What is your point? While not gourmet food of a 5-star restaurant (it is still fast food), it is definitely better tasting than McDonald's.

It is also California culture you are talking about. They have weird names for everything.

That aspect of scientific research wasn't really the point of Sputnik though. The radio signal was simply to announce that the USSR had sent something up into space and something that could be used to verify that it was indeed up there and in orbit around the Earth.

That some scientific value could be gleaned from the simple instrumentation was really a side benefit... not that I'm complaining.

Explorer I, on the other hand, was purpose built to carry on several experiments, and was the key item that was used to discover the Van Allen Belts... named in honor of one of the scientists who put together the instruments on that satellite.

I wouldn't say it was a foolish insistence and in many way letting Russia launch the first satellite was a brilliant move on the part of the Eisenhower administration. The most significant thing is that by having Russia send a satellite over America, it established the overflight principle that low-Earth orbit was a separate domain in international law similar to international waters in the oceans.

A legitimate concern was that if America sent a satellite up into space, that any time it traveled over the Soviet Union that it would be treated as invading Soviet airspace. In theory that could be considered a casus belli for some sort of significant response that would provoke military action.

You could say ditto for even sending a crew member in orbit.

As a result of the Soviet Union sending the first satellite and then sending Yuri Gagarin over the USA at orbital altitudes, the USSR had no justification and reason to be objecting if the USA did the same thing over the USSR. IMHO that was utterly brilliant.... and at the same time making the USSR prance around like some sort of victory was achieved when in fact they gave up a major diplomatic point of order in international law. It really didn't cost the USA much of anything other than temporary prestige that is largely irrelevant today... and was completely made up for anyway with Neil Armstrong's landing on the Moon.

The goal of the Eisenhower administration was to send spy satellites over the USSR, something that happened not too much longer after Sputnik. Unlike what happened with Gary Powers and the U-2 plane getting shot down over the USSR, they had no reason to complain about satellites.

How is that foolish that Eisenhower waited to have the Explorer satellite launch few weeks after Sputnik?

The fear is that somehow an enemy could use that positioning data to target a U.S. Navy ship and use it in a preemptive attack.

I agree with you in terms of a navy ship in the middle of a major shipping channel when they aren't in the middle of a war operation though. Sort of akin to a police car that shouldn't have his lights on or doing other thing than simply being an ordinary commuter in ordinary traffic when they are traveling from one point to another.

A similar situation happens with air traffic, where military jets often don't turn on transponders to indicate position or other normal transponder information if they are on a war footing. Yes, it is dangerous and something they need to deal with as well. On the other hand, the USAF does have times those military jets do turn on transponders if they want to have civilian aviation stay out of the way or if the military jets are trying to play nice and friendly with civilian air traffic.

Perhaps the last couple of decades of being in a continuous global war is something that is getting out of hand.

I agree that Jerry Pournelle was not of the camp that presumes God made the world and there is nothing we as humans can do to possibly screw it up. He was more of the camp that suggested actual science needed to be followed instead of automatic kneejerk reactions and pressing the panic button as soon as you find some sort of theory (regardless of if it is tested or not) to justify some political action.

He understood actual science, and condemned justifiably sloppy science and incompetence among those professing to be following the scientific method. While not all climate science is awful, there are plenty of problems with how the science is evaluated and seemingly political motives for how some of it is done.

I did quite a bit of development in Visual BASIC, and saw that you could certainly develop powerful complex pieces of software in that language that would be as efficient and powerful as any C++ development environment. While there were certainly some shitty things about the specific Microsoft implementation of the language, it worked out pretty well.

In my case I've done extensive development in multiple languages on multiple computer platforms. Over the years I've really grown to detest C development primarily because it is really good at obfuscation and if you are a mediocre developer in it the code goes from awful to hideous in a real hurry. Trying to pick up the pieces from a low quality C programmer and trying to fix stuff is a big pain in the behind that I found to be much easier in other languages. Something else that as a general rule I've found is that a typical C/C++ program that has been sitting on a back burner for awhile that I haven't been doing active development upon takes me a whole lot longer to get back into working on. Switching to something in that language that I haven't worked on actively for over a year takes me about 2-3 days to really get back into the groove of development.... something that for my Pascal code usually only takes me a couple of hours at most. BASIC is sort of in between for my experience but definitely easier than the C code to get back into the swing of development.

