http://www.popsci.com/article/...

Byte was dead by 1993. There was some kind of Computer Shopper clone magazine that took its place (and name) for quite a few years thereafter, but it wasn't Byte. They even managed to get Pournelle's column into this doppelganger of Byte.

Calculator Watch

GIS for calculator watch

I particularly like the one built around a generic 2x20 text LCD.

Life is also simpler in the Mac world because there isn't a triple .NET update every couple of weeks. And the .NET updaters seem to take a lot more time than regular patches. How badly do you have to fuck up a language runtime library to make it need monthly updates? And I'm not talking about just adding new features to the latest one, like with Java. This is .NET 1.x 2.x and 4.x all getting constantly patched.

Because if the main computer goes out after the launch and before the docking, with the backup already broken, things could get a bit... intense... up there. Since it controls external stuff like the rail car, they really just need to get everything moved where it needs to be ahead of time.

There was a helium leak in the first stage. Next launch opportunity is Friday afternoon. I've been wanting to see this thing go up for weeks. First it was sewing machine oil on some cloth around the cargo, then it was the ground radar on fire, now it's a leak. The only good thing about this is that Friday is a holiday day for me, so I can actually watch the launch live. (or watch it get scrubbed again live)

I'm sure it's just the AE35 unit again. Give it a good whack with a hammer and it'll be fine.

I think they also want to try to recover the stage. Normally they break up because of the stress of sub-orbital re-entry or from hitting the water. (The Shuttle SRBs were designed to take the stress of splashdown.) If this works, it would stop and hover just above the water, then cut out the engines and flop over. This one might not be reusable thanks to salt water, but this is only one test on the way to the final goal.

They haven't been on moon with humans, you fucking moron. Or maybe you think they're perfectly fine with setting up an all-robot moon base.

The state of the US space program is about the only thing I won't blame Obama for. The blame for that lies squarely in the halls of Congress trying to keep Shuttle-era pork alive and cutting anything else NASA-related.

Well, they've already never been on the moon, might as well double down with nuclear fusion power that nobody has gotten working yet either!

Now that it's easy to make plates with a full-color printing process that doesn't need stamping, some states have gone totally overboard. In Texas, you can get a custom plate with the logo of most major colleges and NFL teams (even ones up in the "damnyankee" northeast states). You can even get plates with a sequential number on your choice of multiple alternate backgrounds, such as white letters on a pink background, but most of those are "for a cause" art.

And while they require you to change plates after a number of years (due to limited lifetime of the reflective material), I still have and see many of the old stamped plates. Also it seems that at some point they started requiring a new license plate when a vehicle is sold, which only increases the churn.

Of course when you get a new plate, it is a new number, that way they can just have a stack of new plates in the tax office. Back in the day, Oklahoma used to re-issue you a fresh plate with the same number every year with a prefix based on your county (like a telephone number), until a fire broke out in the state prison (probably from a riot) and destroyed the equipment. Then they finally accepted that, duh, plates can easily last ten years.

I think Virginia is another state infamous for plates gone wild. This one is my favorite.

Your last name starts with a digit? Pleased to meet you, Mister 2! (But who is Number One?)

<seinfield>Have you ever noticed how people with handicapped license plates always drive like it's their car that's handicapped? What's up with that?</seinfield>

I think Texas is much worse about that. For instance, I think you can get just about any major college logo or professional NFL team logo. There's at least half a dozen non-logo specialty plates, including one that's just white letters on a pink background. This is because now it's just a multi-layer printing process, and they don't have to stamp raised letters anymore. At least the default plates are now plain instead of that "night sky" background which in the first version actually obscured some of the plate numbers.

Who exactly is Korean here? Panasonic = Matsushita = Japanese.