If you'd bother look at the acronym, you'd notice that it stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Yeah, NASA should stick to space and not develop aircraft systems like wind shear detectors, safer emergency fuel-cutoff systems, LIDAR, or computer-assisted flight systems.
Yeah, we should just make NASA stick to space...thereby widening the gap between aviationa and space, keeping space a horribly expensive venture.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Ah, but if you'd read the article, you need "The Bomb" to develop "The Asteroid." (I'm suddenly reminded of Master of Orion II -- perhaps if I type DAVINCI, I get skip developing The Bomb and go straight to The Asteroid. --------------------------------------- -
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
I've been working at my current company since October of last year. A group of us were brought over from a dot-com when it's B2C component was purchased.
We'd been here for about two months when they passed around an Intellectual Property Agreement that they required us to sign. Of course, the basic wording amounted to all your create are belong to us -- whatever spewed forth from my brain was theirs.
Sorry, but they're not paying me enough to have the contents of my brain.
A few of us raised a such a major stink over this that we got them to rewrite the agreement with the wording "as it directly applies to the sale of health insurance on the Internet"...it was, of course, better expressed than that. Basically, it amounts to they can't touch general ideas, or anything unrelated to the online selling of health insurance.
Raise a stink. It'll help cover your ass.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Seems to me that this is going to require professors to work harder to engage their students and to pass on personally-acquired knowledge in the classroom.
When Joe Average can get all the information, free-of-charge off the Net, people are going to want to get more for their money from universities and colleges. Thus, college is going to have to pump more knowledge into its students -- be that through work experience, more social functions, group homework, or showing them their drinking capacity.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Seems though, that larger companies seem to think they're doing you a huge favor by redistributing your work, so they feel justified in doing so.
Recently, I recieved an email from a larger font firm (who shall remain nameless), who said that they were planning on including a number of the fonts I've designed on a CDROM that they would be distributing. They further went on to say that if I wanted them removed, I had to email them by this-and-such-a-date... In short, the email said, "Well, we're using your shit unless you tell us we can't." No please, no thank you. Nothing.
At the time, I wanted more exposure for my site, so I let them go ahead with it, so long as the CD included all my usual files. I'm still pretty irked about their attitude, though...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Seems to me that things like this are a natural outgrowth of the controls and limitations that are set on the Internet by various governmental agencies that feel that they have the authority to regulate virtual space.
Let's call it AdHocNet. Figure between ham radio geeks and computer geeks, there's going to be some overlap somewhere. Eventually, you'll see a new Net spring up around something the government can't tax or regulate (without mega- and giga-watt jammers)...this being radio waves. The FCC? Don't make me laugh.
Technology has become cheap enough where it's VERY feasible for the Geeks to say, "Screw you guys, I'm goin' home," and to build their own damn Internet using the materials that are available at any half-assed computer store. So the question is: why aren't we doing this?
That people are setting up their own access points and sharing them freely is a great first step. I'll probably set up something in my area with the same thing.
Until launch costs for satellites drop precipitously, I don't think AdHocNet would ever be able to cut its ties to landlines, but it's nice to think about...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
I agree with that re: Linux -- it's great to be able to delve deeply into the guts of the system. However. I'm a Mac user because I don't usually care about that sort of thing. However, the situation has arisen where I need to dust off my old programming skillz, and under pre-MacOS X stuff, I've found myself grinding my teeth.
What Apple is really offering with OS X is *nix with idiot-proofing. Joe Average will still be able to run OS X. (Let's face it. Joe Average can barely open the Red Hat box he bought from CompUSA, to say nothing of installing and using the OS.) Techie Jim will still like using OS X because he'll be able to delve into the guts of the system.
Now if only Apple could get in line with the rest of the world in hardware technology.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Burt Rutan, aerodynamics god, of Scaled Composites was talking about this back in 1998. Apparently, Angel Technologies will be using his Proteus reconfigurable aircraft, which apparently designed with the telecomm purpose in mind long before Angel came along.
