Oh my!

And this one too. I love this.

Really liked that JimmyB. I too wish that our western society put the scientists and others who achieve outstanding feats on a pedestal rather than people who appear to be famous for being famous. Which is why I'm really proud that Tim Berners-Lee got that moment of recognition at the Opening Ceremony.

Anyhow, I'm pleased MSL landed successfully but I'm much more interested about what it's going to do over the next few years.

I finally saw this last night and loved it. Nowhere near as bad as some make it out to be, and far better than any Transformers movie.  Earlier, I made the comment that this couldn't be less coherent than Transformers 3 and I stand by that. This never descended into farce for long stretches as people tried really really hard to be funny. The action was also clean and determinable rather than comprising cartoonish furballs of movement.

This isn't the worst movie of the year. It's far less insulting and stupid, by a significant multitude, than Prometheus. There's even some genuinely good human character development in this, not Shakespeare, but then even Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare.

But then, I also enjoyed Battle LA (on much the same level, these are a perfect double bill).

I find it fascinating how acceptance of these movies seems to vary - Battleship isn't any less entertaining or more stupid than something like Independence Day of yesteryear or MI4: Ghost Protocol of this year. Decades from now, I'm sure people will be confused by the success of one over the other.

I concur.

Not to the same extent. We can already get to these places with robots, and have done several times. New propulsion systems have been developed but only for interplanetary travel, and done on the basis of cheapness rather than speed for these unmanned craft only. Need drives technology, and currently there isn't a real need to develop new technologies so that Curiosity 2.0 can get to Mars faster. Which is precisely what you need in order to open space up. All the arguments in favour of robots seem to follow the same guiding principle that it's easier. When all you do is pick projects because they are easier, you don't grow and mature the technologies.

Worse, you lose the ability to go anywhere beyond LEO and have a stagnate NASA. Precisely what the documentary Fight for Space and Tyson have been arguing against recently. We wouldn't be having this discussion now if a Mars landing had been put on the agenda following Apollo. We'd have overcome all the difficulties you mention when it comes to sending humans, because we'd have much more experience doing so.

One of those difficulties is return. Robots have their place, but so far very few missions have returned with samples, and certainly none from afar, mainly because you don't need to bring back a live astronaut and it's cheaper and easier not to. As a result, we have zero practical experience with returning craft from Mars. We have no rocks and no samples.

I said the Moon, not the solar system. And that's sort of my point, we've not physically been around the solar system, of course all our knowledge comes from them! Using the moon as an example, consider what we can learn about them these other wondrous places with boots on the ground. Further, the experience with Hubble is one of the best to support the sending of folks on missions. Machines break down. If the little rovers Spirit and Opportunity just had someone to give them a little dusting and maintenance, they'd be off again.

What practical realistic things would humans be doing on Mars? On-site research that is able to respond to the unknown (just have a look over the debate over the Viking mission results), and much more efficient and broader exploration of the surface for rocks, samples, and water than is possible for robots. Further, they'd be able to repair their robotic helpers and engineers can also potentially build new equipment and experiments on-site.

Whilst that may be practical with lunar missions, it can't be done with Mars let alone Jovian and Saturnian missions. The speed of light isn't something that can be overcome in this case. And also, you just seem to be advocating that the robots act as direct proxies for humans. Why not just send the scientist?

Cheaper and easier yes. But where does that get you in the long run? Still stuck on Earth facing all the same challenges without any of the knowledge and experience to solve them.

Furthermore, the more complicated these machines become the more fragile and prone to failure they will be and the more they'll require the same sort of protection in transit and landing as humans.

Since manned spaceflight is a lot harder, rising to the challenges it sets and finding solutions arguably (or is that ideally?) leads to greater advances. It's also a lot more inspiring and exciting, meaning that it's more attractive to young scientists, engineers etc. to get into it.

You can only do so much with robots, and their limitations become more apparent the further away they are. So on Mars, where signals have about a 40-minute round trip, new instructions to the robot take up valuable time. Granted, you can just plan for longer missions but imagine a human just making that decision to go and pick up that specific rock right there spontaneously. The human, as trained geologist, can also recogise  which rocks are useful and more importantly be able to place them in their geological context. The best example is the moon Genesis Rock, would any robot have found that? Probably not.

When it started that was my feeling, all very Shire-like and transformation of Orthanc. There's even an uprooting of a large tree!

Truthfully, I was worried about The Hobbit being artificially split into 2 films, and now they're making it a trilogy. So, basically even more made up stuff and almost definitely more offball dwarf humour - things which I thought were among the weakess elements of LOTR. Dare I say this smells like hubris. I just reallly hope it doesn't backfire and we end up getting 3 films that are almost immediately fan edited by everyone and their tennis partner into one 3 hour epic.

The nature of film series is that they're going to be at best uneven, since different people are going to involved and/or the same people are going to run out of ideas/steam (or worst, misunderstand why the series was successful in the first place). The longest running series (in the west anyway) has got to be Bond, and they're all over the place with some fantastic ones and some which are pretty meh.

Well in all fairness, Curiosity was funded and completed years ago (started in 2004). NASA's rather limited in what projects they can start now. They've actually recently had to drop out of a joint Mars mission with Europe.

Orion is a capsule in the mold of Gemini, Apollo and Soyuz (and Dragon as well), billed as a Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). It's what's left over from the Ares/Constellation program that Bush started and Obama axed (because billions had been spent and there wasn't any hardware to show for it, it was going nowhere fast).

It's now set to be launched by the Space Launch System (SLS) which is the new heavy lift rocket program which will apparently be the largest rocket ever built. It will use converted Ares designs (from Constellation) and modified SSMEs and SRBs from the shuttle launch system (so yeah, lots of recycling going on and yet it's still going to cost billions). It may or may not ever be realised since it's hampered by spiralling costs, politics and design flaws.

The problem is that purpose is often the best driver of design, and the Orion capsule and SLS currently has no clear destination - the Moon, Asteroids and Mars have all been talked about but each of these has very different needs (energy, consumables etc.). So the machines are being designed to cover a variety of purposes and destinations and will likely therefore fall short somewhere (because that's the nature of these kinds of machines). There's no "Moon in 10 years" direction in mind here either, with projections going into the 2030s in some cases. 2030s! Who are they trying to kid, no program can ever have that much support for so long in a political environment as poisonous as that of America.

The tragedy is that billions are going to get funneled into the SLS, limiting money for science missions, and like Constellation it'll be cancelled before the decade is out without any rockets actually being built. And Orion is going to go with it, since having a grounded spacecraft is pointless. And even if it's not, by the time a new rocket system is developed, Orion technology will likely be obsolete.

But as the saying goes, 'time is money'. Even for a basic video I can see how one can spend a lot of time on it; planning, recording, editing and uploading (the last of which I understand to be quite troublesome). If you are in it to make money and yet are spending alot of your time, that seems counterproductive. The online ad revenue model is only really sufficient to supplement an existing income, so it functions best as a second, part-time job (which I'm sure is how a lot of people on youtube see it).

But short, cheap or broad content is far more likely to develop under such a model. If you create a platform that encourages one thing, to the point where it pays better, you'll get it. Worse, you'll flood the market with tonnes of low quality crap as millions attempt to micmic the success of the few.

And Network TV isn't ideal, but that environment, with its higher potential revenue and risks, is much more likely to lead to a product that's been crafted with thought, care and skill.

That Youtube distribution model is horrible, it might be ok if you are a video blog series (or Let's Play), but it handicaps creative works since you either have to chop up your narrative or you have to make truncated works suitable for the ADHD crowd. All for a pittance.

It's just not that profitable.