That's not all that different from how he got started with Tesla. He had no intention of starting a car company (he already had SpaceX), he just wanted AC Propulsion to build him a copy of their t-zero - but they had no interest, even for a small fortune. But then they pointed him to this guy named Martin Eberhard who had this wild idea to commercialize the t-zero's tech base on a Lotus Elise body and was looking for funding... and thus Tesla was born.

If somebody damages your car, would you want your insurance company to pay to fix it?

That means they can set prices based on risk. And risk in this case means "perceived risk". It's not brave or not brave. It's just corporate behavior. This is why corporations are not considered people except by reactionaries and the far Right.

Yes, because it is very hard to find a barber here in Austin at a reasonable time

I've been to Austin, and judging from the looks of the locals, it did not appear that the barbers had been very busy.

Yes, I'd go to the mall. I have a better chance of being killed in an accident driving to the mall.

I will bet your chances of being killed in a mall go way up if there are specific threats against that mall.

I would bet that the decision to not show this movie was made entirely by whoever provides insurance to the theater chain. It must be killing the theater owners not to show a movie that has gotten this much publicity at opening. But if your insurance provider says "No", you do what they say.

*Lots* of stuff being done in space that couldn't plausibly be done by robots, micro-g research can't be done on Earth. Stuck in a tin can floating above Venus though, you've basically got all the disadvantages of being on Earth, and none of the advantages.

Mars and the Moon both have potential to host self-sustaining Earth colonies (especially Mars) by applying existing technology, so there's plenty of potential there, if probably not as short-term lucrative as the rape-pillage-and-plunder that has characterized most modern colonization efforts.

I'm not arguing against exploring Venus, it's just that all the usual specious arguments against human exploration of space actually *apply* there. You can't survive on the surface, no matter what protection you have. You can't even stick your hand out the window of your airship without it starting to dissolve. So long as humans are restricted to living within a sealed system isolated from the surrounding environment the only possible benefit of them being there at all are the advantages of a shorter distance - mainly time and energy costs for transferring signals and samples. And compared to the difficulties in creating a lighter-than-air station in a toxic, corrosive atmosphere, just boosting the samples to an orbital station built on tried-and-true technology is probably going to be a lot safer, easier, and cheaper. Someday our technology will no doubt enable us to walk around on the surface and perform real science and exploration in person - but until then there's nothing to be accomplished by getting humans any closer than orbit.

As for visiting the farthest reaches on Earth in person - that's always been mostly a vanity project. Not that there's anything wrong with that, provided you're footing the bill yourself, but after the initial survey the missions with serious funding have pretty much all had a clear idea of what they hoped to accomplish beforehand.

ISDN, so technically not a modem....

Now that Sony has cancelled the premier, if I want to see this movie I'll have to find a pirated copy.

As I recall the toy-grade plastic-extruding 3D printer recently sent to the ISS is working just fine, despite the 0g. As was expected - the things were tested in all orientations, including upside down, here on Earth. If it works fine even when gravity is working against you, it will probably continue to work fine when gravity is "ignoring" you.

Basically the bonding forces between layers are strong enough that, even when the top layer is still liquid, that gravity doesn't play much of a roll. It's not like we're talking about ornamental water fountains here - the plastic is liquified, forced through an extrusion nozzle, and travels *maybe* 1mm before contacting a cool surface and rapidly solidifying again.

And then there's things like the arc-welding robot arm, which can act as a 3D printer capable of drawing free-standing 3D lines connected to a surface at only one end. I seriously doubt it would have any problems in freefall either.

The fact that it is an introductory course rather than a more advanced one has nothing to do with gender, it's the normal way these things are done. If it were a course to encourage boys to take up CS it wouldn't be at a higher level.

I'm not sure I can make it any clearer.

Well, if you're flying to Venus presumably you're doing so via a big honking rocket. And presumably you plan to ride the same rocket home again. Maybe even a Falcon 9, if you weren't taking too much with you.

Not sure just how big the balloon would have to be, but lets see... Falcon 9 v1.1 takeoff mass: ~500 tonnes. Density of CO2 at STP: ~2g/L
500,000 kg / (0.002kg/L) = 250,000,000 L = 250,000m^3, or about 25% larger than the Hindenburg (assuming lift-gas density is negligible).

Umm, air pressure is only an issue if you open the door - which you wouldn't want to do on Venus anyway, unless you want to die of carbon dioxide poisioning.

Microgravity is a legitimate issue, but centripetal force can overcome that, and a rotating "tethered dumbbell" station is well within the limits of current material science.

Heat and cold extremes are only an issue if you can't average them out effectively, by, say having a thermally conductive hull. I recall no major issues on that front from the ISS, though the problem would admittedly grow worse as you get closer to the sun. Rotating would also go a long way to solving that problem as well.

Meanwhile the atmosphere offers plenty of CO2 and some nitrogen, but no hydrogen aside from the paltry amount in the 25ppm water vapor, and extracting that in the presence of the 150ppm sulfur dioxide is likely going to be a challenge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

And as far as "cloud mining" and gathering samples of potential microbial life are concerned, what's wrong with simply dropping a skyhook from your orbital station? It's not like you're trying to support the growth of an offworld colony, there's *way* more hospitable places in the solar system to do that. In fact most any large carbonaceous asteroid would likely qualify.

How do you figure we could get water? There's less than 25ppm water in Venus's atmosphere, versus 150ppm sulfur dioxide. Nor are there any other hydrogen-containing molecules from which it could be synthesized. Air could at least be be made from CO2 and nitrogen, with enough energy.

Also, anything that's flying below the clouds is down in that acidic atmosphere that has wreaked havoc with everything we've sent so far. Could be problematic.

Meanwhile on Mars we have:
- Free solar energy (less efficient than than on Earth, much less Venus, but still)
- 0.4 g. (Is 1g a magic number for some reason? Maybe, but so far all we know is weightlessness causes problems, a lot of which would probably be resolved by *any* significant gravity.)
- 24.7 hour days (within the narrow range that humans can be entrained to)
- radiation shielding (a few meters of sand is WAY more effective than some air and magnetic fields
- An atmosphere almost identical to Venus's except in density (and the absence of the caustic sulfur dioxide)
- fresh water in practically unlimited quantities in the ice caps, and possibly extractable from the soil as well
- The fact that with CO2, water, and nitrogen you can grow plants to produce air, food, and all manner of cellulose-based construction materials.
- the aforementioned sand - good for lots of things beyond radiation shielding, especially if we can develop a binding agent from local resources.
- solid ground to build upon, provide for recreational activities, and provide all manner of hands-on research opportunities.

Sure, it's cold - but heat is cheap. Especially if we took a nuclear reactor along instead of solar panels - a 25-50MWe modular reactor could be lifted to orbit by a single Falcon Heavy, would provide more electricity than a comparable mass of solar panels (even with current mass-rich designs), and would generate a comparable amount of heat as well, making it a much better investment.

Plus it's really only the ground that's cold - insulate the bottom of your boots and the rest of you is already essentially in a budget vacuum thermos. Shedding heat will likely be a bigger challenge than keeping warm, and thanks to that cold, cold ground that shouldn't prove too difficult.

It actually works against women much of the time. They tend to be less interesting in the things the male majority are, so that pretty much leaves flirting...

I wasn't arguing that it was. I was making the point that developing introductory material is standard practice, not just for girls. I'm not sure how you managed to not comprehend that.