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In the 50's they fitted a B-36 bomber with a nuclear reactor to study the feasability of a nuclear powered aircraft. The damn thing even flew, but under the power of conventional engines... the testbed had no way of using the power the reactor generated for flight. A second plane, one that actually would be powered by the reactor and not just carrying it, was planned but never built. A quick google search yeilded this url if you want more info: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pettypi/elevon/baugher_us/b 036-13.html

Nearly every platform has an interpreter for the old Infocom text games. Zork I, II, and III are available for free legally from ActiVision,
and once you have a z-machine interpreter for your Mac, you can use any of the other Infocom games you can find. There are also many (legal) free z-machine games available on the net, and I think that Activision recently sold a CD-ROM with most of the old Infocom collection, including Hitchhiker's Guide, Enchanter, and the others.

Any one of these will keep you busy for the whole flight and taxi ride to your hotel, and you'll probably stay up and keep playing once you get there instead of sleeping off the jet lag. Just remember to bring a pad of paper, pencil, and eraser for drawing maps and working out mazes.

I just found the killer application for my Zaurus Linux PDA. Since it has a builtin keyboard, I was able to play the classic textadventure "Zork" with the help of an Infocom game interpreter while sitting in a waiting room for nearly an hour yesterday. (The people around me must have thought I'm crazy while I was trying to figure out how to get down that &%$ chimney.)
And of course I can always switch to a drawing application to make maps of all the rooms.

For those of you young whippersnappers who have never heard of a grue, download and play Zork or any of the old, great Infocom games... from the "good old days" of computing, when anything over 16 kilobytes was a tremendous amount of free memory...

For those of you young whippersnappers who have never heard of a grue, download and play Zork or any of the old, great Infocom games... from the "good old days" of computing, when anything over 16 kilobytes was a tremendous amount of free memory...

I'm still curious as to how he's going to change Ad-Aware to prevent it being uninstalled by this other program. Does anybody know?

This calls to mind the old story of Robin Hood and Friar Tuck. Essentially instead of having one program that can be killed off/removed, you have two programs each keeping an eye on the other, and starting/reinstalling the other as required.

As someone commented in the last thread on this topic, this all rather reminds me of Core Wars, played out at large. We just need a better way of keeping score...

Ewen

We who design solar cars beg to differ :).

Although you're right, current generation solar cars can only generate about 1-1.6 kW or so, but even then they can cruise at or above 75 km/h.

Of course, right now it's not very comfortable, only seats one person (usually), and is bloody expensive, but who knows what the future will bring?

I don't think DNA will be viable for most standard computational tasks, or for a practial turing machine.

No (respected) person in the field of DNA computing thinks that DNA computing will be practical for everyday tasks. It's just too slow. (For that matter, no turing machine is practical. Every try to program one?)

For the record, I (Geoff Wozniak) am a graduate student of Dr. Lila Kari, a well known member of the field of DNA computing. Incidently, Lila was involved in the project talked about in the article.

However, what DNA computing could be useful for in the future is solving problems that can take electronic computers far too long to figure out. Consider the SAT problem that was solved in this article. Suppose we are able to get DNA to solve SAT problems with hundreds of variables. Sure, it might take a week to do it, (maybe even a month), but it sure beats waiting for millions of years.

Quantum computers, however, could change the whole spectrum. However, they are not as evolved as "DNA computers" are right now and I suspect they may take a longer time to be viable.

Biological systems don't use DNA to do logical operations (that I know of), and the only thing they use it for is for data storage (instructions for building proteins). The only operations (under normal circumstances) an organism does with DNA is copy. Mutations (reversals, transpositions, etc.) occur because of chemical errors. That is the only operation it does really.

Biological systems do a lot more than just copy. Look up work by Landweber and Kari on ciliates and gene rearrangement, for starters. In addition to copy, biological systems also to extracting/cutting, filtering, and pasting/annealing.

You mentioned data storage. Here is where the real benefit of DNA could come into use. The way genes are expressed using only A, C, G, T is quite remarkable. The real advantage of DNA computation lies, imo, in the encoding proerties of DNA. The language of DNA has incredible error-detecting/correcting capabilities. Our work is focusing on learning more about this language and using it for the computational process in some way. I/O would be slow to DNA, but if it can store huge quantities of information, it's worth the effort, especially if better ways for long term storage can be found (of which there is a good chance).

