(From comment on "Titans Alien Thunder")

This is going to be a fascinating event - however I do have some questions.. The total mission cost is around $4 billion - is this good value for money? For example look at New Horizons, a Jupier/Pluto/KBO mission with a total projected cost of $600 million. I also wonder, given the scale of the mission, if a RTG should have been put on board Huygens so that it could stay longer and observe the Titan environment over a longer time? (Yes I know i

This article appeared on BBC news that set me thinking again about the case for electric cars. Even with current technology, the worlds best selling electric car, the Gem, runs at a cost of about 0.25p/mile - compared to 30p/mile for a typical petrol car.

..but I think even up to XP the Outlook view-pane is on by default - and it displays every message in glorious full rich text/html/virus-buffer-overflow format!

If you look at the technical steps that the average novice is expected to take to protect themselves from attack.. Its just a joke! I just want to recieve messages in basic text format - maybe with the odd clickable link. I dont want bitmaps, animations, movies, music..

Well alternative power comes up again, so I thought I would re-edit & post this journo entry, lots of interesting refs, comments welcome!

Robert Zubrin, advocate of a manned "Mars Direct" mission, has presented his arguments to the senate.

Heres a question for you..

I would like to build a reasonably priced portable video edit suite, perhaps using components from my existing desktop. The current system has a DVD-R, 80 Gb HD, Firewire card, Adobe Premiere. I want to be able to multiboot Win98se, Win2000NT, Linux. The options I can see are:

I will start adding what I think are the more interesting posts to my journal. This one on alternative power..

.. I just showed you that by covering half my roof with the best solar cells available on the market, I cannot even cover my own electricity needs. What do you suggest, covering the countryside with panels?