Wouldn't it be easier for the spacecraft to dock with the ISS, and return the samples to earth via. the next Soyuez capsule? It seems silly to need to build a craft capable of re-entry when it doesn't need to...
Oh. I completely agree. But don't force her to learn HTML if she doesn't want to. Let it progress naturally. If you force her to learn HTML right from the start, she's probably going to become disillusioned of the whole concept.
AOL has a built-in webpage builder. Use it. It will work fine for any simple website which an 11 year old would want to make.
I used its first incarnation many years ago. It was a great introduction to webpage design. Since then, I have learned HTML and C++, and am in the process of learning PHP.
Also through AOL's homepage builder, I learned that no matter what the method is, creating a decent website takes a lot more work than is outwardly apparent (It's all in the CONTENT). If content is what you need, than the easiest way to build a website is through a relatively simple tool like AOL's homepage builder. In fact, I'd say that languages such as php are actually not conducive to promiting the use of good content.
It amazes me how ignorant and arrogant some slashdot readers are. Seriously, do you really think that she's going to want to learn HTML for her first website?
Why does the tool she uses have to be open-source? If AOL's homepage builder was absolutely useless, it wouldn't exist. Everything serves a function.
Now, personally, I wouldn't be caught dead using AOL's homepage builder, but it's a great start. Look at the logical progression of how I evolved my web-design skills:
1) Used AOL's homepage builder to create a simple one-page website. (It was quite limited at the time, couldn't make images into hyperlinks, no tables, etc.)
2) Used Netscape GOLD with it's intergrated WYSIWIG HTML editor to add tables to my page. (ooooohhh, aaahhhh)
3) Switched to MS Word's 'save as HTML' function. It's easy, and most computers have word installed on them
4) Started using Frontpage. Welcome to the world of multi-page sites!
5) Learned to write HTML on my own
6) Switched from frontpage to dreamweaver. Started drawing up concept sketches of what the site should look like in photoshop. Starting to dabble in ASP and PHP.
Now, this is quite a long progression, and most people won't follow the same path. But my point is that everybody should learn their own path.
Don't set up a system where you are in complete control. Give her the tools she needs to create the website, and let her explore on her own. If she needs help, let her ask questions.
I'm not saying that ls is inferior on any one operating system. (To my knowledge, I thought that ls was the same on most modern unixes)
What i'm saying is that Mac users don't need to use an overly-complex, antiquated mechanism to display a list of files in a directory. The finder does that for them. I don't want to have to properly format my syntax so that my files are sorted by size in an ascending order.
Joy's main argument is that modern unix-geeks have been unable to devise something better than what he came up with in 1979. And it's true. The only significant addition to the 'standard' the 'base' of unix accepted by the community today is X Windows - no matter what you may say, everything else is functionally the same as it was 30 years ago. Hell... unix continues to use the TTY acronym 25 years after the demise of the teletype machine.
So. Thirty years later we have unix. And we have X. Wow. that's a lot to be proud of...
This is somewhat ironic that sun makes a huge push into the consumer linux market less than a week after Bill Joy (one of Sun's original founders) quits Sun, and openly admits that he perfers OS X to Linux in almost all circumstances - "linux is for kids" as he stated in a recent interview in Wired.
Either way, the servers are great news for both AMD and Sun.
Wow. That's scary. Sounds exactly like one of the primary functions of my job over the summer.
Building was undergoing rennovation. I was hired as an assistant technology consultant. For about two weeks I had to make sure that the over-zealous construction workers didn't destroy our network cables.
Two weeks after I started the job, the demolition crews decided to work a night shift on a friday, which was odd, because they were all union workers, and normally left at EXACTLY 3 PM. Needless to say, on monday, when everybody arrived in the building, they found it without any false ceilings or electrical/phone/network wiring of any kind.
More frustrations... my boss announced her resignation on my first day working. After that, nobody took over the responsibility of making sure I got paid. At one point, they asked me if I was willing to wear an asbestos-proof suit, or take the week off.
How would you like to disassemble and vacuum out every computer in 3 large buildings? Or how about working from 9 to 3 (that's 3 in the morning. Or how about not getting paid until 3 months AFTER I left the job.
um.... do any LAPTOPS offer this? (forgetting the whole 'phone' aspect)
do any DESKTOPS even offer all of these functions in one unit?
either way, physical restrictions will prohibit this from being practical (gotta have big antenna to transmit high bandwidths, room for a speaker, optics for the high-quality camera, microphone for the recorder, place ti put your fingerprint for security, somewhere to hold a stylus, room for the VGA port and accompanying hardware. oh.... and a battery big enough to support this beast.
