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Extra stuff has been placed in chips for years:

http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/chipfun/graff.htm

On my favorite design we had nearly 100% coverage on the test vectors, someone said to "marx the uncovered nets" so we named them Groucho, Chico and Harpo in the netlist.

I was actually at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum a week ago. The museum overall is simply fantastic--a must see for any die-hard geek. Actually, the Air and Space is split into two parts: a museum in downtown DC that has some planes and the lunar re-entry vehicles; and a larger hangar near the airport (Dulles, in Virginia) that has larger planes and space vehicles (including the Space Shuttle Enterprise). Best of all, the Smithsonian Museums all have free admittance. (I probably sound like an ad for the Smithsonians--I just really enjoyed it!)

I saw the UAV exhibit, and it is indeed quite cool to see the sizes and designs of these vehicles. (FYI: the UAV exhibit is at the downtown DC museum.) On the one hand the UAVs are quite large, if you compare them to RC planes and helicopters. On the other hand, it's amazing how far the technology has come, that we can build a flight-capable system with high-quality (military-grade surveillance) optics in such a small package.

I was actually at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum a week ago. The museum overall is simply fantastic--a must see for any die-hard geek. Actually, the Air and Space is split into two parts: a museum in downtown DC that has some planes and the lunar re-entry vehicles; and a larger hangar near the airport (Dulles, in Virginia) that has larger planes and space vehicles (including the Space Shuttle Enterprise). Best of all, the Smithsonian Museums all have free admittance. (I probably sound like an ad for the Smithsonians--I just really enjoyed it!)

I saw the UAV exhibit, and it is indeed quite cool to see the sizes and designs of these vehicles. (FYI: the UAV exhibit is at the downtown DC museum.) On the one hand the UAVs are quite large, if you compare them to RC planes and helicopters. On the other hand, it's amazing how far the technology has come, that we can build a flight-capable system with high-quality (military-grade surveillance) optics in such a small package.

I was actually at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum a week ago. The museum overall is simply fantastic--a must see for any die-hard geek. Actually, the Air and Space is split into two parts: a museum in downtown DC that has some planes and the lunar re-entry vehicles; and a larger hangar near the airport (Dulles, in Virginia) that has larger planes and space vehicles (including the Space Shuttle Enterprise). Best of all, the Smithsonian Museums all have free admittance. (I probably sound like an ad for the Smithsonians--I just really enjoyed it!)

I saw the UAV exhibit, and it is indeed quite cool to see the sizes and designs of these vehicles. (FYI: the UAV exhibit is at the downtown DC museum.) On the one hand the UAVs are quite large, if you compare them to RC planes and helicopters. On the other hand, it's amazing how far the technology has come, that we can build a flight-capable system with high-quality (military-grade surveillance) optics in such a small package.

They've got one of these beautiful planes at the Udvar-Hazy flight center, near Dulles airport (Outside Washington, DC).

It's worth a trip well-out-of-your-way to see the thing - you can get right up close to it, and it is astonishingly attractive; moreso for being so secret and rare.

There's a whole bunch more good stuff at Udvar-Hazy - a great aviation museum.

When IBM and MS were talking about the future of OSs' both knew 16-bit code was at an end, so they decided that something new was in order, it needed to support DOS and Posix since the government just mandated that new systems had to support Posix.

IBM was in the middle of the OS/2 2.x ship cycle and didnâ(TM)t want to distract too many of their engineers with a new project just yet, so they handed off the new kernel design to MS.

DEC at the time was being DEC and canceled DaveCâ(TM)s project called Prisim. DaveC gave his team a month or so off before letting them go. BillG caught wind of the project being cancelled and invited DaveC to a meeting. At the conclusion of the meeting BillG agreed to pick-up DaveC and his team including the hardware guys to design the next generation kernel that OS/2 3.x was to be based.

For the next year the software guys spent their time designing the new kernel and the hardware guys were designing the new hardware (MIPS) that would run the new kernel. DaveC wanted to ensure that the kernel was portable and wanted to use the systems as a forcing function to make sure the devs didnâ(TM)t start using inline assembly.

