I'll agree that the website or the other linked material don't really go beyond the fluff, so let me try to explain why this matters. Frank and most of the other people involved in this have been going to the Linux shows and writing XFree86 drivers for Red Hat and stuff like that since at least, well, 1996 or so (probably longer). Then the Linux Hype Effect sucked them into VA Linux and spat them out the other side (hopefully it had its rewards, although I don't know how much stock they got or when/whether they sold it). Now they are going back to their roots - a small technically oriented company. I expect to see more of this - lots of good companies went through much upheaval in the days of the Linux Hype Effect and so now we should see things realigning in a more stable, sustainable configuration.
I don't see this article as saying that Canada is going to rescue anything. Rather, they are lining up along with Europe to complain (with some justice, since NASA is not upholding the ISS agreements as they currently stand). Now, I suppose if a nation complains enough and is willing to use this as a bargaining chip (e.g. in trade talks or whatever kind of talks matter to the US), then complaining becomes a kind of action. But a much more direct sort of rescue, a more obviously effective one, would be to come up with some funding. Europe once built a half-scale prototype of (some portions of) a crew return vehicle, but in recent years that activity has changed to "well, maybe we could build a few components for the US crew return vehicle, that would be cheaper. Well, is Europe prepared to build their own crew return vehicle? Or pay Russia to supply more Soyuzes?
The other amusing aspect of this whole thing is the number of times that the US has cancelled its part of a project (shuttle, partially; some science satellite in the 80's the name of which is at home; even Spacelab in a sense), and the fact that Europe (and other partners) fail to learn. It is like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown time after time, and Europe seems to always line up for another kick. I guess Canada is now joining them.
Standard UK usage is to say "Avis are renting me a car", "parcelfarce are idiots", etc. Yes it is strange if you are used to the US practice of using the singular, but it isn't just for the BBC.
Yes, I'm torn too. For it to really be an open source effort (in the sense of not requiring a fairly sizeable centralized $$$ flow), you would need volunteer editors as well as volunteers who contribute raw data. And based on my experience at dmoz.org, it isn't clear to me how well it would work for the OED (dmoz is great in a lot of ways, but there are plenty of problems too with neglected categories and standards which aren't uniform and the like).
But having said all that, the OED would be more useful if it were easier/cheaper to get one's hands on a copy. So the status quo has drawbacks which are more than merely theoretical.
Not only are people hacking their computerized new-fangled cars, there is even a sourceforge project, although perhaps the most interesting part of that project is the links, for example to FreeScan or LT1_Edit (the former free at least as in beer, the latter is for $$$).
I hope I'm wrong on this, but the more I look at this, the more I am reminded of "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" (with due apologies to perl fans and desert dwellers). The Liberty Alliance has all these companies signed up, but it seems pretty vaporous in terms of technical specs, marketing efforts, or much else. Time will tell on whether something real actually comes out of this, but I always get nervous when the hype-to-meat ratio is as high as this. Sort of reminds me of voting machines a year ago - everyone was talking about doing something but there was little/no agreement on what a voting machine should do. Six months later, most of the talk had gone away.
replay tv allows you to send the copy of the show that you recorded to someone else with a replay over a broadband internet connection
No wonder the TV industry doesn't like it. Another difference is that the Replay TV has a "skip forward 30 seconds" button, and the Tivo doesn't. Both of these are examples of how Replay TV is just trying to please the consumer and doesn't really care what the TV industry thinks of them (which I guess is how we got the VCR), whereas Tivo is trying to get the industry on board, chiefly by holding out the carrot of being able to get much more detailed information than Nielson provides about who is watching what (not on individuals, but in aggregates).
It looks to be open source although there is one catch - the words "as part of the 'unofficial CP/M web site'". Does that mean that this license does not cover, say, putting CP/M into a product, putting it up on a different web site, or the like? On the face of it, that would seem to be so, but I can't help but wonder whether Lineo is going to open source it the rest of the way at some point - as has been pointed out, CP/M is hardly the focus of their business these days.
The Artemis Project is more of a space club than a business (although it has some of the latter, and it is pretty successful compared with other clubs). Their web site contains a Data Book which was pretty good, but seems to now be members-only.
