Someone tries to grab the smiley face?

I say, it's time a missile test up in Minot.

We need to target this guy, and their patent office.

I would think that 350 kt should be sufficient to stop this nonsense.

  -- grin,

David

Damn, here I thought that with Star Trek only, what, 5 months away that this would be Yet Another Article on it.

So Annoying.

*grin*

David

Thank you very much for pointing me at good programs on the magnetic field reversal. I appreciate it.

I do know that in my lifetime, the amount in degrees that has to be (added/subtracted) from "Magnetic North" to get "True North" has drifted several degrees, for here in my home state of Colorado. I can remember my surprise on reading that!

It's always disturbing to me when something that I tended to regard as taking "geologic time" is now running at, well, "human time" -- this speed.

Again, thanks for your links.

David Small

SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) is absolutely the way to go. Gary Hudson has been pushing that idea for some time. Go up, come down, refuel, and go back up.

The Rotary Rocket idea didn't work out for unforeseen reasons; this is why we have "research".

It's a shocker, but implementing a fleet of SSTO's would be cheap and would work . . .

which means our government isn't interested! *grin*

  -- Dave

To "slashdot".
Verb.
1) To immediately shift the discussion 90 degrees from any known frame of reference in space-time.
e.g., "Hey, you just slashdotted my proposal!"
2) To devolve into arguing over something 90 degrees from any known frame of reference in space-time. e.g., "I know we were talking about Microsoft patenting the Page Up key, but dammit!, you can't express that Sanskrit character properly without patching the X Server with grep,sed,unk,dwork,glink, and you must be running a kernel later than 2.26.0!"
3) To perform steps (1) and (2) so rapidly that missing one reply will leave the reader 90 degrees from any known frame of reference.
4) The hell you say! What really pisses me off about the Mac are the Microsoft commercials are so incredibly lame, they're no real competition for the Mac commercials. In fact, it must be a conspiracy, started by SCO, the RIAA, the MPAA, under the DMCA, and many, many other four letter acronyms.

This may be a stupid question, but, where does Linus work now?

  -- thanks, Dave

What's Steve Jobs' signon at Apple, anyway?

I was planning on getting Mom a Mac, but they can forget it now.

I thought I'd tell him. He doesn't like me anyway (old disagreement) but why not.

  -- thanks,

        David

Charge him with treason, try him, and then kill him.

This sends what diplomats call "a signal" to other slimeballs thinking about selling out to a foreign power.

The other problem with selling out is that sometimes a person on the other team is turned, and gives a list of US citizens who are spies back to US counter-intelligence, and then the spies are screwed.

This happened during the Reagan administration when France turned a member of the KGB high up, and they supplied us with a list of spies. We then arranged for "special" information to be fed to them. We also arranged for "special" chips to be put into PC's that were headed for the USSR by various routes. They degraded over time, giving increasingly unreliable results.

But the most spectacular thing was a Canadian company who made software for managing very large oil networks (such as near a refinery) found out their software was being sent to the USSR via a spy. We told them. So they inserted a subtle trojan horse (more properly, a birthday trojan horse). When there was a lot of very heavy fluid moving through the pipes, the valves were told to slam shut. This resulted in very high pressures in the pipes which burst them.

The resulting fire at one site was so large it triggered the satellites that we watch Russia with as a possible nuclear explosion, because the energy released was in the kilotons of yield. It didn't have the unique double-thermal-pulse of a nuclear weapon, but it was a bigtime fire. The counterspy manager at the NSC had to tell the people there to ignore it, but could not tell them why for 15+ years afterwards.

I've always wondered if someone told Tom Clancy about this, because the start of his novel "Red Storm Rising", about a conventionally fought World War III in Europe, is a massive fire at a refinery leaving the USSR short of oil. Of course, in Clancy's book, it's Islamic radicals who trigger this from the control room, which is a little different from software that triggered itself.

Just before the summit in Iceland, the spy network was rolled up, the spies arrested, tried, and thrown away, hopefully into dungeons. Gorbachev was furious about this, because it meant the data being sent by those spies was probably tampered with and had to be disregarded, and because the USSR increasingly had problems with its PC's. He called Reagan "That liar!" in private.

All of this is a terrific read, and true. You can find it in a book from Thomas Reed, former Undersecretary to the Air Force. It's called "At The Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War". It's at Amazon. Required reading for any Cold War historian.

  -- thanks,

    Dave Small

I'm as old as NASA, 50 years, 1958.

And I look at the first Star Trek XI Movie preview, it makes the hair on my arms stand up. Because it's the real memories, and the real heroes.

Do these mere movie-makers know what they're playing with here? I fear not.

These are the hopes and dreams of a whole generation of engineers. We watched Star Trek. "2001: A Space Odyssey" looked downright likely from 1965. We shot Estes rockets into the sky. And all of us wanted, so badly, to experience free-fall, to see the curve of the Earth, as Burt Rutan's vehicle finally did in a Right-Stuff climb ... sort of, "What the hell, the instrument panel just lost all power and blacked out; let's just keep going and judge our angle out the window, and if the panel doesn't light back up, well, that'll be interesting..."

These movie-makers have already annoyed a bunch of us, judging from the posts on the second preview.

These ... mere movie-makers ... they're playing with oxidizers they do not understand. And people who play with oxidizers often only learn when they get their hands burned. (I will mention I was silly enough to play with a mixture potassium chlorate and sugar. As a result I do not recommend this mixture to anyone.)

No? You disagree? How far back does your memory go?

This preview starts...

