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I would agree that Firefly/Serenity ended up with some darned loyal fans. I'm sure Star Wars has *more total* loyal fans, but Firefly/Serenity probably has a higher percent. Heck, I got sucked into being a browncoat myself, to the point that I carved Firefly Jack-O-Lanterns and made the fortune-firefly package (official fedora packages here). The Jack-O-Lanters fared much better than last year's Donnie Darko one which, while it looked great, tried to burn my house to the ground.

Five hours from the end? So, you probably got far enough to get to this little political jab:

Mindflayer Hunt.

I'm guessing by your preferred gameplay style that you'd hate most MMORPGs -- running around and killing stuff for hours on end amidst pretty scenery. ;) Different type of gamer, different type of game.

Agree -- XII could certainly have done with more story. Still, what they had was pretty good. I wouldn't rate it as highly as Tactics (which was notably longer to boot), but certainly a lot better than IX. God, that story grated on me. And the horrible writing that went along with it. We get it, Square: Good guys are "witty". Bad guys enjoy being spiteful and are easily enraged. No need to keep pressing that home.

Also, I'll second what the poster below said about the indoor scenes.

Me, to my partner while she was playing: "You know what's missing here?"
Partner: *shakes head*
Me: "Everything but walls, ceilings, and floors."

I mean, for God's sake, the least they could have done was to make the rooms and hallways cramped. That way it at least wouldn't be emphasizing how bare you've made them. Gigantic buildings with nothing inside them became cliche long, long ago, and they don't have the excuse of "we don't have enough system resources for decoration" any more. Even if they tried that excuse, beautiful places like the Salikawood and the Paramina Rift would show it false.

I would, however, disagree with the poster that monsters always seem to be standing around waiting for a hero. I cheered the first time I saw a Saurian hunt down and eat a wolf, saw neutral foes walking around, saw hunters hunting them, etc. Yes, ID did this sort of thing as far back as Doom, but it's always a nice feature.

Heh, I made a Frank the Bunny pumpkin this year, based on this design that I made, carved in one of those fake, carvable pumpkins that lasts from year to year. I put it out front, put a candle in it, and got some great pictures. Unfortunately, Frank had other ideas -- he apparently looked at my house and said, Burn It To The Ground.

An hour later, I just happened to pass by the front door when it burst into flames, scorching the front of my house with a 2-3 foot high fireball. Apparently those things are highly flammable, and you're only supposed to use light bulbs no more than 5 watts in them. That's what I get for not reading the directions. At least I was able to get the fire put out, and thus it didn't expose my kiddie-pr0n dungeon.

As far as eye candy goes, OpenGL point sprites combined with a particle system can be pretty.

This whole article isn't "news" to the Japanese. Here's a picture of a toilet that I took inside the cheapest youth hostel in Tokyo that had rooms available when I was there:

http://www.daughtersoftiresias.org/Japan%20Trip/.. . hmm, looks like the URL is down. Well, lets grab one that looks the same from images.google.com.
http://www.crappersquarterly.com/images/japan/Japa neseToilet.jpg

You see "warmlets" even in the most middle-of-nowhere places. Part of the reason why toilet tech is so advanced over there is that western-style toilets are competing against tradition -- the ever-annoying squat toilet -- and so need all the bells and whistles they can get.

If only pigs had wings

Come on, what kind of browncoat are you? The appropriate responses would be:

"If wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak right now."

or:

"If only I had a magical wish-granting plank."

fortune-firefly is your friend. :)

if you studied much history, you would find it highly unusual for democracies to go to war with one another...

That's not such a simple issue. There's correlation, but there's also correlation between peace and wealth of nations, their historic geographic isolation from one another, the rise of the cold war's stabilizing influence during the peak period of democritization, and a number of factors, suggesting that the correlation is not the causation.

track record of the USA is astrounding

On what count?

You don't have to imagine Mashups - they already exist :) Try some of the hits that come up on this search. Sometimes you'll even get video mashups ;)

By the way, Eminem actually changes to other styles pretty well. My favorite is probably "Loser Yourself" (Eminem vs. Beck), although a lot of them work really well (Eminem vs. Prodigy, Eminem vs. the Knightrider theme, etc).

