Personnel for operating the rover couldn't possibly cost that much,.....I'm sure the communication infrastructure for it was already in place.

(1) Thos guys make between $85K and $120K per year. "overhead" about doubles that. This covers things like the building they work in, insurance, vacation pay and the bosses and office cleaning staff and capital equipment. So for $4M/year you get about 16 people full time.

(2) The communications system is HUGE. We are taling about football sized antennas all around the world, satalites in orbit and so on. All these cost money and every space program has to pay a "tax" based on usage and so on. So your $4M does not cover 16 people.

I've been in the software business for many years. I was surprized the first time I had to cost out a project. $1M does not buy many lines of code. We get about 250 lines of code per man-month.

unless they have access to a certain amount of 2000 year old copper and other metals.

Yes they do, ALL copper on Earth is way more than 2,000 years old. read the linked article. It says that there is simply no way to test metal. All of it is billions of years old.

You can look at the corrosion on the outside but there are ways to fake that.

They SHOULD be easy to reproduce. Almost all of truely antique pots and so on were made hundreds of years ago be just "normal indians" It is not like most of them were in their time "high art" it was jsut the vilage potter's work and likely sold for a small amount. The potter made these from local cheap materials that are still locally available and cheap,. Basically any skilled potter who knows what to do can turn out many pots per day both now and 500 years ago.

This is not the same thing as a fake Rembrandt oil painting. 1,000 years ago these pots were made by people of avgerage skills.

"...it's next to impossible to create quality cable (ie: cable that will pass a Time Domain Reflectometer test) by hand without expensive dies, special Ethernet jacks and special cable...."

The above is 100% correct except for one work "expensive". The dies don't cost a long. You can buy th tool for under $50. None of the other stuff is expensive either.

That said, Cable with the ends already on don't cost much either. It's just that it is very hard to pull cable with the.ends on

Also look at the fire code. You can need plenum cable.

They are wide band two inch wide helical scan tapes. The specs on those tapes are very impressive even by today's standards. For example we use wide band analog tape in our lab and the specs are not much different. The machines don't cot so much any more only about as much as a new Lexus

You have to figure those old machines where not built for the lunar mission. NASA didn't have that kind of money. These were US Air force machines.

For just getting one machine to work their current method is the best. What they did was get a bunch of these old machines and disassemble them for parts to build one that works. The guy doing that is a volunteer working for free. Hard to beat zero cost.

If you wanted to build many machines then yes, re-design one from scratch. But have you priced the cost of custom one off software. I'm in that business and I'll rtell yo that $1M does not buy you much/ The only reason software is cheap is because they sell millions of copies.

If his software runs under DOS then rub a virtual "DOS" system inside a modern OS

That Modern OS can be Mac OS X, or Linuix. Or even Windows.

Once the computer is running out of a VM yu no longer have to worry about the hardware lasting. You can move copy the VM image file to a DVD or hard drive and plug it into any Mac, Linux or Windows computer that has a VM player and boot the VM image and be up and running. So your system becomes abot as "portable" as a music CD.

Buy him a few 20" iMacs and set up his software in VMware's "Fusion" and he'll be good to go. He will be able to keep up to date as new version of the OS come out while is old software runs in the VM.

Yes CO2 is produced but the carbon in the (let's say) corn came from the atmosphere. So when it is decomposed or fermented the carbon is put back where it came from.

The burnning of fossil fuels releases carbon back into the air also. This carbon was taken out of the air also but the problem is the time periods. The cabon in oil is the result of millions of years of plant growth and then it is all burned at once in a couple centuries.

Alcohol production is closer to steady state. Same with burning trees and dry grass.

I agree with about above. You do see the small companies grabbing the guys with the best GPAs. The mid level GPA end up at the bigger places.

But WHY? Well there big companies need LOTS of people and by definition there are not a lot of high GPA students. There are simply not very many people in the 5th percentile.

Also they are looking at cost. The big guys need to keep their payroll costs in line