This wasn't an oversight, it was well understood that this would happen. They've gotten lucky that dust devils have cleaned the panels a few times.

The next Mars rover is nuclear powered. There are no attempts at any kind of dust cleaning device- it would be far too heavy and fragile to be worth bothering with.

Repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell.

There's one. There are a lot of others. Yes, he's a moderate Republican, but moderate Republicans aren't welcome in the modern Republican party.

What's wrong with Velcro?

You're missing the real point of discussion classes. If you're doing it *right* you should be preparing material ahead of time. Your opinion shouldn't be uninformed- you need to do the prep work to grasp enough of the subject to at least be able to understand what you know, what you don't and what other folks do/don't understand.

The class I teach has students doing a lot of presentation. Could I do a better job than they could? Of course. But that's not the point- it's that they have to learn it well enough to present it. That's hard, but you learn things far, far better if you have to teach someone else about it.

Yes, I knew large parts of it weren't compatible. I give it a pass on this because the 921 does things better than a Strat- the neck joint is a thing of beauty that should be copied by all bolt-neck guitars, the locking nut is height adjustable, the tremelo doesn't require you to cut the ball ends off the strings, etc. The parts I had trouble with were the lock washers- it wasn't clear these weren't standard Floyd Rose parts, and I had to find someone at Yamaha who actually knew something about an obscure 20-year-old model. (I knew it needed some love when I got it- it was cheap. Plays beautifully now)

But none of that affects my point- *Strats* are self compatible. Changing out a pickguard is hardly rocket science- it's a few screws and 30 seconds of soldering. Everything else swaps in with a screwdriver.

And that's different from a Stratocaster in what way? I can already easily swap out the pickups- they're attached to the pickguard, and I can buy any number of pickguards preloaded with various pickups/electronics for a Strat. I can pull off the neck anytime I want and swap in a new one- it's only four screws, and there are a dozen companies out there that make Strat compatible necks. I can assemble a Strat entirely from random parts- they are almost totally interchangeable.

(My biggest frustration with my Yamaha 921 when I got it off of Craigslist was that it looks like a Strat, but the parts are all subtlety different, so it took forever to figure out what I could use.)

Unless, of course, you do decide to be radical and junk the idea of wood altogether, as many folks have done

Bandwidth is unaffected- you can stuff just as many physical objects in the box as you did before. (In fact, it's going up constantly-think about what a 1' cube box of microSD cards could hold over the years) Just keep sending boxes out at the same rate and you get the same bandwidth

Latency is your issue here- you've gone from a 86,400,000 ms ping to 172,800,000 ms ping.

The error rate is too high- data copying using that medium and the best available (naturally derived) technology makes an error roughly every 100,000 bases. There are existing correction routines, but far too much data is damaged on copy, even given the highly redundant coding tables.

Then again, it could be worse: you could use the single strand formulation. Error rates are far higher. This turns out to be a surprisingly effective strategy for organisms using it, although less so for the rest of us.

Really? We have good empirical evidence that cap and trade works. Check out sulfur dioxide pollution, acid rain and the existing cap and trade schemes in the US and EU. Both have been highly successful, have met their targets *years* ahead of the goals and have cost a tiny fraction of what the naysayers claimed the costs would be. Why is carbon any different?

Yes, we need to get China and India in on these as well. But guess what- climate change affects them too. Get a decent global solution and they'd probably be pretty happy. After all, it's way easier to take X Gton of crap out of the air when you are starting from a base of nothing, so companies in the US would probably happily buy credits off of the poorer countries. Less carbon in the air, poor countries get a boost financially, rich world countries get years to experiment with solutions before implementing them in higher cost areas. You can even go the Australia route and simply give back the money to the people affected by higher energy prices.