I wonder if the richness of songs makes them harder or easier to blend together. Rap or rap-like groups seems to blend the best (Ice T, Beck, Eminem, Missy Elliot, etc) , but oldies tend to also (for a masterful mashup, check out "The Beatles vs. The Monkeys: Paperback Believer"). The Gray Album ("The White Album" mixed with "The Black Album") is another good example. Destiny's Child also works very well in a lot of cases ("Survivor Number Five", "Smells Like Teen Booty", "Destiny's Problem Child", "My Favorite Name"), as does Pink ("Just Mix F***in Anything", "Free Party", etc), Madonna ("Computer Music", "Wild Rock Music", ""), and Kylie Minogue ("I Feel Kylie", "Accidents Happen"), and a number of other pop groups. Semi-ambient groups like Ms Dynamite make some nice mixes as well, like "Egyptian Dynamite" (mixed with "Walk Like an Egyptian")

You'll find that when you mix components of music around and change their styles, you can often get something better than the original (the classic case is "The Genie Dance", but there's a lot of great stuff)

RUNtse de FWOtzoo, ching baoYO wuomun...

One of my favorite quotes from the movie: "Target the reavers. Target the reavers! Target everything! Somebody fire!!!" Great scene... Of course, I have about a dozen favorites from that movie. Does that seem right to you?

Cthulhu has such a nice kitch factor, it's no surprise that there are several movies being made. As for myself, I'm happy enough with Who Will Be Eaten First? (Cthulhu parody of Jack Chick).

The article you refer to was written by a /.er with the handle of Rei who is the most mindless pro-NASA whore I have ever seen. At one point she claimed that crystals grown on shuttle missions had been used to invent certain forms of insulin. Of course the fact that these forms of insulin (Lente and NPH) which had actually been on the market for decades before the first Shuttle launch.

The big advantage of Scaled Composites and the other rocket shops is that they aren't big, stupid, brutally inefficient, Soviet style bureaucracies like the NASA manned space flight program is. Jerry Pournelle has some good ideas on how to fix NASA and get us back into space without spending much more money than we do now. Unfortunately implementing his ideas would cost lots of NASA employees their cushy jobs and would break up the monopoly cartel that Boeing and LockMart have on launch vehicles, which is something that Congress, which gets lots of money from Boeing LockMart, isn't going to allow.

There's a very interesting writeup about the potential problems related to trying to reach orbit in these "scaled composites" "spaceships" at http://www.daughtersoftiresias.org/misc/ss1.html.

Basically, the biggest problem is that due to the simplicity of the engine design (the are examples of space shuttle engine and the SS1 engine on the page above), the design would never scale enough to reach velocities needed to get into orbit.

"Real space"? If you count suborbital as real space simply because it's a near vaccuum, then yes. Otherwise, no, not even close. :)

To all of the people who want to cheer on private enterprise as far as space goes, you're barking up the wrong tree. Boeing and Lockheed, for example, have been producing real, orbital rockets for ages. For smaller companies, there's Orbital's Pegasus and SeaLaunch's Zenit, both built on existing tech but custom developed. For upcoming, look to the mostly-from-scratch Falcon by SpaceX - if they can make their target launch prices all the way to Falcon IV (a big IF, mind you, given startup rocket company histories), it'll throw current launch prices for a loop.

All other projects that was totally fouled up by NASA like NASP (and even insisting on taking over DC-X and fucking that up, too) was pure incompetence?

While the DC-X may very well have been intentional incompetence (since they really wanted the X-33 to fly), it was still incompetence. Or more precisely, no one was allowed to do their jobs, so nothing got done in a useful way. After all, why was the President dictating how the next craft should be designed? Was he an engineer? A scientist? Someone who would have any *clue* about what such a design as the shuttle would mean?

If President Nixon had listened to his people about what the actual options were for space craft (as opposed to what he wanted them to be), we wouldn't be in this pickle.

(If you didn't give the job to Burt Rutan; then you'd probably also get a moon base for that kind of money.)

Rutan's a pretty smart guy, but please keep the fanboy stuff to a minimum. Things are more complicated than they may seem.

I just wonder what we could have had.

I can tell you exactly what would have happened.

1) Von Braun would have continued the Saturn V program.

2) He would have launched an Orion on the back of a Saturn.

3) We'd have been to Mars by the 1980's.

Does that answer your question?

...(because I'm convinced that Virigin Galactic will get there before NASA does again)

Um, no. For why, please read.

