The "Wormhole drive" was introduced in series finale of SGA and allowed Atlantis to travel from Pegasus to the Milky Way in seconds - normal hyperspace travel took three weeks.

And yeah, NO SF show has ever addressed the "how do you find a starship in a galaxy" problem (Star Wars, Star Trek, SG, BSG, whatever).

That's because Groening and Cohen and math/science geeks...

Actually, Futurama handled this really well. Just go forward until you loop through the next Big Bang cycle. Then stop moving forward when the new universe it up to the point in its history where the old universe was and where you want to change things. Oops! Missed Hitler; quick, fast forward to the next cycle!

Not to be a total geek, but:

In SGA, the "Pegasus Galaxy" is supposedly about 3 million light-years from the Milky Way Galaxy.
In SGU, the Destiny is supposedly 7 *billion* light-years from Earth, or ~2300x as far.

So the Wormhole Drive would have to run for hours instead of seconds....and as we all know, the dipolarized unobtanium that powers it goes supercritical if used for more than 30 seconds and destroys the universe, so SGU *obviously* couldn't have used that... ;-)

My primary display is 17" running at 1920 x 1080, but that's because my system is a laptop (MacBook Pro). My second display is 23" also running at 1920x1080. And then I use Spaces to set up 9 virtual dual-displays. Does that make it 360"? ;-)

I have an iPhone 3G. I updated my iPhone to iOS 4. Now I have the same proximity sensor issue; I was on a conference call the other day and kept hearing a beep before I realized that my face was pressing the "3" on the keypad. I had to hold the phone like Steve does in order to make it stop ;-).

My favorite part of the NPR article was the sub-headline: "Discover It, Then Blow It Up".

Kinda sums it all, doesn't it?

It's just a glitch in the Matrix.

You can still compile and run FORTRAN programs--in fact, if you run Linux, you might have a FORTRAN compiler installed and not know it (I'm in Windows, so I can't see if I do right now).

Hmm.....let's see:

[rgenter@at41 rgenter]$ f77 --version
GNU Fortran (GCC 3.2 20020903 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7)) 3.2 20020903 (Red Hat Linux 8.0 3.2-7)
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

GNU Fortran comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
You may redistribute copies of GNU Fortran
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING
or type the command `info -f g77 Copying'.
[rgenter@at41 rgenter]$

Yup. FORTRAN, check. :-)

I did. I make less money, 75K as opposed to 120K, but I get more time to enjoy my life.
after 25 years, I was real tired of pointless 60 hour weeks and day long meetings.

You really don't understand people. I pity someone that places all value someone could possible have on their salary.

I dont think he meant that all software used by the government must be built by the government coding office, but rather that all software created for government should come from the theoretical government coding office. If that is what he meant, it makes sense to me. Most shops wouldnt let the marketing department, for instance, hire a group of programmers to build some software for them without at least involving IT, and really most shops would require that the software be created by developers in the IT department. Having programmers or contractors working for every government agency imaginable, reporting to people who dont specialize in managing software development, is silly.

This is why any serious test gives you probabilities and not yes/no answers. Of course any scientist is aware that most diseases are not linked to a single gene that acts as an on-off switch and that in most cases a cluster of multiple genes might influence the susceptibility for certain diseases, which, then is further modulated by environmental factors. You are perfectly right in that this has no place in the drugstore - even if it gives results in the form of possibilities, this will only instill unjustified panic in people who get told that they have an increased probability to come down with, say, colon cancer, but who have no idea what this actually means.

It isn't a matter of making enough software. Nobody is suggesting that the government code up five different word processing packages and sell them to the highest bidder. It's about knowing that the software running our essential government functions is reliable.

No it isn't. It's a tool that lets people get their jobs done.

Depends on what fails.

If the word processor on some senator's desktop dies, I doubt if anyone is terribly inconvenienced.

If something big and important breaks at the IRS, it may very well be a very big problem.

Software used for essential functions of the federal government probably shouldn't be off-the-shelf. It probably should be somehow verified or authenticated. It might be a very good idea to bring the development of that software in-house, rather than to outsource it. Because if that software fails badly enough, it can render those essential functions essentially disabled.

Why bother flying a plane into a building if you can do as much, if not more, by simply breaking a bit of software?

You don't *want* to blow the satellite to bits because then you have a million little destructive satellites to track instead of one big one. The 2008 situation was a special case: the satellite was already falling back to earth, so all the little bits would burn up in the atmosphere.

Galaxy 15 was in geostationary orbit and is still at roughly that distance. The space shuttle can't reach geostationary orbit; it's too far away and the shuttle isn't built for it. When the shuttle deployed similar satellites, it released them in much lower orbits and they used a combination of small fuel burns and several months of waiting to reach the much higher geostationary orbits.

I don't necessarily agree with this. I think that the number of people already on facebook is definitely an obstacle, but just look at its own history. You just need to create momentum, which is difficult to do but not impossible. When I first joined facebook, hardly anyone I knew outside of one specific circle of friends were on it. But I would tell my other friends about it, and eventually they'd try it out, and presumably do the same to others. I don't doubt it would change, but I doubt it would change like facebook did, at least in regards to privacy. The set-up alone would make that seem like a non-starter. All facebook needed to do was change its TOS. That doesn't seem like it'd work here. What I think their biggest challenge is going to be is to make it as easy to use/join as the more centralized social networks. Anything that starts out by saying "allows you to set up your own node" is going to turn off a vast majority of people.