One thing the video didn't address was the capture process. I keep wondering how this whole fly-up-and-bag-it thing would work. I find it unlikely that the rock just be sitting there waiting. It would have some rotation. If we've learned anything from recent close encounters with asteroids, it's that they are rotating on multiple axises. Even a small rock like the one in the video would have a lot of inertia to overcome in order to bring it to a stop. I doubt that little docking clamp they showed would have enough fuel to do the job.

The casinos should fund the LA-LV hyperloop. It would be a great demo project and image how quickly the casinos would recoup their money if people could make that trip in 20 minutes.

And now you can kiss what's left of the "Massachusetts Advantage" goodbye. Welcome to the Silicon Deathbed.

I have to wonder if the increase in revenue from this will offset the loss in revenue as income and sales moves out of state. In the short term it will but in the long term this will definitely be affecting many business decisions.

It was just less than two weeks ago that NASA announced the 100th discovery of water on Mars. Being the true trend setters that they are, NASA continues to discover water where it is previously been discovered before.

AP - Today at NASA there was a celebration. For the 100th time it has been able to confirm that there was water on Mars. Vint Norgecrack, Director of Mars Water Confirmations, said, "This time we really know it. Again. Honestly, truly, really, for real, pinky swear and all that."

NASA use this news to appeal to Congress to fund the Mars Planetary Water Finder. The MPF is a $22 billion project meant to send smaller probes to all currently existing landing sites and confirm that the confirmations of confirmations of water on Mars can in fact be confirmed.

It's not hating change if the option is to "upgrade" to a piece of crap.

It's interesting to see what people think after they've introduced a change. They will say that there are two types of people: geniuses and those who hate change. The idea that their change may not be good does not enter the equation.

This obviously requires the most perfect conditions to do what this advertisement says it does. I tried it on every table in my home and all I did was shake loose some embedded dust and annoy the cat. The phone never moved.

This is one of the problems with robotic missions... these weird, out of the ordinary events. If this had been a robotic mission it would have been Galileo all over again. "We didn't think this would be a problem so we didn't build to solve it. Now we have to live with the workaround."

Robots are fine for simple things but as the complexity of the machines increases it becomes easier to go with the count on the army of humans who would be willing to make the journey.

One of the things the poster misses is that the rich will buy autonomous cars, use them frequently, but not actually drive them. Consider:

- Send the kids to school and pick them up
- Send the car to the grocery/Starbucks/liquor store where a order send via the Net is filled and loaded into the car
- Avoid drunk driving charges (OK, it's a use but no actual driving)
- Let their teens use it so the teen can text merrily while the car drives
- Send the car out with a dashcam so they can get vids of morons trying to road rage a machine
- Have the car scout ahead to see if there are any cops on the path they're about to take at lightspeed in a manual drive car

I second the "lack of excitement" comment. Think about it, the main proposals for the past few years have to send another rover or orbitter to Mars. Until there's a goal beyond more of the same, the money will continue to dry up.

While all the bleeding edge Dotters here scream "Upgrade" I'd like to ask why? How many web pages are actually using the new capabilities of the upgraded browsers? And how many pages just changed one minor widget? I maintain there's _zero_ reason to tell people they can't view a page without upgrading. It's the old days of "Best if viewed with Internet Explorer" all over again. As you all say, disk drveis are getting huge and the old pages take almost zero space. Add note saying it's not supported and here's a link to the latest and greatest. People who want the new abilities will upgrade.

Remember, you're not the not the only provider on the net. If people only the choice of: 1) Change their entire web serving experience to increase the job security of yuor web developers, or 2) Leave your site, you and your shharreholders might not like the answer.

I just couldn't get past the thought that he was able to get knitting needles onto the space station but would never have been able to get them onto a commercial airline flight.

Google has been playing catch up for years, but now they're changing their UI in gratuitous and overly animated ways without giving the users notification or a "classic" path out of it. Wow, they finally caught up to Facebook!

I don't mind the idea of not supported. What I hate is the idea of whining loudly and interupting the workflow because the user isn't on the bleeding edge. If you can detect the browser version then just don't use the new features on the pages. Don't force me to click a popup or make a decision every time I bring up your page (Google Calendar). Noisily announcing that something doesn't work completely harkens back to the bad old days of user interface design. Very unHTML-like.

Insurance costs represent the true cost of a disaster, not just the physical pain. For example, what if the power plan is damaged and my web site is down for 12 hours. There was no physical damage to my servers but I lost the capacity to do business.