Sorry about no direct line to Proteus. The site's all gussied up with frames.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
I've been using an "honor system" via PayPal since October of last year, and it ain't panning out too well. I'm sure additional site traffic would help, but all in all, I've collected about $150.
Now, I can look @ site logs and compare the number of downloads of my fonts to the number of payments, and less than 1% of the people that visit my site are actually going along with the "honor system"... Depressing and demoralizing, but oh well. If worse comes to worse, I'll stop giving away my fonts entirely and just sell them outright. At least, that way, I'm guaranteed to get a bit of money for my work.
I suppose it's nice if you're a smaller site, like me, though. Every week or so, a couple people will donate a few bucks, and I've gotten a few checks in the mail, some nice cards and notes, etc., so that is kinda cool.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Lately, I've been reading The People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn, and it's become abundantly clear that the crap that passes for an education in the United States is a direct offshoot of the old Industrial Revolution.
What it basically is designed to do is create a middle-class. The people who will meekly sit by, be non-union, and file paperwork and tabulate data all day. Don't question, just do your job, and you'll be rewarded more than the blue collar guys on the factory floor.
It's hard to look at from outside the box, when I live inside it. I'm a white-collar, college-educated schmuck. I punch out code and manage projects 8 hours a day, 5 (sometimes 6) days a week. I'm grateful for the paycheck, but sitting in this cube takes a lot out of me.
I think it's starting to change though... We're moving to a more information-centric economy, and those of us in the "middle class" that are actually capable of doing the work are going to be much more valuable... Because Joe Average can't just sit down and do what we do, we have a LOT more leverage. And there's always going to be a need for more of us, so schools will have to adapt. They'll have to encourage original thinking, critical thinking, instead of rote recital.
Maybe if we're lucky, this will lead to a blurring of the lines between cliques in schools, too. But then again, maybe not.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Well, with the X-33 program (VentureStar), NASA got shafted (to put it nicely) by Lockheed-Martin (IIRC, this was the contractor). They approached NASA, hat-in-hand for $900 million, for which they would provide a reusable shuttle that would cut cost-to-orbit by an order of magnitude. This vehicle would use the Aerospike engine and composite fuel tanks to keep vehicle weight down.
This was initiated by the then-CEO of Lockheed-Martin. He also informed NASA that any cost-overruns on the program would be eaten by his company.
Well, not long after that, he retired, and was replaced by a new CEO, who thought that VentureStar was a BadIdea(tm). He decided that if it went over $900 million, that Lockheed-Martin would have to go back on its word as a corporation and ask for more funding from NASA. Which is exactly what happened.
Furthermore, the continual failures of composite fuel tanks forced LM to return to old-style aluminum ones, which jacked the vehicle's dry-weight up, and put them right back where they started.
Clearly, the big aerospace firms regard NASA as a form of corporate welfare. They get some money, they go to work, come up against something, have to quit working, and come back for more money.
It used to be that when the government needed something, they would specify their needs in a document, say "this is what we'll pay, and you can keep any profit you can make." This is how it was done in World War II when new aircraft were needed. This is how it should *always be done* -- but it's not. In the space program, it's the contractor telling the client what they need and not the other way around. This is why a company like Rockwell gets the contract for the Space Shuttle (they were left out of the Apollo program, and this was done to soothe burned egos), and delivered a poorly-realized, over-engineered piece of shit.
If this sort of thinking continues, then there is no future in space exploration, manned or otherwise.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Time to go configure the router to block traffic from the copyright.net domain...and any other domains owned by the same group... Let's see them work their way around *that*...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Physical Sails = Dead Tech
on
Solar Sails
·
· Score: 2
Never ceases to amaze me that people are insisting on physical sails for solar sailing, given that there are a slew of problems to contend with. Furthermore, the mission profile simply calls for a deployment test and minimal motion (no plans for a planetary or extrasolar mission).
