From my user perspective I find awesome that they bought delicious and will keep it running. But from a business perspective.... Why in hell buy this thing? How does it fit in their plans for hitting it big (if there is any)? Well, I'll be looking forward to their interview. :p

If you really like your job regardless of your boss and his treats (I mean, the place is so good he can be overlooked), then it's harder not to get worked out about it. :/

Totally agree. I would add that he should avoid working much more than he's supposed to, and that if he's tough enough not to waste any time socializing (no sarcasm intended), he should invest that on a side project of his own.. it could be his your way out(being his own boss that is) of our hell.

Oh, thanks, I didn't pay attention to that. But still as it stands it's possible that it was indeed unintentional him opening his profile like that, and his public claims are merely a (rather good) coverup for it

But it's weird, I've read on the news that it was almost 300 pictures.. but I only see a couple dozens.

You're doing a wiiiild generalization. I work on IT/software development and am not on the autism spectrum, neither is any of my coworkers. And think I know how to spot someone with asperger's after working with them every day for a while.... I don't think Bill Gates is autistic, there's no way, he's too much adapted... people with mild autism may know how to interact socially in a pretty normal way, but those are people who really worked their asses off towards that, clearly that isn't Gates' case. He just spent most of his life talking to machines rather than people, therefore he lacked some social skills.

But, considering that's the way to go, can you estimate how much would that cost to assemble,test, launch, deploy, etc? Would the astronauts have canned food for a year or would have some sort of greenhouse to grow their own? Can they carry the necessary amount of fuel to be used in the years they'll spent on the trip? How much would the payload be.... How exactly would they avoid the martian windstorms(this might pose a problem specially to the launch back to Earth) and extreme temperature variations.. I'm just saying, we can't overlook the "details".

There's a whole lot of people with lots of will and wits to do it. It's just that the 'money people' doesn't seem to be an expressive crowd among them, and the government thinks it's better to spend our taxpayer's money giving it away to banks or killing and starving already dirt-poor people in the middle east. Also, It all sounds very exciting when some promising report such as this one comes out on the media. But there's a few engineering and life-sustaining problems to be overcome so the trip becomes reality, and research in that area is more often than not preceded by years of seemingly(or 'from a business perspective') fruitless research. Imo, that seems to have driven some potential investors away.

You must be a troll, a very sad one. Cause if you're not I would object what are you even doing on this website.

I wonder if these reports will get them the government funding they've been dying for so their engineering department can work towards the mars trip. If it doesn't I don't know what else will.

The majority of all the 'raw data' is available on line.

you can even go get your own if you like as it source is not begin hidden anywhere. It is right out in the open so to speak.

Now instead of using stolen 12 year old internal emails and docs which no longer have a clear chain of custody making their contents questionable to dispute man made global warming / climate change. Get a hold of the data and do your own analysis and present your findings along with your conclusions supported by that data.

http://br-linux.org/2009/video-e-fotos-do-boot-do-linux-em-uma-urna-eletronica-brasileira/ (scroll down the page a bit)

It's always possible. But then again just like people think traditional voting system is secure. Very specialized software that run on top of special hardware, as I suppose this voting machines do, are similar to airplanes navigation systems or even engines of cars. What I mean is, they can be much more closely controlled than people. Call me a misanthrope(or a engineer :p) but I trust machines I understand better than people with good references to get things done the way I expect.