You have to think outside of the conventional computing process to see why DNA computation is so interesting. The problem is that "computers" and "electronic" seem to be synonymous, which they are most certainly not.

Woz

The PDP-11 series were extensively copied in the USSR, as were the IBM 360 mainframes

I grew up on Space Quest - they helped make me the geek I am today - and I really hope this sequel happens. Hopefully it will be done properly... while I enjoyed Kings Quest's foray into the 3D world (Mask of Eternity), it was so different from the classic games that it lost a lot of the magic.

Something else I'd love to see is some sort of graphical sequel to the Planetfall games. I loved Floyd and I always wanted to SEE him. Sure, there was the cancelled Activision sequel but something far better could be done these days... Alright, enough dreaming...

I think the Monkey Island games are a good example of a series that has managed to retain its charm throughout all its visual and audio updates. It's unfortunate that a lot of other games have fared much worse. I wasn't even particularly fond of Space Quest 6, myself... Hopefully they will look to Space Quest 4 for much of their inspiration while they figure out where to go with the new game.

In 1941, they had lost the Battle of Britain, were losing the capability to launch an invasion of Britain, and were focussing a lot of effort on the Battle of the Atlantic...which they would have won until American long-range bombers(B29s) became available in large numbers.

B-29s were never used in the European Theatre.

"You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here

If you have never played these fantastic text based adventures, do yourself a favour , and download a free copy !

Darren Kruse CCNP CCDP
WAN/LAN Networking Consultant
mailto://darren_kruse@hotmail.com
www.geocities.com/darren_kruse

If anyone is interested, I'll be conducting an audio interview with David Wiseman Friday morning. The interview is for UWO's campus radio station CHRW, to air on our 12:30 newsmagazine. It'll probably air sometime next week. I'll be asking him some questions about his contribution to the project, as well as about being interviewed by Salon. He's a pretty interesting guy (as evidenced by his website), so there should be some colourful dialog.

If anyone is interested, I'll be conducting an audio interview with David Wiseman Friday morning. The interview is for UWO's campus radio station CHRW, to air on our 12:30 newsmagazine. It'll probably air sometime next week. I'll be asking him some questions about his contribution to the project, as well as about being interviewed by Salon. He's a pretty interesting guy (as evidenced by his website), so there should be some colourful dialog.

Aside from his good works in the terms of Usenet, David is the reason I am where I am today. 4 years ago, I was stuck in Perth, Australia and very bored. I was reading the student newspaper one day and saw an article about student exchanges. To cut a long story short, 6 months later I was at The University of Western Ontario.

I had looked over the courses they ran in Computer Science there, and saw one called "Unix and C". Being a bit of a geek and having used unix a *tiny* bit in my high school days, I thought it was be a cool one to take. David was the lecturer for this course. He had a lot of knowledge and passion for the subject, which is unsurprising considering his experiance with all manners of unicies. His classes for CS175a taught me a lot about Unix (and a little about C). I got 92% overall for the unit, an A+ and the highest mark I've ever got for any unit. The next semester I was at Western, I taught myself Perl, using an account on the CS Department servers and on the Reznet linux box a friend had :)

It was a unit for non comp-sci majors. CS Majors were expected to learn this stuff in a bunch of different classes.
Sadly, Western no longer offers CS175a - Unix and C. I feel it is a loss to the community as a whole, but at the same time, I understand that a one semester course in Unix and C probably isn't seen as too acedemic by many. Which I think is a shame. Too many universities turn out gimps fluent in one langauge, and one language only - Windows *shudder*. I think it sad that units to teach people how to click mice and use Word can get you acedemic credit, but Unix and C courses don't seem worthy enough to run.

When my time was up in Canada, I came back to Australia and while I finished my degree, I made money on the side doing CGI scripts in Perl. Then, when my degree was finished, I applied for a job as a System Admin at a department at The University of Western.. Australia. It was the first job I applied for and I got a callback the morning after I had a 70 minute panel interview. Due, in large part, to the stuff I had learnt in David's class, I passed the interview quite well.

Today, I am 22, earn over AU$40k, I get to play with lots of cool computing and network hardware, and I think it would be safe to say that if I hadn't taken that course with David, I wouldn't be where I am today. I suspect I would have been working as a security guard, making minimum wage, since my degree wasn't actually in Computer Science, but Security Studies. Thinking back, I'm pretty damn glad I did take it ;)

David's homepage is here

Most of the problems with the B-1 were political in nature or were the result of politics.