Using an M2P2 (Mini-Magenospheric Plasma Propulsion) drive would be a much better choice, because in addition to the lack of launch mass (expensive!), you don't need to worry about deployment problems, and can then think about actually doing some science instead of a publicity stunt. More on M2P2 here and here.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
So what we're looking at is something that could be used for a return to the Moon, or to Mars -- lithobraking. Great way of slowing down your spacecraft. ------------------------------------- ---
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
All due respect to Mr. Raskin, but he's out of his gourd.
For starters, an OS is a necessity. Think: do you really want an application that has to handle its own tasking, memory management and so forth? And if you want to run other applications at the same time, how are they going to resolve issues of shared resources? They're not. This is where the OS comes in, genius. Furthermore, the added bloat that adding basic OS features to an app isn't exactly what I'd call desirable.
As for the commentary about the "transparent" PalmOS: Transparent, my ass. I just purchased my first Palm device a little over a week ago, and while I do love it, there is definitely an OS there.
Above and beyond the techie side of things, there's the human interface (something Apple's had a pretty good track record with). An OS also provides the basic look-n-feel, which some engineers treat as foo-foo details, but is absolutely necessary if you intend to have real world users.
Do you think Joe Schmoe down in Marketing could use a computer with no common interface between apps? Do you think that if you dump the OS you could get any more than 2 developers to agree on the interface-design of applications? Do you think that you could get every software development firm on the planet to agree when it comes to resource sharing and memory management?
This might work in a world where one company can dictate standards, destroy upstart rivals, and blatantly steal code and violate patents, but fortunately, we aren't completely there yet.
Then again....
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Doesn't it scare you that cellphones are linked to plane crashes? I mean, COME ON...you've got a hermetically sealed tube designed to carry a couple hundred people thousands of miles at several hundred miles per hour at 50000 feet, and someone using a cellphone can cause it to crash?
What's next? None of us are allowed to have metal fillings or steel plates in our head? How do the microwaves for those tasty in-flight meals work?
And what's the deal with radio scanners? If I listen in to the top secret conversations between the pilot and the tower, I might cause the plane to crash?
What gives?
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Actually, your log isn't going to be that simple. Like radio, light suffers from interference from things like gas clouds, other planetary systems, Vogon Construction Fleets, etc.
Furthermore, there's this thing called "Doppler shift" -- changing of wavelengths based upon the motion of the source in relation to the observer. The observer's motion also has an effect on this.
Furthermore, the difference between signal and noise is one of those things that has a huge grey area. The fact that you'll have coherent light is great...determining whether or not it's a signal is hard.
I'm sure someone's thought of it, but I wonder if anyone has bothered to create a Doppler-shift filter that accounts for Earth's orbit around the sun and axial rotation in relation to the target it's looking at? I suppose that the more crud you can filter out the better, but I'd be willing to bet that the horsepower for this might be a bit high. (Furthermore, without an *exact* fix on the location of the star, there's going to be room for ambiguity.
There's room for a PhD thesis in here.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Well, I guess this automated firing system is going to kill amateur rocketry and anyone vying for the X-Prize.
This isn't a practical national defense system, either. For the theatre-level battlefield this would be great... You could even increase its range by putting up large reflective blimps, use GPS to coordinate the locations of everything and tie the detection gear to the man-portable search radars carried by the Army's LRP teams, and then make a bank shot that goes plane-blimp-target or plane-blimp-blimp-target.
Just please, PLEASE, Boeing, think about having a human-pulled trigger.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Slashdot Mirror
You keep your "flat" clean? I dunno about you, but my place is a shithole...
(Do I get modded up for "Informative" or modded down for "Too Much Info, Ya Friggin Slob"?)
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
If you'd bother look at the acronym, you'd notice that it stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Yeah, NASA should stick to space and not develop aircraft systems like wind shear detectors, safer emergency fuel-cutoff systems, LIDAR, or computer-assisted flight systems.
Yeah, we should just make NASA stick to space...thereby widening the gap between aviationa and space, keeping space a horribly expensive venture.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Take a look at this image.
