This is a great assassination tool! Make it strong enough to carry a small anti-personnel bomb. Say for example a wad of C4 explosive about the size of a walnut surrounded by B-Bs or small ball bearings. Use the camera to get it close to your target. Use the novelty value of the device as a way to allow it to get close to the person who needs killing. Then when within range, BOOM! using a radio controlled detonator.

    Think: " Black Sunday " (a 1976 film with Bruce Dern and Marthe Keller about a massive terrorist attack on the NFL SuperBowl) using this device focused on an individual instead of the Goodyear blimp.

    I'm a German-American blond male. Of course, I think like this.

Well, certainly the part where you take what materials science researchers have discovered in concrete technology and design structural members of a bridge certainly seems to fit that statement of what an engineer does quite nicely. Depending on how "cutting edge" the bridge is, I image there is more or less engineering involved vs. looking up the right sizes in a table, although I'm not a civil engineer so......

No, the next announcement will be delayed for 7 years.

My aunt is an original programmer from the 1960s. She programs satellite orbits to keep the metal boxes circling the earth. She knew Grace Hopper. I think that she has a Knuth check for $2.56.
Men find it fascinating that they can build a machine that can change its physical operation by the manipulation of symbols. It is the primal Promethean creation ability.
Women get the same emotional fulfillment through the creation of real living human beings. Women get the thrill of creating real life; creating artificial life doesn't hold the same kick.
It has nothing to do with sexism. In fact I personally don't think that sexism, as the feminist professors have defined it, actually exists.
When computers get as smart, cute, and interesting as babies, women will become more interested in guiding their development.

Astronauts are allowed a small (in both weight and size) amount of personal items, which have to be approved for travel (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts121/launch/qa-hahn.html). They usually leave them there when they come back down (I've heard a few astronauts talk about it). They have also shipped up larger items (presumably including the guitar) using spare space on various spacecraft (like the Shuttle or the Dragon test mission). If you go read the Wikipedia article on Skylab, you'll see that one of the crew's basically mutinied over lack of rest/personal time. Since then, NASA has built rest and down time into the schedules for astronauts on space stations. Presumably the Russians do the same. On ISS, they've sent up leisure items so people don't go nuts. I have seen reference to an every growing DVD library on the ISS as well.

As for the camera/memory cards... That was probably on the ISS as part of the standard gear. Part of the mission is to take pictures of stuff on Earth. Since they now have an Internet connection, presumably they'll transfer the pictures and leave the memory cards up there until they stop working, when they'll be sent to an inglorious (and fiery) end on a Progress ship.

MIT is almost certainly using Kerberos for their authentication since a) they invented it and b) that's what they were using at least as recently as 2005. In any event, how Kerberos stores passwords depends on the exact implementation, but in at least some implementations (admittedly old) you could decrypt the password database on the Kerberos key server with a key stored in a file in /etc. The Kerberos server is supposed to be kept extremely secure, with Kerberos being the only service running on it and it being kept in a physically secure location.

We need to face the possibility that Egypt is a basket case and we might just have to let it go back to the 13th century. If they cut the cable that connects them to the civilized world, then let them reconnect it when they are ready and able to. It's not our concern.

www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ME10Ak01.html

  We can't do everything for everybody in the world. At best we can save 'our people' techies, rock musicians, and gays, from Egypt's mad mullahs and the hungry hoards. I realize that this is a complicated issue. But it all boils down to the two sentences above.

This has to be 2.3 *peta* FLOPS not giga FLOPS. For instance, in 2010, an Intel desktop processor could do 109 gigaFLOPS (reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS).

Not really... Apollo 10 was everything landing on the moon was except the actual landing. The command module went into orbit, which meant it had to have enough fuel on board to do a burn to get back to Earth. The Lunar Module was mostly fueled (supposedly not completely fueled because they were afraid the astronauts would actually land if they had enough fuel to do so) and it did a deorbit burn, descended toward the surface and then did another burn to get back to the command module. This proposed mission isn't even Apollo 8, which went into lunar orbit.

Maybe Dragon can be turned into a Mars lander capsule and maybe a Falcon Heavy can launch a manned landing mission, but *this* capsule and *this* mission aren't really a dress rehearsal for landing or even for putting humans into Mars orbit (where they could, for instance, directly control a rover). It seems mostly like a publicity opportunity. That doesn't make it a bad idea to *do* (I'd love to see it happen, especially with private money because it may encourage the much more expensive landing mission to happen), but nobody should be fooled into thinking that it's one step away from actually landing.

As a verteran engineer, I can tell you you're an idiot and a liability for whichever unlucky company you work for.

Yes. My 20D with 8 megapixels takes much higher quality pictures that any known cell phone, or any point and shoot with 50% more nominal pixels. It's not just the vastly better optics, it's also the quality of the sensor.