Agreed. The politics of the B-1 were thick enough to spawn a book. The B-1 was promised as a plane that could do everything, and that could provide pork-barrel spending for everyone - it has taken twenty years to get past that mess and actually use the plane.

Politics factored heavily in the B-52 work as well, but as this article describes (in incredible, down-to-the-serial-number detail), most of the problems were resolved. Now it's fairly cost-effective. The B-1 is still considered too expensive, and that will probably be what finally kills it.

• April 17, 1990, posted by Jon Blow:
  ...By this time, the wizards [dungeonmasters] had locked off a few areas that were just spam-for-the-senses...
  
• June 27, 1990, posted by Vintage Mutant Ganja Technerd:
  For example, a delay of 5 to 10 seconds between object creations and logging in, will all do the trick of 'limiting' spamming without the juggling of quotas, login times, keeping track of hosts, et al.
  
• October 4, 1990, posted by A Molitor:
  ...when you run a MUD advertised as having few or no rules, a MUD where you can do anything, players *will* spam it. This is not conjecture, but documented historical fact. Ask around about BloodMUD some time.
  

• From: Jon Blow (blojo@tornado.Berkeley.EDU)
  Subject: Re: Word wrap
  Newsgroups: alt.mud
  Date: 1990-01-22 23:18:55 PST
  Right now my entire adventure is formatted to be easy-readable in 80 columns. This is also a pain, since 1) It takes much longer for me to write it, and I constantly feel a loss of artistic quality when I am forced to reword so that a line will fit; 2) People with wordwrap must turn it OFF, or the adventure will look like Spam. Bummer.

Bard's Tale, that takes me back. I used to test for EA back then (and Infocom) and spent countless hours (thank god they're countless) on the first two in this series on a Commodore 64. They made as much on selling the solution booklets as they did on the software. Speaking of flashbacks, anyone else out there do an Infocom "Marathon of the Minds"? I'm listed in the middle there. But both teams did NOT deserve to win, dammit. We finished the game (Hollywood Hijinx) half an hour before they did, but because of a glitch in it (pre-release version) it didn't tell you it was over and that the bad guy was supposed to escape when you saved the girl, so we kept playing. I still bear the scars...

I knew I'd seen this before - you can play all the classic Infocom games via telnet; see http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ for details.

Sh00z is correct though - Lurking Horror, like many other Infocom games, requires information provided on trinkets included in the retail box. However, the Zorks don't require external information to complete, IIRC; incidentally, the original series has been released to the public domain: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/download.html

There's Infocom's excellent text adventure The Lurking Horror, which is a horror story based on G.U.E. Tech (Great Dome, anyone?). It is an excellent story, and it can get scary as hell as you play it.

You can download it here (direct link), as well as pretty much all of Infocom's adventures. You can also find these high-quality scans of the manuals that came with original Infocom games very helpful -- you should always read them before actually playing the game, as you'll discover with The Lurking Horror.

Sidenote: in order to play these games, you'll need something like frotz. Good luck.

How about $0 Baldric a student run beowulf at the University of Western Ontario built one on hardware dontations. It's not exactly top 500 but it still kicks ass.

It is already being used in autonomous robots for its superiority over sonar at Helpmate with funding from NIST, for use in hospital robots.

Zork, from infogames.

You can apparently get the old Zork stuff from the Infocom web site.

Involves getting eaten by grues, trolls with weapons, that kind of stuff, but no humans are harmed (apart from the player).

See... even Geeks have violent fantasies. We kill imaginary creatures for fun. And profit.

Please tell me it's not the same Infocom as this one.

In addition to the FBI, they may well find themselves in a legal battle with Activision, who hold all rights to the Infocom property.

__

Try the InvisiClues (probably the Heart Of Gold section) which are conveniently available at the bottom of:
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pete/Infocom/hitchhikers.ht ml

IANAL. Also, IANAPA (patent agent, or patent attorney, not all of whom are lawyers).

Slashdotters evidently need more information about patents. I'm going to try and give what I know, using this patent as an example.

