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This type of story should go into a category for snake oil, novelties and pseudo-science. Geez, people have been promoting 200mpg carburators since the dawn of the automobile.

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Ok, in all these proposals for mining Mars and the asteroids, they talk about looking for water, carbon, building materials, etc. It seems like the most important thing they should be looking for is uranium (or thorium). Yes, you need water to make fuel and oxygen, but you can't get fuel from water without power. Same with all the other projects. How are you going to run mining equipment, provide power for the habitations, etc?

Also if you can find extraterrestrial (not from Earth) fissionable material (uranium or thorium) that means you can avoid the risks and expense of having to launch it. A lot of people get upset if there's a proposal to launch a 100kg RTG. Well, to power a mining colony, they will need a lot more than 100kg of fission fuel. What kind of public reaction would there be to the proposal of launching several tons of uranium? It would be much better if they could dig it up on Mars and use it on Mars.

Some of the terraforming projects require moving asteroids of ice to Mars. Again, the only way you can do that is with a nuclear-powered mass driver on the asteroid, and it would be nice to not have to launch that much uranium from Earth.

So when my company starts its Mars base, the first thing we're going to do is find the uranium, and then we'll sell electricity, H2 and O2 to all the other companies that want to (effectively) sell dirt and water. I suspect there's a lot better markup on electricity than there is on dirt and water.

I assume there is uranium on Mars, but I've never heard of anyone looking for it or discussing it. It seems to me that if there are no extraterrestrial sources of uranium, that's going to be a big problem for colonization of space, because it really will take thousands of tons of uranium to provide all the power that's going to be needed for serious mining and fuel production. And no, solar power is not going to work for this. Mining and fuel production requires too much power for solar to be a realistic option. For any activities beyond Mars, solar gets even less realistic. As long as solar is the power source, power is going to be a very tight limiting factor, whereas if you've got a few hundred tons of uranium, power will not be the limiting factor.

Also I wonder if uranium would make a good radiation shield? It seems like DU would be quite effective for that?

The good news is that if you set up a reactor on one of Mars' moons or on an asteroid or in Mars orbit, you can make it enormous and not need any real containment structures. If the uranium is available, it might be much cheaper to build extraterrestrial reactors than it is on Earth.

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It sounds like it's using urine as an electrolyte. That's like a "potato battery", which again is just using the potato as an electrolyte, and is not getting any power from it.

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We waste so much on the shuttle, and it gives back so little. It seems like 50% of the space time in this return-to-flight mission was spent worrying about if the shuttle would make it back to Earth in one piece, and now the shuttle is grounded AGAIN. And the shuttle is going to be retired forever in 2010, so if they're lucky (and have no accidents) they're going to get another dozen flights out of it... and at the end all the repairs, redesigns, safety checks, etc, will all come to nothing because the whole thing is getting scrapped.

Put the shuttles in a museum!

The Earth is set up so that chemical rockets and just barely escape the Earth's gravity. If the Earth were just a bit more massive, we wouldn't have any space program at all. The point is, rockets are only marginally workable.

There are two ways we can go on space: One is the utilitarian way, which means satellites to do useful things for us Earthlings. The other way to go is space exploration where we expand our understanding of the solar system and our presence within it.

The utilitarian view of space is something we can achieve easily with chemical power sources. We have done some great things with chemical power for exploration, but it is also becoming a handicap.

If we want to do much more than the utilitarian use, we need to work on nuclear propulsion. There are so many ideas, including ion thrusters, gas core reactors and many others, with advantages and disadvantages.

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If this catches on, there won't be any need for hydrogen cars, and so all the companies working on them will lose billions of dollars in subsidies, and the fossil fuel industry will lose an enormous new market (the market for H2 from fossil fuels).

If these things catch on, people will start wanting to buy 100% electric cars that don't use any gasoline, and then what will our oil companies do???

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This just isn't wise.

First, for this to mean anything at all, they need to get participation from the companies with the biggest patent portfolios. This includes companies such as Microsoft. It's not going to happen. Without their participation it's meaningless.

Second, even if they do get every single Fortune 500 company to join in the fun it won't help because there will always be small companies that make a play for some cash with a patent attack. We all know about a small I'm-not-dead-yet company coming from nowhere with a lame copyright suit. There are also some tiny companies with no products that come out with pure-play patent shakedown business models. Are these guys going to join in the pool? That's where the real threat is.

