Try this

No, Laika was sent up purely for propaganda.

'The Nobel Prizes, as designated in the Will of Alfred Nobel, are in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace

Thats because when Nobel died, there was no such thing as IT or "computing" (at least the way we recognise it today), and telecoms were just starting to show some promise.

It must have been the summer of 1998 then. I'm very surprised as I got my first PC in the summer of 1997 just after I got my first job and I can't believe I waited a year to try RedShat. It was definitely 5.1 or 5.2- more likely 5.1.

Why don't I try Redhat again? Remember the old proverb; fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Or you use George Dubya's garbed version. Whatever. I had a shit experience and all I had was a command line prompt.

A little bit later than the video, but I tried RedHat (5.1 or 5.2? I can't remember) in the summer of 1997. From my Uni days, I had the impression that Linux was hard to install, but although it was simple enough, getting XFree86 to install and run was a nightmare. I decided to try Redhat since we were promised xxx number of days of support. What they didn't tell you was that it would take a couple of weeks for them to get back in touch with you and then it was simply to go over what you'd done. I think I managed about 3 support tickets before my time was up. I abandoned Redhat and it was a couple of years before I tried Linux again. I was a SuSE distro and it was a doddle to install. SInce then I've moved onto Mandriva and then Ubuntu and have been using this ever since.

I've never used Redhat since and don't feel the need to ever go back to it after the shoddy aftercare service I got.

I've already named him in my blog. See my signature line for the URL.

Since how can a British judge have jurisdiction over a US Company? Are the Twitter uses going to be polled on whether they are Brit or not, and if they, pre-emptively slap their wrists with a harsh cry of "Don't eye try it, matey!"

A solar fart.

...if you want *grin*

You may just want to buy my ebook too!

I've been interested in ghosts all my life, but my interest in them has "gone off the boil" recently due to stupidity within the ranks of ghost hunters, politics, and rising costs of venues. Since "Most Haunted" (a tacky UK TV shop, now thankfully ended), anybody realised they could be a ghost hunter...and venues realised that, whereas before, they would open their doors to anyone with an ounce of goodwill and a token few pounds payment, they now charge HUGE sums for entry. It has soured my interest in the field.

I look upon most groups with a mixture of suspicion and humour. None of them seem to realise that magnetic fields are a vector quantity, so if you point the EMF meter one way, and then another, of course it'll be different! And many groups use EMFs meters designed for use in detecting domestic power cables! Then there's EVP (electronic voice phenomena), the way that disembodied spirits imprint their "voices" on tape and disks without anyone noticing at the time. I've heard only a few that are somewhat convincing. Most are shrouded in a sea of fog and hiss, some you have to adjust the speed, introduce filters, play backwards....if you have to go to that much trouble, chances are there was nothing of any interest there in the first place!

I've written up some of my thoughts on ghosts on my website; everything from experiences on ghost hunts, to the scientific evidence for ghosts (there isn't much!), to a presentation I gave at the London "Skeptics in the pub" about 5 or 6 years ago. Have a look at this page. Pleasant dreams ;-)

The article is a bit dubious on facts. While it is true that the videotapes of the series were being wiped in the 1960s, the film telerecordings/kinescopes were not being junked until 1972, and went on for about 6 years. Also, Steve Roberts is not 35! I knew him for a while; I'm currently 39 and he is at least a few years older than me!

The politics behind the Chroma Dot story is intriguing and in some places unpleasant. The instigator of the team was James Insell, and a method was created to perform the chroma dot extraction by a man named Richard Russell. Insell became a bit proprietorial over it all, and he and Russell parted ways, and now Russell it doing it alone. The original Colour extraction blog is here but they don't seem to have made any huge advances since Russell left. There is some more info, plus a link to Russell's own work (including software download) on my own Dr.Who webpage here

...for infringing people's privacy, a la Google Street View.

Looks like won't be on iBooks any time soon. Thank God for Kindle :-)