The original kernel design doc can be seen here:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object.cfm?key=35&objkey=124
I had fun at the party MS threw when the Smithsonian wanted the design doc.

NT has more in common with the VAX OS than with OS/2 1.x+.

Bottom line here is that MS designed the NT kernel and all they had to do was provide subsystems for running OS/2 1.x, OS/2 2.x, Posix, and DOS applications, when they parted company MS dropped OS/2 2.x and added the Win16 and Win32 subsystems.

----- Rom

Good references for NT history are:
Inside Wndows NT by Helen Custer
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Windows-Network-CUSTER/dp/155615481X
Show Stopper by G. Pascal Zachary
http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Microsoft/dp/0029356717/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207943287&sr=1-2

Which makes a difference, but ain't precisely about extinction seeing as we're several billion people.

There were between 3 and 5 billion passenger pigeons in North America when the Europeans showed up. Less than five hundred years later, in 1914, the last one died.

Nature will wipe us out just as happily as we wiped out the passenger pigeon.

I don't think it's very likely that humanity will die out in the next few hundred years.

It's quite possible that humanity as we know it will not exist five hundred years from now. We will either have fscked up completely and be extinct; or we will have changed so much, hit some sort of Vingean singularity, that "human" will no longer be fully descriptive.

In 1948 there was a huge pent-up demand for a genuine post-war American automobile.
But only 50 Tuckers were produced. There were engineering problems. There were serious questions asked about Tucker's fund raising schemes. Tucker Automobiles

Another is "missing" fossil evidence showing these half ape creatures morphing into man

You want to see human ancestors morphing into man, you got em.

http://www.nasm.si.edu/exhibitions/gal114/SpaceRace/sec500img/561l6p6.jpg

I am an anthropologist. You are ignorant, though not stupid. Read up a little on human origins; we know of many human ancestors, each of which marks a stage in walking upright, using tools, and developing culture.

Take a quick look at this phylogenetic tree of the genus homo.

Have a look at this one.

IBM made a bit of hardware for the US Navy called the A/N-BQQ5 SONAR system. The main consoles had an array of buttons ( keys if you will ) that called functions and of course changed that actual text that was displayed on each button based upon the current function(s) selected. If memory serves, mind you this was 30 years ago, they had an acronym ( the Military has acronyms for everything ) and it was DROS . This is a link to a site that has a decent photo of the control consoles, Click on the image ( yes unfortunately it will open in a pop-up, sorry its the ONLY photo I can find ) for a larger version. As you can see the three consoles are identical; however, each console could be assigned any function that the system performed. Thus each set of keys displayed text appropriate for the consoles currently assigned function, and sub-functions.

I rode USS-OMAHA SSN-692 in winter of '78 and USS Los Angeles was commissioned in '76, so given how long it takes to get a bit of hardware like that from IBM in those days, I would imagine those buttons / keys were more then likely developed in the late 60's.

So there you have your prior art.

Well, for the majority of the country "30-50 years ago" voters we're voting on mechanical "lever machines" with no paper involved. Many places used those machines for close to a century. For tiny towns like the one your aunt works in, pretty much any voting method would be fine. It would be ideal to have at least an accessible option for those that can't independently vote a paper ballot. Though you might also want to consider a clear ballot box rather than a wooden one. Historically wooden boxes often had false bottoms

The benefit of having at least some kind of electronic component at the polling place is that it can inform voters of unintentional errors like overvotes (voting for more candidates than allowed invalidating their vote). Based on all the empirical evidence from academic research, we can pretty safely say that more votes get counted when there is some kind of notification for voters.

I kind of think huge powerful lasers are cool and they will certainly make powerful weapons in the future, BUT, I think that anyone who thinks that China and possibly Russia are sitting still and not doing any laser weapson research themselves is just delusional. The Soviet Union was developing laser weapons 20 years ago, and while Russia went through a load of decline in the 90s, that has been stopped and Russia could (or does already) continue laser and beam particle weapons research. They still have all the old data. The Chinese even have a laser that is designed to blind optics and humans that is standard armament on onw of its tanks and just about everyone assumes that they're researching high powered weapons as well.

