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I suggest visiting some of the national parks in North America. The four listed below have made the biggest impact on me. All of these have great backpacking trails and areas once you get there.

• Yellowstone National Park geothermal power and beauty
• Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks See the largest and oldest living thing on the planet
• Yosemite National Park My photos
• Banff and Lake Louise

These are not what I would call "geeky" but in all honesty, most of the geek destinations have been a let down. I usually get more enjoyment out of books and articles than visiting a place. (Unless you absolutely need to make a stop by micro$oft headquarters)

If you make it to Washington DC, make sure to stop at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, if you are into that sort of thing.

It's also worth noting, that the main Smithsonian musuem is open to the public, free of charge, as are most of the monuments in DC. This should help out your budget. They do have public transportation around DC, but I know of no plans now to have a shuttle run from downtown DC to the new Center when it opens.

The QWERTY keyboard lay-out was originally designed to speed up typing by reducing clashes. The layout was not meant to inhibit the typists abilities, but to rearrange the mechanical layout of the typebars so that they were less likely to jam.

Relevant links:

Why QWERTY Was Invented

A Brief History of Typewriters

Carbons to Computers: Typewriters

Early Office Museum Typewriters

-r

The Komet was probably not powered by linux either. (Details of the fuel, etc. are provided by the link)

The Komet, a rocket propelled aircraft that the Nazi used against allied bombers, had two tanks of fuel, that when mixed in the rocket motor, produced the thrust. Only problem was, the stuff was deadly. Stick your finger in a cup of it, and withdraw only the bone. Now we get cellphones for smokers that use some sort of "fuel" in a can. What ever happened to "solar power" ?

His name is Lemelson, and he has licenses of over $1 Billion. There are various places to find information on him, such as the Lemelson Foundation and The Lemelson Center.

Kind of odd to see him being hailed as a hero on /., considering his heirs are suing anyone they can think of based on very loosely related technologies. I would think /. would villify him. He is many times worse than Amazon, in some respects. See Lemelson Patents Online, a reference for those being sued by Lemelson, as well as Lemelsoninfo.com. There is also a long article on The Lemelson Situation.

He is quite infamous for his use of submarine patents--he filed his first applications in the 50s, and kept filing continuations on them, getting some patents issued in the 90s, but with priority from an application in the 50s. You can see a short PDF article on the courts striking down the practice of submarine patents.

This would not be the first time that Caltech has taken an innovation and turned it into a big time money maker. DNA Sequencing made a lot of money for Caltech, though not without some controversies.

Atlantis, Discovery, Enterprise, Endeavor, Challenger and Columbia.

Technically correct - Enterprise, OV-101, is listed as being a "space shuttle" - but is not equipped for orbital flight: it was purely a test vehicle, for testing the adapted 747 shuttle transporter's characteristics, and practising landings at a dry lake bed and Edwards AFB. (It's now owned by the Smithsonian as an exhibit.) Only the other 5 you list have been into orbit, with the original two now listed as being "retired"; Endeavour was ordered in 1987 as a replacement for Challenger, but incorporates a crew module built in 1982.

Trivia for you: Enterprise was originally supposed to be named Constitution, but a letter-writing campaign by Trek fans convinced the government to change it...

The Skylab station was carried into space on the last of the Saturn V rockets to be launched. Hats off to the most powerful booster ever built. The Saturn V achieved a perfect launch record, rare in any rocket, much less a big one. Its computer was attached to the inside walls of a 1x6.7 meter ring, but your PDA is easily more powerful. Nevertheless the computer even demonstrated it could withstand a direct strike by lightning, twice, on the Apollo 12 launch and still keep going.

Excellent point... you hit the nail right on the head. I believe that the greatest opportunity for open-source systems, in general, lies not in the already-entrenched markets, but in markets that have yet to be explored due to current cost constraints.

Why does Google use Linux on its machines? Linux did not become the best solution for high-end web servers overnight, taking large portions of that particular market share from proprietary rivals. Instead, by becoming the first* widely-used, affordable (read: free) clustered operating system, Linux found its way into Google when Google saw that Beowulf clusters, the new open-source alternative, would be the better route to go than the old way of traditional, monolithic servers.

(*Correct me if I am wrong...)

