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Finally, Wii will also make it possible to browse the web on your television.

Oh, goody! I've been waiting for that for eleven years!

Microwatt transmitters have their uses, but I'm afraid that ain't one of them.

So... what's the point? Do people even listen to the radio anymore? I mean, maybe in their cars - but anywhere else? I've been involved in one way or another with radio since I was a teen and even operated my own fleawatt when I was a kid, but that was a long time before the internet.

If you want to be a pirate it seems to me you'd reach a lot more people taking the max headroom route. When I was a kid I actually wanted to be a radio pirate - now I see no point in it at all aside from being any easy means of civil disobedience. But now, with the internet and the ease with which we can build a vast video library (not to mention it's just as easy to locate a tv modulator as an fm modulator) I'd much rather be Reg.

But Microsoft's influence in this market may not be so profound. Apple has successfully moved from personal computers into a new market where the the line between the computer and home electronics are blurred. Every prior effort Microsoft has made to do this has met with only limited success. Witness WebTV and UltimateTV, both of which have sputtered.

Continue?

I read and re-read Danny Dunn. Most of the stuff in his books has come true (such as the dragonfly telerobotic).
"Although the series is science-fiction, its stories are firmly based on scientific fact. For instance, the Lamont Geological Laboratories furnished information for The Ocean Floor and I.B.M. contributed greatly to The Homework Machine. For The Heat Ray, I was shown one of the first lasers in use. An attamp has always been made to keep the science in the stories ahead of actual scientific developments. many of the inventions suggested in The Automatic House, then purely hypothetical--such as the video-telephone, the rotating house, and the door responding to voice control--actually appeared in public use within a year after the book was published. --Jay Williams "

And you left off Tom Swift!

A great page of young-adult science books I found googling: http://community-2.webtv.net/parhampinkston/Scienc eFictionBooks/

Well almost.

The artical you reference (link reproduced here for ease of use) leaves a few things out. The Soviets trained their dogs by putting bits of food under tanks. The dogs would be released, and would find the food under the tank. The idea was that when you strapped bombs to them and released them in combat they'd run under the enemy tanks and blow them up.

Only problem was, the Soviets didn't have any German tanks to train them on. So they used their own tanks in some cases, and poor mockeries of the German models.

The result was that the dogs were totaly ineffective in tank battles because they would destroy Russian tanks nearly as often as they would Nazi units.

The Soviet used K9 Toops to such effect at Stalingrad largly because of the near total absence of Soviet Armor at that city, especialy in the later parts of the battle.

Just an interesting footnote to history.

Your cell phone already does this to within 5-10 mi (soon to be several feet with E911). It's a transmitter that has to announce its presence to the nearest cell. It's real, it's happening now and it's all logged in your permanent record. Already been used in the Westerfield trial. It might be for a murder trial now, but what next? Traffic tickets?

That is not alot of time. I driving instructor said 5 minimum.

5 car lengths sounds more like it. Here in the states, we are *actually* told 1 car length per 10mph is a safe bet. 50mph = 5 car lengths on average. As someone who learned to drive in NJ, all this talk about safe driving is actually the funniest thing I've heard all day. So thanks for the laughs.

Read this in the meantime.

Sometimes, I get "in the zone" while playing pinball. You know when this happens, because you hit all of your shots perfectly and just keep on going. Recently, in a game of Monopoly, I got in this zone, and was able to play a single ball for well over an hour (not to mention, score about 80,000,000 with it). I was soon distracted by my local pinball friends/rivals, and fell out of my groove, but I still finished the game with a respectable 119.8M points (don't believe me? Its documented here. My initials are DJP).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you are in the zone, stuff is just automatic. The only thing in your head is the task at hand. Tetris also seems to have a similar effect on me...

but I use WebTv!

http://community.webtv.net/THESIGHTT/WELCOMETOTHES IGHTT

On the contrary, my personal site (which is built with compliant HTML 4.0 and CSS) looks just fine on a wide variety of devices. This includes Mozilla, iCab, WebTV, Lynx, and AvantGo. Separate content from style and you'll never go wrong.