First, each patent claim is separate from the others. Each one is effectively its own patent. You'll notice how patent 2 includes patent 1. This is because the first claim is the broadest claim that the patentholder can possibly lay claim to. Claim 2 is more specific, and then it just gets more detailed as you go on. This is normal. In most patent filings, you get a hierarchy of claims.

If Slashdot would let me, I'd put up a table enumerating the hierarchy. But it won't. Sigh. :)

Therefore, I will use my own webspace. Open this in another window and keep it handy.

Anyway, there appear to be three root claims in this particular patent. To wit, claims 1, 29, and 37 each have no dependencies, and set up their own trees.

This is important. One thing to remember is that the root claim is most often just a case of wishful thinking on the part of the patent drafter. It is probably too broad, and will be struck down in court. In theory, the PTO and its equivalent agencies in other countries would get rid of these claims, but in practice, they don't.

However, this does not mean that its dependent claims go with it. Actually, quite the opposite. Because they've been modified, they're narrower, they cover less, they're harder to attack.

But on the other hand, if you get one of the really narrow claims, you get all of its predecessors too. For example, suppose you find prior art for Claim No. 12. That allows you to knock out Claims No. 1, 2, 5, and 7 through 11.

That's why you get so many branches. This is a pretty good piece of drafting, this patent. 12 and 47 are the only big target claims. There's lots of others with only one or two dependencies.

I was going to try and figure out the claims themselves today, but I won't. My head hurts. Maybe tomorrow.

At full sunlight intensity, the sun outputs about 1000W/square meter. Most common solar cells right now are about 15% efficiency (although you can get them commercially at atleast 22%), where you'd get about 150W/sq. meter at full sunlight. That's not too bad, considering 8 sq. meters of these solar cells can propell a solar car at well over 100km/h.

It's already been done to an extent. SolarHost offers web hosting powered by solar power. They are the people providing hosting for The Formula Sun website. (Formula Sun, incidentally, is a group of races across the USA in various solar powered vehicles. Shameless Plug)

So that world in Planetfall was actually Earth of the future? :-)

SEENIK VISTA
Xis stuneeng vuu uf xee Kalamontee Valee kuvurz oovur fortee skwaar miilz uf xatfaamus tuurist spot. Xee larj bildeeng at xee bend in xee Gulmaan Rivur iz xee formur pravincul kapitul bildeeng.

Mathematician AK Dewdney published a book back in 1984 entitled "The Planiverse" which was a very entertaining, but thorough, examination of what 2D existence could be like. I think it's currently out of print, but is worth a look if one can find it. A further description is here .

What happens is at a great school, you have a strong student body. This lets the faculty run the program at a high level (teach fast, advanced content, etc.). This attracts even stronger students, forming a positive feedback loop.

At a not so great school, the students are relatively weak. This forces the faculty to teach slowly, remedial content, etc. Students may also be looking for that "quick fix carreer change", which means teaching technology (Java, JDBC, VB) instead of fundamental concepts (algorithms, data structures, abstraction). This in turn attracts more of the weaker students, forming a negative feedback loop.

So if you're hot stuff, go to a hot school. When the assignments are hard, don't be surprised. If you're more into a slack lifestyle, go to a lesser school.

Of course, teaching quality does vary. But contrary to what some other posters have said, teaching quality is not the inverse of research quality. Some research-oriented faculty are too busy to spend time on their students, while others are also truly great teachers. At small colleges, some faculty are there because they truly love to teach and are great at it, and some are there because they are lamers and a Moo U appointment is the best faculty job they could get. But my basic observation is that these variations are minor compared to the student body feedback effect.

----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D
Research Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
----
Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Oregon Graduate Institute

Someone else has mentioned it already, but I will reiterate: Java does not make a good language to start learning with in a Computer Science program.

I am less than a month away from finishing a four year Honours Computer Science program at the University of Western Ontario. When I started in 1997, we were taught Pascal for the first year course(s) and C for the second year, with C++, Java and others (including Scheme for a course) in third and fourth year, depending on the courses you took. After my first year, they switched to teaching Java off the bat and leaving C out of it (even for second year).

The first thing that profs noticed was how much more difficult it was to get students to understand basic algorithms and simple CompSci concepts (trees, linked lists, etc). The OO stuff just got in the way. Everyone was hung up on trying to figure out how to simple things because of the object stuff like members, function declaration, etc. was just confusing to wade through for students not familiar with the concepts. What ended up happening was profs had to start explaining OO in some minor way, which only confused them further.

