You know, of course, good aggressive competition is illegal when you use it to extend one monopoly into others.

I think it was pretty broken before the invasion. At least now it could be possible to offer education that's not based on religion.

Well... My apps run on ARM. They run on x86, SPARC, MIPS and would run just the same on zSeries mainframes.

If your apps don't run on the hardware you want, then, perhaps, they are not really your apps - they belong to their makers and you are just the person using them.

The problem with applying agile to spaceflights is that you kill people when you fail a unit test.

The cost/safety problem is not only about killing people. The costs of acquiring astronauts, which I estimate in the tens of millions, to the cost of losing one spacecraft are tiny. If you kill the crew Challenger-style and destroy vehicle and payload during launch, you can also count the launch and payload costs, as well as any financial penalties for not completing the mission.

Sounds cruel, but astronauts are clever people and know that if manned space travel gets either too risky or too expensive, they will have to hand their jobs down to robots. And that would be worse than death for them.

I can't wait for September 1993 to end.

I for one welcome our new intelligent, boat capsizing, jellyfish overlords, you insensitive clod.

Luckily, Windows cannot properly uninstall anything ;-) There will always be some DLL, some registry key and some spurious file lost in the filesystem never to be deleted.

Interesting... I can't readily find a list of NASA's failures. On manned spaceflight, I recall two big ones that killed 14 people, both attributed to negligence.

I wonder how many unmanned spacecraft NASA lost and how this compares to the Soviet (and other nations) space program.

It's not like it hasn't been done before with slide rules. There were NTRs, several of them subject of firing tests. Then there are VASIMIR devices that could benefit from space-based nuclear reactors for added power.

I say designing a workable device should not take long these days.

And we keep it going because the pope is a very funny guy

The religion without sin, please, throw the first stone ;-)

If being based on bullshit is grounds for being banned, every religion I know of will have a lot of problems.

So now they need Ubuntu and Fedora running on Tilera-based desktop monsters so that the right people get interested in developing for them.

Since a) developing a processor is insanely expensive and b) they need it to run lots of software ASAP, it would be very clever if they spent a marginal part of the overall development costs in making sure every key Linux and *BSD kernel developer gets some hardware they can use to port the stuff over. Make it a nice desktop workstation with cool graphics and it will happen even faster.

They are going up against Intel... The traditional approach (delivering a faster processor with a better power consumption at a lower price) simply will not work here.

I think Movidis taught us a lesson a couple years back. Users will not move away from x86 for anything less than a spectacular improvement. Even the Niagara SPARC servers are a hard sell these days...