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It depends on the subculture. In scientific computing and high-performance computing, it is common to refer to programs as 'codes'. This language originates from one of the original supercomputer applications, hydrocodes.

If you went to the system administrator of a large computing cluster and asked "what codes are you running now?", he would immediately grok that you know what you're talking about. I wouldn't be at all surprised if big iron Oracle people used the same terminology.

Once we understand the fundamentals of photosynthesis we could learn to engineer near 100% efficient organic solar cells, current silicon solar cells are expensive and are c. 16% efficient at best. For example, primitive photosynthetic pathways found in bacterial could be copied the man made organic solar cells that could be used to generate hydrogen as a by-product of photosynthesis. I suspect this is the aim of the researchers, they may have an eye on patents and are keeping quite. http://www.afrlhorizons.com/Briefs/Jun03/ML0227.ht ml

"Saved" is a bit strong, but there was a DHL A300 hit by an SA-7 over Baghdad that made an emergency landing: http://www.defense-aerospace.com/produit/29222_us. html Most man-portable SAMs would require a very fortunate shot to bring down something the size of an airliner. The traditional method used by aircraft flying in to high threat environments is a special approach, possibly combined with an automated flare ejection system releasing decoys on final approach. Naturally, this system would cause chaos on approach to most civilian airports. The system deployed on the FedEx DC-10 looks like the best solution if one believes that this is the way to go. The US military is placing its hope for protection from the full range of IR missiles in the Suite of Infrared Countermeasures http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/air craft/systems/siircm.htm but this package is far more than airliners need. The danger to airliners is from missiles with a relatively low effective altitude: an airliner at cruising altitude is not threatened by a guy with a missile on his shoulder. More info in some research here http://www.afrlhorizons.com/Briefs/Dec03/SN0303.ht ml

Blah blah blah, atmosphere this and that. Lets get off of our one track minds and develope other means of solving problems. So, the atmosphere is in your way. Do it the American way and blast the atmosphere out of the picture. We already have blur correction to deal with turbulance. I know I've seen Lasers used to litteraly create a hole in the atmosphere. I must admit I wasn't able to quickly find any articles on lasers used this way, however it may not be some magical Harry Potter crap as much as a more simple approach of simply blasting it out of the way. Blur correction http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050207.html http://www.afrlhorizons.com/Briefs/Sept01/DE0108.h tml

And yes, solar electrolysis of hydrogen is incredibly inefficient, but you can probably help it become cost effective with tax breaks due to the fact that it's an entirely local production.
Actually, an interesting solution for hydrogen generation is being experimented with by a number of different groups.
AFRL is one of many attempting to use bacteria to breakdown liquid/semi-solid waste into hydrogen.
Berkeley amongst others are working on ways to generate hydrogen via algae.
I think these experiments have the potential to do some serious damage to our energy needs.

ALON

Available: here and here

After writing my above comment I decided to do a quick search on super atoms to see what I could find. Here's a short list for those interested:

• Super Atoms
• Super Atoms from Bose-Einstein Condensation

Also, assuming that you are out travelling the great countryside, the portable satellite dishes that are available to access the internet from literally anywhere on a laptop, some don't take up much more of a footprint than the laptop itself. Perhaps you won't get the same blazing speed or latency as a landline, but it could truly have it's benefits.

Kill the mars program and fix the Hubble. We will go more places this way.

Are you kidding? First of all, science is about a diversity of observations. Space based optical wavelength, small telescope astronomy is nice, however it provides only a tiny portion of the measurements needed to understand the universe. The observations that we are making on Mars could seal the case that life is probable to exist elsewhere in the universe, perhaps even nearby! The Hubble, currently, can do little in the way of the search for life or habitable planets. Secondly, the hubble is an ancient piece of technology. The money used to run the program is better spent on new, much more powerful types of observatories, for instance Gossamer Telescopes, next generation x-ray observatories, or the Terrestrial Planet Finder. For exploring the furthest reaches of the universe, you must use infrared telescopes like the James Webb Telescope due to the massive redshift. Also it is important to set up a method of making groundbreaking observations of gravitional waves using something like LISA is essential to furthering our understanding of general relativity and cosmology. Also planetary exploration helps us develop propulsion systems that will eventually be used to launch interstellar probes.

There's so much to explore, and we're never going to make progress by continuously dumping money into a dying technology... Hubble's service record has been amazing, especially considering its flaws, however it is time to move on, to discover new and different things that Hubble cannot see.

Eliminating planetary science in order to take more pretty pictures, IMHO, is unacceptable. I'm glad to see that NASA agrees with this.

Disclaimer: I work on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, so I'm a little biased :)

Cheers,
Justin Wick

better pic of the first wooden mouse he made

I'm a USAF member, and at the office lately we've been tossing around this interesting subject. Honestly, the article presented in the story was pretty lame; here's a few good links we've come up with, if you want to know a bit more about the technology:

NASA Press Release
Air Force Research Laboratory brief
AAW photo collection (NASA)

The article mentioned above can be found here.

C-RAM is more likely to be the next big memory tech, as it is impervious to magnetism, radiation, and tempest-style hostile scanning. Chalcogenide memory can be programmed either electonically or optically. "Unlike FLASH and DRAM technologies, which work better when they are bigger, simulations indicate chalcogeniderequires less energy and changes phase faster as the size decreases. In addition, early attempts at fabricating simple C-RAM cells produced cycling endurance limits exceeding 10^12, or one trillion, write/erase cycles and data retention times exceeding ten years at 130C. " See This Air Force Space Vehicles Directorate Report by Mr. Ken Hunt for details. CRAM also makes a tasty treat for hobbits on the run.