California's exchange is well capable of providing a mere 7 Million registrations and was not ever having problems while the Federal site was the subject of so much news controversy.

I am celebrating this event because This is the first time that Bruce Perens can get insurance coverage! I operate my own company and have previously only had access to insurance through my wife's employer. All of my family, my wife, my son, and I, have each individually been rejected by private insurers for what was esentially medical trivia. In my son's case, it was because he took a test they didn't like even though he passed it.

Not everyone understands the B.S. that private insurers were permitted to put people through.

Since I doubt that this sub-question will get through the editor, I'll give you my answer now. My objection was to the use of bitkeeper due to its license. This is not the same as being in favor of violating the license. What Tridge did (invoking the "HELP" command on a TCP stream connection to the bitkeeper server) was not a license violation.

It's up to the editor when they run the replies. But I promise to answer mine.

Yes, I will answer the interview questions as soon as the editor gets them together.

If you have a specific question, you can always reach me via email to bruce at perens dot com or phone 510-4PERENS. Email usually works better.

Not detracting from what the colonists did, but they knew that they only needed to pack enough food and water for the voyage and the settlement time, plus the knowledge they could breath was an additional bonus.

And they also didn't require many billions of dollars of taxpayer funding to support their one-way trip - they paid their own way.

If someone wants to build a rocket to Mars in their backyard using their own funding, then go ahead, and any ethical considerations are your own, with the caveat that local and federal prosecutors might have different opinions than yours.

That said, another analogy is that we don't allow institutions to perform medical experiments on people that will cause harm to them, even if they volunteer with full knowledge of the consequences. We, as a society, consider this to be immoral.

While I know that society often puts people in positions where harm might very well occur (test pilots, astronauts, medical procedures), the usual assumption is that every effort will be made to prevent harm. I'm struggling to discern how this is different.

It may be - it's just with two minutes thought, I'm not able to articulate why it's ok to kill an astronaut on a one-way mission and it isn't to kill a person in a medical experiment that might well save lives. Because in the latter case, it's definitely something society has decided not to allow.

Things have changed in the decade-plus since 2003, AC. Since the Patriot Act. And court filing fees have certainly gone up.

you can bet they have to notify the people who maintain the no-fly list.

I would not bet that - the FBI couldn't find me once when it was a simple matter of looking up my name in a phonebook, back when those were still a thing. As I said, incompetence and stupidity abound, as they do in any bureacratic organization.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that legal name changes are (or are not) monitored by TLAs - either way. But I wouldn't bet the success of my plan to take over the world on the lack of it.

 

Since 2003, it is not so easy to change your name anymore. While in the US, for the most part, you can simply use any name you want, if you want a new passport, you'll have to go before a judge and it's going to cost you about a grand.

Having dealt with various TLAs, it's not difficult for me to believe that they don't have any monitoring system in place for this - incompetence, ignorance, and stupidity abound. On other hand, if I had evil intent in mind and didn't want to get caught, I don't think I'd want to risk triggering this. Far easier to use a mispelled version of your name...

Next you are going to tell me that the Republicans want to push grandma off the cliff, take food from starving children, and ruin the environment.

Yes... What's your point?

'95-ish? That's the first meeting I remember where there was a realistic attempt to propose something to NASA. I don't think there wasn't much research funding before that. Not that long a history.

Mostly the cost estimates have gone up, especially after the scrutiny brought by JWST overruns brought more honest costing. It was always going to be a flagship mission. We could debate whether eLISA is actually going to save that much money over the combined US/ESA LISA proposed in Astro2010, which we cast as the sweet spot of science per dollar.

And as far as eLISA and 2034, well, I ain't holding my breath for funding profiles that far in the future. Actuarially, it's unlikely that it'll fly in my lifetime (scientifically, and otherwise). So for me, not better than nothing.

[...] note that it is at a frequency where there are not a lot of expected sources

There are sources in that range, thus LISA. Galactic black holes merging, inspirals of stellar mass objects by galactic black holes.

LISA was a high pick in the DOA Astro2010 Decadal, now sacrificed on the altar of HSF and JWST.

The satcom device does not have to have been on the aircraft.

Yes, I can come up with a thousand free market answers. And yes, that pretty much answers your question.

Would you buy a vehicle from any company whatsoever if you knew that parts were difficult to acquire? A manufacturer can play a game with parts availability only if they don't plan to stay in business.

Maybe we should go back to renting our phones from ATT as well.

I wrote this up a day before that at http://technocrat.net/d/2014/2/20/6. I've known about it for a month or so, I don't know why nobody else was excited until now.

We do this as well, with Simulink/Matlab, and LabVIEW. Yeah, it would be great if we all knew VHDL, but then we'd be VHDL programmers, not scientists.

We get things working and tested with (very expensive - trading time for money) hardware in LabVIEW, come up with a Simulink model that matches the LabVIEW, then hand it off to a VHDL guy who generates the FPGA code from that. It would be nice if LabVIEW generated usable VHDL but it doesn't. But it's also nice to have a model to play with, and LabVIEW is better at hardware, Simulink better at modeling.

Even so, it's been a bit of a problem getting the final VHDL FPGA to exactly match the results of the tested hardware-in-the-loop LabVIEW and Simulink simulations. Fencepost errors, quantization mismatches, etc.

If we had just handed the requirements to a VHDL person, maybe we'd have something that worked [1], but that person would have been the only one who understood it or been able to experiment with it. This way, ten scientists have been able to use, change, model, and eyeball the algorithms, and see the results, without any of them having to learn VHDL.

[1] maybe not. We tried that experiment, and it almost worked, but the programmer who wrote it moved on to another project before it was debugged, and we were left with code that no one else wanted to start with.