The end result: Another (very) costly superpower stalemate.

The only advantage is that lasers look good on sharks.

Just for historical reference, the Navy experimented with something like this back in the 1950's. According to the writeup from the Smithsonian, the Pogo suffered from a lot of control problems due to propwash buffetting near the ground at takeoff and landing. Back then it took a very skilled test pilot to keep it under control; modern flight control systems like those used to keep semi-unstable airframes (such as the F-16) in controlled flight must make similar VTOL handling a lot easier today.

http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/aero/aircraft/convair_pogo.htm

--Paul

TFA: The balloon is designed to carry 6,000 pounds of equipment, including a 1-meter (39-inch) solar telescope...

Compare to:
Stratoscope II was the largest and most sophisticated balloon-borne astronomical telescope flown in the 1960s and early 1970s. A follow-on project to Stratoscope I, a 12-inch balloon born telescope conceived by Martin Schwarzschild, it was a 36-inch reflector mounted in a 3.5-ton stabilized gondola and studied the infra-red molecular composition of planetary atmospheres, the atmospheres of red giant stars. (They had photos of this on the corridor walls when I studied astronomy at Princeton. It needed a substantial sized truck to carry it.)

I'm sure there is good, innovative stuff being done here - but merely using a balloon is not it. I expect that one advance is in mission duration. I didn't quickly find the flight duration for Stratoscope II, but likely it was a few hours, compared to "as long as two weeks" for this telescope. And, of course, it will have much superior detectors.

Even the simple garden snail has hundreds of "teeth". Reference.

Frankly, this is bullshit.

Ok, additional info to my original post..

You would need to build a solar plant of about 100 x 100 Miles in the Nevada desert to generate the USAs electricity. USA had around 743 GigaWatt (0.743 TerraWatt) installed generating capacity in 1998 - I will dig out a newer figure, but lets say about 1 TerraWatt today.. This scheme in Nevada:

http://www.reuk.co.uk/Nevada-Solar-One.htm

Delievers 64 Mw for 350 acres = 45 watts per sqr meter.
100 x100 miles = 26 000 000 000 m2.
* 44 (watts) = 1.17 TerraWatt supply. Is 100x100 miles too much? How does it compare to coal-strip mining?
It is true that the sun doesnt shine at night - so in reality you would have a mix - wind power, tidal, etc - backed up with ready-to-roll capacity, pumped hyroelectric storage, and new tech like very large SuperCapacitors. Technology is moving all the time..

Cost? Figures vary, but Nevada Solar quote about $0.07/Kwh, wind and others maybe a little less. With oil hitting $80 a barrel this looks good, its hard to compare to Nuclear because of the huge hidden subsidies it recieved, both in terms of research and hidden unknown costs like waste disposal and decomissioning..

More links on power schemes..

http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=46415
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/worlds_largest_4.php
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/21/BUG9VJHBLB1.DTL
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1321857,00.html
http://www.pvresources.com/en/top50pv.php
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6031995.stm

As for Three Mile Island, read this link. Years later, when they could actually inspect inside the reactor, they were horrified to see just what a mess it was in - a huge glob of melted reactor fuel nearly breached the containment vessel - it was very very close to a Chernobyl type meltdown..

http://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/tmi03.htm

Let us say the figure is 2 KWh daily per m^2. Your 100x100 km piece of desert has 10,000,000,000 m^2, thus it makes 2*10^10 GWh daily. Another quick check with wikipedia tells me that annually the USA consumes 29000 TWh. The figure is for 2005. 29000 TWh is 29,000,000 GWh. The gap between 29,000,000 and 20*365 is substantial. You will need a bigger solar farm by several magnitudes. And you will never build it, it is a pipe dream.

Is it really going to be cheaper than (say) paving large areas of desert with ever-cheaper solar cells? Or building the really large wind-farm projects in the many available on/off shore locations?

