Yeah -- discontinuing Aries/Constellation does seem an odd decision. Looking at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDwL6eVCQ2c it seems like it Ares was at least well on it's way to being working/viable with a successful prototype launch. I'd wonder how much savings there would be to going back to the drawing board and trying to re-derive something based on shuttle components.

Seems like it'd be helpful to fund some of this stuff differently -- seems having different administrations coming in and re-tasking NASA with new long-term missions-du-jour is just a formula for cancelled projects and waste..If we stuck to A mission (whatever it is) we'd probably be in much better shape..

I'll be impressed when I see a VT330 or VT340 showing a graphical web browser -- heck, you could go back as far as a VT125 to get monochrome graphics...Not that sending bitmaps over serial would be fun, but modern vector graphics might be..altered..to something ReGIS compatible. That'd be a cool hack.

Neat to see a VT320 going again though, anyway -- been ages since I've seen one fired up.

There are services that will give you, in effect, a virtual post office box. You'll indeed by emailed pdfs of the mail you receive. Haven't used such a thing myself, but one service is at http://www.paperlessmail.com/

Well, it does bear a striking resemblance to Alpha EV7, which had glueless SMP and an on-chip memory controller. The interprocessor ports do strongly resemble hypertransport.

Here (http://www.neoseeker.com/news/5536-amd-hypertransport-the-next-generation/) they even call it a derivative of the EV7 bus.