Finally, we can get rid of the biggest limitation today in gaming: Rich gamers.
By capping the frame rate at 60fps, gamers with insanely fast computers will no longer be put at an unfair advantage. This will also (finally) end the gaming age of machosim - yes, people STILL buy faster PCs to get more FPS on Quake3.
Honestly, I find that any game above 30fps is perfectly playable. Any more than 60 seems silly. Aside from that, there are few monitors that can draw so many frames per second... I actually find that once my FPS exceeds my refresh rate, the game begins to look worse, and other factors come into play. I perfer a good-looking game with a lower frame rate.
In addition, this may promote the revival of Motion-blur which seemed to die with 3dfx (those who used the technology claimed it to be awesome). Who knows?
It seems to me like apple would make a killing if they sold the certificates in their stores (at face value, of course!). It would make a great gift-item, and would be an impulse-buy for many (read: this is the kind of thing that mall-shoppers would buy)
Or would that violate the agreement between Apple (Computer) and Apple (Records)?
The article tells very little about the strength of the compressed graphite crystals.
Are they just "hard", and able to pass any scratch test thrown at them, or are they "strong", and able to support heavy loads(such as a space elevator!?).
Either way, the manufacturing process being used is only able to produce small samples, and is very similar to the process used to create artificial diamonds (from the text of the article, it appears that the process is the same, but with a few steps added in)
Diamonds may be hard, but have very little 'real' use, and aren't exactly strong. We have already proven our ability to (at great expense) manufacture synthetic diamonds, but have yet to find many useful applications for them (other than sawblades, etc...). In addition, it is very difficult (physically impossible) to make them into useful shapes without cutting them into very small pieces and using a bonding agent due to their crystaline structure.
Either way, this should prove to be interesting. I could definitely see this replacing diamonds in industrial applications. In addition, the graphite which forms these new crystals is much harder AND much stronger than the coal used to form diamonds. I wonder if the new substance is thermally conductive....... it certianly could be!
While it IS possible to run 2000 with under 128mb of RAM, it's not pretty, and won't run most mp3 players without needing to swap, which gives the whole system a big performance hit.
Long and short: you could probably get by with less than 128mb on a win2k machine, but you're not going to be able to run Word or IE while listening to music.
XP on the other hand, can barely sustain itself on 128mb, and 256mb is only marginally acceptable.
Either way, if you're running 2k or XP, chances are that your PC has over 256mb of RAM in it.
"The Chinese people have a long and distinguished history of exploration.
Odd. I was never taught anything in school about China's exploration. In fact, I remember learning that while Europe was going power-crazy and grasping for more land, China minded its own business...
Don't get me wrong. This is a GOOD thing, and I wish that the US would learn to do the same
No. The beautiful thing about having no maintence is that it doesn't NEED it.
This server is one of those special cases where the hardware and softare is configured 'just right' The server only runs one program, and is powered off at night, and booted up in the morning. It isn't connected to the internet (nor does it have an IP stack installed)...
Granted, hardware will die, but it can always be replaced, and we still make daily backups (I always find the prompt asking me if I'm using open-reel tape to be humorous). The tape drive indeed did break on one occasion. We never bothered finding a better model; the old one worked fine, and our database was nowhere near 50mb in size... so we found the same exact model and swapped them out.
If it still works, it doesn't need to be fixed. The system is simple, elegant, and easy to use. Other than legality, we had no purpose to ditch the system.
At one place which I assist with IT in, we still run the same UNIX-based billing/accounting system as we did in 1986.
As I am comparitively new, compared to most of this hardware, I wasn't around to see it installed. About 8 years ago, the original Bell Labs Unix server was replaced with an x86 SCO box.
Many of the Terminals remaining are original. The printers both lasted until about a year ago when they simultaneously died.
Our software vendor stopped supplying updates about 3 years ago when they switched to windows. Last month, they completely pulled the plug, and in order to stay legal, we must now move to windows, which will be expensive initially and in the long-run.
I don't pay attention to the SCO system. It just works. It has worked for 17 years. Over those 17 years, we had to purchase one server, a few terminals, and a printer. With windows, we will need to maintain a 3 year upgrade cycle.
And the sad part about all of this is that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the unix hardware. Last week, I sadly removed the terminals, and installed terminal emulation software on the new windows PCs. Sure, I could have attempted telnet, but the server predates TCP/IP, and I feared corrupting the otherwise flawless system in place.
