Thanks, didn't know most of these!

Don't toss the TV and don't toss the internet, unless you're willing to toss booze, drugs and gambling too. She doesn't have marriage troubles, she has addiction troubles!

People who sit in front of the TV or internet for hours don't need the TV or internet *taken away*, they just need willpower or help to fix the underlying problems.

I used to read PC Gamer until I got sick of it getting thinner and thinner, while the price went up and up and the amount of crap on the coverdisc multiplied. Now I read GamesTM (UK mag) and it's pretty good- it feels like it's written for adults, which is bloody refreshing in a games mag.

(No, I don't work for them, just pointing out that it's not all as bad as PC Gamer!)

Check out Moonlite, a (hopefully) upcoming British mission to do just that.

Good for science, good for the comedy value of saying "penetrator" and giggling a lot.

I think it'd be even cooler if they went somewhere else on the moon and did some actual science, rather than an attention seeking stunt. It's a damn shame, and a waste of a brilliant machine.

It would be a hell of a lot easier and cheaper and more quickly accomplishable to build an asteroid detection and intercept system than to create a self-sustaining population of humans off the earth that can be the entire future of the species.

Please quote your financial figures here! Asteroid detection is notoriously hard, and most Armageddon style interception fantasy is flawed by basic physics. The best chance we have of deflecting rocks are to spot them very, very far away and attach rockets, ion drives, big fat nukes to one side and gently nudge them until they just miss us- we need much better technology and infrastructure for the detectors, the launch vehicles and the deflectors.

On the other hand, we have the technology, right now, and the money, right now, to start a base on the moon. Not much at first, just a basic Antartica style base, with a focus on expansion- ripping magnesium, aluminium and titanium from the lunar surface. The first settlers should be geologist and engineers, and expand the base. By sending up people as and when the base is expanded to take them, we could have a colony with enough people to start breeding within 2 or 3 decades, for less than the price of buying a couple of aircraft carriers.

I'm not saying this is what we should do exclusively, but it's easy, and cheap. Why not set up the very first asteroid detection status as part of that moonbase? Use the low gravity well of Luna as a base for our fancy new interception missions? We can can do both- save the people down here, and establish settlements up there, and in fact they reinforce one another.

If a game has me hooked, addicted, and I play it for hours at a time for weeks on end- fine. I'm getting enjoyment, the developers get money, everybody wins. But it seems to me that the games that pull me in the most are those I buy outright, not the WOW-alikes that are subscription based. Surely if you're paying monthly there's always going to be a pressure on Devs to create addictive play? If I'm addicted to a bought-outright game, it's because it's a good game. That can't always be said for pay monthly games- the grind, the acheivements, the high-level horsie you just have to own- do they really add to the game, or do they just feed your addiction?

No-one will ever disregard the machine itself- you don't even have to RTFA to see that "devices such as Enigma have been restored". The government are dragging their collective feet over whether to provide funding to restore the *site*, a collection of 70 year old ramshackle huts. The Enigma will live on, in some machine or other. Maybe it'd even be better in another museum- I imagine that the environment of the Science Museum (for instance) is better suited to keeping it in good tradition than a leaky hut in Bletchley.

My DS is quickly becoming my most-used. Nothing beats being able to play games while watching TV, and coupled with my addiction to Lost in Blue 2 it's got me hooked. Clever touch/microphone features too.

Interesting New Scientist blog: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/05/is-ida-a-pop-star-fossil-or-po.html They seem to make two main points- firstly that the whole thing is degenerating into hype, but more interestingly that there wasn't a big debate here anyway. Yes, it's a missing link, but it's one that all rational people knew must have existed somewhere. It hasn't ignited debate between creationists and evolutionists, for the reason that they don't really debate each other anymore- at least not in scientific circles.