By the way, the parent post piqued my interest... for more information about the coming-about of the electric guitar, follow this link.

Actually, the "Sonic Wind 1" is at the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico.
The Kansas Cosmosphere has the "Sonic Wind 2" on display...
</nitpick>

F-105 Thunderchief (this was originally designed for nuclear strike, even though that wasn't what it became famous for).

F-105. F-101 Voodoo (the toss computer was made by Mergenthaler Linotype of all people)!

B-47 Stratojet (a pretty big aircraft for this kind of maneuver).

...and the Corona satellite.
What I find interesting is that what most people in the US and the rest of the world thought to be a series of peacefull research sateliets named Discovery, actually was the corona spy satelite system. It's even more amazing when you realise what they actually achived with such a 'primitive' system, starting virtually from scratch.

I also found some links to the Thor booster and Agena spacecraft, variants A, B and D on Encyclopedia Astronautica - my favorite webpage for such things.

If you go here

You'll see her full name: Jamie Hodgkins

What is the editor Jamie's last name?

Is it true that it IS /.-Jamie?

The Librarians' Index to the Internet is the best place I know of to search for high-quality web sites.
A few moments of searching there found some likely winners:
Space Place
The Kids on the Web
Kids' Castle

... it does seem that whenever they talk about space they compare things to Volkwagens.

I'm a professional soldier, so here's what I have to say.

If I'm called on to go to visit my colleagues who are already in Iraq, I'll be carrying over 130 lbs of protective gear, weapons, ammo, rucksack and equipment, and the bulk of it goes on my back. A plane and a parachute gets me to my DZ and I walk from there.

Military equipment is bulky and heavy. Take the PLGR (Precision Lightweight GPS Receiver). The last picture shows it's size. This puppy weighs 2.75 pounds and is huge. Compare to any Garmin, Magellan, Lowrance and others whose products weigh less than a pound and are a quarter of the size. (Blah, blah, Selective Availability. Another discussion.)

Another example: The Mortar Ballistic Computer weighs 7 lbs and makes my Gameboy Advance (cheap entertainment in the field) look like a Cray Supercomputer. Oh, and it's roughly 20x larger than the GBA.

So if I had the room in my ruck for a laptop (I don't), and I could justify spending $4500 on it - four months' pay (I took a slight paycut when I quit my sysadmin job in Silicon Valley for the opportunity to get gassed in Iraq), you could bet I'd be buying one of these and not FOUR pieces of crap that are going to break when I hit the DZ.

Cheers! :)

Oregon, Texas, what's the difference!?!

Yeah, but they're working on this technology using the work done at Lake Vostok as an example.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

first a.c. post
fuck karma whoring subscriber monkeys

And Roland has staked out the idea of individual string pickups with the V guitar pickup.

But the six individual pickups predate the MIDI era.

I have one of these http://www.si.edu/lemelson/guitars/noframes/de08.h tm a Gittler, which has six individual volumes and a DB9 port to separate all the signal out to the six different effects chains and amps.

The rotating headlights on the Citroen DS are hardly a new feature - the concept was present on the far more attractive Tucker 48, amongst many other features before their time.

This is pretty old news but it's got better pics. Norad has been tracking space trash for decades. Fact of the matter is, there is trash up there, yes it can hurt you or the shuttle, or the hubble, etc. But the odds are very slim for most orbits. The hubble got hit with a little piece once, but the odds are pretty slim anything we send up will get hit by debris.

he major music companies may fret over falling revenue, but one label saw its business jump 33 percent last year -- thanks in part to the recordable compact discs that the industry says are hurting its sales.

The label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is using recordable CD's, or CD-R's, to ensure that each release in its extensive catalog is always available. And in doing so, the label best known for dusty recordings by Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly is taking initial steps toward creating a 21st-century "celestial jukebox," where nothing recorded ever goes out of print.

The Folkways inventory includes 2,168 titles dating to 1948. Some of those are collections by familiar troubadours like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs. But many more are obscurities like "Music From Western Samoa: From Conch Shell to Disco" (1984) and "Folk Songs of the Canadian North Woods" (1955).

Most recording companies, if they would ever release titles like that to begin with, would let the master tapes languish once a first pressing was sold out and initial interest had waned.

