I'm waiting for you to provide 'the better alternative' like you said you would.

I've mentioned this before, but when you have entire ecosystems built on Windows/Office it can be exceptionally difficult to migrate to open source. You have to make sure everything works or you will have people who will block the migration.

If you want another program, then SolidWorks.

LabVIEW.

Yes, there are linux and OSX versions, but they do not support the full toolkit, drivers, and modules set that the windows version supports.

I know it's a rather specialized piece of software, but it does exist (and I do use it).

~7.75×10^10 (furlongs/(fortnight^2))

With Matlab, yes it is just tabular data that is being read in using xlsread, but when you have existing scripts that are based around that function it can be difficult to get people to try something else. As for the others, VBA macros are used in various missions to get things done.

This sort of gets to the point that real or not, there is a perceived risk that moving to a new, open source solution will break things to a greater degree than the usual upgrade cycle of MS will. It really is vender lock-in, but it's so pervasive that to break it you do have to work with more than just the other parts of the office suite.

Just in case anyone things I'm an MS shill, I'd love to have an open source alternative (I'm a poor college student), but right now, I am locked into MS Office.

It's not just migrating the office suite, it's everything. At school every major piece of software I use (Matlab, MathCAD, & Solidworks) integrates with Excel. This means that to migrate away from MS Office I have to have all three of these programs work with the replacement. Good luck getting people to migrate until you have that compatibility. This does seem to be something that I don't see brought up all that often, and yes it is important.

That's also what they did with the F-1 Engine (the Saturn V first stage engine) production line. It's why rebuilding the line is a valid option for the next heavy lifter.

They bring back the Trackball explorer line and not a moment before.

Back in the early 90s there was a study done on the feasibility of returning the F-1 into production relative to developing a single use version of the SSME (Space shuttle main engine), and back then it would have been cheaper even after you include the start up costs to go with the F-1.

The reason for this is that back when the F-1 was pulled from production a massive effort to secure the institutional knowledge of how to build the engines was undertaken. Thousands of hours of recorded conversions with everyone from the designers to the engineers to the guys on the shop floor on how the engines were built, what problems were encountered, and how the problems were solved.

As a side note, the Soviets kept the Bear in production for most of the 60's, 70's and 80's which is why they were able to keep building them. The B-52 production stopped in the first half of the 60's, and because the forge that was used to make the single-piece main spar wasn't in use any more, it was scrapped.

Now, you could redesign the wing to use a multiple piece main spar like modern airliners, but then you wouldn't have the B-52 any more, you'd have something else.

They do cycle the aircraft and other outside displays through maintenance cycles, and most of the time there are only around a dozen or so aircraft in the Air Park (the newest of which is the first C-17). Also, many of the Air Park planes will be moved inside to one of the hangers following the reshuffleing once they get the 5th hanger built.

One other note, you may remember that they hit a bridge with the shuttle's wing when it was on the barge in NYC - that never would have happened at The Air Force museum as the runway for delivery is functionally adjacent to the museum.

The phased arrays that backed the deployed ABM system would not have been blinded by the interceptor warhead initiations. This was the primary advantage of moving to a phase array system for intercept control duty. There is also the fact that the Spartan missiles would have been doing the intercepts well over Canada, and it is only the SPRINT missiles that would have been doing terminal interceptions. Even with Sprint, a 10-30kt event over your territory is a lot better than a much larger (say 1mt) event that's a ground-burst.

Presently both the US and the Russians use Hit-to-Kill ABM systems because both nations have too much stuff in orbit that is too expensive to replace that we couldn't afford to pump energy into the van Allen belts on the scale that a nuclear-dependent ABM system would provide.

WebOS on my tablet and Windows 7 on my desktop (both at home and at school).

FOREVER!

If you find a suit uncomfortable, then you need a better suit - or you need to stop buying off the rack. I'm a poor college student, but one of the new articles of clothing in my closet is a tailored suit, and it fits like a dream.

Plus there is just something about getting dressed up and taking your girlfriend to the Philharmonic/Ballet/Opera that is just plain *fun* (yes, after the event is more fun, but getting the evening off to a good start is fun too).

Well, it's possible to to use the radar as an input if you know the configuration. You broadcast a specific jamming signal that gets processed into a virus in the control computer and spreads to the rest of the systems. RUMINT is that this is what the Israelis did to the Syrians a few years back.

A more accurate version of your statement would be "require you to have access to inputs to the machine to hack it"