...I think you're the first person in history to call Windows 8.1 "good" and Windows 2000 "bad." What's your secret?

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints, and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own regard. Energise the demolition beams! God, I don't know⦠apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at allâ¦

I think there's already a 2030 mission in the works to send the boulder back with flowers, chocolates, and an apology letter inscribed on a golden disc that reveals a YouTube compilation of Carl Sagan quotes if placed in a laserdisc player. (The instructions on the sleeve for constructing such a device simply say "This product has been discontinued" in a mixture of pulsar coordinates and atomic oscillations.)

Mod parent up. Perhaps it is taken for granted at a place like slashdot, but I've seen no mention of the fact that a huge fraction of the high end pc market - even laptop/mobiles - target gamers rather than scientists and other who do technical computing. Depending on what programs you will be running, such hardware may perform very poorly when compared to workstation class machines. Workstation class laptops with a good GPU and software to use it properly will run circles around an equivalently priced machine designed for gaming.

Even if the heavy duty stuff is to be done on a supercomputer or HP cluster, selecting the right hardware to interface with can spare you a lot of headache during setup/configuration. I'm taking a parallel computing class right now where a remote system has the hardware features we need to learn the necessary programming concepts. My cheap commodity laptop has been experiencing a lot of hardware compatibility related issues as I'm trying to set up the GPU-driver-dependent Eclipse-based local development stack necessary for my projects. Maybe I'm just venting because I'm new and does't know my way around yet. But I can certainly attest to the fact that in my case at least, "Anything" is NOT the right answer.

I hope for your experience over the years, we've done right by you as a supportive community, true to the geek spirit. Tell your daughter we welcome her inquisitive mind as much as we've always done so for all geeks everywhere. Let her know the guys and gals here would like nothing more than to nurture and guide her as she grows and develops into a person of consequence. We are a poor substitute for the love and devotion of a living father. But we can do nothing less.

Not that far from the truth.

If terrorism is a way to guarantee people do your job for you, then perhaps we have discovered the secret eighth habit of highly effective managers?

It was my impression that the pegasus system has a pretty lousy record. responsible for a lot of failures. have they improved much over the years?

I don't understand why the idea is being implemented in such a modest manner. The animation has the rocket stage carried aloft for ignition at high altitude by what looks like an F-18. While I don't doubt the performance of the Hornet's engines, wouldn't it make more sense to extend the payload capacity with a larger carrier craft? Say something on the order of the 747-based shuttle carriers? You would be able lift a proportionally larger rocket stage that is able to deliver a more massive payload into LEO or a proportional payload (planetary probe?) even further. It has always felt to me that an airborne launch of a space vehicle has so many more benefits. You are not restricted for being tied down to any one physical terrestrial location. Launches are additionally more versatile due to the more numerous varieties of orbits available at lower costs. Is there a good engineering reason why concepts such as the Soviet-era MAKS was not pursued?

No—I was limiting the scope of my concerns to this particular tax grab attempt and the corresponding infrastructure upgrade that it would fund. I apologize for the confusion.

Didn't Iran just cancel their space program?

https://medium.com/war-is-bori...

After nothing coming of my own submissions over the years, I've been curious about what exactly is done here. Finally some clue from another....

Does "saving the country" not count as something to accomplish? You've got me confused here.