The notion of any recording falling into history's dust bin was said to gall Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records. Dan Sheehy, director of Smithsonian Folkways, recalled that Mr. Asch used to ask if Q would be dropped from the alphabet just because it wasn't used as much as the rest of the letters.

When the Smithsonian Institution bought Folkways from the Asch estate in 1987, the museum agreed to keep every title in print. Initially, requests for rare, out-of-stock albums were fulfilled with dubbed cassettes.

Now, music fans hankering for "Burmese Folk and Traditional Music" from 1953 can pay $19.95 and receive a CD-R "burned" with the original album, along with a standard cardboard slipcase that includes a folded photocopy of the original liner notes.

The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group representing the major music corporations, worries that CD-R technology aids music piracy. Rather than buy new CD's, the theory goes, people will burn downloaded music onto CD-R's or burn a copy of a friend's CD.

In 2002, 681 million CD's were sold, down from 763 million the year before, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has been using the CD-R technology since 1996 to sell its obscure titles, essentially creating a just-in-time delivery model for record companies. Every time an order comes in, a Folkways employee burns five copies, one for the customer, and four for future requests.

Last year, the company sold 13,467 CD-R's, accounting for 6 percent of its CD sales, said Richard Burgess, director of marketing. Over all, Smithsonian Folkways had net album sales of almost $2.9 million in 2002, up 33 percent from 2001, despite its cutting its advertising budget more than 50 percent.

Interest in Smithsonian Folkways has jumped since the bluegrass-flavored soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2001), from Universal, won a Grammy for Album of the Year and went platinum six times over.

But it is not just rustic American music that Smithsonian Folkways is selling.

A 2002 double-CD set of Middle Eastern and Asian songs called "The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan" has sold 7,800 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Though that is just a fraction of the sales for Eminem in a single week, it is a respectable figure for a museum label that makes no videos, places few ads and deals primarily in music recorded by artists long dead, or in foreign languages, or from locales most Americans will never visit.

"Getting rid of inventory, which is what this custom on-demand stuff is about, is a huge step in the right direction toward making even low-selling albums into a business," said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

Industry analysts say it is also a step toward making all music forever available, one the record business has yet to take successfully.

In 1999, Alliance Entertainment's RedDotNet subsidiary unveiled kiosks that would burn discs in retail outlets while customers waited. But that program failed, in part because the company was not able to secure licensing agreements with major labels, according to Eric Weisman, president and chief executive of Alliance.

Echo, a new consortium of retailers including Best Buy, Tower and Wherehouse, is considering development of in-store stations that would allow customers to download music onto portable digital music players like Apple's iPod.

While the Smithsonian Folkways CD-R operation allows the company to fulfill its obligation to keep everything in print, it is a labor-intensive solution that would be inefficient for the higher-demand catalogs of the major labels.

But Smithsonian Folkways is also venturing into just-in-time delivery for more popular titles. Last fall, the company enlisted the print-on-demand company Americ Disc to manufacture CD's, which are expected to sell significantly more copies than typical CD-R's, but fewer than full-blown retail releases. These Collector's Series discs come with full-color booklets and are identical in quality to commercial releases, but are sold only through the Smithsonian Folkways Web site (www.si.edu/folkways).

The first CD in the series, "Bells & Winter Festivals of Greek Macedonia" proved so popular through mail order that the company quickly made it a regular retail release.

It is hard for some to ignore the irony that as Smithsonian Folkways uses CD-R's to further its business, much of the industry hopes to limit the technology's use.

"It's almost like a little bootlegger's operation going on," said Dean Blackwood, owner of Revenant Records, an esoteric Americana label.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ordering information

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

• A focus. While they couldn't give us a mother and cubs, they could've given us the evolutionary equivalent. Take a couple of classes or orders and get us to care what happens to them over then next 200 million years. Introduce the squids early on. The only continuity TFIW had was "location of former cities"
• Drama- rather than suddenly show the last mammal, they should've shown 100 million years of decreasing diversity.
• Digressions. TFIW had few animals per time zone. If TFIW didn't have the computational budget to animate more they at least could have had more still shots. Documentaries tend to be filled with side loops, constantly showing local diversity- while the predator waits, we take five minutes to check out a cute symbiotic relationship, or a flock of colorful birds, or the prey's prey, or a dung beetle (which also is part of my next point...)
• Humor. Let's see some baby spiders falling off the web before going into the extinction of mammals next time.