(Spock welding on the Enterprise ...)
Voiceover: "30 seconds and counting, astronauts reporting fuel good. T minus 25 seconds..."
John F. Kennedy: "The eyes of the world now look into space..."
And of course Kennedy made the brash promise, and goal, that we'd go to the Moon "by the end of this decade". And we did it!

(first views of the Enterprise being assembled)
Scott Carpenter: "Godspeed, John Glenn", as Glenn went up on the Atlas rocket, which had a habit, no, more like a positive track record, of exploding. In a tiny Mercury capsule.
"The Eagle has landed." Neil Armstrong showing The Right Stuff.
(various views of the saucer section and the V from engineering to the warp drives being assembled)
"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." -- Neil Armstrong on 11, taking his first step.

And then that one quintessential, defining voice from Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy's voice: "Space ... The Final Frontier ...", which first showed up on "The Wrath of Khan" after they really did kill Spock off. And many of us left that movie in tears.

As we move up the saucer section and the word "Enterprise" comes into view...

And with the music from the original series, not that awful score from the first movie, we close that preview with a date in 2009.

I remember.

'Star Trek' came out when the Gemini missions were going, to practice rendezvous, which was necessary to go to the Moon. And we were going to the Moon! In those days anything was possible.

(Oh, there were a few jerk congressmen that wanted to stop it all and waste NASA's money for political gain, notably Walter Mondale, who tried to kill things after the Apollo 1 fire, but they didn't get their way until after Apollo 17. They did manage to kill Apollo 18, 19, and 20, and throw half a million aerospace people directly out of a job. I gotta tell you, I dislike those people most strongly. The 'Great Society' did nothing but spend a lot of money proving government doesn't work. And that money could have gone into getting us off this planet.)

Neil Armstrong saved one of those Gemini missions (with Dave Scott). Buzz Aldrin saved another when the rendezvous computer whacked out; he'd brought along a manual way of doing it (his advanced degree was on this subject). NASA picked those two because they were proven troubleshooters, and man, was Apollo 11 almost an abort. Neil overrode the computer when he saw it was bringing him down into a bunch of big rocks. Balancing training, practice, and an indefinable something, Neil hopped a crater, and touched down with seconds of fuel left.

NASA made the supreme error of trying to hide and conceal what a scary, risky business this was. NASA made it look boring. There isn't much visual and interesting about a bunch of numbers. NASA gives press briefings less interesting than routine Presidential press briefings. Then Apollo 13 happened and we damned near lost the crew; the oxy-tank explosion just happened in one of the time intervals that allowed them a shot at surviving, and the people in Mission Control and Grumman did amazing things and got them home. They were true hackers.

And it was one of the first world-wide events... because people around the world prayed for their return.

Apollo 14 went pretty-much-as-scheduled, up to 17, and that's how it would have stayed, until the StoryTellers decided, to hell with this!, and interviewed the Apollo crews, and got the true stories from them. And then they did what StoryTellers do ... They told the real stories of NASA. Good, bad, brave, cowardly, warts and all. The way it should have been to begin with. We owe a lot to Tom Hanks for his "From The Earth To The Moon" series. And many others.

      I reserve judgment on the second preview. It's in the hands of "Marketing" (the horror! the horror!).

      Let's see if these people have the story telling skills to pull off what they promised in their first preview.

      Thanks,

        David Small

by couchslug (175151) on Friday November 14, @10:46AM (#25762505):

"What we COULD do is dump the manned missions until we, as a society, evolve far beyond our primitive level of technology. Send machines, many machines, which would be both cost effective and expendable. The rush to send meat into space was understandable during the Cold War, but is not wise today." -->

Astronaut Gus Grissom would disagree with you, and he gave his life on Apollo 1. He wrote in a letter:

"If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."

  -- David Small

I hate to even ask, but ...

What operating system does this thing run?

I find myself hoping that's it's Linux with a Beowulf cluster, but ...

  -- thanks,

David Small

I know what I'm gonna try:

"Hello, Google. My name is Doctor Chandra. I'd like to teach you to sing a song. It goes like this: 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy, all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage. I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet, upon the seat, of a bicycle built for two.' "

If it replies that it is an "H A L Niner-Triple-Zero", I am going to run screaming, renounce all computers and the Internet, and live a quiet life as a monk somewhere very very hard to reach.

  (grin)

David Small

Start with the iPhone/iPod Touch's design, and scale it up to about 10x7, the same size as a typical large format paperback like an O'Reilly book. Aside from built in WiFi and BlueTooth, he device includes an Express Card slot and several USB ports, so that it can accommodate the broadband network cards offered by both the HSDPA and EvDO providers. The underlying specs will be closer to a MacBook or MacBook Air.

In iTouch mode, it will be able to do all the things the iTouch does, as well as connect to the 3G cell phone networks with the appropriate adapter. Email, web browsing, etc. are all there. This mode will operate in a low power mode.

One of the "applications" available in the iTouch interface will be an option to boot a full os, which can be some combination of Mac OS X and Windows via bootcamp. Now it becomes a full laptop. A keyboard and mouse can be connected via USB or BlueTooth. An external monitor can be connected via a mini-DVI adapter.

In my view, this would work very well for digital nomads and road warriors. The small device would fit easily into almost any bag, and wouldn't require a true laptop bag. It could be used on a plane or a park bench. It could be whipped out at a moments notice and immediately be useful. At the same time, it is easy to throw a keyboard and mouse into a bag with clothing for a business trip, and have a nice environment to work on documents and presentations at the hotel. When visiting a client, it could be plugged into a projector and run the presentation just as well as a typical laptop.

The problem with this scheme is that the price point wouldn't be anywhere close to the netbooks. This would be a $1,500 machine that would compete with ultra-portables, potentially remaking that segment. I can imagine that the technology could quickly trickle down, however.