That's Jeremlah Cornelius, he was talking about Jeremiah Cornelius, who does have a 3-digit uid. His whole point was that the spammer is using a username easily confused with another used with a 3-digit uid.

And by great I presume you mean ridiculous bullshit filled with ignorance of scientific facts and ridiculous assertions?

It's not going to be launched from Europe. The launch vehicle is going to be Arianespace's Vega, which is launched from French Guiana, in South America.

Isn't that true even on normal days?

There's been some talk about the possibility of sending an airplane to Titan, the Saturn's biggest moon and I it sounds a lot more interesting and practical than a plane on mars.

For one, Mars's atmosphere is very thin, making flying in there very hard. You're going to need big wings to stay in the air and controlling it is going to be delicate. Titan, on the other hand, has a very thick and dense atmosphere, allowing for a lot smaller craft and easier manouverability. That also lowers the power requirements for the propulsion, so it could be quite feasibly be powered by a ASRG giving it a flight time of years.

There are a lot of other very good points, too, but instead of writing about them myself, I'll just post a link to a cool blog that explains most of it quite well: http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2010/06/aviatr-titan-plane-details.html

Here's a very informative presentation about it, too http://vimeo.com/11432536

I've been living with only a 380kbps cellular internet connection for the last couple of months and I don't have the luxury of downloading multiple gigabytes accidentally. Just some hours ago, I decided to spend the evening painstakingly downloading 150MB worth of Arch Linux updates over the connection.

(... Only to reboot the machine after the update and realizing that the crappy internet didn't work anymore. Took couple of hours to get it fixed. Another exciting day in Linux land)

But besides huge downloads, I can generally get by with a slow connection like this, even these days. Online banking, news, messaging and so on are no problem.

citizenship, or permanent residence, that is.

http://www.spacex.com/careers.php

Relevant expertise required and also US citizenship, apparently.

I think you're right. Low temperatures and air pressure, radiation and dust storms would make it practically impossible to go outside the well-shielded martian underground bunker. Now where on earth would you find people willing to live their lives without sunlight inside dark basem^H^H^H^H^Hbunkers?

Well that was an intreguing piece of writing :)

Ceres does appear to be an interesting place indeed. I guess that's why we've got the Dawn spacecraft on the way there. 5 more years and we'll know a lot more about the place than before. If 5 years sound too far away, it'll also be studing Vesta, another interesting large asteroid belt object, next year.