Yes, with a capital 'Y'. Much, much cheaper, much, much more scalable, and also more environmentally friendly.

Nuclear is really the only option, and it's great that your government is going with what's right rather than what the misinformed majority think about nuclear power.

But, dammit, nuclear energy has no alternative for the moment.

Not true..

http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=46415
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/worlds_largest_4.php
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/21/BUG9VJHBLB1.DTL
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1321857,00.html
http://www.pvresources.com/en/top50pv.php
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/6031995.stm

All of Americas power needs could be supplied by (for example) covering 100x100 km of the Nevada Desert with PV cells. Why not just bite the bullet and do it?

there are risks in nuclear energy production

Hmm.. People dont realise just how close 3 mile island came to being as bad as Chernobyl - by sheer luck the vessel held the molten glob of reactor fuel. For a little exersize, extrapolate a Chernobyl scale incident to the 3 mile island area..

http://americanhistory.si.edu/tmi/tmi03.htm

Now go back and reconcile the facts with the claim "Let's just say the radioactive blob was well on its way to China."

Last time I checked, China was on the other side of the exterior containment barriers. Perhaps you are thinking of some other China?

7:45 a.m. By now there are at least 20, perhaps as many as 60, operators, supervisors, and other persons in the control room. Although none is yet ready to believe that the core had been uncovered, radiation levels in the power plant buildings are so high that Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations require the declaration of a general emergency. While state and federal officials are being informed of elevated radiation levels, unbeknown to all, a molten mass of metal and fuel--some twenty tons in all--is spilling into the bottom of the reactor vessel. The bottom of the reactor vessel is steel, five inches (13 cm) thick. But even that thickness of steel would not be expected to hold up for more than a few hours against such heat.

Note that the information presented here comes *after* they discovered the true magnitude of the molten blob years later. It took INEEL a good while to chisel out twenty tons of highly radioactive material with a remote-controlled jackhammer.

From the rather tame Kemeny report

e. There is no indication that any core material made contact with the steel pressure vessel at a temperature above the melting point of steel (2,800F).

Well, they later discovered that twenty tons of material well above that temperature was puddling in that vicinity at an alarming rate: perhaps no longer than episode in the series 24.

The story of TMI is not what was actually released, but how clueless they all were for a long time afterward about how close it came to dumping a Chernobyl-unit of molten goo into the Pennsylvania water table.

Concerning Chernobyl:

All remaining dosimeters had limits of 0.001 R/s and therefore read "off scale". Thus, the reactor crew could ascertain only that the radiation levels were somewhere above 0.001 R/s (3.6 R/h), while the true levels were 5,600 times higher in some areas.

Because of the fallacious low readings, the reactor crew chief Alexander Akimov assumed that the reactor was intact. The evidence of pieces of graphite and reactor fuel lying around the building was ignored, and the readings of another dosimeter brought in by 4:30 a.m. were dismissed under the assumption that the new dosimeter must have been defective. Akimov stayed with his crew in the reactor building until morning, trying to pump water into the reactor. None of them wore any protective gear. Most of them, including Akimov, died from radiation exposure within three weeks.

I suspect he took one look at that reading and thought to himself, "if that reading is correct, my goose is cooked". The Soviet Union never established much of a track record in encouraging the self-preservation of men poured into the breech. Typically, your reward for survival was being shot.

Back in America, the debate centers around 0.5 cancers in the aftermath, rather than the one or two hour window between what actually happened and the China syndrome. I wonder if they made an explicit political calculation: let's rush through publication of the Kemeny report before we learn anything more frightening we'd be obligated to disclose. Under the Bush administration, those obligations have mostly been terminated. They could probably write the accident report today for a future accident that hasn't even happened yet.

Fossett may have been the first to fly SOLO around the world, but Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew round the world non stop without refueling in 1986.

Rutan and Yeager flew in a plane (the Voyager). The first ones to do it with a balloon were Bertrand Piccard and Steve Fosset onboard the Breitling Orbiter III.

