Actually, there was a piece of news today, warning against possible blackouts next winter: although France does usually produce more electricity that it consumes, it imports power dto handle strong peak loads--especially from Germany, it was said. If Germany shuts down its own reactors, and the winter is again especially cold, there might be problems.

OTOH, next year is an election year in France, nuclear power is sure to be an issue, and the news I mentioned originates from the (pro-nuclear) government. Who knows how reliable it is?

Yeah? Just wait until Germany gets hit with a tsunami, like Japan did. That decision won't seem so dumb then.

Switzerland is an even better example on that point. :-) They too are heading towards shutting down their nuclear reactors.

How about a Let's Note R9 or J10 (...)?

Interesting, thanks. I couldn't find detailed specs in English, but they indeed seem lighter than the MacBook Air.

However, what I'd really been drooling about when checking out the Vaio X was the 0.7-kg weight without the extra battery. Even the R9 is over 0.9, and (to answer Anonymous' reply) so is the Eee PC X101. That's not light enough that I'd consider changing my current Eee PC.

Now, only tablets seem to be really lightweight, but they don't have a physical keyboard, and suffer more or less from the same problems as the ChromeBook in terms of usability. Though I could imagine working on an Android tablet if I could find a LaTeX distribution for it (not just an online compiler)...

The device sounds great for travelling with its light weight and long battery life.

It's still half again the weight of a Sony Vaio X + extra battery, which could last almost 10 hours.

Why don't they make them anymore? I was looking for a replacement for my Eee PC 901 (1.1 kg); the 2009-vintage Vaio X sounded great (0.7 kg, or 1 kg with the larger battery), but the best I found currently on the market was the MacBook Air (1 kg, half the battery life, not worth the change).

Don't cancel it, just go through the project management and fire everyone who was mismanaging it causing it to go so far over-budget.

AFAICT, the reason why it's going so high over budget is that the budget itself was massively low-balled to begin with, so that the project would have a chance of being approved. In other words: lie about the true costs, they'll have to give you more later, when it's too high-profile to cancel.

The "mismanagement" here is that it wasn't spotted earlier. You can fire them, but you'll still have to either double the budget or cancel it all...

As someone who is about to get their first Android device, is there a good resource for practices for protecting it?

You may want to read this earlier Slashdot story, from which the suggestion that made the most sense to me was to install DroidWall and just not let applications access the network. Of course, they might not work then, and it can be difficult to single out a single app among, say, Google Services.

Your comment resonates with what Arthur C. Clarke wrote in the post-Apollo preface to Prelude to Space:

Yet when, in 1947, I set this novel exactly thirty years in the future, I did not really believe that a lunar landing would be achieved even by that distant date [...] Still less could I have imagined that the first nation to reach the Moon would so swiftly abandon it again. ...

In one sense, the Apollo Project was indeed a Prelude to Space. Now there will be a short interlude; and sometime in the 1980s, the real story will begin.

The hiatus has been somewhat longer, but hopefully the rise of the commercial manned spaceflight will bootstrap a self-sustaining economic sector, which will no longer be at the mercy of the whims of governments and lobbies, and ossified agiencies crumbling under their own weight.

Only when spaceflight reaches that point, will that story begin.

Great, thanks a lot! How did you figure which was Soyuz and which was Progress?

The ISS equivalent would be that one, which gives you a better view of Endeavour, but misses out a lot of the ISS.

Answering your quip seriously, they'd have to be in geostationary orbit to do that (the ISS is in a much lower orbit, in an inclined plane), and then it would be called a space elevator. Lots of unsolved problems, not the least of which is spinning out at least 36,000 km of strong enough material. But yes, it is theoretically possible, and hopefully will revolutionize spaceflight when it is done.

For clarity I mean more than 1) Space Shuttle 2) International Space Station. I think I got that part figured out.

And 3) Soyuz 4) Progress 5) ATV, for there are three other vehicles docked to the ISS in this picture.

I'll try (just from memory; hopefully people will correct my mistakes). From top to bottom:

• 1) Space shuttle Endeavour.
• 2) Connecting node (which one? There are 3 but I see only 2), with I believe European lab Columbus partly hidden on the left and two-module Japanese lab Kibo on the right. There ought to be a logistics module somewhere there, maybe behind?
• 3) US lab Destiny.
• 4) The big truss, with 4x4 solar panels, the big radiators and the arm on its chariot.
• 5) Connecting node Unity (second launched), with a couple of smaller modules I'm not sure about.
• 6) Russian module Zarya (first launched), with a dedicated EVA airlock facing the camera.
• 7) Russian module Zvezda (third launched), with a Soyuz spacecraft and a Progress cargo (don't know which is which) on its ring of docking ports
• 8) European cargo Johannes Kepler (the X-wing-like thing docked to Zvezda's aft docking port).

Here's a couple of more recent ones, including videos, also taken from the ground (by the same photographer, probably): http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/STS-134.html

True enough. But now that the money is spent, shouldn't we at least enjoy the view?

Now that Paolo Nespoli is back on the ground, I'll miss the updates on his photo album, where he regularly treated us with pictures of Earth, cities, and fun stuff on the ISS itself. Fortunately, they're still online!

(And it's Paolo, not Paulo; he's Italian, not Portuguese...)