Your post is written the same way. I could have cared and looked up several different sources of numbers. But I don't.

I actually believe those numbers now, because you sound butthurt and failed to offer alternatives. So congratulations, you achieved the opposite of your goal.

Capture. You mean Captcha? The thing that's as relevant as tea leaves and astrology?

That there is no more meaning than the one you imbue?

That random, unrelated, almost always irrelevant word jumble to which some posters ascribe meaning out of feelings very similar to religion and winning the lottery?

Is that what you meant?

Seems to require JavaScript. I see a white page. So I guess you should consider yourself lucky to see anything.

The animated website I suppose is because of people like you who enable that horseshit.

So I guess I take that lucky comment back. You got the internet you deserve. Quit yer bitchin.

There wouldn't be so many injuries if such a large chunk of the people setting them off weren't drunk ;)

Which was just changes the problem to a different domain... diverting the probe is going to be a stone cold bitch. By the time you're a couple of hundred feet up, you're only a few seconds from landing and it'll take quite a bit of energy to divert any significant distance. (Energy == weight.) And that's without pondering how amazing the optics and processing system will have to be.

Interesting work to be sure, but applying it in practice will be even more so.

Art in some countries can tell a copyright holder to STFU legally. IF Canada protects art then do it anyways.

Only if it is daytime and not foggy or snowing heavily. Otherwise the windows don't help much either and pilots have to fly on instruments only. These days most of those instruments, even basic things like the artificial horizon, are LCD screens and need power.

The question is if an artificial display helps enough under normal circumstances to outweigh any draw-backs in extremely unlikely circumstances. Being able to see the world around you at night or in fog during routine landings, or seeing other nearby aircraft highlighted in space around you seems like it would avoid many accidents, so perhaps the trade-off is worth it.

If it had happened at night the pilots of the landing plane probably wouldn't have seen the one on the runway. If they had a screen with IR or night vision capability they would have a chance.

He doesn't mean the autopilot lands, although it is possible. He means that the pilots land "blind", using instruments only.

When you learn to fly aircraft you start off on Visual Flight Rules (VFR). You have to be able to see outside at all times, so no flying at night or in fog or in clouds. You then move on to Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), and can basically fly through anything the aircraft can handle without the need to ever look out the window.

A display screen would be able to display an IR or completely virtual overlay image, so in fog it would be a lot better than an actual window.

This isn't about truth and reality. This about Slashdot's daily Two Minutes Hate.

I'm disappointed that he ignored the entire Mars Direct (Dr. Zubrin) component of my question, and instead only responded peripherally to the core component of the question.

Just because he didn't say what you wanted to hear doesn't mean he didn't answer your question. He did answer your question - with the cold sober truth. He correctly identified the bits that matter, and the bits that are handwaving window dressing and addressed the former while ignoring the latter.
 
Zubrin's plans are... more than a little optimistic. (In particular he doesn't have a firm grasp on the difference between speculative laboratory proof-of-concept experiments and actual developed technology. His plan relies heavily on treating the former as the latter.) Musk? Musk is irrelevant. Musk is playing to the fanboy crowd, but don't look behind the curtain. There's nothing there but a pile of powerpoints and someday, maybe's.
 

I think Dr. Stone's Mars response is a great example of everything that's wrong with NASA. There's no leadership at NASA, and NASA is adrift (in the same manner Dr. Stone is afraid a manned mission to Mars would become adrift), and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

I think you represent what's wrong with space fandom, geekdom, and advocacy today.
 
In the first place, you completely fail to grasp that it is not NASA's role to provide leadership - they're a part of the Executive Branch, and their job is to carry out the policies of the Administration within the bounds of the budget as set by Congress. No more, no less. If NASA had it's way, we might have landed on the Moon by the Bicentennial. Or maybe not. Their plans were vague at best. Then Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and LBJ pushed the moon program as a monument to Kennedy. Which momentum didn't last all that long... by '66/'67 Congress was swinging the budget axe, and by '69 the program was running mostly on fumes and force of habit. (which is something else fandom, geekdom, and advocacy have failed to grasp for nearly a half century - just how unique the alignment of circumstances was that propelled Apollo and just how short lived support actually was.)
 
Second, in that you name check... but you complete fail to grasp the meaning of Dr Stone's answer - Mars is going to be very hard, and it's not visionaries and buzzwords that will get us there. It's technology, technology we don't have but are (as Dr Stone says) working on figuring out. By the time we can send men there, the probes will have done the advance scout work and identified the places and areas of research where men can make the real difference.