No, the real answer is this:

• Sourcecode can't infringe on patents. Only distributed products can possibly infringe on a patent. Therefore those who are involved only in sourcecode (ODSL) don't need to worry about patents. That's a question for distributors like RedHat, etc, who do have the resources to fight patent fights or license the patents.
• Software patents don't exist in Europe. Why worry about a problem that doesn't exist?
• We would be better served by a League of Patent Justice to defend the Earth than by some kind of pool. This League of Justice would do things like fight against frivolous patent shakedown claims, and also put out bounties on finding prior art. There almost always is prior art for all these claims.

So I think Linus is wrong on this. There's no way the pool is ever going to include all the participants it needs, both big companies like MS that don't want to be in the pool, and small companies like Acacia and SCO that are really just litigation shakedown companies whose whole business model depends on the threat of frivolous (but expensive) legal actions.

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PHP is a disaster, for two reasons:

First, it has no mechanisms to enforce any kind of good web application design practices. Almost invariably, PHP apps are initially designed by people who are newcomers to programming and the web. There's nothing wrong with that. But PHP doesn't provide any structure to help them make the right decisions, so you end up with no separation between HTML and code, and you end up with an unmaintainable mess.

Second, it's not a full-featured object-oriented programming environment like Java. In Java, I can create objects, store them in sessions, hand them to threads, and store them using persistence frameworks. PHP has only the most rudimentary versions of such features. Within a Servlet environment I can also create filters, something which doesn't exist in PHP.

There is hope. There are some tools like Smarty Templates and PEAR which help a little bit. In fact if beginners would force themselves to use Smarty Templates from the beginning they would get much better results.

Also PHP 5 has objects. It's nowhere nearly as mature as Java's object oriented features. PHP doesn't have strong typing on variables, something which should be a part of any system that needs to be reliable. There's no complition of PHP systems, which means that the only bugs are run-time bugs.

PHP just isn't a good choice.

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If you really want to do it right, use an HTML parser to extract the content, and then re-render it. That's exactly what our mobile search engine does to convert web pages to mobile pages. It's non-trivial stuff. The advantage of doing it is that you do end up with clean, uniform HTML (or WML or XHTML in our case).

Some future version of Tomcat should have built-in content parsing in its filters so that filter writers could write simple filters to transform content in a meaningful way. But I haven't seen that as a proposal anywhere.

We recently launched a mobile search engine. The domain was registered, pages created, etc, so I'm observing it go from zero page rank, to having a page rank and getting crawled. Yahoo's bot definitely crawls more frequently, and Googlebot doesn't seem to crawl any links unless they are linked to from external pages. I assume that as the pagerank increases, Googlebot will get more aggressive, but from what I can see in the logs it's clear that Googlebot takes a "wait and see" approach to crawling.

That's not a bad thing. There are a lot of useless pages out there, and having twice as many pages in the index certainly does not mean twice as many useful pages.

I am glad to see the search engine wars are on and competitive.

If I use a Linux box as my broadband router, is that a regulated device? What I'm wondering is, where does this law stop? If there is a Linux distro that is specifically designed as a "broadband router on a CD", would that fall under the regulation? What if I have a broadband card plugged directly into my computer? Is the broadband card the device, or is the whole computer the device? What about if the broadband card does everything in drivers which are part of the kernel?

Even regular consumer devices like Linksys routers are running Linux, so that makes me wonder if the changes have to be hardware or software changes. It's my impression that on a Linksys router, basically everything important is done in software, so I don't see how this could be implemented in hardware.

And obviously, if this means that Linksys routers need to have a patched kernel, will they have to be locked in some way to prevent changes to the kernel? What about the GPL? If the backdoor is implemented as a part of the kernel, and then that kernel is redistributed, then the backdoor code would need to be published, right?

Back in the days when everything was hardware, regulations like this would be cleanly enforceable, but now that the work is done almost entirely in software, it's a mess.

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From the post: While splitting water to get hydrogen and oxygen is not new, this product will likely make the technology more accessible to the masses and might hopefully show that hydrogen is a more attractive fuel than petroleum-based fuels.

No, what this shows is that hydrogen is simply a derivative of fossil fuels, and is in fact an extremely expensive, inefficient and almost useless way to store and transport energy.

Let's see, we start with huge lumps of coal, convert them to steam, convert the steam to electricity, and then use the electricity to make hydrogen which (in a fuel cell) we can convert back to electricity. Energy is lost at every step along the way. In particular, compressing the hydrogen from atmospheric pressure to storage tank pressure loses about HALF the total energy, so even if the fuel cell is 100% efficient, you've still lost HALF the energy you started with.