• Flying fish- yes, they do exist, flapping their tiny pectoral fins: check out some of the Amazonian Hatchetfish species.
• The unlikeliness of X (giant land squid, silver spiders, etc): who'd have predicted what Pikaia-like creatures could lead to over the next 500 million years
• the diversity of life over the past 500 million years: spend a few hours exploring the Tree of Life Project: after that, none of TFIW speculations seem too weird (although they made some physiological mistakes- as pointed out by others, the giant tortoises's legs don't make sense)
• Extinct mammals: well, out of all of these all we have left are the birds.
• Missing signs of humans: I've seen estimates (can't find them right away- one was in Sci-Am I think) that suggest most large-scale signs of humans (buildings, satellites, canals) would be gone within 500,000 years. Even the longest-lasting signs (large concentrations of radioactive elements, space probes, AOL CDs) won't last more than 100-200 million years given subduction, etc).

I don't buy Vogel's theory that such a thing could have been intentional. But it's hard to ignore the optical scans of reports of nuclear tests referring to them as a "mushroom to 18,000 feet in typical Port Chicago fashion". Or the fact that the same guy (USN Capt William Parsons) who wrote the initial report on the effects of Port Chicago's blast was a year later aboard the Enola Gay as the Manhattan Project scientist on the crew that attacked Hiroshima. The Napa Sentinel found that the ship's destination was Tinian, which was where the atomic attacks did actually originate a year later. And the atomic bombs were shipped through the rebuilt Port Chicago.

So what about the radiation? Well, it immediately struck me in the talk with my friend that we in the Bay Area "always thought the massively high cancer rates in Contra Costa County were due to the oil refineries." Since they have that problem there, once again I see logic pointing at checking it further, not dismissing it.

There seems to be disagreement over the presence of radiation at the scene of the explosion, since no one knew to watch for it. And the site remains under military control today. But this whole thing can be tested one way or the other by checking for elevated background radiation levels in the uninhabited areas of the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta to the northeast of the Concord Naval Weapons Center (formerly known as Port Chicago) which would have been downwind of the explosion in 1944 and where the fallout would have settled.

(In that part of California in July, overnight winds are always inland from San Francisco Bay into the Central Valley. And online info indicates that night in 1944 winds were out of the WSW as would be expected.)

For comparison, the Pulsar, the first digital watch the on the market, cost $2100. A couple years later digital watches were under $20 from Texas Instruments, and just a couple of years after that TI was out of the watch business because they couldn't compete against $4 imports.

This isn't saying that self-winding watches will take off in the same way; it's just comparing the prices of mass-production stuff versus very low rate production.

For comparison, the Pulsar, the first digital watch the on the market, cost $2100. A couple years later digital watches were under $20 from Texas Instruments, and just a couple of years after that TI was out of the watch business because they couldn't compete against $4 imports.

This isn't saying that self-winding watches will take off in the same way; it's just comparing the prices of mass-production stuff versus very low rate production.

(Williams makes some very small turbojet engines, famously for use in cruise missiles)

If I remember correctly, the Jetpack was a very Buck Rogers-looking device, with considerably greater endurance than the Bell Rocketbelt. Unlike the Rocketbelt with its' flight time of ~30 seconds (depending on which model you get your hands on); the Jetpack had a flight time of about 7 minutes, and featured a helmet shaker that would get your attention when you were about to run out of fuel.

(I want to say the Smithsonian display claimed a flight time of 30 minutes...)

So there's the problem... we can easily build an engine -- turbofan or rocket -- that'll lift itself, some fuel, and a person -- it just can't lift very much fuel, and these engines (or rockets) are thirsty!!

