Russia Cancels All Moon Missions Till 2025 (sputniknews.com) 135

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday December 29, 2015 @05:23PM from the do-it-later dept.

schwit1 writes: Faced with a shrinking budget and poor economic conditions, Russia has once again trimmed back its proposed ten-year space plan for the next decade in space, canceling all Moon missions until after 2025. Russian might now have a giant government-run aerospace corporation, but flying space missions is not really its primary task. Like all government agencies divorced from profit and loss, its primary task is really to provide pork barrel jobs, regardless of whether those jobs do anything useful or not. Thus, Russia will have a very expensive space program for the next decade, but the money spent will not accomplish much of anything new.

Comment A reason to really like Google Voice (Score 1) 166

by virago81 on Saturday March 15, 2014 @07:30AM (#46491007) Attached to: Goodbye, Google Voice

Look up: Obi202. It's a small box that allows you to use Google Voice not just as "call forwarder" but as your primary phone number via VOIP.

Comment Re:Where Internet Libertarians come from (Score 1) 691

by virago81 on Thursday December 19, 2013 @10:45AM (#45735823) Attached to: Why Charles Stross Wants Bitcoin To Die In a Fire

Has it occurred to the author that people don't want a central government to take the place of their parents? Parents are parents and government is government. Does government get its authority from the consent of the governed or not?

Comment Too late... (Score 2) 691

by virago81 on Thursday December 19, 2013 @10:41AM (#45735761) Attached to: Why Charles Stross Wants Bitcoin To Die In a Fire

..to put the genie back in the bottle. Stross is complaining about the Titanic's navigation system after it hit the iceberg. If the politurds from around the world had not trashed their own currency systems, bitcoin would have never taken root. If the fiat currency systems were sound and could garner the confidence of citizens, the value of BTC against them would not be rising. In a sense, Volker, Greenspan, Bernanke and their ilk are the force behind the creation of bitcoin. If BTC is taking us to hell on a rail, they are the ones who laid the track.

Comment And for the low, low price of $60,000... (Score 1) 446

by virago81 on Thursday May 23, 2013 @08:14AM (#43801679) Attached to: Tesla Motors Repays $465M Government Loan 9 Years Early

..you too can own a Tesla. The reality is that most taxpayers who subsidized Tesla will never be able to afford one (without a second mortgage). This is just a company who succeeded in getting crony capital so that, if it failed, it could socialize its losses on to the taxpayer.

Government putting up money for basic research is one thing. Government 'investing' in business is just capitalism, something we need to eradicate...badly.

Comment Siebel Patch has been available for years (Score 1) 230

by CowboyNick on Thursday May 09, 2013 @12:06AM (#43671947) Attached to: UK Benefits Claimants Must Use Windows XP, IE6

This is because they are on Siebel 7.8.2.3. If they just installed the patch for 7.8.2.16, which includes support for all of this, then there would be no issue. The patch would only take a few hours of downtime so there's no excuse for this. These patches have been available for many years.

DIY 1980s "Non-Von" Supercomputer 135

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 20, 2009 @11:15AM from the try-this-at-home dept.

Brietech writes "Ever wanted to own your own supercomputer? This guy recreated a 31-processor SIMD supercomputer from the early 1980s called the 'Non-Von 1' in an FPGA. It uses a 'Non-Von Neumann' architecture, and was intended for extremely fast database searches and artificial intelligence applications. Full-scale models were intended to have more than a million processors. It's a cool project for those interested in 'alternative' computer architectures, and yes, full source code (Verilog) is available, along with a python library to program it with." Hope the WIPO patent has expired.

Spaceplane Concept Receives Euro Funding 193

Posted by samzenpus on Friday February 20, 2009 @05:15AM from the space-plane-race dept.

draevil writes "BBC News reports that the novel "Skylon" spaceplane design of British firm Reaction Engines has received funding to proceed with its proof-of-concept design for an air-breathing rocket engine. If successful, the Sabre rocket engine will be able to take the Skylon with 12 tonnes of cargo from a runway, to orbit and then back to that runway without the need for disposable components or a piggy-back ride on a larger aircraft. Should the design prove viable, it could see first use within ten years."

Comment Re:Email to Text? (Score 1) 260

by CowboyNick on Friday October 10, 2008 @10:57PM (#25335901) Attached to: Verizon To Charge Content Providers $.03 Per SMS

That's not true. You can try sending messages to yourself and checking your message count online, even if you don't read them. Besides, I can see most of a txt message in the preview popup on my Treo before I even open it. I can also mark them as read/unread, just like email messages.

Comment Re:One wonders (Score 1) 311

by virago81 on Thursday April 19, 2007 @09:06AM (#18796513) Attached to: Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 2.0.0

Oracle Corp gives the users a choice. I think most people in the org use Thunderbird basically because it's the best client available to them.

I'm not sure why, but Oracle actually hacked up an Outlook plugin to their non-Exchange servers, but it's so buggy that people hate it (I know I did). The Oracle internal web-mail looks like a summer intern project gone bad. Thunderbird wins by default.