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And then there is the big laser pointer that protects DC.

NORAD statement

"Initial indications are that the missile deployed an object that appeared to achieve orbit."

Of course, WHAT they put into orbit is open to speculation.

Am I the only one to notice that this is where Magic Mountain is?
"Everybody" knows that the SGC is down in the bottom of that!
So it's maybe just possible that the guy was a real Klingon, somehow spacially and literarially misplaced through some Stargate accident?

Could be because Canada is a part of NORAD and is a full partner to the United States? Ever heard of NORAD before?

1) I work for an aerospace company, and I recently needed some way to get NORAD TLEs from Celestrak. Never mind what TLEs are, I went to CPAN and found what I needed in a few minutes. How does Ruby compare to Perl in available libraries and utilities? If I have to get the TLE specifications and code my own functions in Ruby, sorry, but I'd rather cope with Perl's shortcomings.

2) Occasionally I have to do some web applications to access corporate databases in Oracle, Ingres, and Postgres. The data contains international characters, which may be in UTF or ISO-8859, I need support for both and an easy way to shift between them, often in the same application. For this kind of work I use PHP together with the eGroupWare suite. I have no need for very complicated code here, these are mostly simple web forms and tables, which PHP+eGroupWare handle quite well. Using the built-in etemplates utility I can code applications very quickly.

3) For really complex work I use C, or C++ with Qt if there is need for a GUI. I often create prototypes for my C code, using either Perl, Python, or Matlab to develop some of the algorithms. After I have the algorithm, I reimplement it in C using the many libraries available, such as GSL, Lapack, or FFTW, for instance.

With all that, I have yet to find a reasonable niche where Ruby would fit, with or without Rails. I can see how someone who wants to learn only one language would think Ruby is the best, but I cannot imagine being more productive in Ruby than in the languages I use for each of the jobs I described.

And the attitude one finds in Slashdot "hey stupid, Ruby is 'teh' language, you must be a troll" doesn't help either. For any other language I can find websites that give detailed descriptions of its good and bad points, but I have seen very little on comparing Ruby with other languages. From the little I have seen, it gives the impression of being somewhat remotely related to Lisp, like Python. How about creating a site that shows some examples comparing code written in Ruby with the same program in Python, Perl, C, PHP, Java, etc?

NORAD tracks spacejunk that is in orbit around earth, simiarly to what NOAA is doing with ocean junk.

Our government and NORAD monitor everything and know what's going on.

Are you sure that NORAD is responsible for this kind of surveillance? They may track missile lauches and satellites; but detecting and analyzing "mushrooms" would be probably done by NIMA.

"funny how NORAD couldn't see any of da "highjacked" planes on 9/11. were they asleep or in coma? "

RTFA.

I'm tired of this stupid-ass 20/20 hindsight that says 9/11 could have been prevented. Would YOU have been prepared to fire a missile at a commercial airliner with 300+ innocent people aboard, not knowing what their plans are?

The answer is no. Don't bother lying to me just to try to 'win'.

They have lots of mountains that could be hollowed out to make ideal bad-guy secret lairs.

There's already one there.

It's not clear from either of these stories 1) why the highway department wants them to have GPS, nor 2) why the contractors don't want to have it.

Are they planning some huge NORAD-like control room with huge screens and little dots for all the snowplows?

Are they having a problem with the drivers taking off time to make snow-angels? I don't get it.

and I'm sure everybody else wants it too. NORAD has nothing, NASA has nothing, space.com has nothing, and I can't read Chinese.

Like it needs to be said, but if anybody stumbles across that information, totally post it.