Notice those little grooves in some of the lettering "SUMMER 2001"? Count them and write each number done as a string... It works out to: 5033215122.
503-321-5122. A phone number. Call it. It will get you started on this whole thing.
Now if someone could tell me what the 323 is between the URL and the AOL Keyword?
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
We can only hope.
Of course, if they get it into the English Channel, the resulting tidal wave would give us a nice 2-for-the-price-of-1 result....
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Ah, but if you'd read the article, you need "The Bomb" to develop "The Asteroid." (I'm suddenly reminded of Master of Orion II -- perhaps if I type DAVINCI, I get skip developing The Bomb and go straight to The Asteroid.- -
--------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Perhaps we can hack Mike Tyson's Super Punch-Out into something a little more appropo -- perhaps Mike Tyson's Prison Break-Out?
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
I've been working at my current company since October of last year. A group of us were brought over from a dot-com when it's B2C component was purchased.
We'd been here for about two months when they passed around an Intellectual Property Agreement that they required us to sign. Of course, the basic wording amounted to all your create are belong to us -- whatever spewed forth from my brain was theirs.
Sorry, but they're not paying me enough to have the contents of my brain.
A few of us raised a such a major stink over this that we got them to rewrite the agreement with the wording "as it directly applies to the sale of health insurance on the Internet"...it was, of course, better expressed than that. Basically, it amounts to they can't touch general ideas, or anything unrelated to the online selling of health insurance.
Raise a stink. It'll help cover your ass.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Seems to me that this is going to require professors to work harder to engage their students and to pass on personally-acquired knowledge in the classroom.
When Joe Average can get all the information, free-of-charge off the Net, people are going to want to get more for their money from universities and colleges. Thus, college is going to have to pump more knowledge into its students -- be that through work experience, more social functions, group homework, or showing them their drinking capacity.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Seems though, that larger companies seem to think they're doing you a huge favor by redistributing your work, so they feel justified in doing so.
Recently, I recieved an email from a larger font firm (who shall remain nameless), who said that they were planning on including a number of the fonts I've designed on a CDROM that they would be distributing. They further went on to say that if I wanted them removed, I had to email them by this-and-such-a-date... In short, the email said, "Well, we're using your shit unless you tell us we can't." No please, no thank you. Nothing.
At the time, I wanted more exposure for my site, so I let them go ahead with it, so long as the CD included all my usual files. I'm still pretty irked about their attitude, though...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
So I guess the book is Jinking for Dummies? Chicken Soup for the Victim's Soul?
High school triathalon: run, duck, and shoot.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Seems to me that things like this are a natural outgrowth of the controls and limitations that are set on the Internet by various governmental agencies that feel that they have the authority to regulate virtual space.
Let's call it AdHocNet. Figure between ham radio geeks and computer geeks, there's going to be some overlap somewhere. Eventually, you'll see a new Net spring up around something the government can't tax or regulate (without mega- and giga-watt jammers)...this being radio waves. The FCC? Don't make me laugh.
Technology has become cheap enough where it's VERY feasible for the Geeks to say, "Screw you guys, I'm goin' home," and to build their own damn Internet using the materials that are available at any half-assed computer store. So the question is: why aren't we doing this?
That people are setting up their own access points and sharing them freely is a great first step. I'll probably set up something in my area with the same thing.
Until launch costs for satellites drop precipitously, I don't think AdHocNet would ever be able to cut its ties to landlines, but it's nice to think about...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
I agree with that re: Linux -- it's great to be able to delve deeply into the guts of the system. However. I'm a Mac user because I don't usually care about that sort of thing. However, the situation has arisen where I need to dust off my old programming skillz, and under pre-MacOS X stuff, I've found myself grinding my teeth.
What Apple is really offering with OS X is *nix with idiot-proofing. Joe Average will still be able to run OS X. (Let's face it. Joe Average can barely open the Red Hat box he bought from CompUSA, to say nothing of installing and using the OS.) Techie Jim will still like using OS X because he'll be able to delve into the guts of the system.