I can't seem to find much mention of the Jetpack on the Air & Space site, so here's what I can find:

• www.flying-contraptions.com
  • "The WASP (Williams Aerial Survey Platform) had a jet engine on the bottom; a single occupant essentially stood on the fuel tank. Williams International, in Walled Lake, Michigan, makes little fanjet engines for cruise missiles, which were ideal for one-man jet belts. Bell worked with them on a jet belt with 7-minute endurance, which first flew on 7 April 1969. Later Williams developed the WASP, later renamed the "X-JET", which looked like a pilot standing in a garbage can. The 600-pound turbofan was mounted in front of the pilot, and the WASP could stay airborne for 30 minutes, reach speeds of 60 mph, and land in a four-square-foot area. It is unknown where the project stands today. It was a contract with the Army Tank Automotive Command. "

• Smithsonian Air & Space Museum page about the Bell Rocketbelt
  • "However, despite the belt's apparent popularity, it turned out to be a commercial failure, mainly due to its limited use because of its short duration use. The Army's higher priority of missile development also contributed toward the loss of Army interest. The Army, and also Marine Corps which had considered the belt, did not adopt it and Bell no longer became sought its further development. In January, 1970, a license to sell and manufacture the Bell Jet Belt was granted by Bell Aerospace Textron to Williams International (formerly Williams Research Corp.) of Walled Lake, Michigan. Williams went onto to develop an improved, longer-duration jet-powered version of the belt."

• Page mostly about the Bell Rocketbelt, but attributes a turbojet-based belt to them as well

• This site seems to confirm my "30 minute flight time" recollection -- but the quote is "...an endurance of up to 26 minutes was anticipated", which would seem to say it was never achieved.

• Here's another (similar) picture, but the site it links to is a 404.

And one (or more) of the Super Bowls. Plus a Bond movie too (Thunderball I think).

Just from what I have seen, I think those were the Bell Rocket Belt that he was talking about (seen here).
I think his design has it's merits. But it also has flaws. If it will work - great, but I just am not sold.

RonB

Hmm, I guess it's how you judge the overlap. It's a good question, for one, whether we would have gone to the Moon when we did, or ever, without the race against the Soviets, a race with strong military overtones. Or to ask how much it would have cost to go to the Moon if ICBM and the Cold War had never happened. Either way, it is undeniable the U.S. was terrified of the Soviet Union, particularly its (largely imagined) nuclear missile capability. Kennedy ran in 1960 partly on a fabricated "missile gap" platform.

Small nukes? I don't think they got really small until the 60's, when we became interested in MIRV's. The ICBM business took its own path when it switched to the far more manageable and reliable solid fuel rockets, the Minuteman series. (I remember a Titan exploding when I was a kid because a wrench was dropped down the silo. It took them a while to figure out where the warhead has gone.) Obviously the Saturn V was designed with a special civilian purpose, but its roots were predictably military.

It was also not clear for a while whether we might have a manned military presence in orbit. Happily we went the stabilizing route of the ABM treaty instead. Oh yeah, the former ABM treaty -- but that's a whole 'nuther topic!

My point anyway was to humbly acknowledge that the American dominance of space flight wasn't just due to our brilliance and hard work and love of discovery :); we subsidized it with many billions for grim military reasons, some altogether necessary. The secondary point, before anyone could say the cold war didn't waste trillions, was that military objectives are an inefficient way to pursue civilian space exploration. Programs like Ariane went straight to the target (I'm hoping here that Ariane never had military purposes?).

Gee, NASM even has a page on the military origins of the space race. I'm finding these things through Google, things I fuzzily recall reading elsewhere over the years. Anyway, what I'm seeing at the moment is a pervasive military motivation, even if the ways the monery was spent didn't always make sense. I would bet Americans somehow felt more secure that it was Americans landing on the Moon rather than Soviets. I remember the vague worries about being incinerated in the 70's quite clearly.

I don't believe that the civilian space program has ever fully disengaged from the military. The Space Shuttle itself was designed with significiant military purposes in mind. IIRC most of the military business went elsewhere after Challenger, and our satellite launching rockets may still be behind because of exaggerated hopes and hypes that the Shuttle could do it all. As the subsidies have been reduced the space program has suffered, to the point that I believe the military is very concerned with maintaining our current launch capabilities. I assume that the market for military satellites is still strong, and that the U.S. won't be launching these on foreign rockets anytime soon.