Another good site is P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T. with lots of details about things like all the different minerals on the moon. Much of it is kind of long term (for example, mining applications which only make financial sense if you are using the minerals off-earth). And at the risk of immodesty I have pages on mining and novelties (with the former being more for the intrinsic value, such as platinum for its appearance or chemical properties, and the latter more having value by virtue of being from the moon). My pages are more focused on near-term applications (such as bring platinum group metals to earth). I try to include some numbers (such as prices of platinum, how much flooding the market would affect the price, how much it would cost to get materials back from an asteroid and stuff), so that you can tweaks the assumptions and see how that affects the finances.
There is more information from the (non-slashdotted) Intel site. The thing at the side of the monitor is indeed a CD player (CD writer, even).
For comparison, look at the Concept PC 2000 (also known as "deep forest") from HP and Intel sites. Both designs feature a small case. The most advanced feature of the 2000 design is that the side of the case has a translucent panel so that you can use the PC as a picture frame (for those who don't have enough room for their pr0n). But the lack of PCI slots seems like a pretty big limitation (if USB were faster and had more peripherals, maybe that wouldn't be such a big deal and I suppose for many uses it still isn't a big deal, but I'm not sure I'm quite willing to consign PCI to the "legacy" category yet).
Others have addressed the various issues about what is a "real" Bourne shell and bash extensions and all that. Anyway, the Linux Standard Base has a section on shells. In a nutshell, bash 2.x was the most POSIX-compliant of the shells that the LSB tested (and no, I don't know exactly what versions or which shells or the like), with pdksh getting an honorable mention. And there were two ways in which bash was not POSIX-compliant and concerning which the LSB therefore diverges from POSIX (whether $0 is the full pathname or just the basename, and what happens if you try to use "." to run a script without the read bit set). I don't know whether a future version of POSIX is planning to change the specification, or whether this is likely to remain a divergence for the foreseeable future or what. In any event, these two issues shouldn't be hard to deal with in writing scripts.
At the risk of seeking buzzwords for the sake of buzzwords, are there interpreters that will run these games via web technologies like HTML (using basic links/forms), Java applets, or Javascript? Having asked the question, I'm not sure that any of the above would actually be more useful to me than a regular interpreter which runs as a Linux application, but I'm still curious.
I suppose many/. readers already know this, but thomas has the details on bills. In this case it is the "Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act", HR 1552. If you follow that link and click on "bill status" you will see that the Senate passed the House version without amendments, so it doesn't need to go to conference committee. Looking at the Congressional Record for 15 Nov 2001 shows you what the Senators had to say on the bill. (linking to Thomas is a bit tricky, so in case I got it wrong, just start at the thomas home page and use the bill number or the date for the congressional record text).
When I was (along with some other people, but mostly me) running CVS development, our most popular download was the Windows client (command line at the time, although WinCVS later got popular). Yet very little of the mailing list traffic, submitted patches, and the like were for Windows. I suppose one could point to reasons like whether people had the right compilers for Windows (cygwin wasn't as mature then as it is now, so we had both cygwin and Visual C++ ports). But I still would vote for the cultural explanation. The model of Windows freeware or shareware is basically a gift from the author to the user, whereas Unix free software is more often seen as a (potential) collaboration in which the users contribute.
Instead of putting 10 instruments on one satellite they should put two instruments one each of 5 satellites (or 3.33 instruments on each of 3). That way if one blows up on launch you haven't lost 2.3 billion euros (about 2 billion US dollars, compared with say $200-300 million or so for NASA's recent science missions, e.g. to Mars).
Is it my imagination or is ICANN actually working on getting their job done rather than horribly complex politics (more complex than needed to solve the problem), or trademark/legal craziness? There's some background at the page of the ICANN DNS Root committee.
Now, I'm pretty skeptical that a closed source DNS server from Register.com is going to be a big part of the solution, but even that I don't really mind so much. Having a few alternatives is good if for no other reason than helping to keep BIND from stagnating.
The article didn't talk much about DNSsec (or this older page) which has got to be part of the solution (to try to give the 10 second summary, when a client makes a DNS query and gets a response, it is kind of tricky to ensure that the response is really from the correct server, and DNSsec uses crypto to solve this and other problems).
The argument that you can't just shout "fire" in a crowded theater entered the law in Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919). This was a Supreme Court case concerning whether the government may suppress pamphlets encouraging people to resist the draft. Although I think that case may have been correctly decided (with the distinction being expressing opposition to the draft versus encouraging people to violate the draft law), I wonder if the Court realized they were treading on, or near thin ice, when they used the "Fire" analogy.