Same propeller as the LA class sub.
Picture from a dry dock in Scotland in the 70's

http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/subs/anglesdangl es/images/friedman_prop_full.jpg

You raise an interesting point. Actually, it raises multiple interesting points.

About monkeys themselves - humans are not considered to have evolved from monkeys but the great apes. Specifically, chimpanzees are supposed to be our close ancestors.

http://www.unisci.com/stories/20013/0712011.htm

The earliest chimpanzee fossils date from 500000 years ago near fossils of Homo erectus or Homo rhodensiensis. So it is considered that chimpanzees and Homo erectus were contemporaries.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7917

This raises the interesting question as to how chimpanzees have remain largely unchanged while humans have evolved from Homo heidelbergensis to Homo sapiens? Interestingly, Homo erectus and early modern humans (Homo sapiens) are considered to have been contemporaries atleast for a while since a finding of fossils in Java (considered Homo erectus) is dated as late as 50,000 years ago.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/erec. html

Homo erectus had a brain capacity about 30% less than modern humans (1000cc vs 1300+ cc in homo sapiens) but they did not outlive even Chimpanzees in the same area. That raises a whole lot of questions about the theories which define why some species survive and some don't.

Henson-style puppetry is no trivial feat. Even though he became famous doing puppetry programs for children, he was(he's dead) an amazingly accomplished artist besides, in the realms of painting and sculpture.

If you don't know of Jim Henson's more serious work, I recommend you watch The Dark Crystal which is an excellent serious fantasy film.

again your ALL displaying how little you understand about what your mouthing off about. if you were going to farm for bio fuel, it's not going to happen in a forrest which has an eco system to support your 1000 year old tree.

And your displaying how little you know. Trees can be used as a source of cellulose as well. And where do you thing all the wood pulp to make paper comes from? A lot of it comes from clear cuts of forest, which isn't sustainable. As for farming, there are Tree Farms and there are fast growing trees. Grow fast growing trees on tree farms and you have a source of cellulose. Of course these tree farms will probably do as much if not more damage to the environment as using petro does. Grown in a monoculture like conventional farmers grow food crops, these trees will need a lot of chemical inputs. However using organic methods and permaculture these chemical inputs won't be needed.

Its going to happen on a large plantation with nothing but the most optimal plant you can grow for your purpose, in an attempt to get the max yield per square metre.

Why use conventioanl agricultural methods and plant a monoculture when on the same land you can grow a mix of crops. Organic farmers don't plant monocultures, they use companion planting. Different food crops can be grow alongside crops for ethanol, much as is done for shade grown coffee, "the bird friendly coffee".

Oh, I see you mention fast growing crops. At the same tyme you mention bio diversity, which I handle above. Instead of growing a monoculture grow different crops together. Shade loving crops, like coffee, can be grown under taller trees. It takes more work but the yield per acre is higher.

so, if you can't understand the problem now, well sorry but your just plain thick.

It seems you're the one who doesn't understand. That or you're a troll.

And then you spout that Mach 4.5 number?

The SA-2 has a maximum range of about 31 miles, a maximum operating altitude of 80,000 ft, and speed of Mach 3.5. It usually carried a high explosive warhead of 287 lbs, though nuclear versions are also known.


As for the SR-71, it's top speed has never been declassified, but assuming a top speed of 3.0, and a flight altitude of 100,000 feet, by the time the missile reaches that altitude, it only has a few miles of operating range left - easy enough to keep away from until it runs out of fuel a few seconds later.

And here's an example of what happens when you try.

According to the Smithsonian - http://www.nasm.si.edu/aircraft/lockheed_sr71.htm

"On March 6, 1990, the service career of one Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird ended with a record-setting flight. This special airplane bore Air Force serial number 64-17972. Lt. Col. Ed Yeilding and his RSO, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Vida, flew this aircraft from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. in 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 20 seconds, averaging a speed of 3,418 kph (2,124 mph). At the conclusion of the flight, '972 landed at Dulles International Airport and taxied into the custody of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. At that time, Lt. Col. Vida had logged 1,392.7 hours of flight time in Blackbirds, more than that of any other crewman."