Huh, I would have thought that the Serenity Poem would have started out with something like "Take my love, take my land, take me where I cannot stand..." or "He robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, stood up to the man and gave him what for..." or something along those lines. :)

Obligatory fortune-mod firefly link.

What you think is wrong, unfortunately. It is spectacularly difficult to get into orbit or to the moon.

Please read http://www.daughtersoftiresias.org/misc/ss1.html for a reasonable run-down of the basic issues. The schematics of the SSME (which does nothing other than propulsion) will give you some idea of the costs and complexity involved.

Yeah - there are some great quotes from that ep. My favorite:

(River/Serenity laughs)

Early: "You folks are all insane."

Simon: "Well, my sister's a ship. We had a complicated childhood."

Early: "Doesn't anybody care that I have a finely crafted gun pointed at this
boy's head?"

I think, to sum up the series, though, one quote really does a good job:

Kaylee: "Well, we're headed for help... right?"

Zoe: "Captain will come up with a plan."

Kaylee: "That's good. Right?"

Zoe: "Possibly you're not recalling some of his previous plans."

For more firefly quotes, check out fortune-mod firefly.

Are you kidding or serious? I'll pretend serious.

The shuttle has several options in the event of damage. First off, they've spent the past several years, in addition to many, many other things, developing RCC and tile repair methods. While limited, they have the ability to fix small holes. Secondly, most debris falloff (which, by the way, was not a "shuttle" problem, but a problem with almost every rocket in the world, especially LOX/LH ones, but also for LOX/Kerosene ones) has been largely reduced (near eliminated) due to using heaters instead of insulation on the bipod and developing better foam application techniques (with other large rockets are likely to copy). If there is damage, and they don't feel safe reentering, the crew is to stay housed on ISS until a rescue mission can be launched. Even still, with a Why can the X-prize competitors do what they do

I tired of having to explain this every time, so I wrote Why SpaceShipOne Never Did, Never Will, And None Of Its Direct Descendants Ever Will, Orbit The Earth.. Read it first, and *then* we can discuss orbital spaceflight. If your hope is "private spaceflight", you're looking at the wrong spot. You need to look at companies actually going to orbit, like SpaceX.

But I've heard either Mal or Wash die

I heard that River is made of chocolate.

(by the way, shameless plug: Firefly fortune-mod available here. I can't wait to add new quotes from the movie into it ;) )

Firefly has a huge fan base. Myself included; that's why I took the time to make fortune-mod-firefly :)

Once we have commercial semi-orbital flight, it won't be much of a leap to orbital commerce.

*sigh* There's a HUGE difference between sub-orbital and orbital. Orbital flight has a Delta-V that is extremely difficult for all but the most powerful rockets to achieve. Sub-orbital has a Delta-V that is insignificant in comparison.

Go read Rei's writeup on this, and I think you'll understand the issue.

This isn't really a variant on Conway's Game of Life - it's closer to a variant on Polyworld. Of course, if you want a grown up Conway's Game of Life, I wrote one called Megaconway a while back - massive worlds made possible by using each byte to store 8 squares and doing operations in bulk wherever possible. It also keeps entropy in the world with occasional random inputs of randomness of varying sizes. My big hope, although I doubt it will occur, is that eventually it will come up with a system that is stable, self-perpetuating, and can "heal" from random damage. Who knows... I leave it running niced to 19 at all times.

That was my take as well. Reading over the description, I had questions, and posted this on their forum; hopefully I'll get my questions answered.

------------

I've been working on a project called Uso (http://www.daughtersoftiresias.org/uso/) designed to create an anonymous network layer, and am wondering if I've been beaten to the punch by Rodi. A couple quick questions about it's capabilities:

1) How much of the described anonymization (such as spoofed IPs) does Rodi currently allow? In my experience with Uso, packet spoofing while ensuring receipt is easier said than done, and your ability to do so varies from network to network. Also, if you're spoofing packets, would not Rodi have to run as root to get access to raw sockets?

2) As actual transfers between two nodes are done in direct P2P fashion (not proxying), what is to prevent an adversary from attempting to download from a publisher and having the publisher's IP exposed? Even if the publisher is spoofing its IP in packets sent out, it needs to get acks back to ensure delivery. Are acks routed through a "bouncer" (i.e., a proxy - I'm not sure why you chose that terminology), as is part of the Uso protocol?

