...if you encapsulate the word "reusable" in quotes. and this is a good illustration of that fact.

At $2bn per flight and a stack of signatures a mile high for each one, they required significant dissasembly and inspection in-between flights. The shuttle was never designed as a production vehicle - it was a test article hastily pressed into production. To keep a "hot standby" for rescue missions would thus be quite costly.

The future is ultimately with 100% reusable "gas and go" vehicles with automotive-like reliability, and not with the latest "SLS" - Senate Launch System. These vehicles require more R&D upfront but the payoff is staggering.

So I created an account using an email address (which is very well hidden compared to the big twit and FB buttons).

It's interesting, but it has a ways to go.

I selected a few "troves" to follow but I still received things from troves I am not following in my home page feed. (with gray trove name instead of green) Could not figure out how to get rid of those, nothing in the preferences that I can find. You do need to manually refresh after you add or remove troves it seems, to update your home page.

Will keep an eye on it as things improve.

The only thing you learn about an interviewee by asking them things like the tennis ball or manhole cover questions is whether or not they are a good candidate for a game show.

Obscure trivia is obscure trivia. It is meaningless.

Attempting to provoke an emotional response via trick questions or questions designed to insult or get the interviewee to take the bait and say something offensive is also dishonest, unless you are administering a voigt-kompf test.

Fortunately I have only ever had to interview for a job during one time in my life, and it was an employee's market so it was easy.

The one oddball question I had was actually a cool one. "Which Star Wars film is the best one" This was before the new ones came out. Any die hard old school star wars fan will typically agree that Empire Strikes Back is the best one, and I answered correctly. I was given a job offer but turned it down and took a job with another company that I really wanted to work for.

The Star Wars question was actually job related, it was a visual effects company and they wanted people that were also fans and had an appreciation of prior art.

Most of my work has come from networking, or running my own businesses. I can't imagine anything more soul sucking than having to submit hundreds of resumes and sit through dozens of interviews.

My family's 1963 house came with an intercom system when it was built. It was a fad at the time the tract was built. They never used it much either. It's still in place though it hasn't worked in a long time.

My experience with Insteon is that it does very badly if you have unreliable power. I live in a rural area and brownouts or voltage variations will kill Insteon devices in no time. I installed insteon switches in nearly the entire house, and nearly all of them died after a few years. I gave up and put the regular light switches back in (which I had saved just in case) and decided that home automation was a hobby that I did not have the time or money to deal with properly. Some of the other posters farther down have the right idea...if it's not wired it's a toy, and if you're building a 4,000 sq ft house, you might be able to consider the higher end stuff. When you turn a light switch on you want it to just work.

As a former long time Amiga user, this seems to work pretty well on the outset, and gives an authentic experience in regards to the clock timing and boot time. (though it thankfully may be a little faster :) ) It looks like they are using the emulation code from Cloanto (Amiga Forever) which has been around for quite a long time now.

This OS and demos may look very simple to younger folks, but it was quite groundbreaking at the time. the H.A.M. (Hold and Modify) demo showing 4096 colors was pretty impressive at a time when most PCs were stuck with 256 colors. There are a lot of really nice demos for the Amiga from the demoscene that took all of that a step further even, hopefully someone thought to save and compile them.

The only issue I ran into so far is on the juggler demo, the ESC key is needed to exit the demo, while on the emulator the ESC key is what switches you away from the emulator mouse to your native mouse, so it does not trigger an ESC on the Amiga. (you need to reset the emulator) Juggler doesn't let you pull down the screen to reveal the workbench. There may have been a keyboard shortcut that I have forgotten about to toggle screens. I haven't touched an Amiga in 20 years.

Hats off to the coders, brought back a lot of memories.

And as a descendent to that is was amazing what the Amiga did with the 68000 and its custom graphics and sound chips, as you mention at the very end. you never saw smooth scrolling and sprite movement on a PC. The Amiga and the C=64 both had arcade quality graphics locked to a 60hz interlaced or 1/2 vertical res (single field) refresh rate of a standard NTSC television signal. Since the whole thing was timed to that frequency, you never got tearing. The only downside was interlace flicker without a frame doubler, but not a lot of applications used interlaced mode.

...to play Ultima V in dual SID mode.

After several C=64s and the 128, I moved to the Amiga, which got me into the VFX business thanks to the Video Toaster and Lightwave.

Looking forward to reading this article. If it's good I'll stash a copy next to my "Rise and Fall of Commodore" book.

Depends on where you are. Priuses (Priii?) are everywhere in urban environments, but last time I visited texas oil country, every last car in a parking lot at lunch one day was a full size pickup.

A large factor in the derth of small pickups is the chicken tax, the stupidest protectionist law still on the books.

...is towing capacity. The tremendous torque would make it no problem for power, but range is a huge issue. Buzzing around town light, no problem. But the traditional use of a full size pickup to haul boats, toy haulers, travel trailers and 5th wheels long distance would probably garner almost nonexistant range due to the wind drag and weight. It's hard enough to make that equation work with diesel and gas - I take a significant hit when hooking up the toy hauler trailer.

So you would have a choice of a gas vehicle that will do all those things, or an electric vehicle that is probably only good for short hauls or not towing, and then needing still another vehicle to do towing. A hybrid is a better case for that use, as long as the power is there when you need it.

For all those people that drive them only for a status symbol but don't actually make use of them, then that might be a good market for them.

I use my 7.3L turbodiesel about once a month to pull heavy things like god intended it to, and the rest of the time I'm in my 30MPG car.

...the energy cost of separating the hydrogen from the oxygen? That is currently the Achilles heel of fuel cells. It takes more energy to do that than to burn fossil fuels or nuclear directly. Though every once in a while someone comes up with a lab-proof for doing it more efficiently. Anyone have the latest on that technology?

It seems like many times when a large government entity spends billions of dollars on a large IT project to consolidate or make more efficient the handling of lots of data, it frequently ends up in massive amounts of wasted money and failed projects, with lots of pork doled out to consultancies and middlemen, and in the worse cases ends up with the project abandoned entirely with all the money down the toilet. Many examples have been posted to /. in the last 10 years.

Are there some good cases of where the money was well spent, and a solid, cohesive working product came out of it?

Some of the root cause may be the politicizing of the contract process in the first place (beltway bandits and congress critters mandating a piece of the work go to their district) and the letting of cost-plus contracts. Other times may be the requirement to take the absolute lowest bidder, which ends up with someone who lowballed the job and cannot possibly execute it properly within the promised budget.

How does one properly motivate and direct a team under these conditions? The actual production of the software needs to be isolated from the politics above, and act as if they are working for a small company developing a new commercial website. With lack of competition - it's not like people can go to all those other government healthcare websites - a replacement incentive needs to be put in place if one wishes to tread down that path. In a monopoly situation, these are common problems. Highly centralized services do not take into account basic human nature.

Earlier in the last decade, there was a famous powerpoint slide that made the rounds within Aerospace circles. It was titled "SLI - The Work of a Nation" and showed which pieces of the Space Launch Initiative* were to be built in which congressional districts. It was the butt of many jokes as de-centralizing the production of such a complicated item always results in ballooning costs as it makes it extremely costly and difficult to integrate the various components. That may not be the case here but it's definitely seen in other federal projects.

* the then-current name for the over-bloated, impossibly expensive shuttle replacement heavy launch system now known as SLS - Senate Launch System as goes the joke.

...you see a huge hoard of people launching a spacecraft, or massive ground support infrastructure, you are looking at obsolete technology.

A step in the right direction.

Correct, the Win2k theme. Should have clarified. The default XP theme is hideous.