Sudarshan

   The Russians have achieved a low-cost, reliable launch capability because,

What is wrong with that? Yahoo pipes for example provided pointy clickety interface to mashing up data. Lot of people used it to do useful work.

It really does not matter if a even single sysadmin who already uses the shell does not start using this. It just needs to have its OWN users that is all. If you just consider ALL Eclipse users + ALL Visual Studio users, that is a HUGE user base... Now the vi/emacs user may feel superior to the others...

but in reality anyone in this world can have their own reasons to create products and use various tools. All the best to the author of this tool for taking the pain to code this...

If it works out and gains users... awesome... else it shows we still find Old tools useful. We have not stopped using Fire or Wheels today though they very OLD technologies. Whether the shell is as important as fire or wheels OR transitionary like Hydrogen blimps or something in between only time will tell...

These are GTO numbers... but the bots r tiny in Kgs I guess...

The glxp teams share the rockets i guess... The robots must be cheap at least in terms of materials used... in relative magnitude to the launch... I could be wrong. Engineering the bots does not get paid apart from the learnings and future opportunities...

One major gain was a strong focus on education many of them learning English. However most of it is rote learning centric. It is only in recent years that India has been able to make a place for itself in the BRIC economies.

Just because something is possible does not mean we need to do it. And that is something I figured today!!!

Something magical has prevented HN from turning into a rest room wall when many others have failed. "Processes" and communities can make that magic happen. Anyway as I said elsewhere I have abandoned the idea :).

I love the community here... Validating an idea can get over in a few hours especially if the decision is to toss it away...

I would go onto say we should not have not moved out of Africa at all.

Most people would agree that we humans somehow end up making places less beautiful by own standards by inhabiting them and exploiting them.

But we NEED to do it. We can just ensure that we restrain ourselves from crossing a commonly accepted limit. I had never suggested turning moon into a billboard in the sky.

Think of it more like rock painting made by a caveman. in certain restricted parts of the moon.

But hey only the winner gets to keep the cash. They are in it for the learning so that they can become part of the industry.

But in a strange way mankind needs to move "forward" "whatever" that means. We need to colonize the Solar system, then the galaxy and then spread to the other galaxies.

Governments prefer to fight religious wars by spending orders of magnitude more than the NASA budget, because it is easier to garner votes with war. It appears as if free enterprise is the only force that will take man beyond the gravity well of this planet.

It is natural to dislike crass advertising. But we should remember that even Google is just an advertising company. Without Google we would have been worse off. Yes worse off even without SEO, SEM and so on.

The situation is not black and white. Formula 1 racers are covered in Ads. But we still watch the games and enjoy them too. The moon is our common heritage. We cannot let it turn into an eyesore. But it will some day be mined, some day, there will a number of ads, whether you or I or another person objects to it will hardly matter. What we can do is strike a balance between growth and beauty.

It will no longer be as beautiful as it was. But as a civilization we will be better off. If you consider we are better off today than in the stone age. That itself is subjective. But this world belongs to 6.5 billion people. It is for them to decide quality of life v/s beauty by abstaining from exploitation.

We have taken steps like having sanctuaries, of leaving Antarctica alone and so on... Maybe we will do something similar to the moon as well. Maybe no development will be permitted on the visible side of the moon at all. It does not matter. Maybe no structure larger than the limit of visual acuity will be permitted.

Free enterprise abiding by the laws we give to ourselves has to take us beyond the shackles of this planet. Let us be pragmatic. Every penny that the Space industry will make will take us off this planet... not in hundreds... not in millions... but in billions...

google has a product called app inventor.

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

Hope it is now easily accessible as a web app... Cool UI.