I have a 22 y.o. YNA (big green thing, 50% evil) who is very lazy. He would love to go motoring around the house in one of these things.

I should not google things before i drink my coffee... I completely messed up my delta-v estimate. You are all right, mercury is a difficult target. It would still be worth it... maybe a solar sail or electrostatic decelerator for free delta-V?

I did a cursory goog, and got the impression that the delta-V to Mercury is 1/6th of the delta-V to Mars. Mercury is down the hill from us, not uphill. Mercury would seem to have the added benefit of having 10x the initial solar radiation available for running a sail. I'm a little disappointed to see this topic get so few posts. Mercury has a lot to offer from an explorational perspective. Plentiful energy, a B-field, easy to get to.... much more interesting than Mars in many ways.

Sending neutrino messages is old hat. Receiving them is a bit more difficult, because neutrinos are so damned difficult to detect. They basically don't interact with anything, which is why Fermilab can shoot a neutrino beam an a 735 km underground trip to Minnesota. So to receive your IM, you need a detector the mass of the USS Iowa. I sent out "Dinner is served" back in the 80s, by the way.

I thought gps was a military thing and that all that civvy stuff was just freeloading.

I remember, as an ardent newcomer to L5, talking about exactly this sort of thing with Eric Drexler in a park somewhere in the Bay Area, back in 1983. What the heck, good luck to the Chinese. Maybe they'll even do it. (although the delta-V required is truly staggering, even for the kind of intercept described)

How come the first thing that came to mind was "they want to put a kill switch in my car?" They won't call it that, of course.

Lulsec spokesmouth arrested: news. In the bigger scheme of things, nobody gives a rat fuck what lulsec thinks about paypal.

Stumbling right out of the gate over privacy problems would likely doom Google+'s chances of emerging as a viable, realistic rival to Facebook, which rules the social networking market with about 700 million account holders

Editorialize much?

Use a photo of the garbage-filled gutter in front of the NYSE, or maybe Bernie Madoff, or a simple graphic of a downward-trending chart with the words FRAUD superimposed.

Funny you should mention digging ditches. I dug a nice one across my property a couple of years ago when my employer furloughed its staff for a few days. I won't bother dicksizing what i do for money, but you can figure it out from my previous posts. You're not the only intellectually gifted snowflake in the room, son. Man-up and take responsibility for your bullshit.

This will inevitably devolve into "I can't pay attention because I'm so smart", much like "i can only eat mac n' cheese because i'm a supertaster". Time to charge-up the taser ...

Forbidden Planet --> Voyage to See What's at the Bottom --> Star Trek --> 2001 --> submarine nuke --> Fermilab main control room crew chief. ymmv.

"Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures." Says it all. Fail. Technologically illiterate dreck bereft of so much as a wisp of credibility to anyone even passingly familiar with the field. Shame.

I run an atom smasher! I make antiprotons! I shoot a neutrino cannon at Minnesota! you bet my job is awesome!