I know we have plenty of reasons to bash SCO, but I must testify that anything that can last 17 years with little or no maintence is worth keeping. I've already had calls about the windows hardware not working as expected. Ugh.
Dude. It sounds like you simply have a blown-out power supply.
This happens ALL THE TIME with PCs. Of course, Apple has much tighter quality control, so this happens a lot less, but does happen nonetheless (I've seen several iMacs and G4 towers with dead PSUs).
Power supplies can die due to manufacturing defects (specifically cheap electrolytic capacitors), or due to bad power. If your building has bad power (you probably don't even know it), the life of your power supply will be easily cut in half (consumer-grade surge supressors and UPSes do little good against voltages which are constantly 'noisy').
Why not get one of the increasingly-popular self-sufficent wired ethernet camera devices (which I have seen for about $300), and add a wireless 802.11b/g bridge onto it?
Good points, but you've got to remember a few key points.
"Prevention of environmental disaster" More like monitoring of onngoing environmental disasters. The money would be better spent on preventing them on the ground rather than just watching them from space.
Knowing there is a problem is the first step in evading it. We need to know there is a problem before we can fix it.
"Creating a global network for modern communications, entertainment and networking" I thought that was what M$ was trying to do. So our great space program is about being a slave to the telecoms... Why don't we just put a giant Verizon logo on all the rockets from now on?
Agreed. Our telecom network is currently quite good. Underwater fiber-optic cables can provide faster, less latient connections than satelittes. If we could build a satelitte communications system which uses visible lasers, satelittes may become practical. In addition, space-based communication is still better for landlocked and third-world nations which can't afford a large wiring-infrastructure.
"Global education and health services" Give me a break. What, are we going to try to broadcast PBS to the entire world? The only people who will benefit the satalites and all the other space based comunications are the people who can afford the devices to tap into those communications. Last time I checked the poor in Africa want food, not TV's. The only people that will be able to afford these devices are the people that don't need these services.
Food is only a temporary solution. Once they have eaten it, they need more. Education is a permanent solution. Once they are educated, they retain the knowledge they have learned, and eventually, they'll be able to pay for their own food.
"Cheap and environmentally friendly energy" Let me guess: widespread use of potatoes to power clocks. They have gone a long way to create operational systems but they still need to develope them and they haven't been put into practice? In other words you have a coupel of ideas but you have done jack shit asbout them.
Solar/Microwave energy shows great promise. It's clean, safe, and friendly.
"Emergency warning and recovery systems" More satalites.
"National defense and strategic security" And more satalite systems.
Agreed both ways. However, the ground-stations must be highly redundant in the event of a catastrophe.
"Protection against catastrophic planetary accidents" Not too useful since it doesn't seem we are seriously developing any of the tech necessary to prevent a strike if one was imminent(sic). And knowing NASA, the mission to save earth will eb pushed back and eventually scraped due to budget cuts. We have to put saving the world on the back burner cause our president wants to go to war with someone else to boost his poll ratings. Plus, unless the asteroid is in low earth orbit, how is NASA ever going to get to it? Satalites again...
We do need to spend more money in this department. Agreed.
"Creation of new jobs and Industries -- a new vision for the 21st century and a mandate to explore truly new frontiers" This is the best and possibly the sole reason to have a space program. This alone makes it worth it. But lets face it: they haven't done anything in this theater since apollo (with the exception of a few probes). NASA and the shuttles is like an old man and his model T. He is constantly fixing the car just so he can go down to the local convience mart. Chuck the jollipe and get a hot rod.
You are 100% correct. Go read the Turner Theses on the American fronteir. They show how the existance of some form of fronteir is vital to the success to a country.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be easier for the spacecraft to dock with the ISS, and return the samples to earth via. the next Soyuez capsule? It seems silly to need to build a craft capable of re-entry when it doesn't need to...
When will us Mac users get NTFS support?
I'm not sure if you realize it, but there is no easy solution for using an external hard drive over 32gb with multiple platforms.
As of this driver, it appears that NTFS is probably the best way to do this, as it now has Linux support.
Windows or MacOS don't support Ext3 natively, and the 3rd party drivers are slow. Fat32 has a 32gb limit. Mac HFS+ can't be read by Windows.
How easy could it be to write an NTFS driver for OS X?
Oh. I completely agree. But don't force her to learn HTML if she doesn't want to. Let it progress naturally. If you force her to learn HTML right from the start, she's probably going to become disillusioned of the whole concept.
Okay. An eleven-year old girl probably uses AOL.
