They have a tricorder? Well that's it. The gloves are off. Listen up everybody - we're going to a quadcorder.

Now that's just silly. Of course something mission-critical like a space probe won't be running PHP.

It'll be running jQuery on node.js.

what do you mean the latency from our data center on Pluto is lousy? look at the cost savings we get from the free cooling!

Unfortunately that chart doesn't work for any kind of ingested radioactive substance, and it's kind of disingenous for Randall to present it as if it's a meaningful comparison. There's plan radiation, and then there's radioactive contamination in dust, liquid or aerosol form, and the second one is the gift that keeps on giving.

IANAhealthphysicist, but I can read Wikipedia, and I'm pretty sure you get a lot more radiation damage to your cells if you eat or breathe in a radioactive particle than if you sit next to the same number of bequerels on the bench, because your body can incoporate the radioactive emitter directly into your cells for the entire rest of its (maximum of bioactive and radioactive) lifespan, and your skin won't screen out the alpha radiation like it does for an internal source. Iodine-equivalents are pretty nasty since although they have a half-life on the order of days, if they get inside you they dump all that radiation into your thyroid, which is not a good place to have it. Long-term, Radioactive strontium is the worst because it replaces calcium and so binds directly to your bone marrow, which is not good for leukemia. And potassium-equivalents are in the mid range, with a half-life on the order of months to years and they are bioavailable, but not permanently so. As far as we know.

Oh, and a lot of those last have been dumped into the ocean by Fukushima, and are now inside fish. Do they bioaccumulate up the food chain? We're not really sure, but we'll probably find out. It's a wonderful science experiment!

tldr: Don't eat, drink or breathe radioactive gunk. It's worse for you than it looks.

And don't forget that in the Microsoft enterprise-backend administration world (which appears to be following a tech trajectory diametrically opposed to the shiny-flashy-broken all-Surface-no-substance Windows 8 world), there is a very strong trend back toward the console, via Powershell.

Things go round and round and round again, but even on Windows, the command line endures and conquers.

By the way, Powershell does some things much, much better than any current command shell on Linux. When are we going to get a bash-alike that is based on piping arbitrary objects? (And Powershell objects are pretty neat, they're not just raw .NET objects - they're dynamically reconfigureable-at-runtime things much more in the old Smalltalk spirit than anything that came after C++). Ruby would probably do it, if someone could add piping support to it and hack up the libraries to make it interface with all the various incompatble object OS and object systems under the Linux/X hood.

Well, two things. Lack of ambition and the Therns.

(And the Mysterons, and the Ice Warriors, and the Tripods, and whatever the hell it was that UMC dug up on Phobos...)

Well then, we'll just have to hope that they miss us more than they hit.

Yes.

There's an interesting textbook called Irreducible Mind released in the last few years which details the multitude of evidence acquired over the last century and a half that something very interesting and strange is going on with the mind-brain interface, and that not only is it not established that the mind is the same thing as the brain, but that it's pretty well established that the mind, whatever it is, can exist decoupled from the brain, and can under some circumstances (and quite possibly a lot more commonly than that) access information that there is no physical model for the brain being able to access.

Also take a look at Extraordinary Knowing which documents much of the same material but in a more newbie-friendly way. Still scientific, just not as heavyweight.

Yes, this stuff is weird. Yes, it's often onsidered taboo to research. Yes, it's very hard to "scale up" and make behave in industrial settings. But it appears to be real, and it has a lot of implications for the computational and simulationist approaches to general artificial intelligence.

(Mainly, that it doesn't look like even simulating the physical structure of the brain will get any further toward simulating an actual human mind than modelling a person's house would get us close to simulating that person. If the brain is shaped by the mind, and not the other way around, then sure, you'll see correlations, you may even be able to infer behaviour from physical structure - as you would be able to guess my personality if you looked at my house. But that finite physical structure will not be the mind, because the mind/inhabitant is much larger than the brain/house and contains much unexpressed detail. Quite possibly an infinite amount of detail. We simply don't know what the mind is yet, but we are starting to get a picture of what the mind isn't.)

