This is one of the problems with robotic missions... these weird, out of the ordinary events. If this had been a robotic mission it would have been Galileo all over again. "We didn't think this would be a problem so we didn't build to solve it. Now we have to live with the workaround."

Robots are fine for simple things but as the complexity of the machines increases it becomes easier to go with the count on the army of humans who would be willing to make the journey.

One of the things the poster misses is that the rich will buy autonomous cars, use them frequently, but not actually drive them. Consider:

- Send the kids to school and pick them up
- Send the car to the grocery/Starbucks/liquor store where a order send via the Net is filled and loaded into the car
- Avoid drunk driving charges (OK, it's a use but no actual driving)
- Let their teens use it so the teen can text merrily while the car drives
- Send the car out with a dashcam so they can get vids of morons trying to road rage a machine
- Have the car scout ahead to see if there are any cops on the path they're about to take at lightspeed in a manual drive car

I second the "lack of excitement" comment. Think about it, the main proposals for the past few years have to send another rover or orbitter to Mars. Until there's a goal beyond more of the same, the money will continue to dry up.

While all the bleeding edge Dotters here scream "Upgrade" I'd like to ask why? How many web pages are actually using the new capabilities of the upgraded browsers? And how many pages just changed one minor widget? I maintain there's _zero_ reason to tell people they can't view a page without upgrading. It's the old days of "Best if viewed with Internet Explorer" all over again. As you all say, disk drveis are getting huge and the old pages take almost zero space. Add note saying it's not supported and here's a link to the latest and greatest. People who want the new abilities will upgrade.

Remember, you're not the not the only provider on the net. If people only the choice of: 1) Change their entire web serving experience to increase the job security of yuor web developers, or 2) Leave your site, you and your shharreholders might not like the answer.

I just couldn't get past the thought that he was able to get knitting needles onto the space station but would never have been able to get them onto a commercial airline flight.

Google has been playing catch up for years, but now they're changing their UI in gratuitous and overly animated ways without giving the users notification or a "classic" path out of it. Wow, they finally caught up to Facebook!

I don't mind the idea of not supported. What I hate is the idea of whining loudly and interupting the workflow because the user isn't on the bleeding edge. If you can detect the browser version then just don't use the new features on the pages. Don't force me to click a popup or make a decision every time I bring up your page (Google Calendar). Noisily announcing that something doesn't work completely harkens back to the bad old days of user interface design. Very unHTML-like.

Insurance costs represent the true cost of a disaster, not just the physical pain. For example, what if the power plan is damaged and my web site is down for 12 hours. There was no physical damage to my servers but I lost the capacity to do business.

DST starts roughly 80 days after the solstice and ends roughly 50 before the soltice. Changing clocks based onthe season rather than the actual amount of daylight or the time of sunrise is wasteful.

I've experienced problems with my Toyota but it was because the cruise control sucks. When the car starts losing speed (caused by hill or headwind), the cruise control doesn't slowly apply gas until it gets back to the set point. Oh no. It downshifts and races the engine hard until the car is at least 5 MPH past the set point. So much for fuel economy. And I can see how this would cause an unprepared driver to freak out and make things worse.

I haven't seen signs of bad engineering, just sloppy engineering or cheaping out. I also have a problem with any car company who's saying, "We're perfect, it's our drivers who are stupider than average."

At least this means that teachers can't be threatened for completely slamming Intelligent Design.

Ozzie always confused me. The world has been moving closer and closer to integration and, as soon as he got to MS, they went in the other direction. MS restructured so that OS, Office, Gaming, and many others were their own profit centers. They were given bonuses or blasts depending on how they did individually. Now if that meant that OS did something that hurt Office, that was fine as look as OS got a win out of it.

And these "organizations who might be willing to buy the company's assets and keep the service going" would be planning to do what with the (hopefully) aggregated data?

September 13, 1999: The day the moon left Earth's orbit.

The problem with the way teachers are ranked is that it causes the unintended consequence of teaching to the test. Everything is a waste of time for them.

The solution to this is to rank teaches based on the how the students succeed when the teacher has no direct input. Rank teachers based on how students do in the following grade. A 1st grade teach gets ranks by the grades in 2nd grade and so on. 12th grade teachers get ranked based on if the person does well over the next four years in college, work, or the military. There's always the posibility of collusion but it becomes more difficult.