AOL has a built-in webpage builder. Use it. It will work fine for any simple website which an 11 year old would want to make.
I used its first incarnation many years ago. It was a great introduction to webpage design. Since then, I have learned HTML and C++, and am in the process of learning PHP.
Also through AOL's homepage builder, I learned that no matter what the method is, creating a decent website takes a lot more work than is outwardly apparent (It's all in the CONTENT). If content is what you need, than the easiest way to build a website is through a relatively simple tool like AOL's homepage builder. In fact, I'd say that languages such as php are actually not conducive to promiting the use of good content.
It amazes me how ignorant and arrogant some slashdot readers are. Seriously, do you really think that she's going to want to learn HTML for her first website?
Why does the tool she uses have to be open-source? If AOL's homepage builder was absolutely useless, it wouldn't exist. Everything serves a function.
Now, personally, I wouldn't be caught dead using AOL's homepage builder, but it's a great start. Look at the logical progression of how I evolved my web-design skills:
1) Used AOL's homepage builder to create a simple one-page website. (It was quite limited at the time, couldn't make images into hyperlinks, no tables, etc.)
2) Used Netscape GOLD with it's intergrated WYSIWIG HTML editor to add tables to my page. (ooooohhh, aaahhhh)
3) Switched to MS Word's 'save as HTML' function. It's easy, and most computers have word installed on them
4) Started using Frontpage. Welcome to the world of multi-page sites!
5) Learned to write HTML on my own
6) Switched from frontpage to dreamweaver. Started drawing up concept sketches of what the site should look like in photoshop. Starting to dabble in ASP and PHP.
Now, this is quite a long progression, and most people won't follow the same path. But my point is that everybody should learn their own path.
Don't set up a system where you are in complete control. Give her the tools she needs to create the website, and let her explore on her own. If she needs help, let her ask questions.
I'm not saying that ls is inferior on any one operating system. (To my knowledge, I thought that ls was the same on most modern unixes)
What i'm saying is that Mac users don't need to use an overly-complex, antiquated mechanism to display a list of files in a directory. The finder does that for them. I don't want to have to properly format my syntax so that my files are sorted by size in an ascending order.
Joy's main argument is that modern unix-geeks have been unable to devise something better than what he came up with in 1979. And it's true. The only significant addition to the 'standard' the 'base' of unix accepted by the community today is X Windows - no matter what you may say, everything else is functionally the same as it was 30 years ago. Hell... unix continues to use the TTY acronym 25 years after the demise of the teletype machine.
So. Thirty years later we have unix. And we have X. Wow. that's a lot to be proud of...
Thanks to the dude who moderated this as insightful, I am now locking all of the doors in my house, and am putting on my bullet-proof vest.
Only in America. Land of the Free, Home of the Brave.
Oh. Yes. 15 years ago, the manpage for 'ls' wasn't 15 pages long.
And yes, ls is availible to me on every OSX Mac in the world. However, almost no mac users use it on a daily basis. There's a reason for this.
This is somewhat ironic that sun makes a huge push into the consumer linux market less than a week after Bill Joy (one of Sun's original founders) quits Sun, and openly admits that he perfers OS X to Linux in almost all circumstances - "linux is for kids" as he stated in a recent interview in Wired.
Either way, the servers are great news for both AMD and Sun.
Wow. That's scary. Sounds exactly like one of the primary functions of my job over the summer.
Building was undergoing rennovation. I was hired as an assistant technology consultant. For about two weeks I had to make sure that the over-zealous construction workers didn't destroy our network cables.
Two weeks after I started the job, the demolition crews decided to work a night shift on a friday, which was odd, because they were all union workers, and normally left at EXACTLY 3 PM. Needless to say, on monday, when everybody arrived in the building, they found it without any false ceilings or electrical/phone/network wiring of any kind.
More frustrations... my boss announced her resignation on my first day working. After that, nobody took over the responsibility of making sure I got paid. At one point, they asked me if I was willing to wear an asbestos-proof suit, or take the week off.
How would you like to disassemble and vacuum out every computer in 3 large buildings? Or how about working from 9 to 3 (that's 3 in the morning. Or how about not getting paid until 3 months AFTER I left the job.
I got $5.75 USD per hour.
Never EVER work for a school district.
um.... do any LAPTOPS offer this? (forgetting the whole 'phone' aspect)
do any DESKTOPS even offer all of these functions in one unit?
either way, physical restrictions will prohibit this from being practical (gotta have big antenna to transmit high bandwidths, room for a speaker, optics for the high-quality camera, microphone for the recorder, place ti put your fingerprint for security, somewhere to hold a stylus, room for the VGA port and accompanying hardware. oh.... and a battery big enough to support this beast.