Now if only Apple could get in line with the rest of the world in hardware technology.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Burt Rutan, aerodynamics god, of Scaled Composites was talking about this back in 1998. Apparently, Angel Technologies will be using his Proteus reconfigurable aircraft, which apparently designed with the telecomm purpose in mind long before Angel came along.
Sorry about no direct line to Proteus. The site's all gussied up with frames.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
The polar lander crashed. It was given up for dead. Have some respect for it.
Heyyyy, waitaminute...the same thing could be said for Windoze machines everywhere. *grin*
All kidding aside, this is a piece of hardware, trying to reprogram it or get it up and running again isn't the same thing as defiling it's grave.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Carpal tunnel syndrome or neck problems?
I think I'll take carpal tunnel, despite the obvious impact it would have on my sex life.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
I've been using an "honor system" via PayPal since October of last year, and it ain't panning out too well. I'm sure additional site traffic would help, but all in all, I've collected about $150.
Now, I can look @ site logs and compare the number of downloads of my fonts to the number of payments, and less than 1% of the people that visit my site are actually going along with the "honor system"... Depressing and demoralizing, but oh well. If worse comes to worse, I'll stop giving away my fonts entirely and just sell them outright. At least, that way, I'm guaranteed to get a bit of money for my work.
I suppose it's nice if you're a smaller site, like me, though. Every week or so, a couple people will donate a few bucks, and I've gotten a few checks in the mail, some nice cards and notes, etc., so that is kinda cool.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Lately, I've been reading The People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn, and it's become abundantly clear that the crap that passes for an education in the United States is a direct offshoot of the old Industrial Revolution.
What it basically is designed to do is create a middle-class. The people who will meekly sit by, be non-union, and file paperwork and tabulate data all day. Don't question, just do your job, and you'll be rewarded more than the blue collar guys on the factory floor.
It's hard to look at from outside the box, when I live inside it. I'm a white-collar, college-educated schmuck. I punch out code and manage projects 8 hours a day, 5 (sometimes 6) days a week. I'm grateful for the paycheck, but sitting in this cube takes a lot out of me.
I think it's starting to change though... We're moving to a more information-centric economy, and those of us in the "middle class" that are actually capable of doing the work are going to be much more valuable... Because Joe Average can't just sit down and do what we do, we have a LOT more leverage. And there's always going to be a need for more of us, so schools will have to adapt. They'll have to encourage original thinking, critical thinking, instead of rote recital.
Maybe if we're lucky, this will lead to a blurring of the lines between cliques in schools, too. But then again, maybe not.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Well, with the X-33 program (VentureStar), NASA got shafted (to put it nicely) by Lockheed-Martin (IIRC, this was the contractor). They approached NASA, hat-in-hand for $900 million, for which they would provide a reusable shuttle that would cut cost-to-orbit by an order of magnitude. This vehicle would use the Aerospike engine and composite fuel tanks to keep vehicle weight down.
This was initiated by the then-CEO of Lockheed-Martin. He also informed NASA that any cost-overruns on the program would be eaten by his company.
Well, not long after that, he retired, and was replaced by a new CEO, who thought that VentureStar was a BadIdea(tm). He decided that if it went over $900 million, that Lockheed-Martin would have to go back on its word as a corporation and ask for more funding from NASA. Which is exactly what happened.
Furthermore, the continual failures of composite fuel tanks forced LM to return to old-style aluminum ones, which jacked the vehicle's dry-weight up, and put them right back where they started.
Clearly, the big aerospace firms regard NASA as a form of corporate welfare. They get some money, they go to work, come up against something, have to quit working, and come back for more money.
It used to be that when the government needed something, they would specify their needs in a document, say "this is what we'll pay, and you can keep any profit you can make." This is how it was done in World War II when new aircraft were needed. This is how it should *always be done* -- but it's not. In the space program, it's the contractor telling the client what they need and not the other way around. This is why a company like Rockwell gets the contract for the Space Shuttle (they were left out of the Apollo program, and this was done to soothe burned egos), and delivered a poorly-realized, over-engineered piece of shit.