At the moment I still think Scratch is by far the best introductory programming language, and is definitely better than LOGO or BASIC for that job (and so far better than Java or Javascript I can't begin to say how lousy those are for new programmers). Yes, BASIC did start out as a simplified programming language intended for introducing programming concepts, but I think it is that simplicity which gives it a whole lot of advantages.... assuming that those who graft on extra features are already familiar with the flavor of the language and what makes it powerful.

Still, in spite of Jerry Pournelle perhaps not having a whole lot of experience with C, there is something to be said about how as a language... even as a compiled language (where there definitely exist some pretty decent compilers following in the tradition of the original Dartmouth variant), BASIC is a useful and powerful language that can be used to create complex and useful pieces of software and I dare say can even be used to create operating systems if anybody cared. In terms of the raw machine code produced, the language is sort of immaterial other than how you as a developer can comfortably get the ideas out of your head and into the computer in an efficient manner.

In terms of a theory like Newton's laws of motion that can give a ten digit accuracy assessment, you are correct. Still, if there is a 10^-90 probability and 10^100 "experiments" going on in a given galaxy, that is still some room to suggest a high likelihood of occurring on a galactic scale even if it is almost impossible to have happen on a given single world.

I would hope it would be more likely than that extreme level of improbability, and given how artificial eukaryotes have been created in a laboratory from a completely abiotic initial state there is at least a pathway for it to happen. Yes, creation of life from raw elements has occurred with nothing more than a couple biologists simply willing it to happen (and a whole lot of interesting chemistry with a fully functioning organic chemistry lab). Designing a minimalist DNA strand was particularly impressive.

One thing that panspermia does address is to maximize the likelihood of life to seed a planet that has life supporting characteristics and make the Drake equation have at least one variable that is near 100% in terms of probability.

It is unlikely that panspermia has impacted only the Earth and perhaps a couple other planets that passed through one part of the Galaxy.

It also provides a mechanism to explain how something extremely unlikely to happen in one particular spot could still be virtually universal, for the same reasons. In other words it turns the watchmaker arguments of creationism on its head as a sort of cosmological "Infinite Number of Monkeys" theorem applied to the creation of the Prokaryotes and their appearance on the geological record.

I still remember him arguing that Basic was a superior language over C

I can make arguments that at least some forms of BASIC are superior to C. Language holy wars are something that has existed since Grace Hopper created the first compiler. With object-oriented COBOL, it is hard to suggest that any particular language is necessarily good at everything.

C just happens to have a good code base and was taught to many CS students as something to create compilers... which made a plethora of compilers available to pick from and for a whole lot of the awful compilers to disappear into oblivion from sheer Darwinian competition. BASIC was in a similar position though, which is why a certain Bill Gates happened to already know how to code a BASIC interpreter for the 8080 CPU by simply dusting off his lecture notes.

Most of what he has written in the past twenty years is mostly on his blog. He wrote quite a bit on politics (a pretty staunch libertarian but with Republican leanings) and climatology (where he was definitely in the "skeptic" camp).

One of his largest accomplishments was being on the President's Space Council where he was one of the backers and political supporters of the DC-X. He personally got into the lobbying effort to get funding for that project through Congress... something that as a project developed many of the theories and ideas for VTOL orbital spacecraft. Without the DC-X it is unlikely that SpaceX would have been able to their their Falcon 9 to land the way it did.

His largest political failure was a proposed lunar exploration prize program similar to the X-Prize but on a larger scale. He got the Republican House leadership (including the then-speaker Newt Gingrich) to accept his idea of basically appropriating $10 billion toward the first three companies that would successfully send and return astronauts to the Moon in the 1990's. After getting the House leadership on board including the minority ranking members (Democrats) of the Science and Space committees, Newt got into his own political mess that ended up killing the whole idea. I can only imagine what might have been had that proposal actually gone forward.

