I wonder if they are running "orange Leos"? Here's a post from alt.folklore.computers in 1998. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is necessarily accurate, though: the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the latter half of the 60s, so it may be a bit younger.
When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.
BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".
Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company, best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of corner tea shops.
Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4 mainframe emulating a LEO.
30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....
Fortunately, you don't have to use the flash-based support site. If you go to http://supporthtml.oracle.com/ , you get the HTML-based version, which is much more user friendly.
I saved this post from alt.folklore.computers. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is necessarily accurate -- the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the later half of the 60s.
I don't know if some modern incarnation of the Orange Leo made it past Y2k. If it did, my guess is it will still be around for a long time...
From: Deryk Barker
Subject: Re: Multics
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.os.multics
Date: 1998/11/09 [*snip*] When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.
BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".
Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company, best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of corner tea shops.
Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4 mainframe emulating a LEO.
30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....
but what would happen to Titan's atmosphere? Huge greenhouse effect?
Possibly. But not for very long, at least in the geological sense. Titan's able to maintain its dense atmosphere because it is so bitterly cold. The kinetic energy of its atmospheric gas molecules is not very high, so Titan's weak gravity is able to hold onto them. With significant heating, the atmosphere would bleed away.
Quite a lot of Titan is made out of ices. These will replenish the escaping atmosphere, for a while. But it also means that Titan's going to be steadily losing mass; as it loses its mass, it further loses the ability to hang onto its atmosphere.
Mars' escape velocity is 5.0225 km/s, and, starting from a colder location than Earth, has still lost most of its atmosphere. Escape velocity on Titan is 2.6452 km/s, barely stronger than our Moon's.
Not all animals have equivalents of X and Y chromosomes, and even if they do, they don't necessarily follow the human pattern.
Human males have one X and one Y chromosome, and human females have two X's. But the female chicken is the heterogametic sex in that species. Hens have two different sex chromosomes, Z and W. Roosters have two copies of Z.
Are you thinking of Non-Stop/Unix? IIRC, that's the SVR4 Unix variant that was originally out of Tandem. Compaq purchased them in the late 90's, before they committed hari-kiri by buying DEC. They've subsequently broadened the Non-Stop line, taking advantage of Tandem's design experience (and brand names). I'm not familiar with anything from the Non-Stop family going over to Tarentella; perhaps you're thinking of Non-Stops running Tarentella's products?
The world knew Earth was round. I think the problem in Columbus' time was whether you could "fall off the bottom" and into the jaw of some dragon.
No, the major problem (at least with the advisors in the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who tried to block funding for Columbus' voyage), was that they said that Columbus' calculations for the size of the Earth were too small. And, in fact, it wasn't really a problem. The advisors were right. Going West is a lousy way to get from Europe to India. It was Columbus' good fortune that there was a continent in between.
So, sometimes you can make the right decision for the wrong reasons. We'll see how it goes with this theory.
Antarctica is covered in at least a few thousand feet of snow which would probably be the most unperdictable surface you could try to build on
That several thousand feet is ice. Given the temperature, it's pretty stable. The Amundsen-Scott base is built on top of it.
Ice also doesn't cover the whole of Antarctica; if you're worried about ice you could build your telescope right on top of the permafrost. Some pictures of the "dry valleys" are here.
Sounds very unlikely to me. You will find weird custom S/360 derivatives in places like the Space Shuttle, but coordination and route planning doesn't sound a likely place for one.
Of the 360-based operating systems, IBM's TPF has a major presence in the airline industry, but this probably isn't the system in question. TPF tends to handle ticketing and reservations. TPF stands for the Transaction Processing Facility; it's the descendant of the old Airline Control Program (ACP) developed for Sabre. Sabre in fact is still running TPF, although I believe they're busy transitioning away from the mainframe to Tandem's er I mean Compaq's er I mean HP's NonStop/UX.
Of course, it might not be an IBM mainframe at all; Unisys has a niche in the airline industry. But heck; given that this is route planning, just about anything from AIX to z/OS is a possibility. Even *shudder* Windows.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor, has been blogged quite a bit about Jibjab lately. He wrote about the question of whether that implied license protects JibJab here. Surprisingly enough, he suggests that the answer is "no".
