Oh how this is sooooo close to the mark, wish I had mod points. Like others I gave up reading JP's column. Well that's not quite true, I scanned it just to see who he would be name-dropping this month.

Steve Ciarcia's column, on the other hand... that guy was amazing. Not that I ever built any of his circuits, but he certainly added that technical grunt to the magazine.

...and it's my favourite single-player computer game, and at around 90kb it's not a glutton on disk space. Haven't been keeping up much with later developments, has there been much innovation since then?

According to wikipedia Congreve rockets were invented in 1804, so Doc could have used these.

In Jules Verne's 'Mysterious Island' he writes about how his castaways build a civilisation on a remote pacific island. One of the things they build is a telegraph from scratch. They also build paddle wheels, make guncotton, determine the latitude and longitude of their island, make a secure house out of a cave behind a waterfall, grow wheat from a single husk and a lot of other things. And as a bonus, it has the return of one of Verne's most famous characters (read it and find out who!). This is one of my favourite books, I can definately recommend it to the whole slashdot crowd.

No problem. Your style is to string overly long sentences together with commas. There are five in the fourth sentence of your first paragraph alone. Doesn't that bug you?

Whilst hydraulics might sound like a good idea, remember the operating conditions it's working in - the mean surface temperature is -63C which could severely affect a hydraulic system

...and for the life of me, I don't know why, considering Spirit has shown how easy it is to get bogged even with autonomous ground-plotting software. The Lunar Rover mesh wheels worked perfectly, were lightweight and durable, why not do the same? Alternately, if I were in charge of wheel design I would perhaps consider a more spherical wheel cross-section. I recall something I saw whilst browsing Google Patents which was a 1930's swamp buggy machine that had spherical wheels. The softer the terrain the further it sank down, which in turn increased the ground contact area. Seemed like a good idea to me.

Exactly. Seeing the GPs query, the mesh tires were the first thing I thought of too. They worked on the low gravity and soft surface of the moon, can't see why they wouldn't work on Mars.

This article on Hackaday late last year is about a project to make Homebrew Kodachrome: http://hackaday.com/2009/12/08/homebrew-kodachrome/

I use StrokeIt and do a quick right-left swish, you insensitive clod!

Wish I had mod points, parent is absolutely correct. Stop complaining and trying to find some panacea for your architecture problems. It seems you want to have something you can show your client 'There! it works on THAT browser!' instead of thinking about the common denominator. There's no way I'd be happy having to use not just a particular browser, but a particular version of that browser - who are you trying to kid? The client and the user, it seems. Sorry if this seems harsh but that's my opinion.

...one molecule ought to be enough for anybody!

As with your locomotive example, WWII planes are at a technology level that can be rebuilt by dedicated enthusasists whereas post-war jet aircraft not so much. Reuilding a jet engine is so much more specialised.

Amazon.co.uk sold both downloads as loss leaders. The 40p limit applies to the wholesale price, not the retail price.

  - I pay Amazon 29p
  - Amazon pays Sony 40p (or more?)
  - It counts towards the chart
  - Amazon hopes my retail experience was good, and I'll come back for more music downloads in future. This time at a profitable price.

Everybody's happy.

It really doesn't matter whether you make your site follow the lowest common denominator or, as you suggest, maintain multiple versions for different browsers. What it comes down to is spending time on creating new features or spending time catering to the bugs of IE6.

Yes, not supporting IE6 may cost you some part of your visitors, but how many visitors are you losing because of lack of development and modern features? That's not as easily measured and obviously depending on the type of site we're discussing, but in many cases I bet it's a lot more than 5-10%.