3) Is not a client's IP inherently exposed when it tries to download from an aversary posing as a publisher? Uso has the ability, in some situations, to simply have packets returned to its local subnet instead of the specific machine doing the request, which it then sniffs with pcap. It's not easy, and is still being worked on (we're going to need to do some arp flooding and poisoning for switched networks).

4) How are you doing NAT tunnelling? The mentions of the use of TCP to get past NAT, for a UDP protocol, were just confusing. In Uso, when we talk with a client for the first time (postconfiguration), we try and detect how bogus of packets we can send and still be heard. If it can't respond to us with what we perceive as our IP address, it talks back to the IP/port that it received and lets us know what that IP/port is, and that we must be behind NAT; the behind-NAT node then sends regular keepalive packets on the same port so that incoming traffic will be able to go through it (a technique known to work on most, but not all, routers; a few only allow return traffic from the IP that you initially tried to talk to)

5) How are you determining what spoofing is possible behind your network? See above for how we deal with this in Uso in postconfiguration; in autoconfiguration (i.e., before you send any traffic), we use packets with timeouts and see if they get returned to us.

In short, I'm curious as to how you're dealing with many of the issues I've had to deal with.

Microsoft's public failures are always amusing.

"Again"? You mean there was a first time?

And if you want a glimpse of what the dialog is like, check out the Firefly fortune mod.

Airplanes were not "just for joyrides" - the military began looking into them almost immediately, as just a single example. Phones were not curiousities - they quickly became essential tools for relaying information, being much more efficient than telegraph for relaying information.

SS1 has no applications, except possibly an incredibly limited role for carrying sounding rocket equipment inefficiently, beyond joyrides.

Carmack, as much as I really like the guy, is futzing around in a garage and has no hope of achieving anything even Rutan-level significant. He can't even settle on his propellant combination to use, for YHVH's sake, after years of working on it. It's almost a completely different rocket every six months, and he's using fuels and technologies (like vanes instead of gimballing) that were long rejected for use in large-scale rocketry (and he's been learning why the hard way). Rutan is making joyrides. SpaceShipOne's ilk can never make it to orbit - it's what happens when you make your design around a heavy tank and a low ISP engine in order to save money.

The funny thing is, when people advocate "private" rocketry, they always point to those who have done rather meager accomplishments, and ignore the private companies that have done great, *real* accomplishments. Why is it, for example, that Boeing and Lockheed are ignored? Even though they used government funding, they built a good number of our nation's major rockets. The Pegasus rocket, built by Orbital Sciences, was built entirely with private funding; it is a rocket that actually *does something useful*, and should be heralded by those who seek private rocketry to bring down costs. But they instead ignore it, and instead cheer for those who accomplish almost nothing in terms of technological issues involved in getting to orbit or reducing costs, like Rutan.

My initial point, however, was that Star Wars has nothing to do with real-world access to space, and it was stupid to bring it up in the first place.

Amen. The last episode of Galactica that I saw, they were on a desparate search for water, and were scouring system after system for it in vain. You know, the compound of the element that makes up 90% of the universe (hydrogen) and the most common element in rocky bodies (oxygen)? Which, in the form of water ice alone makes up most of the solid material in the colder extents of planetary systems?

Firefly, on the other hand, was pure genius. I loved it so much that I made a forfune mod for it. ;)

What sort of slashdot geek would be obsessed with Firefly? :)

What sort of slashdot geek would be obsessed with Firefly? :)

Wake me up when they produce anything that addresses the real technical challenges of real spaceflight, instead of building unscalable joyrides.

1. Nasa's rates are too high? The Delta-IV Heavy is one of the cheapest launch systems in the world per kilogram, *despite* the fact that US labor costs are so much higher than Russia's and China's. The shuttle is expensive (although not as expensive as is often portrayed here, and has many capabilities that are widely used - for example, bulk cargo return, which has ferried back spacecraft on about 1 in 3 missions, and was what was keeping the ISS from being loaded up with trash), but the shuttle is hardly the only NASA spacecraft out there.

2. NASA didn't build the spacecraft. *Private* companies like Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital, etc did. In general, they did both the design and construction. Now, if cheaper spacecraft were possible without unreasonable risk, don't you think that these companies, with all of their experience, would just build their own? They've got the budget for it, after all. Some private space launch companies exist, but they mostly use modded versions of Soviet-era rockets, and charge about what the Russians and Chinese charge for space launch; they're not hugely profitable companies.

