Oh, and after 30 years by themselves in a spaceship, once the "astronaut" gets there, they're probably INSANE.

From re-watching Friends and Seinfeld 2400 times.

Crashing is the easy part. Really, everything we put on Mars is just a controlled crash, and that's when everything goes right.

Cranks *ARE* their base.

"The wealthy don't pay taxes" isn't a winning campaign message.

Where would you get the meteor? How would you direct it?

If you were an alien, and you managed to make it across interstellar space to another solar system, maybe you are at the very limit of your civilization's technological advancement, and you have spent 30 years on a one-man one-way mission and after all that just landing "successfully" (not dead) was the best you could manage.

*IF* there are aliens, and *IF* interstellar travel is possible, the first beings to do it are going to be coming in on the space equivalent of a Viking longship, not an aircraft carrier or 787.

First contact isn't going to be with a ship capable of doing anything other than just barely getting there.

I have a theory about why rms is so insistent that Linux be called "GNU/Linux" and it has nothing to do with the explanation he gives, which I find completely nonpersuasive. Please, don't assume that I disagree with their reasoning because I don't understand it and, therefore, explain it to me in an attempt to convince me. I understand the logic, I merely disagree with it.

Anyway, in the mid-1990's there was a joke going around. I first heard it from my friend the FreeBSD fan. The joke?

Q: What's the difference between GNU and Linux?
A: Linux has a kernel that boots.

At about the time that joke came out, the FSF engaged in a major effort to get the GNU/HURD to boot. After many months of work, you could kind of get it to run, but it was in no way useful. Shortly after, rms started insisting that people call Linux GNU/Linux.

It sure looks like the major effort was a response to that joke and, when that effort failed, they decided to respond to the punchline "Linux has a kernel that boots" with "no, Linux IS a kernel that boots." I presume they thought that devastating. To me, it seemed pathetic. I mean, with all of their resources and more than a decade of work, they weren't able to do what Linus Torvalds did all by himself in a few weeks. I think that it's an excellent example of how hard "big bang" development is when compared to a more incremental style.

Once again Apple has changed the field with another innovation. They have now redefined the meaning of "courage".

Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS. It did not copy the text of some file that defined the API. I don't think that the INT operations even had fixed names - they had numbers. So a BIOS call would be documented as http://stanislavs.org/helppc/i...
INT 16,0 Wait for keystroke and read
This exact operation can be described using different words e.g.
On Int 16,0 the system will pause until a keystroke is pressed and the value will be placed in AH.
I understand the issue in Oracle v. Google to be exact copying of some number of interfere files. Such files did not exist for BIOS as far as I recall.

Visualizing a 2x size rudder on a B-52 made me lol. Just got back from a trip to the Pima Air Museum and saw some great aircraft, but that would be great.

hope he get a Nobel.

Many a Super Cub. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

No kidding - especially the socket libraries that let me write network code in the later 90s that would work on Sun, Mac, Windows, and Linux. Getting cross platform network code to work in C at that time was quite painful. And I don't recall any C++ libraries that I found pleasant to use before boost, and now Qt. And even now, while I consider boost essential, it's really only pleasant in the same way as no longer having to get your braces tightened qualifies as pleasant.

You might have missed high temp super conductivity entirely then. The phenomenon was measured and replicated in many labs - but it was at least a few years before any plausible theory came out - and 20 years on we do not have firm agreement on the cause.

It is a little more extensive in Texas - you can use deadly force against a fleeing robber to recover property that could not be replaced.

I wonder if the accretion disk could get to the point of pair instability thereby reducing the photon pressure and increasing the rate of flow across the event horizon. I did a little Googling, but any knowledgeable pointer would be appreciated - as I'm sure the idea is not novel.

Thanks /. for removing the - from my comment!