Hmm, I guess it's how you judge the overlap. It's a good question, for one, whether we would have gone to the Moon when we did, or ever, without the race against the Soviets, a race with strong military overtones. Or to ask how much it would have cost to go to the Moon if ICBM and the Cold War had never happened. Either way, it is undeniable the U.S. was terrified of the Soviet Union, particularly its (largely imagined) nuclear missile capability. Kennedy ran in 1960 partly on a fabricated "missile gap" platform.

Small nukes? I don't think they got really small until the 60's, when we became interested in MIRV's. The ICBM business took its own path when it switched to the far more manageable and reliable solid fuel rockets, the Minuteman series. (I remember a Titan exploding when I was a kid because a wrench was dropped down the silo. It took them a while to figure out where the warhead has gone.) Obviously the Saturn V was designed with a special civilian purpose, but its roots were predictably military.

It was also not clear for a while whether we might have a manned military presence in orbit. Happily we went the stabilizing route of the ABM treaty instead. Oh yeah, the former ABM treaty -- but that's a whole 'nuther topic!

My point anyway was to humbly acknowledge that the American dominance of space flight wasn't just due to our brilliance and hard work and love of discovery :); we subsidized it with many billions for grim military reasons, some altogether necessary. The secondary point, before anyone could say the cold war didn't waste trillions, was that military objectives are an inefficient way to pursue civilian space exploration. Programs like Ariane went straight to the target (I'm hoping here that Ariane never had military purposes?).

Gee, NASM even has a page on the military origins of the space race. I'm finding these things through Google, things I fuzzily recall reading elsewhere over the years. Anyway, what I'm seeing at the moment is a pervasive military motivation, even if the ways the monery was spent didn't always make sense. I would bet Americans somehow felt more secure that it was Americans landing on the Moon rather than Soviets. I remember the vague worries about being incinerated in the 70's quite clearly.

I don't believe that the civilian space program has ever fully disengaged from the military. The Space Shuttle itself was designed with significiant military purposes in mind. IIRC most of the military business went elsewhere after Challenger, and our satellite launching rockets may still be behind because of exaggerated hopes and hypes that the Shuttle could do it all. As the subsidies have been reduced the space program has suffered, to the point that I believe the military is very concerned with maintaining our current launch capabilities. I assume that the market for military satellites is still strong, and that the U.S. won't be launching these on foreign rockets anytime soon.

Since we never went to the Moon, these should still be on Earth somewhere, and still have good fuel in them.
You should be able to power a laptop and a good all-band radio with it.

You absolutely can't miss the U.S. Space and Rocket Center - it's the Earth's largest space museum, featuring a real Saturn V moon rocket lying on the ground and a mock-up standing on end, a slew of other rockets (Redstone, Atlas, Jupiter C, Hermes, V-2, a Shuttle mock-up, real engines all over the place, and more), space station presentation, Skylab mock-ups, full lunar lander and rover exhibits, and more, plus a helicopter and some missiles. They have a moon rock on display. (You can touch the one at the Smithsonian.) There's an IMAX Dome theater showing something spacey, a climbing wall, Mars rides, a centrifuge, and a really fast outdoor elevator to nowhere they call "Space Shot."

You are confusing "technology" and "technological development". You are saying that there is a correlation between a country's technological development and their wealth. That's undoubtedly true, but it has nothing to do with whether the development of new technologies solves the problems that underdeveloped countries have today. What we are discussing here is whether the development of new technologies will help underdeveloped nations. Underdevelopment is not a problem of any lack of new technologies, it's a social problem of the lack of deployment of existing technologies.

With every technological improvement population size decreases.

Take a look here. Technological improvements bring about massive population growth. It is only that when individual countries become enormously wealthy that their population growth slows. It is wealth, not technology, that causes population growth rates to decline.

And even in most of the wealthiest and technologically most developed countries, populations are still growing today. There are very few countries in the world where population sizes actually are decreasing.

Mouse did a lot of work for the Grateful Dead back in the day. The Europe '72 cover art was his. He also won a Grammy for the cover art for one of Steve Miller's albums. Mouse's original work goes for a pretty penny these days and I doubt he is hurting for cash. He may well believe he has a legit complaint. Bio...