To quote in part:
To the best of my knowledge, though -- and I'm not an expert on the old pre-1976-Act rules related to renewals -- any such license would have disappeared with the end of the original 28-year-term of protection. Under the 1909 Copyright Act, copyrights endured only for 28 years, but the author or his heirs could renew them after the end of the original term; the new term would also last for 28 years, though that has been extended several times by Congress to the point that pre-1976 copyrights last for 95 years from publication. And the new term would be a fresh, clean copyright, free of any licenses or transfers that the author originally did as to the original term. (The whole point of the renewal was to give the author of a work that had proven its long-term value a chance to recapture some of the value, even if he sold his rights for cheap when he first wrote it, before the value of the work was clear.)
This Land Is Your Land was written and, I infer, published in 1940; presumably the copyright was renewed in 1968 by Guthrie's heirs (Guthrie died in 1967); and this renewed copyright would, I think, not be governed by any licenses that Guthrie had originally granted (though perhaps if the heirs also republished Guthrie's notation, that might be seen as a new license).
Fluent doesn't want to support Apple OS X, yet they will support FujitsuPrimepower?
Sure. Because supporting Fujitsu's Primepower boxes is pretty much the same as supporting Sun UltraSPARC -- Primepower runs Solaris on Fujitsu's SPARC clones. You don't run into them all that often in the USA, but they've a strong presence in Japan and Europe.
It's not like they are already selling Fluent for Net/Free/OpenBSD, so porting and supporting the application on MacOS X would not be a trivial task.
Probably the most famous example of a drug with an icky source is Premarin (R), a widely used estrogen replacement. It is made from pregnant mare's urine.
WebMD has an article about "pharmazooticals" here. The gila monster drug makes an appearance.
As a visitor to Europe (just got back from a ~three week stay), I was flabbergasted as to how crass the TV output was. Apparently it's OK to show buck naked actors and actresses on network TV cussing at each other, but they won't so much as point the video camera at a blunt butter knife.
I often wondered if his books were some kind of method of covert messaging...
Around 1920 Edgar Wallace used this scheme in one of his thrillers about "The Four Just Men". One of the group has been captured, and given the high profile of his crimes, he is being held in solitary. In order to pass along the rescue plan to their imprisoned colleague, his compatriots write a travel book that contains the scheme encoded and arrange for it to be reviewed in enough major newspapers that the prisoner can legitimately request a copy.
No need to unplug the PC. You can just disable the break- signal-stops-sun with kbd -a disable.
Want it persistant after a reboot? Modify the settings in/etc/default/kbd
Wheeling back on topic, Mac USB-serial adapters advertised as such are kind of pricey. However, you can also buy a less capable USB-serial adapter advertised for use with serial palms and so forth. Generally, they're not as good, but will still do the trick.
An alternative list of supercomputers is (or perhaps "was") kept by Gunter at GAPCON. He ranks sites, as opposed to individual systems. Unfortunatly, the site seems to be down right now, but the ever helpful google cache (search for "gapcon supercomputer") put the NSA at #4, behind the Japan Marine Science Center, LLNL and LANL.
I think much of his information comes out of press releases, leaks, submissions, etc. The record for the NSA hadn't been updated for a while, but this may give you an idea of what they might have been running not very long ago.
The modern stuff is all well and good, but what's really fascinating is his list of the top computing sites in 1956. (Or search google for 1956 computing sites and click on the cache.) Here's the top two. Rating is in OPS:
583733.3 - [ONR]
Office of Naval Research,Arlington,Virginia,US
1) MIT Whirlwind 1 500000
2) ERA Atlas 2 83333.3
3) ERA 1101 200
4) ERA Atlas 1 200
253787.8 - [MIT]
MIT,Cambridge,Massachusetts,US
1) MIT TX-0 166666.7
2) MIT Whirlwind 2 45454.4
3) IBM 704 41666.7
Note that the supreme super-computer of that era, the Whirlwind, is quite a bit slower than your pocket calculator.
In order to even have heard of the 3d file browser FSN, the little girl in Jurassic Park must have known Irix (definitely a Unix [TM]) a lot better than most.