Now, some of this can be attributed to growing pains associated with changing a program curriculum. However, I am also currently a teaching assistant (TA) for the third-year operating systems course and the caliber of student I am seeing from a programming perspective is quite lacklustre. The OS course is required, so there are a lot of people taking it and I get to mark about a third of the assignments handed in. I will tell you now that I am, generally, not impressed with what I see. The students are beating themselves up trying to grasp the concepts of C when coming from a world of Java (recall, these third-year students never had C) since Java hides so much from them.

What I'm getting at is that a good language to start with is not OO. Why? Because the concept of OO makes much more sense after you've been introduced to iterative/functional programming. The natural way to solve a problem is not with objects and obfuscation (i.e., good design), but to work out a solution and step through it a la iterative/functional programming. (more on this in a sec)

You want to avoid Java because it hides too much. Java is good after you have an understanding of what is happening in the machine. In fact, Java is a nice language after the fundamentals are known to you.

Now, about the above point of iterative/functional making more sense, naturally. Firstly, think about how you tend to solve problems: come up with an idea, walk through the steps to get it to work. Note that there is nothing about objects in there. A pseudo-code algorithm translates a lot easier to a C program than it does a Java program. Pseudo-code is what a lot of first/second year students see and it should not be a chore to implement it. Functional languages are natural for some (like me) and follow the principle of "when I'm done with this, I'll give it to you", which is also not too tough to grasp once introduced to it.

Bear in mind - I am not anti-OO. I just think it's a more advanced concept that should be saved for later. I design everything around the OO philosophy now in my programs (no matter what language). It is good. It is just not for students starting out.

We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.

Here's who does:

• Carnegie Mellon has Wireless Andrew all over campus
• Dartmouth has it
• Drexel has it (Information Resources and Technology, Library)
• Princeton (Firestone Library and Computing & Information Technology)
• Marquette
• Richard Ivey School of Business at University of Western Ontario

Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.

Paul

We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.

Here's who does:

• Carnegie Mellon has Wireless Andrew all over campus
• Dartmouth has it
• Drexel has it (Information Resources and Technology, Library)
• Princeton (Firestone Library and Computing & Information Technology)
• Marquette
• Richard Ivey School of Business at University of Western Ontario

Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.

Paul

Also, take into consideration that the incorporation of these standards into vendors' products is excruciatingly slow at best. Several years ago, vendors had the idea that we can take care of all of your healthcare information systems needs -- "Our system does it all!". Well, they soon learned that healthcare information systems were extremely complex and they couldn't manage/keep resources to maintain/produce such huge systems and still make a profit. Enter the age of the "Best of Breed" system. "Our system just does these few things, but it does 'em really well! You just need to buy/build an interface to get it talking to your other systems!" Many of us that work in healthcare IT cringe whenever someone mentions an interface. The results you get from stringing together lots of interfaces can often be like playing the telephone game - send a piece of information from one system through one or more interfaces, to another system and hope like hell it makes sense on the other end.

You guys are on the right track when you talk about security. I worked at one hospital that was in the "Top 10" hospitals in US News and World Report a couple of years ago and some of the stuff I saw floating across the network was scary. We had some clinical systems that sent their userid/pw across as plain text. Packets floating across the network often contained patients names, clinic notes, diagnoses, lab test results, etc., all in PLAIN TEXT! It was amazing how much information I could obtain by using an evaluation copy of a packet analyzer on an unsecured network port at this institution.

One scary trend I've noticed lately is all of the people/vendors that want to download patient information to PDA's without having adequate security on the PDA. I'm just waiting for some doc to lose his Palm and have some kind soul find it and turn it over to the local media. :)

There are lots of other issues that futher complicate the whole healthcare information system issue such as institutional politics, workflow/usability issues, etc., but I don't have time to get into them right now.

Personally, it sounds to me like these guys need a serious whack with a clue-by-4... that or they need to get out and do a bit more research on the subject at hand..

BTW, if you're the author of this, or you know the author, drop me a line. I've had it up on my website for a while, and I'd really like to ask him for permission to have it there.

Just take a peek here for interpreters on your platform of choice, and here for free official releases of the first three Zork games (see above for Hitchhiker's Guide links).

Just take a peek here for interpreters on your platform of choice, and here for free official releases of the first three Zork games (see above for Hitchhiker's Guide links).