3,418 kmp = Mach 2.79, pretty bad ass. I though you were not able to break the sound barrier over the US, either a special circumstance or I am just wrong.

No doubt the GP missed a few obvious bipedal animals. (Some mentioned were birds, Kangaroos, and of course Humans. Another poster made an excellent comment regarding Human bipedalism, so I won't go into that.)

However, I agree with the core of his statement: animals with more legs are more common, and, geographically speaking, much more dominant than humans. There are 4+ legged animals in more nooks and crannies and extreme environments than humans will EVER be able to colonize, no matter how advanced our technology gets.

Insects alone, which all have 6+ legs, make up for approximately 80% of all the world's animal species. There are over 900,000 different species of insects! Without any doubt, if another meteor were to strike the earth, the insects would become the next dominant form of life.

Here is a story claiming we still have the genes present in modern humans. If it was a seperate species, we would find simular genes but not the same ones. I cannot find the refernce to the movie making the claim. It would probably help if I could remeber the name. I'm sure someone else will help us with it.

A quick google search lead me to this site hosted at Natural History Museum but claims This is the web version of a Smithsonian publication on Natural History for Educators. Museum professionals write articles on current topics in natural history and include a teacher resource section to help translate these articles into the classroom. It also includes links to backs issues. in the authors notes. It seems to be the actual Smithsonian Institution so I'm not sure how much credit you will give it. I'm not ditching the Smithsonian Institution, It is just that it is government funded and that could skew the results.

Surpisingly, It seems to indicate that people were suggesting we are the same species a lot longer then I originaly thought. The paper cites the 60s I think.

OK, I think I might have found it. It apear to be called "Neanderthal, the rebirth". I don't know if it is the same one, but after clicking on the link, it describes some of what the one I watched showed. And It looks like we are in luck. It is going to be on this month. I saw it last year.

Here is a story claiming we still have the genes present in modern humans. If it was a seperate species, we would find simular genes but not the same ones. I cannot find the refernce to the movie making the claim. It would probably help if I could remeber the name. I'm sure someone else will help us with it.

A quick google search lead me to this site hosted at Natural History Museum but claims This is the web version of a Smithsonian publication on Natural History for Educators. Museum professionals write articles on current topics in natural history and include a teacher resource section to help translate these articles into the classroom. It also includes links to backs issues. in the authors notes. It seems to be the actual Smithsonian Institution so I'm not sure how much credit you will give it. I'm not ditching the Smithsonian Institution, It is just that it is government funded and that could skew the results.

Surpisingly, It seems to indicate that people were suggesting we are the same species a lot longer then I originaly thought. The paper cites the 60s I think.

OK, I think I might have found it. It apear to be called "Neanderthal, the rebirth". I don't know if it is the same one, but after clicking on the link, it describes some of what the one I watched showed. And It looks like we are in luck. It is going to be on this month. I saw it last year.

Here is a story claiming we still have the genes present in modern humans. If it was a seperate species, we would find simular genes but not the same ones. I cannot find the refernce to the movie making the claim. It would probably help if I could remeber the name. I'm sure someone else will help us with it.

A quick google search lead me to this site hosted at Natural History Museum but claims This is the web version of a Smithsonian publication on Natural History for Educators. Museum professionals write articles on current topics in natural history and include a teacher resource section to help translate these articles into the classroom. It also includes links to backs issues. in the authors notes. It seems to be the actual Smithsonian Institution so I'm not sure how much credit you will give it. I'm not ditching the Smithsonian Institution, It is just that it is government funded and that could skew the results.

Surpisingly, It seems to indicate that people were suggesting we are the same species a lot longer then I originaly thought. The paper cites the 60s I think.

OK, I think I might have found it. It apear to be called "Neanderthal, the rebirth". I don't know if it is the same one, but after clicking on the link, it describes some of what the one I watched showed. And It looks like we are in luck. It is going to be on this month. I saw it last year.

Oh, I missed this when I posted my first reply, which is okay as it is a totally separate issue:

We'd probably have to dredge up some Siberian or Mongolian farmer who just happens to be the closest living relative to the very first people to cross the landbridge, and give all of North America and South America to him.

