There's already a method for generating fuel from Martian atmosphere that's been tested with a practical model here on Earth. You have to carry a bit of catalyst with you, I believe, and a source of energy if you're not patient enough to wait for the weak solar available on Mars.

It's still likely easier than remote drilling, recovery, and refining.

Am I the only one who noticed that the 'funniest joke' wasn't all that funny... then read the rest of the article and wondered what they'd cut out to get the 102-word joke down to less than 80?

Just what could be in those 20-something words to make the joke so much funnier?

I'm willing to bet that almost any jurisdiction in the United States would find someone getting fired to prevent the vesting of shares would be an act of fraud on the part of the employer.

The contract is: work for us, don't quit or get fired for cause, and if we are a success you'll have shares and maybe get rich. Their 'cause' is 'we might have to pay up'. FRAUD!

The smarter employees should be starting a class action lawsuit right now, and burn that company to the ground and pillage the corpse for whatever they can get.

I'm old enough to remember when Usenet became useless every September. Old enough to remember when it was USEFUL after the freshmen calmed down and grew up.

Also, after UUDecoding my jpeg pr0n, it took 10-15 seconds to decode a still image on my computer. Bah!

If you had an ideal incompressible solid, you might very well have created the first immovable object.

If in can't have a compression wave, it can't move.

Personally, I'm mostly anti-abortion. I think that except in unusual circumstances (pregnancy started by rape, screening shows significant birth defects, pregnancy's going to kill the mother, and probably a few other situations I haven't thought of) a woman who has the emotional ability to have an abortion has something wrong with her. I'm NOT going to condemn a woman because of that belief, or even try to prevent her from getting an abortion.

The problem is that abortions are usually performed long before the brain is up and running. Hell, a full term newborn doesn't have much going on mentally compared to, say, a cat. Every day, fully grown adult animals with far more mental capacity than a 12 week old fetus are slaughtered to put fresh meat on my plate. How could I possibly be against abortion when I'm OK with that?

And I would say that calling someone a hypocrite because they take conflicting stands on two different subjects is perfectly valid. Calling the person who points that out an 'asshole' is not exactly a persuasive argument...

Wives are devilspawn.

FTFY.

Realistically, solar is the only 100% inexhaustible energy source available to us... if you limit the definition of 'inexhaustible' to 'lasting at least as long as the remaining lifetime of the Earth'.

Maybe fusion, if we ever figure it out, but everything else will run out on a long enough time scale... and so far as I'm aware those timescales are all shorter than the remaining lifetime of the planet. Just because some fuels are expected to last 10x longer than human civilization has so far existed doesn't mean they're unlimited.

Peter Sellers had more than a couple of mental issues. I think his opinion of the Pink Panther movies is irrelevant - they were brilliant within their genre, and that fact is only accentuated by how poor the non-Sellers sequel was back in the day, and how abysmally awful the Steve Martin remake turned out to be.

Rockets perform better when their frames are low in stress. Having someone blow the vehicle before launch reduces the chance the rocket will go off prematurely, or fail completely.

I like that, but I submit that it would be appropriate to have it be some kind of pay-per-view. Police cruisers don't have endless supplies of bandwidth, and what they do have costs money.

Most in-car video is DVR'd then downloaded upon return to the garage. You want live, you're going to do it over a secondary (and unnecessary) connection so as not to interfere with the police computers in the cars used for things like directing a cop to an incident and letting him know what he's getting into, as well as running various computer checks.

Also, there'd have to be some kind of system for a supervisor to shut down the live feed for some events - you don't need the bad guy getting a play-by-play of what the cops are doing to catch him.

FTL travel requires bypassing the energy required to move a mass through normal space.

The moment you have FTL, you have a method for adding infinite energy to the universe... say by using FTL to boost a mass out of the middle of a solar system, then letting it fall back in via traditional Newtonian methods from the outer edges of it.

I'm pretty sure the universe doesn't like that.

If anyone is poisoned by "Space Nuttery", it's you. This isn't the only website where you seem to just sit and wait for these discussions so you can go off on your rant.

Get a freaking life.

Two things;

First, I had a grandfather who 'invented' all sorts of stuff. He was really enthusiastic about it, but it was all crap. Some of it was actually profitable with some clever marketing applied after he'd sold the rights for peanuts.

Second, I invented a rotary engine. Took me 20 years of thinking about it to get it right, too. It was one of those things that always bothered me since I first learned about the piston engine, the loss of all that energy to heating/cooling cycles and reversing piston direction. While my design is theoretically much more efficient that any Wankel, it still suffers from large seals. Oh, and just before I got serious about developing it, someone else came up with more or less the same design but THEY had a working prototype in the lab. Theirs also went nowhere.

If burning things remains important to powering vehicles in the future, I suspect it'll be micro turbines for base load and a battery system to augment it. Otherwise, we're going full electric.

Seabreacher isn't a sub, it's a speedboat that briefly bobs below the surface.

Also, I was calling people like ME an idiot! I'd buy a proper sub if it would go down 50', hold two people, and cost me less than a car... and if the wife let me.