Back in my (pre PC) college days, COBOL was big in business but wasn't taught or used by anyone in the Computer Science department. If you wanted to learn COBOL, those courses were offered through the school of Business.

And APL was taught by the department of Mathematics, to the extent that APL packages were used in the statistics classes.

Computer science classes weren't about teaching programming languages (we probably went through a dozen or more, from Algol and assembler to Lisp and Simula and Snobol -- we were expected to learn them ourselves depending on the assignment), but about how to think about programming (and operating systems and so on).

Yet another reason to find a way around the speed of light.

Actually I've always said (jokingly) that if anyone does find a way to go FTL, it'll be the computer chip manufacturers. In fact Brad Torgersen and I had a story to that effect in Analog magazine a couple of years ago, "Strobe Effect".

Or worse, they're running SQLServer on Sun boxes...

Although actually the "let's" wasn't part of Alan Shepard's original phrase. (In a similar vein, "Get those scientists away from that rocket and shoot it!".)

Another favorite: "Let's roll!"

Least favorite (or most hated): "Let's do this". Talk about hackneyed and overused phrases.

In the Apollo program -- at least, with Saturn V launches -- it's "Ignition sequence start" at T-7 seconds. Those F-5 engines had a complicated ignition sequence which took several seconds just to get the dang things lit. (The pre-burners which turned the propellant turbopumps had to be lit first, and the RP-1 propellant (essentially kerosene) was also used as the hydraulic fluid for gimballing the outboard engines, so had to be pressurized.)

With the Shuttle they started main engines a couple of seconds before T-0 to give them time to come up to power and ensure that they were running properly before igniting the SRBs. Once the solids were lit everything was along for the ride until burn-out (or explosion, as with Challenger).

I would much rather them use existing tried tech and incrementally advance them rather than try a radical new design.

Except that they're not. Those solid boosters? They're "based on" Shuttle SRBs, not identical to them. Several segments longer, meaning higher internal pressures, different burn characteristics, etc. If you don't think that's going to take extra years of testing, there are several bridges I'd be happy to sell you.

Ditto for any other technologies that they're basing stuff on rather than reusing identically.

The SLS isn't also known as the "Senate Launch System" for nothing. NASA's role should be to try radical new designs, not serve as a conduit for senators to shovel pork to their constituents.

Yep. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen .. all metals. To an astrophysicist, we're not made of meat, we're made of metal.

(Okay, there's a fair bit of hydrogen in our mix, too.)

And I still don't trust it.

A hobbit. They can be trusted. Don't you know nothin'?

No. Then it'd have to be a whole key ring.

Cuba.

A launch from Florida (in an easterly direction) doesn't look like it might be an attack on Cuba; a launch from south Texas does (or could). The political and technical situations are a bit different today.

Also, spreading the pork around to multiple states/congressional districts. Texas got the facility in Houston.

Oh, and what open water is to the west of Brownsville? ;-)

As the saying goes, no (battle) plan survives contact with the enemy. That doesn't mean such a plan has no use whatsoever.

An 'Integrated America Plan' or an 'Integrated Computing Plan' would of course be ludicrous in hindsight. (Just as is the original Integrated Space Plan). But such plans have the power to inspire people. To make people think "hey, I see a better option over here". To encourage people to make it so. To dream things that never were and say "why not?"

Sure, if we had cheap access to space there'd be a lot more people making their own plans and going out and doing it. Maybe this plan will help inspire the next generation's Gary Hudson, Elon Musk or a non-fictional Delos D. Harriman.

(Disclaimer: I've probably still got a small stack of the original ISP poster in my basement. My ex used to sell them through her (long defunct) Space Pioneers business.)

If the car has a way to let the passenger take manual control and override the autopilot, then the passenger has become a driver and should be properly licensed.

While I don't discuss the licensing issues, my book The Reticuli Deception (set about 100 years from now) has several scenes involving both completely autonomous (sole occupant darkens the windows and takes a nap) and not (driver overrides the computer to deliberately cause a collision with the guy tailing someone, then escapes by having arranged for a rental car to drive itself to the next block and be waiting for him). (That's only a minor spoiler, most of the book takes place off-Earth. Caveat, it's a sequel to The Chara Talisman, which come to think of it has one scene with an autonomous taxi.) </blatantplug>

>40 hz of current?

Sure, at a frequency of 30 mA for about 0.5 volt-hours.

Who says memory retrieval is non-lossy? It's an organic process, of course it's lossy. Our brains just make shit up to fill in the gaps.

The stuff we retrieve frequently is slightly less lossy because it gets refreshed (somewhat) when we remember it (sort of remembering that we remembered it).

And our brains are very good at making shit up to fill in the gaps, almost too good.

As the legendary Henry Spencer said, "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

Clearly the folks behind systemd do not understand Unix.