• GMD ifarchive of new and old interactive games
• Frotz, infocom game player for all machines (including Windows and Linux)
• Nitfol, an even better infocom game player
• About.com guide to IF
• unofficial Infocom page with some freebie Zork downloads
• Most of the Infocom games (Amiga games site, but the data files work on all platforms with Frotz)

Well, I actually work for the research group at UWO that was in charge of this. Here's the website.

University of Western Ontario

Woo-hoo! That's my university. Glad to know my tuition is at least paying for something educational.

I've yet to see an exam require a copy of the book's receipt.

Keep this proof of purchase to receive seperate distributions and course credit

Compaq is also in bed with and the University of Western Ontario building a 48 processor beowulf (alpha+Linux) . Compaq seems to be all hot and bothered about supercomputing as of late.

Now the *exciting news* is that they are teaming together with upto three other university's and build a "Beowulf of Beowulf's" (think 4 of these babys Connected together through *very* fast network connections, so you can submit your job and "it" would decide if there's too much going on at Western it can queue part of your job up at another university. Thus creating a beowulf of beowulf's

Baldric the student run beowulf is also (read hopefully) going to be a part of this with our donation of 50 some nodes (just off the truck) from Sprint Canada. (ok that was a blatent plug ;)

Compaq is also in bed with and the University of Western Ontario building a 48 processor beowulf (alpha+Linux) . Compaq seems to be all hot and bothered about supercomputing as of late.

Now the *exciting news* is that they are teaming together with upto three other university's and build a "Beowulf of Beowulf's" (think 4 of these babys Connected together through *very* fast network connections, so you can submit your job and "it" would decide if there's too much going on at Western it can queue part of your job up at another university. Thus creating a beowulf of beowulf's

Baldric the student run beowulf is also (read hopefully) going to be a part of this with our donation of 50 some nodes (just off the truck) from Sprint Canada. (ok that was a blatent plug ;)

Compaq is also in bed with and the University of Western Ontario building a 48 processor beowulf (alpha+Linux) . Compaq seems to be all hot and bothered about supercomputing as of late.

Now the *exciting news* is that they are teaming together with upto three other university's and build a "Beowulf of Beowulf's" (think 4 of these babys Connected together through *very* fast network connections, so you can submit your job and "it" would decide if there's too much going on at Western it can queue part of your job up at another university. Thus creating a beowulf of beowulf's

Baldric the student run beowulf is also (read hopefully) going to be a part of this with our donation of 50 some nodes (just off the truck) from Sprint Canada. (ok that was a blatent plug ;)

• The Unofficial Infocom Home page - along with information, walkthroughs, and even the Invisiclues for most every infocom games, you can also download Zorks 0 - 4 completely legally
• If you dig your way through that page, you'll eventually find the "where to get Infocom games" page... most every link is dead and you'll get disappointed real fast, but there is ONE EXCEPTION, and its the JACKPOT: Joey Jim's Superstore Infocom Classics Masterpieces Collection Online Download for $17 (american). It's the every-game-except-HHGTTG-and-Shogun, and you can find HHGTTG online as mentioned elsewhere. It has the manuals and the maps. Since you can't seem to get the physical version anywhere anymore, this place is the only place I know to get the goods.
  
  Darn near all of them work on the Palm Pilot, just look for the .dat files and convert them with the include z2pdb converter.

And here is another site that's bristling with cool Infocom info.

All this stuff about "attack microbots" and "God's eye views" makes for interesting reading on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

But the truth is that the USAF's fleet of B-52H strategic bombers is expected to soldier on until the year 2040. The last of these planes rolled off Boeing's assembly line in the early '60s. Already, they're older than most of the people who fly them, and they're supposed to outlive both the B-1 and B-2 bombers.

I'd take "Air Farce:2025" a bit more seriously if it weren't for those 80 year-old bombers my grandchildren might fly.

Radical New Jersey separatists downed another B-52, the third in four days. JLF spokesmen claimed credit and charged the USAF with illegal use of cluster microbot munitions, outlawed by the Harari Convention of 2016. President Sharpton issued a statement categorically denying the charge. The bomber was downed near Trenton, in the southern no-fly zone...

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~ pettypi/elevon/baugher_us/b052i.html

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa /bomber/b-52.htm

k.