As to the ambulatory eyeball, variations of that (usually a flying eyeball) were a common theme in hippie art of the '60s. The motif goes back to Ancient Egypt and are a hot rod staple. Maybe if you combine the eyeball with a Monsters, Inc motif, Mouse would have something, but the monster eyeball alone isn't enough.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?

I assume you mean satellite, but anyway...
Yes, something like this is used in space all the time. RTG, SNAP, whatever you want to call it, heat from decaying radioactive fuel heats one end of a bank of thermocouples, and the heat bleeds off the other end, to generate electricity. Both manned, and unmanned have used them.
Doesn't anybody remember when the logic-impaired Greenpeace types were whining about Galileo, with its RTG?
Anyway, I just want to point out that, at least from the article, this sounds like another non-news thing. unless it's considered a big deal to use natural hot and cold water for the temperature gradient.

The MIT students didn't quite get it right. Their gadget doesn't seem to have gain. The key insight needed for fluidics is that a jet of fluid can be diverted with a smaller jet coming in from the side. This allows building a fluidic amplifier.

Once you have an amplifier, you can do switches, gates, flip-flops, and other logic elements. Analog control systems, with fluidic sensors and amplifiers driving pneumatic or hydraulic cylinders, are also possible. When the inputs and outputs are pneumatic or hydraulic, it's often convenient if the control system is, too. Fluidic elements are very reliable, too - there are no moving parts except the working fluid.

One wierd fluidic application is this kosher public address system.

The same tactics (not necessarily the same abuse) have occurred over the lifetime of the patent system. There was a previous /. story (I'm too lazy to look for it) about how patent litigation stifled the development of the airplane until in WWI the US government refused to honor the affected patents. Then innovation just took off, if you'll pardon the pun.

Also, I believe Edison had several patents covering the light bulb. (And thousands of patents covering other things.) It may be obvious to you but it was certainly not obvious in 1879.

(Doesn't Voyager and all other longterm probes to the outer solar system use beta emitter batteries?)

No.

Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's)
Three RTG's provide electric power to Voyager. The generators produce about 1800 watts of heat by the radioactive decay of plutonium. The heat is then converted to about 400 watts of electric power by thermocouplers. The RTG's are mounted on a boom to protect the scientific instruments from excess heat and radioactivity.

Why would the CIA World Factbook offend anyone? it's a tremendously good resource.

One thing the US government is really good about is putting out lots of free data archives that it's spent money building. There are *excellent* resources available to the world:

The USGS puts out really great maps and elevation maps for free. Not something you can produce on your own easily.

NASA puts out some of my favorite stuff -- images, huge quantities of data.

The Farm Security Administration has some really nice old photographs.

The Library of Congress has tons of really nice stuff.

The Smithsonian is one of the greatest museums I can imagine.

The US government is one of the most steady and highest-quality provider of useful content (and ad-free!) available to the Internet.

I kind of wish there was some site that listed all the US government sites as a sort of tree...make it easier to browse through them.

i don't care if this scorpion is robotic, it isn't cool unless it flouresces like a real scorpion. honestly, they make the coolest dorm pets :-)

(in case you're interested in this, check out this link: HERE)

Might be a little bit of speculation, but they could do a bit of comparative studies. They could potentially know the size of infants (from nearly hatched egg fossils) and adults. Depending iftyou consider them warm or cold blooded you can roughly estimate their growth rate based on contemporary animals (say gators, birds and mammals) and extrapolate from there.

Also, some bones and teeth exhibit growth rings, like those of trees. Maybe this type of dino had bone growth rings that are clearly visible.

The flag icon for Slashdot's 'United States' section is missing its first stripe - the stripe that represents Delaware, the first state admitted to the Union. While a simple oversight could be forgiven, it should be known from here on out that Slashdot is in fact aware of the missing stripe, and even worse, refuses to do anything about it!

This vulgar flag desecration and rabid anti-Delawarism must be put to a stop. Let the Slashdot crew know that we will not accept a knowingly mutilated flag or the insinuation that Delawarians deserve to be cut out of the union. I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?

This intentional disregard of a vital national symbol is unpatriotic. Why, the flippant remarks CmdrTaco made about our flag border on terrorism! I urge you to join the protest in each 'United States' story. Sacrifice your karma for your country by pointing out this injustice. Let's all work together to get our flag back. Can you give your country any less?