When you sign up for a tour of duty to a place like that, you also sign a number of waivers and documents stating that you are aware that there is no bailing out early, and no chance of a rescue flight in winter. I'm sure it must suck to try to recover from a stroke while at the South Pole, but there is no reason to risk the life of others just to get her out - even less now that she is actually recovering.

At least actual transport is fast once it's safe to send it these days; Amundsen and his team spend 99 days going from the coast to the south pole and back, Scott and his team was on the move for about 150 days before succumbing to hunger and cold (in reality succumbing to bad planning and lack of preparation).

Don't forget the Ben Nanonote - where the whole design from the bits and bytes down to the nuts and bolts are open source.

Less space taken up, less weight, less cost and less power consumed. If you don't need to play DVDs or CDs, you don't need the drive. Software can be downloaded or installed via USB drives - even more so if you're running Linux.

Lets face it a lot of people who uses netbooks uses them as a secondary computer, not as their primary one (exceptions exists off course).

Whatever you post online has to be assumed to be there forever. If you at some point posts embarrassing photos with one account, at another time posts something linking that account to another account, then somewhere online posts something linking the second account to your real identity... guess what? Your real identity is now easily linked to those pictures you posted while drunk all those years ago. It's not going to look good on your resume, is it?

It don't even have to be yourself posting something you want to keep hidden... most of us have thoughtless "friends" who uploads stuff that can be linked to you. A former coworker got into lots of trouble because another coworker brought a camera to an office party - stuff that you find funny after ten beers is a lot less funny when you sober up and realize that your boss have found the pictures while browsing Facebook.

The only way to keep your anonymity is to be careful and aware of what you do online at all time, and be paranoid to boot. Or possible be so uninteresting that no one will bother to dig too much to get your information.

Kind of strange that I was taught loekkeskrift when I went to school in the 80's, and my nieces (14 and 9) is being taught it in schools right now then...

Off course being taught it is not the same as being good at it - it's a clear case of "use it or lose it" like many other skills (like reading fraktur and understanding Old Norse, to mention two).

Where you live must be a sad place... In Norway getting 35mm film is still easy, and most photo-shops are still offering one hour development services. Off course most people are using their digital cameras more than their analog cameras, but that's to be expected since you can just snap a dozen pictures without having to worry about running out of film.

Writing in cursive is still taught in elementary schools over here, and if you can write it you can most assuredly read it. And while I can't say it's a common skill, I know of quite a few people of a wide age range (myself included) that can read gqothic blackletter with ease.

Books wont die in a long, long time. What will disappear is the dime-novels, the cheap and cheerful flights of fantasy that has little to no literary value - these will go digital, and frankly I think that might be for the better. The paper and bindings of those are horrible, and the only thing they they teach people is that "books are disposable" - a though that is horrible to me and many others.

The Nobel prizes were created by the Will of Alfred Nobel, who died quite a long time before modern computers were even a remote possibility. Obviously there was no Nobel prize for computers - nor economics, since economics were not considered a science back then (note that the so called Nobel Prize in economics isn't a Nobel Prize - it's a prize in memory of Alfred Nobel). Maybe there is a need for an internationally recognized prize for outstanding achievements in the field of computer science... but it won't be and can never be a "Nobel Prize".

Complaining about the fact that Nobel didn't make a provision in his will to institute a prize for a field of science that didn't exists in his time makes even less sense than the creationist argument that evolution isn't a science since Darwin wasn't awarded a Nobel Prize (hint: Darwin died before Nobel).

Cheap shots, eh? Well, you're lacking any real arguments, so I guess you have to aim low...

As anyone who have been paying attention to the Shuttle knows, the first shuttle to fly in space (Colombia) was equipped with ejection seats for the first test flights (STS1 to STS4) and then removed. Any current way to egress the Shuttle during launch is time consuming and requires that the Shuttle is under controlled flight - which will not be the cause if something goes wrong with the launch system. Do you even know what a Launch Escape System is?

You should read up on Space Shuttle abort modes, and pay particular attention to the sections on Ejection escape systems.

And pary tell which of those redundant systems lets you escape if there is a catastrophic failure with the launch vehicle - especially while the solid fuel boosters are burning? Right, none.

There may be several ways to egress the shuttle - but there is NO Launch Escape System as the term is commonly defined. End of story.

A properly designed LES would have avoided that problem - for instance by using ejection seats like the Russian Buran Shuttle did. Off course, it would make the Space Shuttle less sexy and unable to carry seven crew, but safety costs. Seven highly trained persons died because of choices made in the early seventies when NASA designed the shuttle and decided to not include a requirement for a LES. If such a requirement had been present, the whole Space Shuttle system might have ended up looking very different.

And don't even get me started on the stupidity of mounting the payload next to the fuel tank instead of on top.

The US versions was tested extensively before the space craft were considered safe to fly, and one must assume the same for the Soviet/Russian and Chinese versions too. In other words, they had to work, otherwise they wouldn't fly. In addition, as pointed out by another poster, the Soviets had a launch failure in which the LES saved the crew.

So the answer is YES, they ALL worked. The ones on the Soyuz and Shenzhou are still working.

Lets just hope they upgrade the heat shield before trying that - 15mm of cork won't cut it from orbit. And I'm really not sure if standing up is how I want to deorbit either...

That said, this looks like a better, safer and more boring alternative for about the same mass.

Looks to be a wild ride - where can I sign up for a flight?

On a more serious note, I'm slightly worried about the apparent lack of an escape system in case something goes wrong during the powered stage of the accent. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Vostok, Soyuz and Shenzhou spacecrafts have all used some form of escape system as have pretty much all planned spacecrafts as far as I can tell. The only spacecrafts that have flown without any escape systems was the Voskhod and, ahem, the US Space Shuttle. The former was a jury rigged Vostok capsule designed to grab headlines, the later.. well, lets just say that if it had been equipped with a escape system there would be seven astronauts back in '86 that would not have died.

that while common logic dictates long term storage in bedrock that is highly stable, there is no such place in Japan. Well, there is plenty of bedrock, but being situated pretty much on top of an active fault line, there is little in the way of truly stable bedrock. There is plenty of better places to build deep geological repositories, most nations don't really want to have somebody elses nuclear waste transported along their coasts to reach those places - if the were even willing to accept the waste in the first place, which is far from likely.

It may be that using a broken power plant is the best option for Japan right now. If that is the cause, I just found another reason why I'm glad I don't live in Japan (earthquakes and tsunamis are near the top on that list).

Out of curiosity, what is the military uses for leaving earths gravity well? Going up to geostationary orbit I can see, but beyond that?