Because although companies may change, the humans that run them are exactly the same. Call me when human nature changes.

That's nice. Makes sense. Perfectly reasonable.

Now, turn into a committee.

And if the answer is "everyone gets equal financial support," then what prevents 1000 candidates from running?

And if the answer to that is "Nothing", have we really been harmed?

Now that is an interesting take on things.

Worried about those Canadians again, eh?

I'm sure the pizza is better in DC or NYC.

Well, at least in NYC.

Interesting. I'm surprised that they managed to pull that off over a PCI bus.

They were able to do it because the PowerVR chip processed a tile-at-once and only wrote the final rendered frame over PCI. Since you never have to read the frame buffer for more complex multi-pass effects (unlike all other cards at the time), you could get by with PCI throughput. The card had local memory to store textures and the scene draw ordering buffer.

Out of curiosity, did the PowerVR cards manage to behave well in that regard, or could you induce situations where firing up the 3d cratered throughput on any IDE/ethernet/whatever peripherals on the same PCI bus, or where frames dropped all over the place because your IDE controller decided that something needed to Get Written NOW, and grabbed mastery of the bus at the wrong moment?

This was a problem experienced on ALL early video cards, thanks to the mess that was early PCI busmastering. Most people just ignored it, just like tearing. The only time you really cared was if the video card caused your sound to stutter.

If you read Black Hat World, you find that CAPTCHAs are a solved problem for spammers and fake account creators. The better systems run them through several OCR programs in parallel. That knocks off about 67% of them. There's a lot of special casing involved, but from the spammer's viewpoint, this is a solved problem. Getting from 67% to 90% would be convenient, but humans aren't at 90%. If all the OCR programs give up, the problem is sent to an outsourced service where low-wage people solve CAPTCHAs all day.

The Black Hat forum system itself makes users play and win a short video game to lock out 'bots.

Yes, the micromanagement of manned flight is impressive. But, funny that, it works. When having the wrong ink marker can abort a mission, you think of these sorts of details.

The Shuttle died precisely because of Government interference. Specifically the booster tech (from some idiot Congressman in Utah that I can't recall) and the Air Force which, as is typically, wanted the NCC-1701 with Captain Kirk, phasers and photon torpedoes (and probably Lt. Uhura). If engineers had actually been able to build the shuttle they designed in the first place (booster below, cabin above), it would likely have worked reasonably well (for a technology pushing prototype space vehicle, remember what they're trying to do...).

Our government doesn't have the capability of putting a human in space (we let the Ruskies do it) because we've defunded manned programs in favor of unmanned programs. That is a smart move on NASA's part because you can get a bigger bang for the buck by tossing up robots.

If NASA was funded at any reasonable and consistent level, they would restart the manned program. But the NASA administration is masters of winding through the travails and insults of government funding and they're rather pragmatic to boot.

No money, no mission.

When the facts are with you, bang on the facts
When the law is with you, bang on the law.

When neither the facts or the law are on your side, bang on the table.

No, you can't. The paperwork makes it well nigh impossible. You drop dead of old age before you get approval.

There was quite a bit of soul searching after Apollo 1 and then the shocking realization that nobody was in charge of the lunatic asylum (literally, get it?). NASA spent several years sitting back and reorganizing the entire enterprise (the TIE - Technical Integration and Evaluation program). One of the little known facts about Apollo is that it made multiple breakthroughs in organizing large, complex technical projects. This furthered development of other, complicated technology based products like the 747 and related aircraft. Things like the LHC could not have been built without the insights that the TIE program developed (pretty much with paper, slide rules and punch cards...).

And, if you want an example of how politics and NASA did not work well together, I remind one and all about the Shuttle.....