Finally, we can get rid of the biggest limitation today in gaming: Rich gamers.
By capping the frame rate at 60fps, gamers with insanely fast computers will no longer be put at an unfair advantage. This will also (finally) end the gaming age of machosim - yes, people STILL buy faster PCs to get more FPS on Quake3.
Honestly, I find that any game above 30fps is perfectly playable. Any more than 60 seems silly. Aside from that, there are few monitors that can draw so many frames per second... I actually find that once my FPS exceeds my refresh rate, the game begins to look worse, and other factors come into play. I perfer a good-looking game with a lower frame rate.
In addition, this may promote the revival of Motion-blur which seemed to die with 3dfx (those who used the technology claimed it to be awesome). Who knows?
It seems to me like apple would make a killing if they sold the certificates in their stores (at face value, of course!). It would make a great gift-item, and would be an impulse-buy for many (read: this is the kind of thing that mall-shoppers would buy)
Or would that violate the agreement between Apple (Computer) and Apple (Records)?
The article tells very little about the strength of the compressed graphite crystals.
Are they just "hard", and able to pass any scratch test thrown at them, or are they "strong", and able to support heavy loads(such as a space elevator!?).
Either way, the manufacturing process being used is only able to produce small samples, and is very similar to the process used to create artificial diamonds (from the text of the article, it appears that the process is the same, but with a few steps added in)
Diamonds may be hard, but have very little 'real' use, and aren't exactly strong. We have already proven our ability to (at great expense) manufacture synthetic diamonds, but have yet to find many useful applications for them (other than sawblades, etc...). In addition, it is very difficult (physically impossible) to make them into useful shapes without cutting them into very small pieces and using a bonding agent due to their crystaline structure.
Either way, this should prove to be interesting. I could definitely see this replacing diamonds in industrial applications. In addition, the graphite which forms these new crystals is much harder AND much stronger than the coal used to form diamonds. I wonder if the new substance is thermally conductive....... it certianly could be!
The player is only compatible with Win2k/XP.
While it IS possible to run 2000 with under 128mb of RAM, it's not pretty, and won't run most mp3 players without needing to swap, which gives the whole system a big performance hit.
Long and short: you could probably get by with less than 128mb on a win2k machine, but you're not going to be able to run Word or IE while listening to music.
XP on the other hand, can barely sustain itself on 128mb, and 256mb is only marginally acceptable.
Either way, if you're running 2k or XP, chances are that your PC has over 256mb of RAM in it.
"The Chinese people have a long and distinguished history of exploration.
Odd. I was never taught anything in school about China's exploration. In fact, I remember learning that while Europe was going power-crazy and grasping for more land, China minded its own business...
Don't get me wrong. This is a GOOD thing, and I wish that the US would learn to do the same
No. The beautiful thing about having no maintence is that it doesn't NEED it.
This server is one of those special cases where the hardware and softare is configured 'just right' The server only runs one program, and is powered off at night, and booted up in the morning. It isn't connected to the internet (nor does it have an IP stack installed)...
Granted, hardware will die, but it can always be replaced, and we still make daily backups (I always find the prompt asking me if I'm using open-reel tape to be humorous). The tape drive indeed did break on one occasion. We never bothered finding a better model; the old one worked fine, and our database was nowhere near 50mb in size... so we found the same exact model and swapped them out.
If it still works, it doesn't need to be fixed. The system is simple, elegant, and easy to use. Other than legality, we had no purpose to ditch the system.
Does Windows 98 count as a DOS program?
At one place which I assist with IT in, we still run the same UNIX-based billing/accounting system as we did in 1986.
As I am comparitively new, compared to most of this hardware, I wasn't around to see it installed. About 8 years ago, the original Bell Labs Unix server was replaced with an x86 SCO box.
Many of the Terminals remaining are original. The printers both lasted until about a year ago when they simultaneously died.
Our software vendor stopped supplying updates about 3 years ago when they switched to windows. Last month, they completely pulled the plug, and in order to stay legal, we must now move to windows, which will be expensive initially and in the long-run.
I don't pay attention to the SCO system. It just works. It has worked for 17 years. Over those 17 years, we had to purchase one server, a few terminals, and a printer. With windows, we will need to maintain a 3 year upgrade cycle.