Maybe you don't know but the first inhabitants of the Americas DID NOT cross the Siberian, Alaskan land bridge from Asia to the Americas. The Americas had populations of people before the land bridge existed. Monte Verde, Chile dates from 12,500 BP (Before Present) which dates it 1,000 years before the land bridge, the Land Bridge being dated to 11,500 BP. Sp the fact is is people populated the southern most part of the Americas before the land bridge in the north existed.

Why is it that the further south you go into South America, the older the civilizations appear to be? Seems like they keep finding all kinds of ancient ruins there. Now what is the likelihood that people would wander from the north all the way down there before creating the civilizations they created? Could the Americas have been populated from Antarctica instead, before the polar shift? Prolly not, I guess there were no humans back then, but still...

Actually I wonder why this article says nothing about Monte Verde, the oldest known settlement in the Americas. It is located in the southern tip of Chile which makes it the southern most settlement site in the Americas and it dates to 12,500 BP (Before Present), so it was settled before the Clovis people were around. This dating also places the settlement before the opening of the Bering land bridge between Asia and America.

It's funny that at one time the same was said about the Ford Motor Co. In 1927 they built the 15 millionth Model T, a record that would stand until 1972, when Volkswagen built the 15 millionth VW beetle. Today, it's only their own PR people who think Ford is increasing their market share. Actually, their stock price has gone consistently down for the last three years.

As you see, there's no such thing as a company that will "always dominate". Considering that the software industry evolves much faster than the automotive segment, I don't think we will need to wait 45 years to see another company assume the predominance Microsoft has today.

The Modern Incandescent blub is really based on the research and patents of Irving Langmuir who worked for
General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York.

His invention of gas-filled incandescent lamp in patented in 1913 is the one we use today.

He was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Langmuir's lamps gave up to 20 lumens per watt which was a very large improvement for that time.

http://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/bios/langmu ir.htm
http://www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/92.html

Anyhow there is a whole back story where J.P. Morgan the main investor in the Edison General Electric company realized the Thomas Edison's Electric lightblub and DC current system was inferior, removed Edison from the company. Then aquired there biggest compeditor Thompson-Houston and changed the name to General Electric in 1892. Irving Langmuir was really the first true hard core scientist that went about perfecting electric lighting for the General Electric company.

Anyhow I am all for eliminating incandescents at this point and I do live in California.

RF lighting such as (Microwave-powered sulfur lamps) and LED lighting are the most efficient and make Compact Fluorescent lanps look just as obsolete as incandescents...

If I remember correctly, it's actually in the Smithsonian. This is the only reference I can find at the moment: http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/pressrelease.cf m?key=29&newskey=434

Swan did patent the light bulb before Edison. Edison went into partnership with Swan in the UK to avoid a patent battle (which he would have lost). See:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/lighting/bios/swan.h tm

What seems surprising now is that Swan did not exploit his priority in the US. I don't have the facts to hand (I'll actually go and find a book) but I suspect that he simply didn't have time to file a US patent. Which is much the same situation as the original Wheatstone/Morse telegraph patents.

It's amazing that over 100 years later we still haven't solved this fundamental weakness of the patent system: in awarding the victor of a patent race all the spoils it hinders R&D as much as it helps.

It'll be over when Aunt Tilly uses Linux on the desktop.

And why can't she use it today instead of Windows?

Because, just for one example, today the Smithsonian launched an online exhibition called Earth from Space which uses a version of Flash not available (yet) on Linux.

And because when she buys a wireless card she has to learn about something called "ndiswrapper".

And because asking a little old lady to get root so she can edit /etc/sudoers is hopeless bullshit, but thanks for playing.

No, Linux on the desktop won't have won until Aunt Tilly can use it as easily as Windows.

With Linux appearing on the corporate desktop, the gap is closing. But there's still a long long way to go.

was MS Windows really 386 capable in 1988? I remember when OS/2 2.0 came out with it's Windows 3.0 compatibility and a year or so later made an upgrade MS Windows 3.1 compatible. I guess that would have ment that MS Windows 2.0 was 386 capable and just how much effect did THAT really have?