So it is with people who use the analogy today. Whenever someone start comparing some kind of speech to shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, don't get carried away by the emotional appeal but keep an eye on your rights, lest someone try to make off with them.
And the cool part is that the interviewer was trying to get him to start some kind of argument. But instead of getting defensive or fighting back with something he didn't like about Linux or whatever, he just sidestepped it, and humorously too. Well done.
Although a Linux kernel has tons of functionality that you wouldn't use if you were running the Hurd on top of it, there would be potential advantages (SMP, running on a lot of hardware, etc). However, there are (at least) two factors which I suspect might stop this show: IPC speed and memory footprint. (1) The hurd uses a lot of interprocess communication calls between one of the hurd servers and another (or between a user application and a server). Therefore a good microkernel will try to make IPC very fast. Without having looked at Linux benchmarks in this area, I don't know how it stacks up, but I doubt it has gotten as much attention as in your average microkernel. (2) Would the Linux kernel use a lot of memory on unused functionality? (This one might be less of a big deal, although I don't happen to remember things like whether Linux swaps out kernel pages which aren't getting touched).
Someone asked Linus about the preemptible kernel patches (and latency in general) at the Annual Linux Showcase on Thursday night. The thing about the preemptible kernel is that it is only for uniprocessor - SMP kernels aren't preemptible. So unless you want the SMP case to be capable of tying up a processor for "too long" at a time, then you need to re-do each bit of code which is capable of long latencies anyway. The other thing which came up is that responsiveness of the system improved quite a bit recently with VM fixes (2.4.14 was the improved version, I think). It was a matter of the VM queueing up too much I/O (and the drivers trying to throttle it, instead of just throttling it all in the VM - or something like that). The preemptible kernel won't solve that kind of problem - although it may change/mask the symptoms
enough to make it a bit hard to be sure where a problem is.
Oh, and to bring things back to ext3, Steven Tweedie was also there and made a number of comments about ext3. He has been fairly busy/nervous lately as ext3 just got into the hands of Lots Of(TM) users (when it shipped with Red Hat 7.2). The most serious problem I remember him talking about was that the 7.2 installer
had a box marked "upgrade my ext2 to ext3" and one marked "makefs the filesystem" (or something like that), and some people were checking both - which would create a nice new empty filesystem in place of the one which was being "upgraded". But of course that is just user error plus a confusing installer, not a kernel problem. Most of the things which looked like ext3 kernel problems seem to be something else, as far as Steven has been able to tell so far.
There shouldn't be a lot of problems for binary compatibility with C (e.g. glibc, libcurses, X libraries). (Famous last word is "should" so unless someone does some testing and reports the results, take with a grain of salt). For C++, it gets a bit murkier.
The Intel page has a section called "Compatibility with the GNU Compilers". They refer to the C++ ABI that was developed for Itanium, which I believe is basically the same ABI as GCC 3.x (it has mangled names which start
with _Z). When they say they aren't compatible with g++, I suspect they mean g++ 2.95.x and maybe even 3.0 or 3.0.1, I'm not sure that sentence applies to 3.0.2 or (certain unspecified) future releases of 3.x.
Exactly. One benefit of x86 instructions (the only benefit?;-)) is that they are pretty compact. And that wouldn't be such a big deal except that it means more of them fit in cache, you can fetch more instructions in one memory cycle, and that sort of thing. So using native transmeta instructions across the bus could easily slow things down (kind of a thought experiment, since as far as I know they haven't done it even for testing purposes).
This page (document 27) at the national security archive
contains a PDF of the heavily redacted memo.
In addition to the kitty, there is also material
about spy satellites and other such things.
The HyShot home page has lots of cool stuff, such
as pictures. The thing is launched on a suborbital rocket which goes to 300km altitude
and Mach 7.6 (with some help from gravity on the way down). Compare with Mach 25 for orbit - many rocketplanecompanies are aiming for suborbital instead of going straight to orbit.
Anyway, back to HyShot, the home page contains lots of details about what happens in what order and all that good stuff.
I'm not sure it is a widely known feature (I just discovered it recently), but I've grown pretty fond of news.altavista.com. A normal search engine will rarely spider a news site quickly enough to be of use for the searches of the sort "there is a news story on the radio, let me go to the net and find out what they are really talking about" variety. Does anyone other than altavista offer a search engine of this sort?
