We'll be able to live on Venus and Mars before we can live on this planet, even if it is a paradise.

The fastest man-made object ever was the Helios 2 probe in the 70s. With a gravitational assist from the Sun, it was able to reach 150,000 miles per hour. Even if we could escape the solar system at 10x that speed (which is FAR beyond our current capabilities) it would take almost 10,000 years to reach a solar system 20 light years away.

Realistic interstellar travel requires relativistic speeds, and right now we aren't able to accelerate anything much bigger than a hydrogen atom to those kinds of velocities. Not only that, but when you start to approach your destination, you need to be carrying just as much energy to slow back down.

A lot of people seem to think we'll be launching robot probes on 200 year missions within our lifetimes to go explore these newly discovered planets. It's easy to have one's imagination off by orders of magnitudes when thinking about interstellar distances.

Because Government is the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. They are different from you by definition. It's like this in every single nation-state that has ever existed.

Nah. It blows.

Star wars might have only passable acting, but it has great characters that you actually care about. The only remotely charismatic character in Avatar is the evil army guy.

And the special effects might have been impressive in a technical sense, they look like the box art on graphics cards.

Oh, I get it, it was supposed to suck.

What Kurzweil doesn't understand could fill a book.

Several in fact.

The problem with IE6 is that it doesn't render CSS properly, has ugly javascript quirks, and is STILL FUCKING USED BY 30% OF THE DAMN INTERNET.

And yes, I am a web developer.

20% of school leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate

You mean graduates?

Teenagers are really really stupid.

Make it a misdemeanor criminal case. Download a movie and get the same first warning / week in jail plus a $100 or so fine that you would get for physically stealing the movie from Best Buy.

Of course, since in this country most crimes are defined at the state level, this wouldn't really work.

I'm starting to really think that we're making a mistake putting full-fledged computers in everything we build. They allow for an amazing array of features, but it makes fully understanding our machines much more difficult. Security problems like this one are inevitable.

A dumb analog xerox machine is pretty easy to understand, and one that runs on a microcontroller and a few KB of ram (if that) isn't much harder. But who but the most dedicated hacker has any real idea about what is going on inside a modern Xerox. It *might* not have any undocumented "features," but you have no way of knowing. Security has gone from being a matter of applied common sense to involving a large amount of blind trust in these manufacturers.

It's a symptom of a larger issue though. We're rapidly getting away from having a society where a well educated and technically minded person can understand the actual inner workings of the technology they interact with every day. The tradeoff might be worth it, I'm not a luddite. But we should remember that we are entering into a new kind of relationship with our machines,

Man, forget about emergency rescue. A launch to the moon isn't something you can just do in a few days. If you're going to the moon, just pray that everything goes according to plan.

As long as they don't change the naked-eye appearance of the moon (no Target or AT&T logo, please) then yes, absolutely.

I think everyone is missing the point as to why the space program has faltered.

In the late 50s, missile technology was very primitive compared to where it is now. Sputnik meant that Russia had good enough missiles to hit a somewhat precise location in the US. We had to respond.

Developing the first ICBMs was enormously complicated. Space research developed a lot of technology that would be used to wipe Moscow off the map.

Today, missiles are very well developed and the private aerospace industry can largely handle the research without the help of a government agency (though certainly not without government money). Nasa is no longer contributing (as much) technology to the military, and what it does is mainly things like GPS, which can be done with existing space technology or even private launches.

To a Senator, the space program serves no purpose and aside from being a sweet deal for some states' economies, benefits no voter directly. And while the space program still has some fans, they aren't numerous enough to swing any election.

Frankly, what NASA needs most is a consistent and predictable budget, a director who won't change jobs when the president leaves office, and hands off from Washington. If they could set a policy and stick to it, we wouldn't be in this mess.