With China's enormous population, even such ridiculously high standards will still produce thousands of qualified, eager, and willing applicants. Since so many of such "perfect" candidates are available, why bother putting anyone less qualified to the test?

There is no mention in the article of HOW that rover will get up there in 2011. Does anyone know what it's launch vehicle is planned to be?

Both illegal downloaders and the music industry know that it is pretty much impossible to sue every filesharer. This knowledge is basically what keeps filesharers going. The only reason that organizations like the SIAA sue individual parties for ridiculous sums of money is to induce fear in the overwhelming majority of filesharers and thereby cut down filesharing as much as possible by pure psychology. Coupling this video with the real-life verdicts carried out on a few of the millions of filesharers will effectively cause many eleven-year-olds to piss their pants in fear and not download that album. What the SIAA doesn't realize that the average eleven-year-old that will actually be intimidated by this will probably not BUY any albums either, and that almost all filesharers will simply see through the scare tactics and filesharing will live on. Therefore, what this amounts to is just a ton of money wasted by the SIAA on a stupid music video that will at best serve to entertain the public on youtube. The SIAA made a good move with their first video from the 90s; they appealed to people's sense of morality, detailing how much work is put into a game and why it is worth it to support the creators. Though appealing to conscience wouldn't stop all filesharing, people would at least feel moved to pay for games (or other media) that they enjoyed, supporting an industry of quality. I do not know why they have resorted to useless fearmongering instead.

If the newspapers don't make money, journalists and photographers are not paid. If journalists and photographers are not paid, they will not risk going into dangerous situations to learn the truth (remember the two journalists held in North Korea) and the truth will have to come out through amateur bloggers and cell phone pictures, which all of you must admit is often inaccurate or uninformative. News costs money. Perhaps taxing internet use is not the right way to support the news industry, but if people quit paying for papers, some sort of tax will be necessary simply to keep the industry alive in any country. And before anyone replies suggesting it, online advertising revenues will never come close to covering the costs of quality reporting.

They're planning on launching this in 2012, and it's just a test. What with delays, bureaucracy and imminent lack of funding due to the world economy, you can't expect Europe to get actual people into space until at best 2018, at which point American private companies, Russia, and China will be headed for the moon, if not already there. The Orion program seems much the same to me.