The Russians have plenty and the Obama administration secured quite a few decaying nukes for our Glorious Comrades and used the fuel to provide nuclear power.
I understand that the USA is now producing Pu-238 again so that's something for future missions.

Now we are talking about a European mission from 10 yrs ago so that's definitely a factor in deciding how to power the apparatus.
But it's also true that whatever Russia has is available - for a price.

There's been a lot of science on Slashdot since the days when we joined.
Plus, shit happens in people's lives and there are only so many hours in the day. So there's plenty I've missed and I was never all that interested in the minutiae of space exploration. I love to learn more about the universe but I'm also quite convinced that our lives for the reasonably forseeable future are tied to this Pale Blue Dot and here's where my focus has been for quite some time.

It's not inconceivable that fuel cell cars will be a success but the current state of tech is much better suited to stationary storage or heavy vehicles.
From the few reviews I've found, they seem to a bit on the sluggish side unless paired with a battery, which makes them more expensive.

As for catching Tesla, they'll really have to throw money and resources into it - Tesla is NOT standing still and they've already built out their fast charging infrastructure.
Hydrogen transport and storage is nowhere near as ubiquitous and is not a trivial problem.

"Over a decade without warming" - that's only somewhat true of the surface temps and not at all true of the ice caps & the ocean.
You do realize just how much ice was lost from the Arctic sea, the Greenland ice sheet, the land-based ice of the Antarctic and the various glaciers during your "over a decade without warming"?? FYI, it's way more than a multigigametric cubicfuckton.

You do realize just how much heat it takes to melt ice, right? That just converting a given amount of ice into water without raising its temperature requires as much heat as heating that volume of water from room temp to nearly boiling?? You are aware of that, right??

I keep posting the link below for all the "no warming since whenever" folks. Let's how that some of you actually bother to read the post - you just might learn something.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/20...

However we do it, we'd be turning down the thermostat to a setting we've lived through in the present & recent past.

Many jungles, such as the Amazon, have very poor soil and only function because of rainfall and an interconnected ecosystem. That sort of interconnectedness is the antithesis of modern large scale monoculture farming. You need to be able to foster the production & maintenance of soil - or use a lot of petrochemical based fertilizer.

Quite a bit of those costs are being incurred right now. For example, Hurricane Sandy, flooding in Europe & the UK, prolonged droughts in CA, TX & Southwest, ever more damaging wildfires,etc.

How did those presumably photosynthetic plants cope with the several months of darkness that's part of the polar year?

Are you posting from 1960? Appliances have had delay timers for decades.

You overestimate the power of environmentalists.
If they had the power you imagine, there would have been no new coal plants built anywhere after 1970.

And they've not been able to prevent nuke plants from being built in quite a few countries, even after Chernobyl.

The idea behind the "hiatus", "little or no warming" is wrong. See the link below for an explanation.

http://tamino.wordpress.com/20...

Linode is a standard VPS provider. I don't need "hosting" where the sites are on a machine with 1000 other web sites. I do high-end business-to-business sites that need to be available and very responsive. Because of using a variety of software pieces and having to run cron jobs and all that I also need access to the machine.

As for disk space there's no comparison between a service like Amazon S3 (or similar offerings from Google, Rack Space, et al) and a bunch of disk space. Disk space is actually pretty cheap, but Amazon's service level for S3 is something like 8 9s (literally). It's simply crazy. But it's what my customers expect. If someone hits a "play" link and the music doesn't play they'll move on to the next provider. I had a guy explain to me one day "if I have to wait 10 seconds I'm already on the next web site". He wasn't kidding. These folks work hard when they work and dead links are not acceptable.

Nothing's perfect, but with the right tools I can run a business offering a service level that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago, particularly for one or two guys.

I lived for years on the edge of neighborhood that had unreliable power; it wasn't unusual to have very brief power outages - on the order of seconds, multiple times per day,especially in summer when the heat wave hits and folks crank up the air conditioning and my desktop computers would restart.

That's no big deal for laptops - but those cost a lot more than even a more powerful desktop. And at the time, they were a lot more than a desktop & UPS combined.

How clever is Google... being paid to display ads and also being paid not to display ads.

It's a win-win.

Do no eViL -- yeah, right! ;-)