They've already announced that they're no longer going to build their own hardware. The color Nook HD and Nook HD+ series is going to be replaced by a re-branded Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.

How do you plan to handle delivery? An Earth sized chunk of carbon might require delicate handling as it is drop shipped on your home. BTW, a signature will be required.

I didn't miss the point. That was sarcasm. And, for what it's worth, the employer didn't see it that way -- they insisted I work to a project completion schedule and on-call schedule that required 80 hour work weeks. Either I got the work done or they wrote me up for missing deadlines. I would have left but I had no other job to leave to (there was a recession, remember). As soon as an opportunity presented itself, I was out of there.

what were we talking about? sorry tired. Hey, my 80 hour work-weeks are what kept me employed during the recession. They couldn't fire me -- I was doing too much work for next to no pay. Yeah, I made a few mistakes. But I fixed 'em. Sure, my salary history will work against me when I go apply for another job. At least I stayed employed in my field. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need some more coffee before I pass out at my desk.

Yeah... that meme is getting old. Some of us are married over 20 years now. I started reading /. in 2000. Lost my older UID when I left for a few months, came back, but couldn't recover my password because I no longer worked at the company that owned the email address I registered with. UID name I'm using dates back to the mid-'80s. Some of us have been around a while.

Trust me dude. You might have it better... My wife is definitely not a morning person. Nothing like waking to the sound of your wife shouting at the children to get your day started right...

and you think that'll stop Chinese manufacturer's from selling them equipment?

intel fabs are in the U.S. The packaging, the wire bonding. That's done in Malaysia. But you have a point. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, and a number of others have facilities that are quite capable of making high quality high performance processors.

oil is not getting cheaper, it's getting more expensive. The only reason the recycling of plastics and depolymerization of biomass is becoming "economical" is that the cost of crude pulled from the ground is exceeding the threshold for processing these other materials.

You start with one 10 ton/day reactor. Next quarter you build a 50 ton/day reactor. Then you build a 250 ton/day reactor. Then you build a 1000 ton per day reactor. Once you hit maximum scale that's economical, you reproduce the reactor and work on efficiency. Most petroleum refineries are not one big giant crude oil distillation unit. They're many systems working in parallel. And there's more than one refinery...

Your math is off. If there is demand for 100 barrels of oil for use as fuel, we will pull 100 barrels out of the ground and burn it. If we substitute 10 barrels of oil from recycled plastics, then we only pull 90 barrels of oil out of the ground. In both cases, we still burn the same 100 barrels of oil. The plastic existed already -- the energy required to pull the oil out of the ground and process the constituents into the chemicals pre-cursors for the plastic had already been spent. There's only a small net increase in CO2 production due to losses from reprocessing the plastic (again), which may be offset by not producing CO2 when extracting the oil from the ground and transporting the crude which it replaced.

it's called a mass driver.

Those are contaminated, and do not represent the aggregate sample of a complete asteroid. There might be information we're not seeing because we're only seeing the chunk that survived the atmosphere.

It takes more than a year to get the robot to the surface with it's instruments. These robotic probes are often a decade in planning, manufacture, testing, integration and launch. In fact, the robotic probe will likely be sent on a slower, less energetic path; so, it will take longer to get there. That's not the point. In the same amount of time on the surface, the human can accomplish considerably more.

While I don't have a high opinion of the SLS stack or of Congressional pork... One of the problems NASA is faced with is justifying their existence, which in the public eye (i.e. our representatives in Congress) has to include some form of manned spaceflight. This while not having the funding wherewithal (as provided by the same Congressional representatives) to complete a flagship manned planetary or lunar exploration program.

You can't completely discount manned spaceflight as having absolutely no scientific value; because, there is scientific and technical value in performing a manned mission to an asteroid parked in orbit. There's a quote that goes something like: "A geologist with a rock hammer could learn more in an hour than the robotic probe learned in a year." It's a gross oversimplification but there's some validity to it. By putting people on the site, we can learn quite a bit about the makeup and structure of the sample asteroid that might not be possible with a single pre-designed robotic probe, regardless of how well designed. A human in-situ can make observations and connections based on experience that a robot might not be equipped to make. Said human could then make decisions based on that information, which might be different than decisions made by a remote operator.

In addition, in the process of designing and flying the vehicle we gain valuable technical information necessary to support various human. We get improved engine designs for vehicles, human or robotic. We get better life-support designs which can be applicable to terrestrial applications as well as space. We get better harsh environment suits. We test the ability of our systems to support "long-endurance" human spaceflight outside the cozy protected orbit ISS resides in.

Now, if your argument is simply that we shouldn't be putting humans into space at all, as it's too dangerous and/or expensive... I don't know that I have a counter argument that you'll find acceptable. Sure, we can do some things more cheaply using robots and automation. That's true with many human endeavors. McDonalds is working on automating food production in their restaurants, for example. Agriculture can be largely automated. Manufacturing can be automated. Art can be automated. We use human labor because humans are cheap(-er) than using machines or humans introduce artistic / cultural variation, or humans can make observations and connections based on experience that machines cannot (yet) make, or we just have a surplus of humans looking for something to do...

Sending people to space is expensive because of the energy cost (boost out of the gravity well) and life-support cost. There's no getting around the energy required to boost out of the gravity well; but, we can improve the vehicle and drive costs down. Life support costs we can reduce through infrastructure improvements. If we're ever to have any kind of presence in space, we have to start somewhere; and, that's going to require putting humans into space to obtain experience that cannot be obtained remotely via robotic telepresence. If we're going to reduce the cost, we have to build infrastructure, which is largely going to require some human supervision. We're going to go there eventually; the root technology is available now.

Not a lot. However, they've been in free fall around the Sun for as much as 4.5B years. The pile of rubble will pick up the odd grain of sand, chunk of ice or small piece of gravel every now and then as it orbits; and, it will stick together and grow. Or it will fly apart as was evidenced by Hubble sees asteroid breakup