Slashdot Mirror
I'll agree that the website or the other linked material don't really go beyond the fluff, so let me try to explain why this matters. Frank and most of the other people involved in this have been going to the Linux shows and writing XFree86 drivers for Red Hat and stuff like that since at least, well, 1996 or so (probably longer). Then the Linux Hype Effect sucked them into VA Linux and spat them out the other side (hopefully it had its rewards, although I don't know how much stock they got or when/whether they sold it). Now they are going back to their roots - a small technically oriented company. I expect to see more of this - lots of good companies went through much upheaval in the days of the Linux Hype Effect and so now we should see things realigning in a more stable, sustainable configuration.
I don't see this article as saying that Canada is going to rescue anything. Rather, they are lining up along with Europe to complain (with some justice, since NASA is not upholding the ISS agreements as they currently stand). Now, I suppose if a nation complains enough and is willing to use this as a bargaining chip (e.g. in trade talks or whatever kind of talks matter to the US), then complaining becomes a kind of action. But a much more direct sort of rescue, a more obviously effective one, would be to come up with some funding. Europe once built a half-scale prototype of (some portions of) a crew return vehicle, but in recent years that activity has changed to "well, maybe we could build a few components for the US crew return vehicle, that would be cheaper. Well, is Europe prepared to build their own crew return vehicle? Or pay Russia to supply more Soyuzes?
The other amusing aspect of this whole thing is the number of times that the US has cancelled its part of a project (shuttle, partially; some science satellite in the 80's the name of which is at home; even Spacelab in a sense), and the fact that Europe (and other partners) fail to learn. It is like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown time after time, and Europe seems to always line up for another kick. I guess Canada is now joining them.
Standard UK usage is to say "Avis are renting me a car", "parcelfarce are idiots", etc. Yes it is strange if you are used to the US practice of using the singular, but it isn't just for the BBC.
Yes, I'm torn too. For it to really be an open source effort (in the sense of not requiring a fairly sizeable centralized $$$ flow), you would need volunteer editors as well as volunteers who contribute raw data. And based on my experience at dmoz.org, it isn't clear to me how well it would work for the OED (dmoz is great in a lot of ways, but there are plenty of problems too with neglected categories and standards which aren't uniform and the like).
But having said all that, the OED would be more useful if it were easier/cheaper to get one's hands on a copy. So the status quo has drawbacks which are more than merely theoretical.
Not only are people hacking their computerized new-fangled cars, there is even a sourceforge project, although perhaps the most interesting part of that project is the links, for example to FreeScan or LT1_Edit (the former free at least as in beer, the latter is for $$$).
Happy hacking!
I hope I'm wrong on this, but the more I look at this, the more I am reminded of "a camel is a horse designed by a committee" (with due apologies to perl fans and desert dwellers). The Liberty Alliance has all these companies signed up, but it seems pretty vaporous in terms of technical specs, marketing efforts, or much else. Time will tell on whether something real actually comes out of this, but I always get nervous when the hype-to-meat ratio is as high as this. Sort of reminds me of voting machines a year ago - everyone was talking about doing something but there was little/no agreement on what a voting machine should do. Six months later, most of the talk had gone away.
replay tv allows you to send the copy of the show that you recorded to someone else with a replay over a broadband internet connection
No wonder the TV industry doesn't like it. Another difference is that the Replay TV has a "skip forward 30 seconds" button, and the Tivo doesn't. Both of these are examples of how Replay TV is just trying to please the consumer and doesn't really care what the TV industry thinks of them (which I guess is how we got the VCR), whereas Tivo is trying to get the industry on board, chiefly by holding out the carrot of being able to get much more detailed information than Nielson provides about who is watching what (not on individuals, but in aggregates).
It looks to be open source although there is one catch - the words "as part of the 'unofficial CP/M web site'". Does that mean that this license does not cover, say, putting CP/M into a product, putting it up on a different web site, or the like? On the face of it, that would seem to be so, but I can't help but wonder whether Lineo is going to open source it the rest of the way at some point - as has been pointed out, CP/M is hardly the focus of their business these days.
