We don't need any breakthroughs; we already have good plans to get to Mars with existing technology. Have you heard of Mars Direct? It's a plan for routine manned flights to Mars accomplished with existing chemical rockets (actually the Shuttle launch stack), artificial gravity induced by spinning the spacecraft linked with a tether to an empty rocket stage around the common centre of mass, and using chemically propelled cars (why would we use electric if we can have something better?). If we had wanted to, we would have sent people to Mars by now. All the things you mention are completely unnecessary.

This is exactly what NASA should not be doing. If you want to know why, you should read the 2003 testimony of Zubrin on the future of NASA.

Not all ARM CPUs have division. I know for a fact that an ARM7TDMI doesn't.

Is there even one mature language that runs on Parrot? (not brainfuck, etc.) They seem to be in perpetual-development mode.

No, the main advantage of objects is convenient interfaces.

Not for unsigned numbers it isn't.

To my knowledge, there is still no solution. But if you read it carefully, the article does leave one possibility open: assemble a large heat shield in space and use it to decelerate through atmospheric drag on Mars before opening a parachute. We don't currently have the capability to do it, but it seems technically feasible.

...and disabled.

No, as a matter of fact it was a rip-off of a novel by Tom Clancy (read the last paragraph of the plot summary).

That's GNU/Kernel.dll, mister!

Speak for yourself, I want my grave to be made of glass so I can look up girls' dresses after I die.

Good explanation, but I'd like to offer one correction. The -gcc suffix is not part of the triple, that string is just the name of the compiler binary, as in /usr/bin/arm-non-eabi-gcc. The actual triple is arm-non-eabi.

It's sad but it does seem to be the case. Maybe they have become disillusioned after years of trying to raise awareness and finding that the common folk just didn't care. If they speak about the importance of free software principles, their words will fall on deaf ears. But if they aggressively raise these red herring issues that the average person can relate to, they will get some much wanted attention. It's hard to tell whether they will win any permanent mind share this way.

Even though Stallman is absolutely right about free software, the message of bright red colours, screaming slogans and extreme statements does paint the FSF in a bad light and will probably put many people off.

FSFe seems to be much more reasonable: maybe the two are playing a game of good cop/bad cop?

It has always annoyed me how it's tolerated here to hijack threads near the top of the discussion. But, as you point out, reversing the order has its own problems. If that's the case, why not just display all sibling comments in random order? Take the UID or a session ID as the seed so they don't jump around too much, but every person sees them differently. You might still get some reposting, but it overall it could improve the format of the discussion.

Alternatively, after a while, start biasing the order in favour of threads with lots of replies. Then you get the best of both worlds.

Of course, any such fundamental changes won't happen before the new javascript interface is ironed out, which is to say probably never. Still, it's an interesting problem to think about.

I'm tired of this sad trolling. GPL advocates never complain about the BSD license. It's only BSD advocates that complain about the GPL. You know what? Just because you want to use other people's code without having to respect their conditions doesn't give you the grounds to demean the GPL, dude.