But commercial hydrogen is not produced by electrolysis. It's produced from natural gas and steam. So let's see, we start with natural gas, a product which has the following properties:

• Cheap
• Easy to store and transport with widely available equipment
• Can run through cheap, widely available engines
• Fairly clean burning (compared to diesel)
• High energy density in compressed tanks

and we convert that to hydrogen which has the following properties:

• Very very expensive
• Very difficult to store. The only real-world proven way to store it at a high density is to liquify it. That will never be a practical option outside of aerospace industry
• Can be burned in regular engines, with regular engine efficiency, or can be burned in extremely expensive fuel cells. There is no realistic possibility of fuel cells becoming cost competitive in the foreseeable future.
• Low energy-density for real-world storage (compressed tanks, etc). Fuel cell cars have a range of less than 200 miles usually.
• Oh, and it's clean burning! Finally after all the bad things about H2 we come to one good thing!
• It makes the whole global warming and oil dependency problems worse becomes it takes so much energy is wasted in the process of converting fossil fuels into hydrogen.

The one thing that could help is that you can make hydrogen from clean nuclear energy and from clean solar energy, but given that hydrogen electrolysis is not cost-competitive with even cheap fossil fuel electricity, why should it be cost competitive with much more expensive solar electricity?

I regret that our government is involved in subsidizing this whole boondoggle, but I have no worries that it will continue in the long-term. Some small improvements in lithium batteries, and some reasonable production economy in lithium batteries will make electric cars competitive with plain old ICE cars, and the hydrogen fuel research pork programs will shrivel up and die.

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"/bin/sh has been associated with security problems in the Unix world since the early 70s. Most Unix/Linux security situations arise when an unauthorized user gets access to the /bin/sh process. Fedora Core 5, due out in October, will not include this dangerous executable. Instead users will control the system through the advanced Gnome windowing system and will be able to develop object-oriented network-transparent applications in the MONO framework."

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(Posting anonymously here to protect the guilty)

I had a client who was upset about my hourly rates because he was comparing me to offshore programmers who were working for about 1/8 of my rate. But his project was a mess. There was no separation between the View and the Model (ie, there was HTML thoroughly intermixed with code). No one understood how the system worked. Code was being stored in database tables and then executed to render requests. The project was vastly behind schedule. In short, a lot of things were going wrong. He was just looking at the $/hour, not value/$. Value/$ is the only ratio that really matters. He's a smart guy, and has learned from his mistake.

One good programmer is more than equal to ten bad programmers. A good programmer will deliver this:

• Code that's an asset, something which adds real value to the business
• Code that's a product, in the sense that it is ready to be deployed both in-house and in other businesses, instead of code that is interwoven with infrastructure
• Code that is documented and comprehensible to others who get involved
• An organization that has internalized sane design and coding practices to make all of the above routine, instead of unexpected

Anyway, that's what I did for him, as much as possible. Hiring programmers who don't know what they are doing is like building a house with bad construction. It may look good but it's not worth anything.

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My guess is that employers' main motives for banning after-hours employee "fraternization" are to a) inhibit forming unions and b) if sexual harassment occurs after-hours, the employer could have legal risks from it. Employers might not see any up-side to after-hours "fraternization" and there are some clearly-visible down-sides (for the employer).

Workers in IT (esp. programmers) spend long and irregular hours, socialize with eachother, and exchange ideas. That's just the culture of it. I somehow doubt that the employers who pushed for this decision are specifically thinking about their IT staff. "These are not the droids they are looking for" basically.

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I hope the shuttle comes home safe and then gets parked in a museum. The problem here is that the heat shields are exposed to stress during both launch and entry. All other spacecraft have a heat shield that is only used one way or the other way, and then is disposed of. It's a bit much for me to want to reuse something that has to be exposed to the rigors of launch and then reentry and then be reused. I'm glad that it has worked as many times as it has in the past but this does not seem like a safe design and does not seem like the right thing to use to protect astronauts. The heat shielding is the one part of the shuttle that has no redundancy; if tiles are lost in critical places, the shuttle disintegrates.

It also seems like they have spent a large fraction of their space-time on this mission simply making sure the shuttle is fit to return to Earth, rather than doing useful space work. The shuttle was sold on the promise of routine, cheap, quick flights to space, and we have something that flies so irregularly that it's hard to even say how often it flies (once a year or less?). It's such a bucket of bolts that astronauts then have to spend half their time just inspecting it for damage while they're in orbit. NASA should not be putting astronauts at risk in a ship like this. NASA should be spending its budget on programs that have a future, rather than programs which have been a dead end for a long time.