The Artemis Project is more of a space club than a business (although it has some of the latter, and it is pretty successful compared with other clubs). Their web site contains a Data Book which was pretty good, but seems to now be members-only. Another good site is P.E.R.M.A.N.E.N.T. with lots of details about things like all the different minerals on the moon. Much of it is kind of long term (for example, mining applications which only make financial sense if you are using the minerals off-earth). And at the risk of immodesty I have pages on mining and novelties (with the former being more for the intrinsic value, such as platinum for its appearance or chemical properties, and the latter more having value by virtue of being from the moon). My pages are more focused on near-term applications (such as bring platinum group metals to earth). I try to include some numbers (such as prices of platinum, how much flooding the market would affect the price, how much it would cost to get materials back from an asteroid and stuff), so that you can tweaks the assumptions and see how that affects the finances.
There is more information from the (non-slashdotted) Intel site. The thing at the side of the monitor is indeed a CD player (CD writer, even).
For comparison, look at the Concept PC 2000 (also known as "deep forest") from HP and Intel sites. Both designs feature a small case. The most advanced feature of the 2000 design is that the side of the case has a translucent panel so that you can use the PC as a picture frame (for those who don't have enough room for their pr0n). But the lack of PCI slots seems like a pretty big limitation (if USB were faster and had more peripherals, maybe that wouldn't be such a big deal and I suppose for many uses it still isn't a big deal, but I'm not sure I'm quite willing to consign PCI to the "legacy" category yet).
Others have addressed the various issues about what is a "real" Bourne shell and bash extensions and all that. Anyway, the Linux Standard Base has a section on shells. In a nutshell, bash 2.x was the most POSIX-compliant of the shells that the LSB tested (and no, I don't know exactly what versions or which shells or the like), with pdksh getting an honorable mention. And there were two ways in which bash was not POSIX-compliant and concerning which the LSB therefore diverges from POSIX (whether $0 is the full pathname or just the basename, and what happens if you try to use "." to run a script without the read bit set). I don't know whether a future version of POSIX is planning to change the specification, or whether this is likely to remain a divergence for the foreseeable future or what. In any event, these two issues shouldn't be hard to deal with in writing scripts.
At the risk of seeking buzzwords for the sake of buzzwords, are there interpreters that will run these games via web technologies like HTML (using basic links/forms), Java applets, or Javascript? Having asked the question, I'm not sure that any of the above would actually be more useful to me than a regular interpreter which runs as a Linux application, but I'm still curious.
I suppose many /. readers already know this, but thomas has the details on bills. In this case it is the "Internet Tax Nondiscrimination Act", HR 1552. If you follow that link and click on "bill status" you will see that the Senate passed the House version without amendments, so it doesn't need to go to conference committee. Looking at the Congressional Record for 15 Nov 2001 shows you what the Senators had to say on the bill. (linking to Thomas is a bit tricky, so in case I got it wrong, just start at the thomas home page and use the bill number or the date for the congressional record text).
When I was (along with some other people, but mostly me) running CVS development, our most popular download was the Windows client (command line at the time, although WinCVS later got popular). Yet very little of the mailing list traffic, submitted patches, and the like were for Windows. I suppose one could point to reasons like whether people had the right compilers for Windows (cygwin wasn't as mature then as it is now, so we had both cygwin and Visual C++ ports). But I still would vote for the cultural explanation. The model of Windows freeware or shareware is basically a gift from the author to the user, whereas Unix free software is more often seen as a (potential) collaboration in which the users contribute.
Instead of putting 10 instruments on one satellite they should put two instruments one each of 5 satellites (or 3.33 instruments on each of 3). That way if one blows up on launch you haven't lost 2.3 billion euros (about 2 billion US dollars, compared with say $200-300 million or so for NASA's recent science missions, e.g. to Mars).
Is it my imagination or is ICANN actually working on getting their job done rather than horribly complex politics (more complex than needed to solve the problem), or trademark/legal craziness? There's some background at the page of the ICANN DNS Root committee.
Now, I'm pretty skeptical that a closed source DNS server from Register.com is going to be a big part of the solution, but even that I don't really mind so much. Having a few alternatives is good if for no other reason than helping to keep BIND from stagnating.
The article didn't talk much about DNSsec (or this older page) which has got to be part of the solution (to try to give the 10 second summary, when a client makes a DNS query and gets a response, it is kind of tricky to ensure that the response is really from the correct server, and DNSsec uses crypto to solve this and other problems).
The argument that you can't just shout "fire" in a crowded theater entered the law in Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919). This was a Supreme Court case concerning whether the government may suppress pamphlets encouraging people to resist the draft. Although I think that case may have been correctly decided (with the distinction being expressing opposition to the draft versus encouraging people to violate the draft law), I wonder if the Court realized they were treading on, or near thin ice, when they used the "Fire" analogy.
