But, assuming that he de-friended her, the message will just get stuck in the "other" folder. Might be years before he gets around to seeing it.

[can't do much better.]

Actually, right at the moment, that's not true-- humans are vastly more capable than robots. I'm quite supportive of robots, but a human geologist could do in a day what it takes the Mars rovers a month to do.

Ah, now that's the question. Robots are evolving much more quickly than humans. What will the machines be able to do in 2030?

(will they need us at all? for anything?)

The money you spend on a Mars orbit mission sets you up for landing on Mars by developing and testing a critical portion of the technology, the part that gets humans to Mars orbit and back.

Taking the first step gets you one step closer to Mars.

If you waited to take you first step until you were ready to run a marathon, you'd never stand up at all.

A system that tracks the whereabouts of every American (or at least, every one with a car), and saves the data for five years...
This story needs the tag "what could possibly go wrong"?

There are a lot of different pieces required to go to Mars, land, and return. Some of these, like a habitat that humans can live in for the required transit to Mars and back, we have, or at least, we can make with only small modifications to what has been developed (the Space Station). Some of them, like landers and habitats and space suits for use on the Martian surface, we don't have. Every one of these pieces is a potential bottleneck for a human mission.

What you are basically saying is, we should delay Mars exploration with humans until we have all the pieces developed. The Planetary Society is saying, no, let's not delay, let's do a mission we can do now

The longest usage we have gotten out of a space suit on the moon is three eight-hour walks. The report from the Apollo missions was that the suits were trashed by that point (lunar dust is very abrasive)-- they would not have been usable for another use. Mars dust is not as abrasive as lunar dust, but it is much finer. A different problem. Do you want to send humans to Mars if you then have to tell them "oh, by the way, you'll be on the surface for 500 days, but you can only go outside three times. After that we're not sure your suits will still hold pressure, so stay inside."

Of course, we can develop and test suits for Mars. Developing and testing is something we're good at. But there are a hundred pieces that have to be developed and tested, and only so much budget.

So the question is, do we want to delay, until all the parts for landing and habitation and launching back from Mars have been developed and tested? Or do we go now, doing what we can with what we can do?

Because going to the surface, living on the surface, and launching off the surface is really hard, and really expensive, and requires a lot of engineering and solving a lot of problems that we haven't yet solved. We don't know how to land something on Mars that's as large as a human habitat. This will take some work. Landing on Mars is going to be a very expensive mission.

But, on the other hand, if we did send people to orbit Mars without landing... that might be a very powerful incentive to try to get that technology made and actually land on the next mission.

Cool. I've been proposing this for years.
http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa....
http://telerobotics.gsfc.nasa....

Emperor Julian the Apostate! (AD 332 - AD 363)
"He is clearly Rome's second ever philosopher-ruler, after the great Marcus Aurelius. But if Marcus Aurelius was weighed down by war and plague then, Julian's greatest burden was to be that he belonged to a different age. Trained classically, learned in Greek philosophy he would have made a fine successor to Marcus Aurelius. But those days had gone, now this distant intellect seemed out of place, at odds with many of his people, and certainly with the Christian elite of society. "

http://www.roman-empire.net/co...

--nice bio by Gore Vidal, too.

Because the chips need to be made on single-crystal material, which needs to be grown on a single crystal substrate.

This is, by the way, not particularly new in the solar cell research community. Photovoltaics researchers have been developing technologies like this for a long time-- it's called "epitaxial lift-off" or "monolithic metamorphic" in the most recent versions (with "metamorphic" indicating a change in lattice constant), but older variants were called "cleft" and "peeled film technology".

"A key stumbling block in the effort to combat global warming has been the intimate link between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth."

Time to cue up the warning about correlation not being causation.

Most particularly, in this case: when the economy gets better, people buy more stuff. There's a correlation between how many teddy bears people buy for their children and their income. That doesn't mean that increasing the production of teddy bears will increase average income. When the economy grows, people buy more.

These are traffic lights. Traffic lights with cameras attached.

They're just traffic lights in the shape of robots. Which is pretty cool, when you look at the pictures.

That link says nothing whatsoever about rules for government employee e-mail.

That's a link to rules about ISPs archiving e-mail that is the subject of a subpoena.

The link you give says nothing of the sort. The link states that a government may require an ISP to archive e-mail subject to a subpoena.

That has precisely nothing to do with State Department employees, nor does it say anything whatsoever about what e-mail addresses they use.

That is a great example of "ABCs"-- Argument By Changing the subject.

I've never quite understood: why would anybody want to get out of jury duty?

I've often suggested that, but this is the first time I've heard anybody else suggest it.

Yes: vote, but the candidates on the slate should be randomly selected from the population