Mounting a robotic arm and small reentry capsule on the asteroid transfer vehicle could do the same mission. I like space travel, but the main thing this video showed me is that the politics are making NASA propose dumb ideas. NASA is burdened with the politically mandated "Senate Launch System" and the apparently unkillable Orion capsule, but insufficient funds for anything else. So here we are. Personally I would kill the SLS and Orion, subcontract manned work to SpaceX, and use the funds for advanced space-related R&D.

At the federal level, our entire legal system is based on the concept that a machine copy of a document is as good as the original. In addition to all the other problems pointed out by other readers -- engineering errors, medical errors, financial errors, this type of error also greatly harms our legal system as well. A problem since the legal system is essentially the operating system for our society. I don't see how Xerox is going to survive the wave of lawsuits that is going to follow. They need to immediately warn everyone to stop using their systems, and then recall all affected units. Going forward, I suspect that the name "Xerox" will now mean: "to mangle or randomly distort".

I'm shocked that top government officials are using secret government email addresses. We should insist that they turn over every email address so that they all have to waste hours each day deleting spam and irrelevant stuff like the rest of us!

I have been reading Jack Vance since I was about 11, many years ago. I knew that he was in his mid 90's and blind, and I never expected him to write anything again. However when I was looking at his works on Amazon a few weeks back, I saw that last year, at the age of 95, he was still in good enough shape to have written (or at least dictated) a biography called "This Is Me, Jack Vance! Or More Properly, This Is I".

So, thinking that this would be a good way to show my appreciation for all the fun his works had given me, I purchased it. Now I am glad that I did. Hope that some other fans also did the same! Not a bad way to go, hearing about your latest Amazon sales figures for work that you published at the age of 95.

This gun is a terrorist's dream! The problems here are so obvious that hopefully this will be banned quickly.

Your discussion should mention that it is patent pending. Otherwise they will probably not be interested.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the price of gas is down by nearly $1.00 a gallon since the election. Duh...which party generally controls gas prices?

One of the reason why California has so many startups is that California State law clearly states that work done by an employee for the employee's own time and business interests belongs to the employee. It is very clear that the author of this article has no experience with startups.

If the default "inventions belong to the employer" rule was in effect everywhere, then the net effect would be to lock up employee ideas with little actual benefit to the employer. This is because most big companies are not very innovative, and thus fail to exploit most employee inventions. Most of the modern world as we know it would never have happened.

Dangerous and bad idea. I hope that the article remains forever ignored after this.

...But the sword was considered to be too powerful for anyone to possess, so it was removed from the game and stored on a one gig flash drive. But it was foretold that one day players who could wield the sword might reveal themselves...

In retrospect, Apple should have kept Google maps in iOS for another year, and rolled out iOS maps first as an app. That way they would have had time to debug, and get a more graceful market introduction. I suspect that the problem is that Apple did not do enough iOS maps testing in advance, and was blindsided by all of the post-launch problems. Given that this is a safety issue, this is actually a pretty big fail.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requires Java in order for outside users (such as patent agents and attorneys) to access their files on the USPTO servers. They have been warning for months that their systems are not compatible with Java 7, and only work with earlier versions of Java.

This is a big pain, since it forces you to keep your entire system at Java 6.X. Earlier I thought that this delay was mere bureaucratic foot dragging. Now I'm thinking that perhaps they had a "heads up" warning.

Mercury, not impossible to land on in certain regions -- Venus unlikely due to extreme heat and pressure, Mars a given, Jupiter no solid surface, Saturn no solid surface, Uranus no solid surface, Neptune no solid surface, Pluto -- not a planet.

So technically, assuming that no one wants to go to Mercury for some reason (unlikely), then outside of Mars, there are no other "planets" nearby anyway. If we call planets around other stars by a different name, and again assuming that Mercury is just to uninteresting to visit, then he might be right. Of course this still leaves lots of other real estate out there to visit.

The Russians had this idea first!

From personal experience, I can vouch that Apple II floppy disks hold up over 25 years!

Oh great, after years of grammar in er, grammar school, now I'll have to unlearn ending sentences with a period