So it is with people who use the analogy today. Whenever someone start comparing some kind of speech to shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater, don't get carried away by the emotional appeal but keep an eye on your rights, lest someone try to make off with them.
And the cool part is that the interviewer was trying to get him to start some kind of argument. But instead of getting defensive or fighting back with something he didn't like about Linux or whatever, he just sidestepped it, and humorously too. Well done.
Although a Linux kernel has tons of functionality that you wouldn't use if you were running the Hurd on top of it, there would be potential advantages (SMP, running on a lot of hardware, etc). However, there are (at least) two factors which I suspect might stop this show: IPC speed and memory footprint. (1) The hurd uses a lot of interprocess communication calls between one of the hurd servers and another (or between a user application and a server). Therefore a good microkernel will try to make IPC very fast. Without having looked at Linux benchmarks in this area, I don't know how it stacks up, but I doubt it has gotten as much attention as in your average microkernel. (2) Would the Linux kernel use a lot of memory on unused functionality? (This one might be less of a big deal, although I don't happen to remember things like whether Linux swaps out kernel pages which aren't getting touched).
Someone asked Linus about the preemptible kernel patches (and latency in general) at the Annual Linux Showcase on Thursday night. The thing about the preemptible kernel is that it is only for uniprocessor - SMP kernels aren't preemptible. So unless you want the SMP case to be capable of tying up a processor for "too long" at a time, then you need to re-do each bit of code which is capable of long latencies anyway. The other thing which came up is that responsiveness of the system improved quite a bit recently with VM fixes (2.4.14 was the improved version, I think). It was a matter of the VM queueing up too much I/O (and the drivers trying to throttle it, instead of just throttling it all in the VM - or something like that). The preemptible kernel won't solve that kind of problem - although it may change/mask the symptoms enough to make it a bit hard to be sure where a problem is.
Oh, and to bring things back to ext3, Steven Tweedie was also there and made a number of comments about ext3. He has been fairly busy/nervous lately as ext3 just got into the hands of Lots Of(TM) users (when it shipped with Red Hat 7.2). The most serious problem I remember him talking about was that the 7.2 installer had a box marked "upgrade my ext2 to ext3" and one marked "makefs the filesystem" (or something like that), and some people were checking both - which would create a nice new empty filesystem in place of the one which was being "upgraded". But of course that is just user error plus a confusing installer, not a kernel problem. Most of the things which looked like ext3 kernel problems seem to be something else, as far as Steven has been able to tell so far.
There shouldn't be a lot of problems for binary compatibility with C (e.g. glibc, libcurses, X libraries). (Famous last word is "should" so unless someone does some testing and reports the results, take with a grain of salt). For C++, it gets a bit murkier. The Intel page has a section called "Compatibility with the GNU Compilers". They refer to the C++ ABI that was developed for Itanium, which I believe is basically the same ABI as GCC 3.x (it has mangled names which start with _Z). When they say they aren't compatible with g++, I suspect they mean g++ 2.95.x and maybe even 3.0 or 3.0.1, I'm not sure that sentence applies to 3.0.2 or (certain unspecified) future releases of 3.x.
Exactly. One benefit of x86 instructions (the only benefit? ;-)) is that they are pretty compact. And that wouldn't be such a big deal except that it means more of them fit in cache, you can fetch more instructions in one memory cycle, and that sort of thing. So using native transmeta instructions across the bus could easily slow things down (kind of a thought experiment, since as far as I know they haven't done it even for testing purposes).
This page (document 27) at the national security archive contains a PDF of the heavily redacted memo. In addition to the kitty, there is also material about spy satellites and other such things.
The HyShot home page has lots of cool stuff, such as pictures. The thing is launched on a suborbital rocket which goes to 300km altitude and Mach 7.6 (with some help from gravity on the way down). Compare with Mach 25 for orbit - many rocketplane companies are aiming for suborbital instead of going straight to orbit.
Anyway, back to HyShot, the home page contains lots of details about what happens in what order and all that good stuff.
I'm not sure it is a widely known feature (I just discovered it recently), but I've grown pretty fond of news.altavista.com. A normal search engine will rarely spider a news site quickly enough to be of use for the searches of the sort "there is a news story on the radio, let me go to the net and find out what they are really talking about" variety. Does anyone other than altavista offer a search engine of this sort?