I looked at the video and I'm sure that turkey would taste just fine!

I would have thought they'd at least add solar panels and electric engines to extend the time their unblinking eye stays on target indefinitely.

The two sites are not as good as it gets. The South African site is better by a large margin. It was the best in the scientific review and the best in the site review. Once you have the minimum radio silence required, you still need the infrastructure (roads and power to the stations - present in South Africa, but still needs to be built in Australia). Australian minimum wage is around 20x South African minimum wage and I would like to see Australia make 1 dish at the same price South Africa can make 10 dishes. The only reason Australia was included is because they started crying so badly when they lost, the panel felt too sorry for them to give them the back hand their proposal deserved.

It seems as if many people simply disregard the cost of labour is Australia vs the cost of labour in Africa.

In South Africa, the labour law states that the minimum salary per month is around R1000.
In Australia, their labour law states that the minimum salary per week is 570 Australian dollars, which translates to around R19 000 per month.

Perhaps many Australians are 20x more efficient than South Africans, but there is simply no way that it will be cost effective to build a massive radio telescope in Australia

I have always been under the impression you build these big things and have these big mouths to compensate for your minuscule penises.

I wonder how this will hold up in a small earthquake. Can't think that it will last.

Racism. As a South African with many friends travelling abroad I need to point out that we are at least less racist than America (incarceration inequality in America) and Australia (when did Abo-hunting end again). We are working very hard to rid the whole country totally of racism. The only difference is that in Africa, the whites never attempted to exterminate the blacks and therefore the blacks are in majority.

In terms of radio silence, the sites need to be radio silent and remote, but not so radio silent and remote that you need to build a new road to access it. I really hope we pull this through. I submitted a slashdot article a while back about the cooperation of many african countries and the fact that we were the pioneers to use composite materials for the dish reflectors, but it never hit the front page.

I wonder what the water temperature at this planet's poles are

Bill Gates is working hard to create a very efficient school system where the good teachers are rewarded. As seen in a recent TED talk, head masters require an appointment to visit a teacher's class and may not demand to sit in more than one day a year. Without transparency there is no incentive for a teacher to become better at teaching. They are busy changing this.

I do not click on any "purchase" button in google to see how much an item costs, as I'm sure they have all my banking and address details stored and might just reply "this item will be shipped to this address at this price"

Somewhere the manager/funder needs to make a weighed decision on which risks to take and which to spend time and money on investigating. Unfortunately, on the Challenger, he made the wrong call. Fortunately, on the millions of other projects that do succeed, the right calls are made.

I reckon in every launch there will be some crack head who says this is too dangerous or has fundamental flaws. Excluding the mother and/or wife of the explorer. Afterwards these crack heads only get attention if they are right.

If I predict disaster on every launch for this or that reason and post it on youtube (and delete the video it if there is no disaster), I might become famous on the one time that disaster strikes.

I'm sure Americans will be searching for another planet since they are not willing to put in the slightest effort to save the environment or help reduce climate change. They did not ratifying the Kyoto Protocoll and now they start the COP17 meeting in South Africa with "we're not doing anything unless China and other countries does something as well".

China has around 4 times the population of America. How can America say anything before China exceeds their emissions by 4 times. I was hoping America would pitch up and bring some leadership with them, for instance "we understand the problem and we will start by bringing down our emissions by 10% in the next five years, no matter what the rest of the world does", but instead all we get is selfishness. I am tired of America and glad that their relative wealth to the rest of the world is falling as this is getting old.