If this sort of thinking continues, then there is no future in space exploration, manned or otherwise.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Time to go configure the router to block traffic from the copyright.net domain...and any other domains owned by the same group... Let's see them work their way around *that*...
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Never ceases to amaze me that people are insisting on physical sails for solar sailing, given that there are a slew of problems to contend with. Furthermore, the mission profile simply calls for a deployment test and minimal motion (no plans for a planetary or extrasolar mission).
Using an M2P2 (Mini-Magenospheric Plasma Propulsion) drive would be a much better choice, because in addition to the lack of launch mass (expensive!), you don't need to worry about deployment problems, and can then think about actually doing some science instead of a publicity stunt. More on M2P2 here and here.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
So what we're looking at is something that could be used for a return to the Moon, or to Mars -- lithobraking. Great way of slowing down your spacecraft.- ---
------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
All due respect to Mr. Raskin, but he's out of his gourd.
For starters, an OS is a necessity. Think: do you really want an application that has to handle its own tasking, memory management and so forth? And if you want to run other applications at the same time, how are they going to resolve issues of shared resources? They're not. This is where the OS comes in, genius. Furthermore, the added bloat that adding basic OS features to an app isn't exactly what I'd call desirable.
As for the commentary about the "transparent" PalmOS: Transparent, my ass. I just purchased my first Palm device a little over a week ago, and while I do love it, there is definitely an OS there.
Above and beyond the techie side of things, there's the human interface (something Apple's had a pretty good track record with). An OS also provides the basic look-n-feel, which some engineers treat as foo-foo details, but is absolutely necessary if you intend to have real world users.
Do you think Joe Schmoe down in Marketing could use a computer with no common interface between apps? Do you think that if you dump the OS you could get any more than 2 developers to agree on the interface-design of applications? Do you think that you could get every software development firm on the planet to agree when it comes to resource sharing and memory management?
This might work in a world where one company can dictate standards, destroy upstart rivals, and blatantly steal code and violate patents, but fortunately, we aren't completely there yet.
Then again....
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Doesn't it scare you that cellphones are linked to plane crashes? I mean, COME ON...you've got a hermetically sealed tube designed to carry a couple hundred people thousands of miles at several hundred miles per hour at 50000 feet, and someone using a cellphone can cause it to crash?
What's next? None of us are allowed to have metal fillings or steel plates in our head? How do the microwaves for those tasty in-flight meals work?
And what's the deal with radio scanners? If I listen in to the top secret conversations between the pilot and the tower, I might cause the plane to crash?
What gives?
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Actually, your log isn't going to be that simple. Like radio, light suffers from interference from things like gas clouds, other planetary systems, Vogon Construction Fleets, etc.
Furthermore, there's this thing called "Doppler shift" -- changing of wavelengths based upon the motion of the source in relation to the observer. The observer's motion also has an effect on this.
Furthermore, the difference between signal and noise is one of those things that has a huge grey area. The fact that you'll have coherent light is great...determining whether or not it's a signal is hard.
I'm sure someone's thought of it, but I wonder if anyone has bothered to create a Doppler-shift filter that accounts for Earth's orbit around the sun and axial rotation in relation to the target it's looking at? I suppose that the more crud you can filter out the better, but I'd be willing to bet that the horsepower for this might be a bit high. (Furthermore, without an *exact* fix on the location of the star, there's going to be room for ambiguity.
There's room for a PhD thesis in here.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
Well, I guess this automated firing system is going to kill amateur rocketry and anyone vying for the X-Prize.
This isn't a practical national defense system, either. For the theatre-level battlefield this would be great... You could even increase its range by putting up large reflective blimps, use GPS to coordinate the locations of everything and tie the detection gear to the man-portable search radars carried by the Army's LRP teams, and then make a bank shot that goes plane-blimp-target or plane-blimp-blimp-target.
Just please, PLEASE, Boeing, think about having a human-pulled trigger.
----------------------------------------
Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!