The only way to seriously get space launch costs down are the "high risk" designs and extensive basic research. Guess who's doing those? That's right: NASA.

By the way, lets just head off an obviously impending argument.

3. The shuttle *HAS* changed since its inception. For example, the bulk alloy of its tanks is now lithium-aluminum; its insulation type has changed; its thermal blankets have changed; its tiles have improved; the SSMEs have gone through a number of refinements; the seals on the O-rings have completely changed (and probably would have changed even without the challenger disaster, as the research was ongoing at the time into the separation problem, which was a well known problem, and not just in shuttle SRBs); etc. But yes, the basic design is old; only the details have changed. There are a number of basic design issues that should be dealt with that we didn't know at the time, and a number of issues that were forced on them due to budget constraints.

You too, eh? So many ways...

You too, eh? So many ways...

You don't need a big budget for a good story line. My favorite game in the old dos days was Star Control II. At the time, there was no voice, simple tracked-music, and graphics that were nothing special. But the game was *fun*, and had a great plot.

One person in the article mentioned that you shouldn't stereotype characters. Perhaps, but then again, if you start with a general stereotype and then run in wild tangents from there, you can end up with great results. Case and point: the spathi. My favorite alien race from any game I've ever played.

Small groups can make great games. The key is utilizing tools made by others. For example, check out UFO: Alien Invasion. A couple of quake-modders who liked X-com is making a stunningly beautiful freeware version of the old X-com games. Great music, eye candy, and fun gameplay.

Hmm, link is wrong. That should be here. Sorry about that.

Yeah... most net protocols don't do much of anything to grant you anonymity. That's why I've been working on Uso (site still under development, just like the project). While I hate to put a date on when the first version will be out to the public (because I was so wrong the last time I estimated), I'm especting to start debugging my last mess of changes later this week, leading to a release around the weekend after next. Check the News/Updates section on the site for updates.

There's a moderately thorough whitepaper on one of the protocols implemented at the site. The other hasn't had its internals completely fleshed out yet, so there's no whitepaper yet.

To sum up, the first method is for bidirectional traffic; both machines send with source addresses using the maximal degree of lying about their sources that their routers will allow. For destination addresses, they have as much lying about where on the target subnet the target machine is as possible. Recipients of packets ignore the source and destination addresses, and instead use user-unique codes in the payload to look up where to send responses to. If the machine is behind a switch instead of a hub, it can attempt to use arp flooding or other techniques to get packets sent to other machines. Regardless of the configuration, the sender doesn't know how much lying the recipient is doing about where it is located.

The second protocol, which doesn't have a whitepaper yet, is unidirectional. Transfer requests and acks are proxied in bulk via an uninterested third party. The uninterested party never knows what the packets that it is sending are for, and while the transfer-requesting machine has to give out an address on its local subnet to receive what it asks for, the sender can fib about where it is to the extent that the routers that it passes through will allow. Since the proxying involved is only acks in bulk and transfer requests, proxy loads are kept to a minimum.

Both protocols use encryption, with a SSL-style three way handshake to establish a session key (public key=RSA, secret key=Blowfish). The unencrypted portions of the packets are designed to have no general distinguishing characteristics, to help prevent filtering; instead, each client scans for its unique code in the destination code field. Both protocols are designed to allow communication through NAT by determining their information through a postconfiguration stage with an outside "friend" client.

The project is in C++, uses libnet, libpcap, and openssl to do the dirty work, and is designed to be as cross-platform as possible (although I don't plan to port to Windows until I've at least got an alpha version released for Linux).

I still believe the only reason why Scaled got SS1 into suborbital flight because FAA and not NASA was/is the controlling agency.

As if. The Germans were lobbing similar payloads as SS1 to similar heights back in the 1940s. It's a (proportionally) easy task, regardless of who is running it. SS1 is no more difficult than a large sounding rocket; NASA launches about 30 sounding rockets every year at a price of 1 million dollars each (typically only 50-100 lbs payload and not man-rated, but you get the picture).

As for safety record, Scaled has a long way to go before it reachs NASA's pathetic level.

Excuse me? NASA has probably the best safety record of any space agency in the world. The shuttle's 2% failure rate is better than the NASA average, which is better than the world average. Rutan, on the other hand, nearly wrecked SS1 twice in two consecutive flights - first by launching in high wind conditions so as not to disappoint the crowd below, and next by proclaiming the problem "fixed" and relaunching to the same effect. It fits in with his general track record: innovative and boundary-pushing, but not exactly a 'safety first' guy.

