http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar That was an excellent example of private industry dropping the ball without a guaranteed flow of money from the government. Yes, I can see private industry handling low earth orbit. But the moon or Mars? There is no way that they will pay so much risk money ahead of time without promise of near-term profits. American corporations have forgotten how to invest in the future and only concern themselves with quarterly reports. Lockheed wouldn't even fund its share of 50%, or even a single year of development.

Use these -first- to get the design at least partially congealed in your mind. Only when you have a clear idea what it's supposed to do, and what it's supposed to look like, should you move ahead into code.

If you are doing still shots or landscape, then that is more than sufficient. I have a collection somewhere of a bunch of stereo pairs I took during a vacation that way. They seem to be as good as any more expensive method. And if the 3d-ness isn't what you had hoped for, then you still have two shots.

Nobody is going to say "No" to Apple in California.

The Slashdot title might be wrong, but the original author is perfectly clear that it is a model of a model train. That's two meta-levels, and can be as removed from the original as it needs. obj = model(model(train)).

But if you take this as "a victory for LGBT" and not let this be for his memory alone, then you have robbed and victimized him yet again.

True, but this is for Alan Turing personally. This statement should not be diluted to be more generally applicable. Let this one be for him alone, since he was the victim in this particular instance. Rather, if another public statement is required, then work toward that.

I would suspect that unforeseen developments, such as big advances in 3d circuit design, would alter this schedule a lot. This is simply daydreaming.

Common sense is your searchable database of experience. It is basically meta-knowledge about what you have learned in the past. Like when your reasoning is: "Should I try to run this red light? I don't see any policeman," and your meta-knowledge is "Last time I used that reasoning, I received a citation." Thus the true but unfair observation that children lack common sense.

> Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence

Just who are these people? If you read articles by Minsky or Kurzweil, you would think that AI progress has stalled completely. General AI seems to have stagnated in the 80's. Ask an industry marketer, he will use the same buzzwords that have been brandished since the early 90's. Self-initiation of reasoning and logic are still very far away.

Admit it! A summer week at Asilomar Beach is more than enough reason to proclaim some headline-grabbing topic.

It has exactly what you need, an html-like format, but tagged by meaning, not presentation. The project has tools to convert it to printable formats.

The spec: http://www.docbook.org/

The tools: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/

I don't think that companies actually have problems with the concept of contributing to open source. Many of them do. Big example: Eclipse, with a LOT of corporate support.

I think the reason is that they are trying to keep their legal burden to a minimum. Requiring legal assistance to determine what is proprietary and what is open, assurance of provenance (did not borrow/steal from O/S), etc, is just too much for some companies and their teams to worry about. A considerable amount of documentation would need to be maintained to delineate the border between contributing and not contributing. A rule of "don't contribute" is the simple, clean and easy way to avoid it. Possibly if there were some commonly agreed-upon public and open mechanism to assist in this, there would be much more O/S contribution, especially from smaller firms.

When Win9x support was dropped, it was in order to end the dependency on legacy code and to enable new features. And I am sure that a complete Mozilla build on Win9x was pure hell.

This discussion does not mention software issues at all, but merely the level of effort for official (paid?) support. So I would not be surprised if Firefox continued working on Win2k for a while. Will their compiler -really- check OS level?

Actually, I think that announcing it on the show is an attempt at a graceful way to say "no."

If you read the article, you will see that it is likely that the vote will be 8-7 against this proposal.