Mr. Pournelle knew Dan Quayle too (through the Space Council), but he pretty much dropped out of politics in such a direct manner after Bill Clinton was elected except through commentary like I mentioned above.

It could be argued that Jerry Pournelle also pioneered the idea of a blog on the web and was one of the first to do that where he entered some of his first entries as hand written HTML.... definitely doing that well before the word itself was coined. He did it as a way to continue his Chaos Manner series even post Byte, but went in different directions as well.

Of course what is driving GPU technology at the moment is mostly Bitcoins and crypto-currencies in general. Ever since folks figured out that setting up a server farm of hundreds of GPUs could literally print money, the financial incentive to buy them up has been enormous. Their use in graphics is sort of a sideline when viewed from that perspective. If you can sell a GPU for more than it was a year ago, that is precisely the reason.

Yes, AI technology has been doing well too as has virtual reality stuff. Research in those areas is decades old though and actually pre-dates Byte magazine in terms of some of the seminal software that was developed in those areas. State of the art for Virtual Reality is sadly Minecraft and some knock off clones of various kinds (like Medieval Engineers or Eco). There is a reason why Notch was a huge fan of Oculus Rift when prototypes first started to go public.

The huge area of AI research that has also taken off is in the financial markets. Predictive AI algorithms that can identify trends in various securities and foreign currencies has made a great many multi-millionaires and billionaires even (Warren Buffet if I need to identify but one of those). That has sucked up some of the best and brightest talent in the software industry where creating a better algorithm earns both the author and the company who implements that software some serious money. It wouldn't surprise me at all if GPUs were used there as well for the same reason they are being used by cryptocurrencies.

ReactOS and WINE have been working together since practically day one of both projects. Since both are working on the Windows NT API, a fair bit of the code is mutually interchangable (but obviously not 100%). There have been developers who have contributed to both projects. Neither will be absorbed into the other community as if that were to happen it would have happened a long time ago.

As far as interest, you need to keep in mind that Linux floundered a whole lot until IBM took interest.... in part because Linux permitted the company to use its mainframe business as a platform for web servers. I don't need to go into details, but that is part of what brought the big $$$ and developer interest into Linux and brought in the Nazgul lawyers to actually defend Linux against Microsoft in that epic battle with SCO. ReactOS doesn't have that sort of support or killer app yet.

I would imagine if Windows 8 support ends, ReactOS might get a bit of a review though and certainly interest by companies seeking to maintain older Windows machines. I actually know about at least a few new computers that are shipping with Windows 3.1 oddly enough. Old software on new hardware is still a real thing where if it does the job there is no point in getting it updated. While with a whole lot of digging you can get licenses for that ancient OS and even MS-DOS 6.0 or earlier, often it is simply easier to use the open source operating systems like FreeDOS and ReactOS as they support current hardware even if they use the older APIs.

You would have to let heavy industry into our most well known natural park.

How would a large scale industrial facility built 1000 miles from Yellowstone be different than existing heavy industries that are well within that same radius?

You hear about people getting triggered over the Keystone pipeline. Now just imagine what happens when you try shipping other liquids (or pipelines that could be converted into petroleum lines in a pinch) over similar distances and further. Shipping hot water anywhere beyond a few miles from the generating plant isn't worth the hassle.

A terawatt scale generator plant would definitely produce a whole lot of useful energy for the region though.

Something that would make the Voyager spacecraft stand out as something interesting to look at is that the albedo would be incredibly high (it is far brighter for its size & mass due to the refined metal panels and protective gold-plated foil surrounding the key instruments) and the spectrum of light coming from it would look almost unique compared to any other object. It looks manufactured and can be detected as a manufactured object.

A somewhat similar object is a near-Earth asteroid that has a really high Titanium reflection that many astronomers seem to think is actually a spent 3rd stage engine and rocket core for a Saturn V used in the Apollo missions. It was detected as an asteroid (and cataloged as such) but the spectral analysis shows it to be unlike any other asteroid seen. If space mining ever becomes a thing, I'm sure that will be one of the prime early objects to check out in detail