Every launch of a private spacecraft means NASA is losing it's empire, one flight at a time.

NASA's empire of airborne joyrides? I mean, that's all that SS1 is and can ever be.

P.S. - Almost all of NASA spacecraft are built by private companies anyways. So, if you have a complaint, it needs to be with the bidding process, not whether private industry or the government is building the craft.

A lot of people don't seem to realize that NASA is a research organization, not a space cargo organization. Most of their budget generally goes to new research. Even a sizable chunk of the shuttle's budget (from which that 13k$-15k$ per kilogram number comes from, compared to 10k$ for Ariane-5 and 7k$ for Proton and Long March (although they get the benefit of cheap labor)) goes to research on how to lower maintenance costs and improve performance of reusable craft. The shuttle itself was really a research craft; you might have noticed that most of NASA's manned space program craft have been designed to try and push the envelope. If you want a cargo workhorse, use a Delta or Atlas, or go overseas.

As an example of how much research NASA does, just take a look at how many papers there are on NASA's site that just contain the word "novel".

Rutan doesn't do research. He doesn't have the budget for it. His budget was about right for what he did: a completely unscalable joyride craft.

Make NASA look dumb? Oh please, give me a break.

For starters, read Why SpaceShipOne Never Did, Never Will, And None Of Its Direct Descendants Ever Will, Orbit The Earth. Rutan's rocket joyride is nice, but it has nothing to do with space exploration, satellites, or anything else relevant apart from stirring public interest in space (which I do credit him for, along with making a privately funded supersonic craft).

Oh come on... I could make "that thing" far better, in minutes, in Gimp. Were you blindfolded or something?

Here's an entry that I made that got second prize in the Cassini-Huygens art contest - took an hour or two to gather source images, and then an hour or so to do the composite and all of the hand-painting, color balancing, etc.

Here's A Few More Pictures That I've Made In Similar Time Or Less

I'll challenge any Photoshop-user to a timed edit-off any day.

First off, the requisite Why SpaceShipOne Never Did, Never Will, And None Of Its Direct Descendants Ever Will, Orbit The Earth

Now, to address some specific points.

1) "For 1% of the cost of one shuttle flight": They carried 1/80th of the payload to 1/6th of the delta-V of a minimal orbit and plan to sell this for 1/500th of the cost. Lets just be nice and pretend that costs will scale up at merely an O(N^2) rate (in reality, scaling up an SS1-style design to orbit is all but impossible); that's almost 6 times worse a deal.

Don't like the assumptions about the scale-up rate? Then discuss a *Real Spacecraft*.

2) "I'd wager that for $100 million you could send three people to orbit.": The shuttle's cargo mass is about the same as 240 people plus their share of life support (assuming ~100kg). At this rate, if the shuttle were a passenger liner, it would carry them at a rate of 3.75 million dollars for 3 people, not 100 million.

3) "Apollo only cost us $50 billion": In 1968 dollars, 24 billion dollars. In modern dollars, that's 130 billion dollars. That's about NASA's entire budget for the last 8 years. Unfortunately for us now compared to the past, back in the 60s, we actually cared about spaceflight, and budgetted accordingly.

4) "So is space expensive because it's hard": Go try to strap yourself to a virtual bomb made out of the lighest materials you can get your hand on, and start igniting the bomb's chemicals, have them burn hotter than the boiling point of iron, push your flimsy craft upwards at several Gs, with a vibrational load that will rip most materials to shreds. Rocketry is bloody hard - it's amazing that we're able to get off this huge atmosphere-covered gravity well at all, and those who actually pulled it off - not posers who ride up to a vaccuum in an airborn rocket sled without dealing with the technical problems of *real spaceflight* - deserve all the credit we can give them (not just NASA, but ESA, China, Russia, Japan, India, Brazil, etc).

the Xprize did it for how much money?

SpaceShipOne Never Did, Never Will, And None Of Its Direct Descendants Ever Will, Orbit The Earth

Well, at least we know what they'll be eating while on the trip...

You don't need a special tool. I carved these pumpkins with an ordinary drill (I should have taken the picture from further away; this isn't an optimal angle for Bush. It gives him "monkey lips" from this high up).