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I have a friend who is smart, but not a real "computers guy". He was at my house and needed to borrow a computer. I only have Linux computers here, and so he tried it and was impressed. He could do everything he needed to do under Suse without any problems: access his mail, access the Web, access Excel spreadsheets (with OpenOffice), etc. Except for one thing: he couldn't play video clips, and when he got his laptop, he said, "I'll use Windows on this so I can play video." That's all. Otherwise he would use Linux.

I am very experienced with Linux and computers in general and I still can't get Windows Media video to work properly on this, and the only DVD playback I have is through MPlayer and I still can't get a GUI working on MPlayer.

What I had to go through to get this far: Download and compile MPlayer. Ok, that's no problem and it plays DVDs. Download and install the Windows codecs pack. Now MPlayer (still with no GUI) can play WMV. That's great. Xine (KDE's preferred video player) can't detect these Windows codecs, even though I put them in /usr/lib/win32, which is where they're supposed to be. So no integrated desktop playback; if I want to play a clip, I download it, save it, open up a console window, and point MPlayer at it. I tried to get MPlayer to compile with --gui-enabled so at least I could have a front-end for it. No luck; it can't find gtk2+ development libraries. I tried to install them and couldn't find them anywhere that MPlayer could find them. I also tried to install a dvddecss lib where Xine could find it so Xine could play encrypted (standard) movie DVDs. Again, nothing I could do worked.

Mind you, this is all with Suse 9.3, the latest and greatest. All of this stuff is supposed to be worked out by now. I can get it to just barely work, with no desktop integration and no GUI, and I'm an experienced and knowledgable user. What are other people supposed to do, just use their imagination?

Oh and the situation is even worse with Flash. In my previous Suse installations, Flash worked fine in Konqueror. Now with Suse 9.3, I get a crash when Konqueror tries to render a page with Flash, so I have to use Moz or Firefox to view it, and guess what, those have problems working with KDE's sound system so I might not get sound with my Flash.

I realize that there are legal problems with codecs and DVDs and whatever. Before Linux is ever going to get consumer-level acceptance, these problems need to be solved, or worked around. A solution would be to get a commercially-developed Linux media player that a) integrates with the desktop and b) works and c) package that with the distro. A work-around would be to make up a media player installer that you just click on, it downloads whatever it needs from non-US sites, and it does all the stuff, and it WORKS.

I'm happy to pay for Linux distros (I think I paid almost $100 for Suse 9.3 pro). If they have to tack on another $10 or $20 to include a solid, well-integrated working media player, they need to do it.

All the other apps are more than good enough right now. OOo is a good consumer-level (and biz level) replacement for MS Office. Firefox is better than IE. All that is lacking is multimedia playback.

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It seems like they are spending so much time and money working on safety problems that these things are doing very little actual space flight. Ok, so the fleet is grounded again. Great. They will be grounded forever in 2010, so they have about four more years of flying. If it takes them another year to fix this problem and get it back to being flight-ready, that means about three more years of flights, which probably means less than ten more flights.

How much are they going to spend to get these ten (or less) flights going? Also, it could be substantially less than ten flights. If there is another accident, that will be the end. If there is another safety problem after the foam, that could also be the end. So ten more flights is a best-case scenario.

When the shuttle was originally sold to Congress in the 70s and 80s, they said it would be a cheap way to get stuff into orbit, because it's reusable and they could fly them routinely (once a month or more). In practice they have never made anywhere near that number of flights and now we'll be lucky to get half a dozen more flights from the fleet before it's over.

Isn't it time to cut the losses on this boondoggle? It seems that they should have cut the losses on it years ago, and with the current situation, it makes more sense than ever.

Don't fix this safety problem. Don't fix any more safety problem. Find three museums that want to house the remaining shuttles.

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It seems like there are a few ways to make it easier to spot these. First, I wonder if they show up different under UV. For example, if you looked at a page of normal black text under UV, would it be possible to spot these dots? Secondly, it's easy to buy color injection refills these days. What if you refill a cartridge with the wrong colors, like putting red in the yellow inkwell? That would give you a test cartridge which should show these dots in an obvious way. Would any of this work?

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Further down the page, it appears that China is just now releasing a CPU that is contemporary for 1995. So which is it? They are getting ahead of the US or they're lagging ten years behind?

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