Matthew wrote nice. Basic and VB are superb languages for beginners . I relate to those days in early 90s. Author skipped the small history. The disaster of trying to sell VBscript in IE. Maybe M$ laughed at the the handicapped "Javascript1.2". Netscape had it which could not do anything nice from a browser. So they invented a super VBScript with a new method CreateObject. And spent the whole decade, billion $$$ later, in the cleanup after that small method. CreateObject was M$ own Chernobyl. And they still worry about it to this day.

There is one thing which got missed out. GMO foods are specially modified SO THE CROP FAILS TO PROVIDE GOOD SEEDS. Now if at all, any one was really interested in giving all the goodies to the starving Africa, just dont switch off that gene. But those big corporations did. The same corporation which did not see a little bit of downturn in 2008. The second alarming issue is that a GMO crop will kill a non-GMO crop even hundreds of meters away during polination. That is just a free add-on the corporations get to force everyone else who does not want GMO in the neighborhood. Solution to starvation in Africa is only to kick out oil, gas and uranium companies out from Africa.

Just curios on how many other mars missions have even made this 95% in their first attempt?