There is a Site Trying to stop it apparently.... They've got my vote!

And in the article, they even take into account that the atmosphere and temperature for the crops will have to be controlled, even if the soil can be used as it.

But what about taking care of the atmosphere for the colonists, if they're all eating asparagus? I mean, asparagus is tasty and nutritious, but what about the `side effects'? If asparagus is a staple of Martian colonists, will they all get used to the smell, or will it require more heavy-duty filtering equipment to remove the odor?

I wonder if perhaps foods that don't have the kind of `side effects' asparagus has should be considered first? Beans/legumes may be inevitable, since the colonists will need protein and only vegetarian diets will be feasible, but the side effects of legumes can be kept under control with Beano. To the best of my knowledge, no similar remedy exists for the side effects of asparagus.

Given that you're posting around here, I'm guessing you have a Linux box handy. Here are some of my favorite sysadmin tools:

• dig - This is a more advanced tool for seeing what's going on with DNS.
• nmap - A great tool for probing your server to make sure you haven't left anything open.
• Apache Bench (ab) - This simple but effective benchmarking tool comes with the Apache server. It's great to see how your site will perform under load.
• wget - a tool for remotely getting web pages; it's very versatile -- you can even use to save a copy of your whole site, just in case.
• Ethereal - Having trouble figuring out what's going on between the browser and your server? This will capture all the packets and decode them into a nice conversation for you.
• vmstat - want to know why your server is slow? Get used to watching the vmstat numbers while it's fast, so you can see what's different when it's slow. It's raw numbers that are hard to interpret, but it's worth getting to know. Maybe this should be another Ask Slashdot question?
• Netsaint - this is my favorite automatic monitoring package. Once your site is in production, you can set this up to patrol things and make sure everything is working. That lets you get on with other stuff, knowing you'll hear about trouble pronto.
• MRTG - A tool that makes excellent long-term graphs of bandwidth use.
• IPtraf - Where MRTG gives you the broad overview, this gives you the second-by-second nitty gritty.
• perl - Last but most is Perl, a Swiss Army chainsaw of languages. If you'll be doing any web stuff, pick up a copy of Learning Perl and spend a little time with it. Once you learn the magic of regular expressions, you will never again say "that's impossible!" to a problem.

As far as non-sysadmin stuff goes, here are some of my other favorites:

• Bugzilla - this is a free and flexible bug tracking system. Highly recommended, especially for those people who don't think they need a bug tracking system. Our designers thought it was silly to start, but even they use it all the time now.
• CVS - Like bug tracking, most web sites don't think they need version control. Most web sites are wrong! CVSweb is also recommended.
• HTML Tidy - bad HTML in, good HTML out.
• WebTV Simulator - Sure, you and I don't use WebTVs, but a lot of people do. Browse your site with this to see how the other half surfs.
• VMWare - Along similar lines, VMWare is a Windows box emulator. I use it to keep a bunch of synthetic windows machines with a variety of OS versions and browser versions. It makes QA much easier.

And if there are particular tasks that have you stumped, come back and ask again. 'Round these parts, we have big toolboxes.

http://developer.webtv.net/design/res olution/

Well, score one for Nancy Luft. May we all live our lives free from the dangers of the Sputnik mind-control lasers.

This Tivo looks *really* cool, to start off with. But doesn't it look a whole lot like webtv? Does anyone else think it strange that Sony and Phillips teamed up orignally to produce WebTV ( old news) and then sold off the product to Microsoft when it was failing? Now Sony has partnered with Tivo to produce a Television application that actually seems pretty useful, and that will maybe compete with WebTV in the future? Did anyone notice that Phillips is again involved in this venture (Phillips personal Receiver).

My guess is that Sony (in selling webtv to Microsoft) has a deal with Microsoft that disallows them from manufacturing tv-web appliances for X number of years or altogether. Maybe Sony has a few tricks up it's sleeves.

Joseph Elwell.