"chairman of Plants Need CO2, a non-profit with ties to the coal industry." Who'd'a thunk??

Can someone please explain to me how "decreased projected income" became "loss"?

"as rich as Germany" before>/i> we gave all that cash to Greece?

I love SysInternals and have the original Winternals files on an old 3.2 SCSI-II somewhere (or maybe buried somewhere in a /win//utils/OS/win directory on my server). Run as many SysInternals as you want and find me the BHO that's preventing an ActiveX control from passing info through a hidden helper browser window. You can sit all day with Proc* looking for that. I want to find a bad thread or spin or memleak, yeah, SysInternals all the way.

HT is by no means dead; you can spend a lot of extra time putting a screw through a board with a hammer but a screwdriver is probably the better and more efficient choice for the job.

Hijacjk This ain't jsut for helpdesk monkeys; we use it constantly in Enterprise software testing. Server works fine, Client works fine, OS checks out, software ain't working. Run HT and find the culprit pretty quickly, and when your customers are telcos and banks doing short-cycle upgrades for occasionally legit reasons, your on-site guys need to find fast answers.

Heh. me giving a sober assessment.

It's not about the will to do it (although that does play a role). The minute the copycyt Chinese land on the Moon the US -- possibly together with Russia &/or the EU -- will put an Apollo-type effort into getting to Mars. Hell, Just read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars (ISBN 978-1-85168-780-0) and see what nearly insurmountable problems there were in getting to the Moon, and she really only deals with life sciences, not physics.

The problem is that we can't realistically get a payload of sufficient size there. The technological hurdles are easy; the problems are physics and biology. We can build a dozen rockets, take advantage of orbital mechanics for unmanned segments, launch 'em off three full-size gantries together so that one launch window serves three machines.

But before we even think about getting the people there we still have to figure out how to arrive, orbit, and then land precisely -- repeatedly -- unmanned, all while dealing with the 8-minute radio delay in the best of circumstances.

The problem of human physiology is even worse than the physics problem. We can come up with odd trajectories and multiple burns and en-route dockings to provide additional fuel to carry such things out. Have you ever seen the astronauts coming back from 3-6 months on the ISS? It takes a huge fucking crew to get them out of the return vehicle and into recovery. It takes three strong men just to pull those poor bastards off the couch and out of the capsule. And that's from LEO. There ain't no recovery crews waiting on Mars.

We can't fucking land more than about tonne on that planet.. Forget the time and the <50% success rate of achieving orbit and landing a probe. We could land on either Phobos or Deimos no problem. Mars has just enough atmosphere to really screw things up.

To even consider going to Mars we first need to send at least 5 rockets full of supplies and land them literally next to each other. We also need to park another 2 or 3 in orbit to hold fuel for Mars Orbit Docking in order to dock and go home within a reasonable time frame. Aldrin's free transfer trajectory is great but unsuitable for human passage.

Get the supplies and contingency machines in place, then think about it. But first figure out how to drop 5 tonnes safely to a very particular spot on the surface. Now do it repeatedly. Because that's what landing on Mars requires.

Why not just farm it out to ESA or Russia? Arianne has a damned impressive success rate and Russia is waging a price war with China. Either way, your payload goes up at rock-bottom prices.

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NASA is a palindrome: an agency formed that first couldn't get off the ground, then got up in the air, then into low orbit, then high orbit, then to the Moon, then to low orbit, and now can't even get off the ground. I used to be so proud of them...

Almost half of all people on-ine (and with no consideration for off-line usage) are still using a decade-old OS. And that's bad why? My fucking Atari 800 blew the doors off of anything that came along for more than a decade and its OS was fucking hard-coded into a 10KB ROM pack (upon which we piggy-backed 4 other selectable 10KB OS .ROMs)

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When an OS -- even from a company you don't like -- does the job it's supposed to do, what's the problem? Of course I like my various *nix installs as long as they do what I need them to do, but if you have to use Windows for anything, XP is the last in a (supported) line which will still more or less do what you tell it to do. You may recall that XP (like everything before it) installs with a basic version of Win3.1.