff with bodily fluids and excrement all over it.

I was perfectly happy with having a second bin to put just paper/cardboard in, and the old recycling truck also had a separate bin for paper. I even have a pile in the corner of the back yard where I dump my leaves every year (a no-maintenance compost pile) and put what little wet garbage I produce on that.

But then the greenie-weenies (this is Austin TX, the first place that California's silly ideas appear) just had to have their single-stream recycling and goals of recycling an absurd portion of trash. So now I have a second enormous wheelie-bin (along with my enormous trash wheelie-bin) for recyclables. And to make it all more fun, now they only collect recycling every other week, and I have to look on a calendar to see if there's recycling this week.