Actually, getting hold of bubonic plague is easier than you think. It's endemic amongst e.g. prairie dogs in the Four-Corners area of the US (where Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona connect).

Of course, that ubiquity means it'd make a pretty poor bioweapon, since it also means the medical infrastructure is equipped to handle it. Also, it's a bacterium, so it can be treated with antibiotics. (In the 4-Corners area, hantavirus is a more serious concern.)

To answer your original question, I'd say "wishful thinking" -- but the 9/11 attacks probably started out that way too.

Your comment prompted me to try nlzero.com again. My account is still there!

Noise Level Zero (nlzero) is the heir to Byte Magazine's BIX (Byte Information Exchange) system from pre-web days. No official connection, but it uses the same CoSy software and many of the BIX regulars moved over to nlzero when Byte shut down the BIX system.

Still going, with recent messages, though of course nowhere near as active as BIX was in its heyday.

Pfui, you young kids and your screen editors like 'vi'. The 'ed' editor was good enough for Ken Thompson, it should be good enough for you.

Now get off my lawn!

Back in the day, my college campus mainframe, a Burroughs B6700, had (in addition to its more conventional "disk pack" drives) a head-per-track (HPT) drive. The disk was several feet in diameter and the whole surface was covered with read/write heads (they didn't need to move).

Can't find specs on the B6700 version, but here's a blurb about the older B5500 version (from http://www.retrocomputingtasma...)

The powerful advanced systems concepts of the Burroughs B 5500 are fully complemented by the revolutionary Burroughs On-Line Disk File subsystem. With its "head-per-track" design, the Disk File provides all-electronic access to any record throughout the file in an average of 20 milliseconds.

        File organization, programming, and use are simplified because access is entirely by electronic switching, with no moving arms, card drops, or the like. Each record segment is equally available regardless of physical location on the disks. Multiple segments can be transferred with a single instruction.

        Module size is four disks totalling 9.6 million alphanumeric characters of information capacity. Up to 100 of these modules may be used with the Burroughs B 5500, effectively extending the memory of the computer systems by almost a billion characters. Transfer rate is 100,000 characters per second.

As others below have noted, plenty of old fogies remember The Terminator, its sequels, or The Sarah Connor Chronicles (watchable only for Summer Glau).

I have to confess though that my first thought was to wonder if he was related to John Bigboote ("that's Bigboo-tay!") or John Smallberries.

I only got them to stay on the line for about 15 minutes. When he told me to press the Windows key ("The what?" "The key with a flag picture on it") I said "My key has a picture of a penguin on it, does that make a difference?"

He hung up.

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.