Yeah. Having an Emplant board. I've owned several Amigas, and hung out with several other Amiga owners. Blow it out your arse sideways.

Yes, but alas, the situation is much more complicated than fishing.

Yes. That is in fact precisely how I feel about it. Teaching 'em how to use the pole is right in there as well. It's woeful what the education system in this country has become. It's awful how entitlement programs are designed to self-perpetuate by cutting off recipients when they just begin to get their shit together. And it's awful how we don't actually permit people to be self-sufficient in this country; grow your own food in your own backyard and you just might get a visit from the cops.

Ranty McRanterson, I know. But seriously, at the rate at which we shit upon the disadvantaged in this country, it's a wonder we ever even hear from them, let alone see or smell them.

Well, at least there's that to make all this time spent Slashdotting worthwhile. If I am an anything fanboy, I am one for Neal Stephenson.

I had very few problems with termination on my Amiga. It seemed to work fine with any termination I used. Macs were where I had problems. And the Amiga was in fact the first computer that really had great plug and play. It had a microkernel-based OS and the drivers could be loaded from option ROM on the cards automatically, and then later they could be replaced in memory with a newer driver loaded from storage. In spite of this, Amiga themselves actually released at least one storage controller (MFM+SCSI) with no autoconfiguration; I had one in my first A2000 running a ST225 and later, a SQ135.

Yeah, for those users, Amiga offered the A2000 with an accelerator, and called it the A2500. You probably recall.

That's why they didn't do that. They wanted to maintain the library of software that would run on the A500. Without that, the A500 would have been a sad joke. At $600 as a package with a TV encoder, it was cheaper than most accelerators. You couldn't expect people to ever add anything but a memory upgrade.

That difference is minuscule compared to having an '020, let alone an '030.

Because it was the thing to have, not just for the coolness factor or the utility of being able to run MacOS (and faster than it would run on the Mac, too) but because it added more I/O including some highly credible serial ports. You're going to use your serial port for a MIDI interface, right? Given that nearly all you need is some level-shifting hardware, since it has a 31,250bps mode? And if you have two Amigas, which is not unlikely since you might well want one with the old chipset and one with the new, your parallel port is likely to be used for PLIP. It's actually fairly speedy. Then you only need one egregiously expensive ethernet card.

I mean, if you're not messing with the Amiga to recapture the past, then what are you doing? Most of the classic games run in emulators, and there's really no point to using the hardware any more except as an affectation. It would be fun perhaps to use the Amiga in a nerdy stage show, but there's no point to trying to do "real work" with it. It's an amusement.

Because there's absolutely no way for Orion to dock with something else that has yet to be developed, launched separately, meant to support a longer mission.

Right?

Rendezvous with an asteroid is about the same as rendezvous with another small orbital body, like a space station. You match your orbital plane, and then you plot a point of intersection between your orbit and the target. You match velocity and orbit with a maneuver when you get close. You then get nice and close, and do what you're gonna do (take pictures, grab on, etc.).

As with all things, the devil is in the details. But we've gotten really good at rendezvous - we've been doing it in orbit since the 1960s in Gemini, we've done it in lunar orbit. There's no reason to say that rendezvous with a giant lump of rock would be any different - it's just crunching the math on how much delta-V is necessary, and then building hardware to get it done.

When Kennedy gave that speech, we had all of 15 minutes of manned spaceflight experience from putting a single manned capsule on what was essentially a V-2 rocket imported from Germany. Alan Shepard could have held his breath through most of that flight.

So yeah, the later Mercury flights, the Gemini flights, and the Apollo program were essentially from scratch.

We don't need it. However, all our allies need it, and we choose to keep footing the bill and helping them out.

Note: I do not agree with this policy, but that's what's going on.

I get what you're saying, but in the time when the Constitution was written, a standing army wasn't necessary because you had a good month of lead time before someone else's army could get here to do something untoward.

The technology of flight changes that. There should be a smaller standing army specifically for defense of the nation restricted to North America, and then a reserve contingent that can only be activated by Congress (emergency resolution, war declaration, etc.).

All the hundreds of bases on foreign soil should be liquidated, and the foreign countries that get those back should start footing the bill for their own defense. Then we'll see how much they want to cry about American expansionist policies and so on.

I suppose you could use spokes.

Smartwheels are made of telescoping scopes which depend on future-tech materials science, and this will require different future-tech materials science to be practical, so clearly it's totally different.

Seriously though, it is totally different. Smartwheels can track over broken surfaces with full traction, these cannot.

When you give people the schematics to your computer you're implying comfort with a high level of hackery. A friend added his own Zorro II slot to an Amiga 500. He always wanted to add a Video Toaster to a 500, all the signals were there, but nobody ever wanted it done for obvious reasons :)