Not really what you were thinking of, but FOGBANK was a bizarre twist on/subversion of the idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK

Basically this material used in US nuclear weapons hadn't been made in 15+ years, and when they tried to make it again, the result failed in testing. Of course, people started assuming they'd "forgotten" how to make it, but it ended up being that they never knew how to make it in the first place -- impurities in one of the ingredients turned out to be important, and the ingredient they were getting 15 years later was "too pure".

Parts of California pay well over $0.20, and Hawaii runs over $0.25. Difficult rural areas can go past even that.

Well, dysgraphia is commonly associated with Asperger's syndrome. Guess what syndrome is commonly associated with geeks?

Cool page, but it doesn't really agree with you. Note its quote:

In brief, at 1.0 rpm even highly susceptible subjects were symptom-free, or nearly so. At 3.0 rpm subjects experienced symptoms but were not significantly handicapped. At 5.4 rpm, only subjects with low susceptibility performed well and by the second day were almost free from symptoms. At 10 rpm, however, adaptation presented a challenging but interesting problem. Even pilots without a history of air sickness did not fully adapt in a period of twelve days.

This suggests anywhere from 1-2 RPM could probably be workable, suggesting a practical radius of as little as 0.15 miles, or diameter of 0.3 miles (~241/482 meters). Further, this assumes 1g. It's highly unlikely that 1g is necessary.

Mars is one of the most likely targets for extended-duration missions, and has a surface gravity of 0.376g. So let's say 0.4g. This lowers the diameter to as little as 180 meters (~0.11 miles).

If you bring it up to 400 meters in diameter, or less than 1/4th of a mile, you can have 1 1/3rd RPM at better than Mars-equivalent gravity.

Finally, diameter/radius can be a deceptive way of looking at this, since a basic spinning station need not be circular. A first pass need be little more than a room attached to a counterweight with cables.

IIRC, my back-of-the-envelope calculations a year or so ago were that cutting the defense budget in half basically solved US revenue problems, and still left us with a better military than the next ten combined.

It's more complicated than that since you have to compensate for the economic impact of reduced defense spending, but a gradual combination of cuts and redirection to more productive things (e.g. infrastructure, education and job training, alternative energy investments, etc.) would get us into a much better situation.

Of course, this makes too much damn sense to ever happen.

Every conservative I encounter assumes stem cells = dead babies, so apparently they don't even know what they're against. Perhaps you should go tell them, I think it's been five minutes since the last conservative leader found something his whore-shippers are supposed to hate.

You appear to be conflating "user space" with a poorly-defined term "application space", they have no relationship. I can run a kernel in "user" space, and I can run a text editor in "kernel" space. The kernel is not hacked on by application programmers, and the text editor is not hacked on by systems programmers.

VMs are largely a systems issue. People building the applications end-users use are largely not the people building VMs, and the people building VMs actually _do_ have to have a rather close understanding of hardware issues. Libraries like Qt straddle the gap between systems and applications, being strictly neither. Their interaction with VMs they are not themselves running on top of is definitely a systems issue, however, as you are trying to bridge two unrelated systems (the VM, and the host it happens to be running on top of, or possibly even another VM on the same or a different host).

You are also conflating access to the equivalent of "/dev/cdrom" with "direct hardware access". This is also a fallacy. Xine is accessing a special file, not a raw hardware device, and there are several layers of indirection between Xine and the hardware, and you could easily substitute another file and Xine would neither know nor care. Xine isn't what's fiddling with hardware registers and the like, the drivers are. Xine is an application running on top of abstractions others have built.

Apparently you missed the word "application". Application developers don't and shouldn't care about hardware, nor should they be writing the VM. That's for systems developers to worry about.

Some developers may do both application and systems development, that does not mean they are the same discipline.

... never distinguished between "native" and "managed" code.

Write the damn code according to the rules and idioms of the language in use, let the language implementation deal with the rest. If you're an application developer and care about *how* your code is being run, you're doing it wrong.

Someone is confused by math and/or the word "almost".

MMI has billions in cash and equivalents on hand, and no debt. Google is effectively paying an amount roughly equal to their 2010 profits.