How about those crazy Eurocrats, eh! All with their unelected science officials making science funding decisions and all! It's like a madhouse! With scienceing! A mad sciencehouse!

So, um. Completely unrelated question - which ballot is it that the project administrators with funding authoritiy over at DARPA, NASA, the National Institute of Standards, the Department of Energy, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation, stand on again?

Shan't play your pocklips! Shan't! It's smelly!

Mars pocklips has red snow! Venus has smulfic acid rain! Andromeda's parents bought her a whole glacksy to smash!
Your pocklips is a silly little wet, silly, smelly one, and, and and it smells!

Waaaaaa!

That's a feature, not a bug.

Seriously, this is something I actually want. If I want text to be in a column, I can resize my browser window so it's smaller. I get really frustrated with today's website schemes which render all the text inside a tiny column on my huge landscape monitor. I have all that space for a reason - why does the website designer think their idea of a readable layout is better than mine? I'm the one who's actually reading it.

Unfortunately, the traditional Marxist-Lenist mechanics of winning a violent revolution tends to make achieving actual socialism difficult.

First you have to get a few billion people murderously angry with their neighbours and sisters and brothers; then you have to set up a centralised command-authority to make all those murderously angry people kill the right people and not the wrong ones, and train them how to kill efficiently and without moral qualms; then you have to deploy that command authority to take a burned out, smoking wreck of a world filled with well-trained, still murderously angry but now hungry killers, and make them not kill you. Easiest way to do that is to intimidate them by being really nasty, nastier than the old government they got angry enough with to overthrow.

Congratulations! Now you've got a world filled with smoking wreckage and scared, emotionally scarred angry people who are good at lying to your face so you don't kill them, but who still remember how much better things were before the revolution and the civil war. And now you get to use those people to create an open, loving, honest, trusting society where everyone does things for everyone else out of the goodness of their heart.

Good luck!

Yes, we've had those for a few billion years; they're called lifeforms. They run on water and sunlight, and put together they make this wondrous technological fabric we call an ecosystem.

Hey, guess what! We already live in an entire post-scarcity nanotech-run planet! And yet, somehow, we still seem to want stuff. And our assemblers often run amok and compete for feedstocks, or try to eat us.

Why do we think that crude low-resolution self-assemblers that run on metal and plastic and electricity are going to be significantly more efficient or tractable to design and deploy than the bio-nanotech we already have?

This is an important point and is true not only of the economy but many other complex systems, including the environment, cities, and climate. Slow changes are fine; fast changes cause stress, and the faster the change the worse the trauma.

This is also true when we look at history. It doesn't go in a straight line, it goes in bursts of disruption and adaptation. Many of the major suck-points in history, that we look back at and think of as normal for that time, weren't in fact normal - they were traumatic responses to abnormal periods of rapid change. Dickensian London with its rapid influx of industrial workers into suddenly growing cities; times of war, plague and crop failure; the period of huge migrations that crashed the Western Roman Empire. All of these were changes that stressed a social system beyond its adaptation points and eventually provoked a new adaptation - but not without major grief.

Tapping your chest with a bullet won't hurt. Getting hit by that bullet at the speed of sound, will give you a very bad day. It's all in the kinetic energy, the speed of the change.

And once we have it, what do we do with it?

Getting space ore down to Earth in a rocket cargo hold will pay off only if it's solid gold/platinum, last I checked the ballpark numbers.

De-orbiting entire asteroids the cheap way is not particularly fun for those near the impact site.

Leaving it in space for colonists to build with literally begs the question: what would be the economic reason those people to live in space? To mine more stuff so they can build more homes for more miners? That's a nice pyramid scheme, but we can already run those cheaply on Earth.

And we want to live in a hostile radiation-blasted vacuum.... why, exactly?