Does Skim work well on the small MacBook Air, or is the resolution too low?

There might be a problem when they arrive which means they have to leave almost immediately...

The 26 month phasing of the Earth/Mars orbits pretty much rules out leaving immediately.

Check out Homebrew: http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

I find it much less obnoxious than Fink and DarwinPorts.

I'll support Solar Power sometime after the manufacturers of Photovoltaics start powering their factories with Photovoltaics.

It was done a few decades ago, before the oil companies bought the PV manufacturers.

http://www.green-energy-news.com/arch/nrgs2010/20100020.html

I am also a NASA engineer that thinks it's best to let Ares go.

NASA did a lot of research and science before the Constellation program sucked all the funds from everything else NASA does, and Constellation is still at least 3 billion dollars per year short of what it needs to actually get built. I don't see any of these senators proposing the borrowing or tax increases needed to realistically implement a manned return to the moon, so the chances of it happening are approximately zero. Meanwhile, it's killing all of NASA's other missions.

Given that, it make sense to restore the balance back toward research and technology development and try to get cheaper commercial access to LEO going until we have the technology (fuel depots, electric propulsion) required to affordably go farther.

My Dad's first calculator cost $300 and it took a full pack of AA's and it had glow-y red numbers inside tiny light bulbs or vacuum tubes or something.

Those were Nixie Tubes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube

And it was the most exciting thing in the world! If there had been an internet back then, there would have been feverish discussion and hardware hacks and all kinds of 'boy' chatter regarding it and other devices competing for the same market.

We mostly talked in person back then, but it was just as exciting.

But nobody talks about pocket calculators much these days. We've solved them. They're done. They work perfectly...

Why can't I find one as good at being a calculator as my nearly 30 year old HP-15c?

Sure, scientists and such are clever and will try to figure out how to continue to expand the sciences, even without financial support systems of the past, but the demand in aeronautics will continue to diminish, fewer experts will get involved, and any incentives to stay will simply go away.

This budget restores funding to the science and technology development programs that Constellation cannibalized when it was under-funded. Aeronautics gets a 15% increase, for instance.

The truth is, there's no great plan, instead these cuts are politically motivated...

NASA's budget was increased, not cut.

Constellation was a huge unfunded mandate. It sucked all the funds from everything else NASA did. The Augustine report that studied future options for NASA said it would take 3 billion additional dollars per year to implement the program, and it gave several better options for NASA in the unlikely case that the $3 billion was available (but it isn't).

I see these changes as being common sense, not politically motivated. No politician of any party would want to borrow the money required to see Constellation through.

I bet that they have lost more money paying people to develop DRM technology than they have lost from people downloading music illegally -- especially when a lot of people then buy the whole cd after downloading a few tracks online. What idiots! Their greed will eventually ruin them. (It's doing it already -- just look at the rise of creative commons and other similar licenses for music and whatnot...) I understand that downloading music and other media illegally is illegal but to fight for every penny when you're losing money doing it...that's just stupid and greedy.