It seems right that since I announced the BBS Documentary production on Slashdot, I should also take the time to give testimony to one of its primary interviewees that took it from side fun project to meaningful historical work.

My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.

They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.

There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.

Another common low-tech scam in tipped restaurants involves the 'extra' copy of the receipt. The merchant copy is what you typically fill out with the tip, total, and signature. But if you leave the customer copy, an unscrupulous server can take that, fill it out with a larger tip, and file that one instead of the original.

So make sure to always take the extra receipts with you!

Changing DST would have a much smaller financial impact on businesses and the government than changing open-close hours. Think of all of the menus, window signs, painted signs, business cards, letterhead, and all sorts of other branded merchandise that have to be updated for each business that changes their hours, not to mention the time it would take to update the websites, social media sites, email signatures, etc for online presences. And add to that the huge price hikes for all the companies that do that sort of work as a response to the huge increase in demand for their services. And this doesn't even touch on the second-order financial impacts (like costs of updating existing/potential customers of the changes, updating any time-dependent internal processes, etc)

By comparison, the financial impact of making DST permanent would be far smaller as the mechanism for moving time forward/back is already there.

The paper does not take libration into account, but the good news is that the math here also doesn't require a huge anchor point on the moon like the earth-based space elevator as all of the tension is accounted for by gravitation. But you're right, roughly seven degrees of bend due to libration (both latitude and longitude) would present a big "last mile" problem. Do I hear another paper getting written?

I do something similar to what your looking for with a combination of Synergy (http://synergy-project.org/), which uses your network to send the keyboard/mouse inputs to the correct computer based on your mouse position), and multiple inputs on my monitors. In other words: PC1 would be your base computer, and would have the keyboard/mouse you want to use with everything attached. PC1 would be attached to the primary port of both monitors (HDMI, for instance) PC2 would also have a keyboard/mouse, but they wouldn't be used. It would be hooked up to the secondary port of both monitors (maybe displayport) DOCK1 will obviously have the laptops built-in keyboard/mouse, but that wouldn't be used. It would be hooked up to the third port of both monitors (maybe DVI or RGB) In this setup, you'll need to manually change the monitor inputs, and synergy will direct the keyboard/mouse to the correct places. As far as I know, your only other option would be the matrix KVM (as mentioned above a few times)

Just wanted to mention how Slashdot never fails to disappoint.

For the record, textfiles.com has no ads. None. Going to it or not going to it doesn't affect my revenue/income particularly. I don't run that site for money.

But if you'd rather hear a much funnier story about the legal threats I get, please watch my video That Awesome Time I Was Sued for Two Billion Dollars.

That was old school hacking, before "War Games" and people trying to crack computers and security and writing viruses.

You were using your Amiga 1000 before "War Games" came out? That's pretty hardcore, man.

NASA didn't design the LEM, Northrop Grumman did. Spacecraft are designed by aerospace companies (like Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Rockwell, and now SpaceX), and then NASA picks the design they like best. The best engineers are typically at the private companies because the pay is better than at government run NASA.

Well, the first space shuttle, the Enterprise, never went to space. It's easy to have a successful first flight when you have the resources to build a full size scale model to 'test' with. And they weren't coming hot off Apollo; the space shuttle was about a decade later.

They made it needlessly complex. This is why they have had, and continue to have, so many problems. The designers promised several launches each month and a payload cost in $50-$100 per pound range.

The scientific community at the time said much the same things about the shuttle design that they currently say about the ISS; that it's too much money for too little return. Some even go so far as to suggest these overly-complex plans, pushed on the unsupportive science community are essentially aerospace company welfare.

Hydrogen peroxide powered rocket packs fly for around 30 seconds, because they have a specific impulse of around 125, meaning that one pound of propellant can make 125 pound-seconds of thrust, meaning that it takes about two pounds of propellant for every second you are in the air. Mass ratios are low for anything strapped to a human, so the exponential nature of the rocket equation can be safely ignored.

A pretty hot (both literally and figuratively) bipropellant rocket could manage about twice the specific impulse, and you could carry somewhat heavier tanks, but two minutes of flight on a rocket pack is probably about the upper limit with conventional propellants.

However, an actual jet pack that used atmospheric oxygen could have an Isp ten times higher, allowing theoretical flights of fifteen minutes or so. Here, it really is a matter of technical development, since jet engines have thrust to weight ratios too low to make it practical. There is movement on this technical front, but it will still take a while.

John Carmack

I often have over 100 tabs open in Opera at any given time. Mostly due to laziness but that's neither here nor there.