More points for the longer they lasted (typewriters were around for over a century).

A quern is a hand-powered grindstone. Practically every house in the world - well, the world grinding grain to make bread or porrage/ pottage/ gruel - used one from the dawn of seed gathering (centuries to millennia before the dawn of agriculture) until about the start of the industrial revolution. Say, between 10 and 20 thousand years.

They only went out of use when it really became cheaper and easier to take your grain to the mill to get it ground by wind/ water/ horse power instead of indulging in (literally) "the daily grind".

If you want a million or two years more of duration, then you could go for the sound of stone on stone, making a new stone tool. More latterly, depending on region, antler on stone, but that's probably only a few tens of thousands of years.

Oh, you wnat something technological?

How about the "pop" of a gas light lighting within it's mantle? These days you probably won't even hear it on a camp site - just the click of an LED switching on/off - but for a century or so it represented the chemical industry, the first large-scale "to the door" distribution network (home many optical fibres still run in trenches originally cut for gas pipes?) ; the billing that went with it, needing computers (human ones, then adding machines, then typewriters).

Reading someone's motivations from their actions has always been a pretty fraught guessing game. It's not as if people are reknowned for their consistency or lack of hypocrisy in general.

Oh, the thing I mentioned last about the Monsetego (or whatever it was - is Taurus a Ford model?) was back in the days of human design. My source was a Ford engineer who was bitching to me while I was hitch-hiking and he'd just been ordered to design this optical jig monstrosity, by hand, explicitly to bugger up reparability for the buyers. About 1982 or 1983. His story didn't mean damn-all to me at the time because it was about 6 years before I started trying to learn to drive. But I filed the story as something to keep the next driver entertained with. IIRC the engineer was driving from Ford's Dagenham plant back to Halewood after being dealt this shitty hand, and he was well fuming about it.

I'd be overjoyed if windows 8 on the wife's machine would print to our 13 year old laser printer two days in a row without needing the printer drivers re-installed.

(I'd also be overjoyed if the wife would have let me install a proper network in the house when we moved in, because I can't get the printer to work at all over the wifi, but that's probably a separate issue.

Though I still lose it when somebody writes "ex-patriot".

Errr, why? It would seem a perfectly sensible construct for someone who used to be a patriot but for whatever reason (money, loathing for their home-country's debased political establishment) has ceased to be a patriot.

There's the other homophone "expatriate", for someone who lives in another country to that of their allegiance, but that's a completely different concept. For example, I mostly earn my income as an expatriate, but it would be impossible for me to earn anything as an ex-patriot (since I have never been a patriot).

This particular disease (HOA-itis) being an American one, I only slightly wonder what the supply of house buyers is like. If buyers are also in limited supply, then what is to prevent the seller form selling to the buyer without passing on the HOA obligations. Are they enforceable in court, or would the HOA have to come to court to prevent the sale going through without the HOa contract - thereby putting the costs upfront for the HOA too.

We used to have such tihngs in our country. They were called "feu duties", being short for "feudal duties". Yes, that does mean "feudal" in the same sense as "you owe three days a week labour in the Feudal Lord's fields, and he gets to virginity test all brides before their new husband gets to try them". We got rid of them in the mid-1990s. Glad to see America has yet to catch up.

We will. I've noticed a lot of people are already back to entering years in two digits.

In the run up to Y2K I switched to using ISO8601 date format and haven't budged. YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.ssss+TZ.... If the client then insists on using something parochial, I'll explain my reasons (date, alphabetical and numeric forms sorting into the same order) and then after they've expained why they want something parochial, I'll implement the changes they want. But they have to justify moving away from a reasonable proposition.

We were lucky that we managed to hide our Y2K bug from our customers (they came in from some 3rd-party software) by retiring the DOS version of our main product and completing the release of the windows V1 line, despite all it's bugs. But I also had a literally sleepless night babysitting a billion or so dollars worth of equipment (plus about 200 staff) as we checked out all the machines to see that there was nothing untoward happening. Cost around £2mllion.

You should have just pointed out what plants do with water, they split it into hydrogen and oxygen and so that is the only time water is really truly actually consumed.

Strictly not true. Neutral water has a concentration of approximately one part in 10^7 of hydrogen ions (and the same of hydroxyl ions), and they're constantly dissociating and re-associating. Off the top of my head, I forget what the mean lifetime of any one molecule of water is, but it's more likely to be fractions of a second than multiples of a year.

The original story is a non-story. I remember in the playground at school nearly 40 years ago joking that the idiots moving into town from London had never tasted water that hadn't been through three people's kidneys since it was last rainfall. Our geography teacher made us work out the numbers - it was a little short fo two pairs of kidneys.

I will take my beatings

Just jazzing up a dead horse to give you a flogging that you will definitely not forget for as long as you live.

Current mission durations would make that about 2 rounds.

But bear in mind that you don't get onto this particular gravy train until you're in your early 30s (school, bachelors degree, masters, doctorate, post-doc experience). I went into industry instead of academia and so I'm about 7 years ahead of my classmates who went into academia and about 50% higher in salary.

You're projecting your money-grubbing motives onto other people. That probably says more about you than it does about them.

I don't think anyone in the scientific community has any doubts that there was life there at one time. It's just a matter of proving it.

I certainly hope you're wrong in this statement.

Well, speaking as an industrial geologist (not publishing for public consumption, but certainly researching), I can certainly state that this geologist is not convinced that Mars has ever had life. Certainly I'd be fascinated if life were found on Mars, or if evidence of past life on Mars were found. either event would hugely increase the breadth of our knowledge of the range of possibilities available to life. Unless, of course, it turns out to be essentially identical to life on Earth, in which case I'd have to suspect contamination of one environment from the other. But my personal interest in finding that evidence does not extend as far as over interpreting small items of evidence like this. Hell, I remember the 1996 McKay et al ALH84001 paper - I read that one hot off the presses and had a full day to think about it while driving to the other end of the country. Interesting, but not convincing ; and I think that the consensus has solidified around that position.

Science is a very conservative (small 'c') profession. We require evidence, and better evidence than this.

I suspect our two planets have been inoculating each other for a very very long time.

While that is certainly not impossible, I don't think that it's at all likely. And it is much, much easier to achieve the transfer from Mars to Earth than vice versa.

You can take another point off your score - the pictures may not mean much to you, but as a geologist, I find them quite informative. Not a slam-dunk, but definitely interesting. I could think of several competing interpretations which I'd expect to have been addresses in the full paper (I think I'll be into the local library to see if they stock 'Astrobiology' tomorrow).

I doubt that the Germans would be as rude about your technical knowledge on the basis of your original address as you are of theirs.

You're also reading and posting when the story has literally been here 15 minutes. There hasn't been time for quality discussion and moderation to take place

It'd take at least 5 minutes to read the first FA, and another couple to be fairly sure that the second FA was a complete regurgitation of the first. (Actually, I'm not really sure which was first and which second ; there may be a third FA.) So you're only allowing about 7 minutes to think of an analysis and compose a reply.

It took me pretty much that long to compose this low-content message.

Even by the standards of Slashdot's ACs, that is some high-grade bullshit. n wonder you haven't got the balls to put your name to a post like that.