The plan was to move more slowly, using airplane-like vehicles to get into orbit. Ultimatley, the moon was the goal. JFK's challenge derailed the early shuttle program in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Use of 'disintegrating totem poles' replaced the development of reusable spacecraft parts. The shuttle program that we got after Apollo was another quick-easy-expensive program, rather than the result of 20+ years of development. sorry no cites, but I have little time right now for this....mebbe later. (google should find bunches - look up project dynasoar, X-15, etc)

success = failures + 1; // how to be good at any job.

.....air conditioner repairman in a few interactive web sessions per week for a year? chef at a 5 star greasy spoon? TV sitcom writer ? What professionals (esp unions) would be insulted by such a trivializing of their careers? Computers are the most complex machines every devised. How good could such a 'professional' be? (claimer: I am pro developer)

I knew it. I've known it all along, but was afraid that it was true.

orig post said the seller is claiming it as their own code, which is a violation of pretty much any license I'm aware of. If the seller is honest, they'd correctly credit the author. Lying about the author upfront suggests they probably removed previous copyright notices and intentionally are violating the license.

I worked 30 years in astronaut training facility (full-fidelity simulators), and wrote many many documents on software that I wrote. I always kept my own digital copies, of course. Over the years, the contracts changed hands many times, and different document systems were implemented, and "all" documents were "always" converted from old to new. I was never able to later re-locate *any* document I had submitted to *any* of the document systems. So my copies of my documents were the only ones that actually existed that I knew of. This included meeting minutes, peer review notes, design and 'as-delivered' documents. So I think institutional amnesia is more the norm, and actual memory beyond 3-5 years is rare.

"each phase of the code compilation process is exposed as a service that can be consumed by other applications."
How bout if the 'other app' is a web browser window? TFA suggests this will be possible with MS's product.

I was thinking cpu-specific, not OS-independent. Sorry for ambiguity. CPU-specific compilation may allow for use of idiosyncratic features/bugs in the production of invasive code, something a little more difficult if the target hardware is unknown.

Now malware can be shipped in various partially-compiled steps and in different packaging (one,two,three modules, arriving from different vectors, etc), making detection harder, and can then be compiled targetting the cpu it lands on. Oh, what a fricken great IDEA! platform-independence for malware just got easier! It''s really getting hard to distinguish between the bad guys and producers of ideas like this.

Astronomers, as a group, are every bit as smart as rocket scientists. I've worked with both at NASA. I think they can handle the name change.