Almost all of that technical heritage in the logic of weaving was maintained by women across cultures. An example contemporary to the lovely Ms. Lovelace and Mr. Babbage would be the founding of the Rhode Island School of Design. That institution was funded by ship's captains to maintain their most talented daughters in programming Jacquard looms for the local textile industry and other arts. Today it is a eminent art and design school if not the best. If not the first programmer, Lovelace was the first non-inventor/nerd that programmed, ie. the first application programmer.

They are publishing results in Astrobiology to create a standard metric for analog space suits. Operating standardization is a great next step for this field.

On a human-factors standpoint it will be interesting to see the energetic differences between the suits. One issue is they are being tested in different place with different wearers.

Stop sweeping problems under it.

If these devices are vulnerable then they will be exploited. The best solution is transparency and working consortia for both testing/verification and patching these problems before that vehicle, pacemaker or other device is used against consumers.

Asteroid retrieval is about $1-2 Billion spread over a decade. Single moon landing is at an order of magnitude higher at $10-20 Billion with unknown duration. This is what happened with Shuttle and Station and appears to be happening with SLS: they eventually sucked cash out of other NASA programs while legislators direct even more resources into those single projects as if 10,000 people working together can't manage more than one task.

We should go back to the Moon but that should not prevent us from also snagging an asteroid. The funny thing is that the returned asteroid was planned to go into Lunar or very eccentric high orbit, either would have been a great shake-down cruise for Orion before going to the Moon.

iOS 7 should let the device act as normal flash storage. This is a crippling weakness in Apple's current devices and traces all the way back to the Newton's custom filesystem in the 90s. Seamless printing, especially with all the wireless printers around, is a no-brainer.

That is some impressive engineering. One of my cousins is a machinist on the AP1000 factory line, it's a great design except that it's not a fast-breeder. Despite Fukushima, nuclear power continues to be one of our best options, if not the best.

The OSS paint package I want: a new version of the old Amiga DeluxePaint IV software. Seamless pixel-pushing for still and animation.

If the drone is over someone else's property, it is trespassing in their airspace. This may be especially true below 500' and anything over that is FAA controlled. So the drone flying neighbor is either going to be violating your property or common airspace.

If the neighbors' houses were close together and the person was still over their property but actively observing your property? That would be interesting in court.

If you can't open it, you don't own it.

Voted halberd but the Chinese flavor, the ji or dagger-ax is god-tier version.

Steve Jobs on the Apple Newton MessagePad 2000, "If it doesn't have a trackball it's not a computer. Kill it."

Funny how the truth barely gets modded. Space manufacturing "will" be huge even much bigger than Earth's industrial base someday. Digital Fabrication is going to push this forward very quickly in general. Luna has specific issues in severe lack of volatiles. For now any precision machinery will still be built on Terra.

The idea of it being "cheaper" to launch deep space flights from the moon seems to come from a purely gravitational notion. Ignoring economics, politics and thermodynamics (not to mention that any clients are going to be in LEO) this idea is and always has been a has been.

"now that the US is largely out of the space business"

Curiosity, ISS ops and SpaceX would like a word with you.

This is an argument for skinnable UIs, modifiable UIs and GUI/CLI cross use.

Every user has their preferences and we should be able to customize our computers to those preferences. If you want the faux-wood paneling, it's there. If you want some Strong Typing, you should be able to interact with it in bash. It'd be great to be able to type batch commands for Photoshop, even if it was just simple stuff like crop and re-save.

Amazing fact: in a world of vapor projects Excalibur-Almaz is one of the few new-space companies with flight proven hardware. The VA capsules and TKS modules are heritage Soviet equipment with upgrades. This is some of the finest spacecraft designed by one of the greats of the early space age.

Hopefully they actually get to (lunar) orbit with paying customers. Also, 15X reusability plus integration on Falcon has strong cost implications after first flight.