Windows/386 was the '386 version of Windows 2.0, and was able to pre-emptively multi-task multiple DOS processes. This was by far the most important feature to early Windows users (since there were very few Windows applications), and is something OS/2 simply couldn't do.

Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, and was also offered in a '386 version (but not given a special name like Windows 2.0 for the '386 had been). It was the first version of Windows to really take off, and there was arguably a positive feedback loop, with people buying it to graphically run multiple DOS applications, thereby creating an installed base that led applications developers to target the Windows API.

With OS/2 for the '386 still years away (because of all the wasted effort on OS/2 for the '286), and applications beginning to arrive in a big way on Windows, Microsoft decided that it was essential to give developers a similar API on the new system. The result was the Win32 API, a 32-bit version of the Windows API that Microsoft added to NT OS/2. IBM demanded that Microsoft remove Win32 from NT, Microsoft refused, and so IBM ended the partnership. NT OS/2 thus became Windows NT, with the OS/2 subsystem restricted to running character-mode OS/2 1.x applications (IBM took ownership of OS/2 2.0).

I never heard of Gates doing any of what you mentioned

Bill Gates described his involvement in the IBM PC project in an interview back in the 90s. A transcript of the interview, from the Smithsonian Institution, can be found here. Gordon Letwin, one of the original eleven Microsoft employees, has also given an insight into the extreme hostility certain individuals at IBM had to Windows, and IBM's refusal to allow Win32 to exist even alongside the OS/2 API (i.e. the ultimatum to remove Win32 or IBM would pull out of the partnership).

but I did hear that when Microsoft provided IBM with the first version of MSDOS, it was so bad that IBM needed the source code to fix it before shipping it as PCDOS. It seemed all versions of PCDOS were 'fixed' versions from there on out for some reason or another.

That sounds like the sort of story bitter old OS/2 supporters might have invented. I doubt if IBM had enough people devoted to the PC project to have rewritten MS-DOS, even if they had wanted to. More to the point, given the extremely tight schedule, there almost certainly wouldn't have been enough time, and Microsoft's team arguably had more experience in the area anyway.

Did Bill Gates have any hand at all in choosing the 8088? The evidence that he did is pretty much non-existant, and it sounds like all attempts to actually follow up the "Numerous published accounts" have drawn a blank. Actual engineers involved in the decision are responding "WTF." Nobody's claiming to have heard him actually suggest it. And with good reason. It never happened.

20 years ago, Shouptronic made a computerized voting machine that keeps an audit trail on paper. The technology is already there.

Shouptronic voting machine
"Electromechanical machines like the Shouptronic bridge the recent past of the lever machine and the future of fully electronic touch-screen voting. The Shouptronic resembles a traditional lever voting machine, right down to its privacy curtain. The candidate slate is printed over a backlit grid of illuminated buttons. A green VOTE button locks in and records the choices. Votes are recorded to a hard-drive memory. Recording features include a memory cartridge, a backup battery, and the means of printing a paper tally. This Shouptronic machine was used in Fairfax County, Virginia, from 1981 to 2002."

Don't tell the worrymongers, but I hear other space craft (take for instance Voyager - wouldn't work with just solar...) already contain RTGs.

This Wikipedia page has links to dozens of specimens of various stages of human evolution. Some even with pictures! I know, I know, you might actually learn something that contradicts your small-mindedness, but it might be worth it.

This page on the Smithsonian Museum's website (I know, I know, it's a 'devil's facility', but bear with me) also has a lot of stuff on evolution, including specimens. But, again, you might actually learn something, and then your straw man would fall apart.

Follow these links with caution, Christian warrior!

Not to mention the children's song about the Solar System.

Again I say to the teeming masses of Slashdot: lever machines are the answer! They have been proven for almost 90 years! I know that many of us /.ers want a computer chip of some kind running Linux in absolutely everything, we need to learn that electronic is not always better.