ITER still makes sense on theoretical grounds; you push the boundaries of Science and something good is bound to come out of it.

The stated reason why these guys were rejected from peer reviewed journals was that they hadn't come up with a viable theory of how it works. Their data shows that it has positive energy output, but they have no idea why. If it does actually work (a big "if"), then some of the data from ITER may end up showing why this thing would work.

But it's probably all nonsense, anyway.

Not so much logic as "I learned just enough about thermodynamics to prove that the sun can't work".

They'll start naming them the way sequels get named.

• HTML: The Legend Continues
• HTML Unleashed
• HTML: The Next Generation
• HTML Reloaded
• Final HTML Fantasy XII-2

Your own dogfood. Eat it.

The numbers posted in the GP are just to get to LEO. The Saturn V got 119MT to LEO, but only 45MT to the moon. That was enough to send three guys, a buggy, and some porn. And one of the guys had to stay behind in lunar orbit (which I guess is what the porn was for).

If we're going to bother with the moon again, we'd like to do something more than just take a quick look around and scurry back to Earth, so we're going to need a lot more than 119MT to LEO.

And if you look at the other numbers for those 300HP engines, they're often getting better gas mileage than their slower predecessors.

I drive a stick. I expect most car jackers today will manage to get maybe three feet away.

More seriously, this really isn't a big deal. Car thieves use much faster and cruder methods, like hammering a screwdriver into the lock, or just break the window. Car alarms are a joke, too. When was the last time you heard somebody's car alarm go off that wasn't due to a big truck running by, or a dog brushing up against it, or kids throwing rocks?

I'm almost certain the joke is older than that, going back to the seven astronauts of the original Mercury program. Some of the early (unmanned) prototype rockets didn't exactly get into space, and these failures were more public than many of the USSR's failures.

There's a movement around the Bible Belt to home school kids to keep them away from textbooks that mention evolution, or as a general protest of government-run education. At some point, it started to become a stereotype in some circles that all home schooled kids fall into this category.

The term "space opera" is already around for that purpose. When George Lucas is giving an interview with a degree of candor, he'll usually use that term to describe Star Wars. Naturally, Lucas doesn't give many interviews with a sense of candor anymore, but I seem to remember him using it in the interview with Leonard Maltin that was in the VHS versions in the '90s.

That last bit right there is the hard part. Making algorithms was a hard task, to be sure. It took eons before humanity had the right mathematics to make RSA possible, but that work is all done now. There isn't all that much work being done in making new crypto algorithms, because we're pretty sure the ones we have will stand up. Even a breakthrough in Quantum Computing or Complexity Theory wouldn't completely destroy everything out there. There is some work to do in hash algorithms (MD5/SHA1), but that's the exception.

However, putting those algorithms into a practical system is hard, and the work has to be more or less started from scratch with each new system. Every single entry point to the system has to be secured, including a lot of non-obvious ones. DeCSS was done because just one software DVD player mishandled the keys, and that toppled everything else.

In other words, Sony has just gone and proved that the only DRM that remains unhacked is the kind that nobody cares to hack. See also: SACD.

I fail to see how that's a bad thing.

Either way, really. Procedural languages turn into a spaghetti mess. Functional languages won't work at all.

Nay, no, notta. Functional languages make you think completely differently about how the computer operates. Simply wrapping things up like that is how you get spaghetti code. The budding programmer will tend to keep writing this way for a long time. Some never grow out of it.

That's the biggest indictment of CS curriculums I've ever read.