And the sad part about all of this is that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the unix hardware. Last week, I sadly removed the terminals, and installed terminal emulation software on the new windows PCs. Sure, I could have attempted telnet, but the server predates TCP/IP, and I feared corrupting the otherwise flawless system in place.
I know we have plenty of reasons to bash SCO, but I must testify that anything that can last 17 years with little or no maintence is worth keeping. I've already had calls about the windows hardware not working as expected. Ugh.
Based upon the complete PDF complaint, it appears as though the Elementary School students are listed the Plantiffs, rather than their parents.
Does this strike anybody as odd?
Dude. It sounds like you simply have a blown-out power supply.
This happens ALL THE TIME with PCs. Of course, Apple has much tighter quality control, so this happens a lot less, but does happen nonetheless (I've seen several iMacs and G4 towers with dead PSUs).
Power supplies can die due to manufacturing defects (specifically cheap electrolytic capacitors), or due to bad power. If your building has bad power (you probably don't even know it), the life of your power supply will be easily cut in half (consumer-grade surge supressors and UPSes do little good against voltages which are constantly 'noisy').
Why not get one of the increasingly-popular self-sufficent wired ethernet camera devices (which I have seen for about $300), and add a wireless 802.11b/g bridge onto it?
Could someone explain to me the logic behind the Maltron?
Honestly, the thing looks like a badly-designed torture device. It looks like one-handed typing would be easier on a full-size qwerty.
If that thing doesn't give you carpal tonel, NOTHING will.
Besides, who the heck names a product beginning with 'mal'?
Oh well... it's expensive, so it must be good!
Good points, but you've got to remember a few key points.
"Prevention of environmental disaster"
More like monitoring of onngoing environmental disasters. The money would be better spent on preventing them on the ground rather than just watching them from space.
Knowing there is a problem is the first step in evading it. We need to know there is a problem before we can fix it.
"Creating a global network for modern communications, entertainment and networking"
I thought that was what M$ was trying to do. So our great space program is about being a slave to the telecoms... Why don't we just put a giant Verizon logo on all the rockets from now on?
Agreed. Our telecom network is currently quite good. Underwater fiber-optic cables can provide faster, less latient connections than satelittes. If we could build a satelitte communications system which uses visible lasers, satelittes may become practical. In addition, space-based communication is still better for landlocked and third-world nations which can't afford a large wiring-infrastructure.
"Global education and health services"
Give me a break. What, are we going to try to broadcast PBS to the entire world? The only people who will benefit the satalites and all the other space based comunications are the people who can afford the devices to tap into those communications. Last time I checked the poor in Africa want food, not TV's. The only people that will be able to afford these devices are the people that don't need these services.
Food is only a temporary solution. Once they have eaten it, they need more. Education is a permanent solution. Once they are educated, they retain the knowledge they have learned, and eventually, they'll be able to pay for their own food.
"Cheap and environmentally friendly energy"
Let me guess: widespread use of potatoes to power clocks. They have gone a long way to create operational systems but they still need to develope them and they haven't been put into practice? In other words you have a coupel of ideas but you have done jack shit asbout them.
Solar/Microwave energy shows great promise. It's clean, safe, and friendly.
"Emergency warning and recovery systems"
More satalites.
"National defense and strategic security"
And more satalite systems.
Agreed both ways. However, the ground-stations must be highly redundant in the event of a catastrophe.
"Protection against catastrophic planetary accidents"
Not too useful since it doesn't seem we are seriously developing any of the tech necessary to prevent a strike if one was imminent(sic). And knowing NASA, the mission to save earth will eb pushed back and eventually scraped due to budget cuts. We have to put saving the world on the back burner cause our president wants to go to war with someone else to boost his poll ratings. Plus, unless the asteroid is in low earth orbit, how is NASA ever going to get to it? Satalites again...
We do need to spend more money in this department. Agreed.
"Creation of new jobs and Industries -- a new vision for the 21st century and a mandate to explore truly new frontiers"
This is the best and possibly the sole reason to have a space program. This alone makes it worth it. But lets face it: they haven't done anything in this theater since apollo (with the exception of a few probes). NASA and the shuttles is like an old man and his model T. He is constantly fixing the car just so he can go down to the local convience mart. Chuck the jollipe and get a hot rod.
You are 100% correct. Go read the Turner Theses on the American fronteir. They show how the existance of some form of fronteir is vital to the success to a country.
At first glance, I mis-parsed the title of the article as "IEEE to Standardize OS Security Compromises"
Correction: what were they running Apache 1.3.26 on before we slashdotted them?