Coal-fired power-stations DO contribute to global warming. The down-wind mercury levels, whilst elevated, aren't high enough cause the well-known chronic toxity effects (google 'minimata' for the gory details), but they could (collectively) lead to TEOCAWKI. Which would be bad.

This is the bit I don't get:

Really? How does that work? Have the people who happen to be nearby all have to have signed up for the trial, or is their presence somehow automagically detected and uploaded? Hey, if you want to sign away YOUR privacy, feel free (though I'd rather you didn't) It doesn't give you the right to sign away my privacy at the same time!!

Does this mean I should be avoiding people who use Windows Mobile smartphones? Oh wait, the universe already took care of that for me.

OMFG Hitler was a vegetarian???!!!! PETA are fascists!!!oneoneslashslash?!

Yah, cos the market for cars is just wiiiiiide open to free competition. No incumbent advantage there, nosirree, and certainly no federal subsidies, trade unions or investor-funded lobbiest paid by THOSE companies, good heavens why the very idea gives me the vapours.

Take ten seconds to think about a steel plant. Have you ever seen a steel plant? Now, consider the mass of such a plant. Consider the cost of moving it up the gravity well from earth and then back down onto the moon. Realise that you're talking about several orders of magnitude more mass than /every launch ever made from earth, combined/. Think for a moment about all the other industrial processes required to turn steel into spaceships. (Another clue, spaceships have other ingredients apart from metal.) Oh yeah, and you'll need masses of cheap energy and a couple of thousand people to run the plant, plus concomitant life support, facilities, plumbing, training that takes. Finally, note that there's no iron ore on the moon. Congratulations! you have now achieved a small glimmer of understanding of why why your comment was utter drivel.

Apart from work on pysiological adaption to weightlessness, can you cite a few papers on worthwhile original research carried out on ISS? (hint - no, you can't.)

That's the sort of fatuous reasoning that convinced Dubya that returning to the moon would enable some sort of "way station" where a weary crew bound for Mars can pull over, take a comfort break, refuel, let the kids stretch their legs and so on. It's nonsense.

Why not?

You're right, except that there is no such market beyond the handful of people willing to drop a few tens of millions on a Soyuz to ISS, or a few hundred thousand on a Branson/Rutan "Suicide Special". Certainly nothing like enough to cover developing and flight-testing human-rated flight hardware on top of Delta and show a profit.

Glad to see the "asteroid mining" trolls have finally shut up & gone away though :>

It's not hard to predict that expectations for the poor sap who takes over after Dubya - which was always going to be a poisoned chalice - were always going to be impossibly high. Sadly, his almost Sheen-like naturalness at playing the part of the President means that many people's expectations are even higher (cos everyone knows that how well someone governs is directly proportional to their backstory, tone of voice, oratorical ability and so forth. That's worked really well for us in the past, hasn't it. Personally if we're all agricultural peasants in four years time, or radioactive mutants, or living a fascist theocracy, he'll have succeeded in my book.

It's true to say that a major factor in the premature curtailment of the orginally planned series of Apollo missions was the entirely rational fear that the more missions launched, the greater the probability of a total loss of missions and crew, and that this would lead to a complete loss of public support for NASA.

As a moment's reflection would indicate, this is such a blindingly obvious idea that the fact it's not happening must mean it was considered and discarded for a good reason (or, as is actually the case, a whole passel of very good reasons.) Unless you're one of those cosy groups of people who think NASA and JPL are staffed entirely by drooling halfwits, or in league with the CIA invasion force of UN black-helicopter-flying lizard creatures, of course, which is always a possibility on Slashdot... :)

What most people who use the "technological spin-offs" argument in debates about resourcing of space activities fail to grasp that the same sort of (unpredictable) spin-offs would result from spending the money on any other massive technological or engineering project. Taking that as a given, wouldn't it be better to spend the funds in a direction where the *primary* result of the expenditure is of more utility? (Say, as an example, a massive expansion of renewal energy generation capacity and associated technologies and engineering.)

I'm a huge fan and proponent of robotic exploration of the solar system. NASA, JPL, the aerospace contractors and their partners in universities across the world have done an amazing job with comparitively tiny sums of money. Alan Stern (the head of NASA's Space Science Directorate who resigned when his plan to make visible the pain caused by the massive cost over-runs on MSL by shutting down the Spirit MER rover was overruled by higher-ups) has recently pointed out that routine cost overruns are crippling NASA. Ares and Orion show every sign of following this trend, and for what? To keep alive the fallacious dream that seems rather too popular that Star Trek is a plan for future space exploration, rather than an entirely traditional drama turned to SF by the addition of magic impulse drive / dilithium crystal devices. When we've done a robotic Mars sample return, which although fiendishly hard to accomplish is infinitely more practical than doing a manned mission), let's talk about Moonbase Alpha or whatever. (And whilst we're at it, for god's sake abandon the ISS, the most expensive white elephant ever to wreck astronomical observations.)

1. there is no way the shuttle could retrieve an astronaut who "floated away". Hence, no drill.
2. For the same reasons that they can't intercept you putative astronaut marshmallow, they also can't intercept the toolbag.

The nature of those reasons are left as an exercise for Dr _Banzai. (Hints: delta-v, ranging.)

Perl's a plague?

OK then: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey0eS-Nx6Ks