The "Riddle of Stars" trilogy was just reprinted in a single volume as Riddle-Master: The Complete Trilogy and is still available.
McKillip also wrote three science fiction books, all out of print: the standalone Fool's Run, and the "duology" Moon-Flash and The Moon and The Face. Fool's Run is quite good; very cleverly plotted. I've always liked her writing, but McKillip is a bit surreal for some.
Apple's market cap. is 5.82 billion dollars, about half that of Sun.
There are certainly advantages to technology deals between the companies -- both use openfirmware , after all. Rumor even had it that inside apple native versions of MacOS "classic" were built and running on SPARC hardware, and Sun released a version of Solaris 2.5.1 that ran on PowerPC. But I see a merger as being unlikely. Although Quartz on Solaris would be fun!
If Sun is going to be bought, the only deal that makes sense to me would be a purchase by Fujitsu. I can't see Sony jumping into the server business, nor Dell going mano-a-mano with Microsoft.
Apropos of the Leo mentioned in a previous slashdot story.
I saved this post from alt.folklore.computers in 1998. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is neccessarily accurate -- the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the latter half of the 60s, so it may be a bit younger.
On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past some organization having been forced to make something like the orange leo y2k compliant.
Peter H. Coffin (hellsop@execpc.com) wrote: : Barry Margolin wrote: : : > For that matter, how many portable OSes have been implemented by *anyone*? : : The most current OS/400 (v4r3) will still run programs compiled on the : System 38 tranparently. That's 10-15 year old object code over at least : one complete architecture change. The machine also has a history of : being able to run in System 36 mode, over that same architecture change. : : I'm not sure if that counts as a ported OS or not, and I do work for : IBM, so I'll stop now...
Peanuts.
When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.
BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".
Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company, best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of corner tea shops.
Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4 mainframe emulating a LEO.
30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....
If he [Clarke] had [filed a patent for geosynchronous satellites], he would almost certainly by now be far and away the richest man on the planet.
Clarke published his idea in 1945. The first geosynchronous satellite, Syncom I, wasn't launched until 1963. Clarke's patents would have run out by the time geosynchronous communications satellites began filling the skies.
Appart from the UK there really isn't anyone in the "coalition" with global reach, nobody that has the ability to make large medium term troop deployments on a global scale
I don't think that anyone besides the UK, US, and France is currently capable of making "large medium term troop deployments on a global scale". China and India would have insurmountable logistical issues invading Iceland. Even Russia seems better defined a regional powerhouse, although sheer size makes its region large.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier
Re:A good "compromise"
on
Defining "Planet"
·
· Score: 4, Informative
it seems obvious that there are tens, if not hundreds/thousands of Pluto-sized objects out there
Let's rephrase that: there *might* be hundreds/thousands of Pluto-sized objects. But we certainly haven't found any yet!
Pluto - 2300 km
Quaoar - 1300km
Varuna - 900km
Ceres - 479km
Chiron - ~175km
Note that Quaoar, the largest of the bunch, is half Pluto's size and barely larger than Pluto's moon, Charon.
As long as Pluto is substantially larger than any other known transneptunian object, it doesn't seem like we would need to worry about planetary definitions.
As I recall, Miss Jennifer 8 Lee used to write for the Washington Post. Her middle name really is "8". I don't know why they stuck the period after it. I mean, it's not like her middle name was 888 or 8isenough or anything like that.
I believe Harry S Truman was another fellow whose parents inflicted an odd middle name upon him. His middle name was S.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if they are running "orange Leos"? Here's a post from alt.folklore.computers in 1998. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is necessarily accurate, though: the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the latter half of the 60s, so it may be a bit younger.
From: Deryk Barker (dbarker@camosun.bc.nospam.ca)
Subject: Re: Multics
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.os.multics
Date: 1998/11/09
[...]
When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the
customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.
BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".
Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever
commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons
Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company,
best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of
corner tea shops.
Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange
cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4
mainframe emulating a LEO.
30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....
Fortunately, you don't have to use the flash-based support site. If you go to http://supporthtml.oracle.com/ , you get the HTML-based version, which is much more user friendly.
Kittinger was a contestant on the "What's My Line" game show in 1956, in honor of an earlier altitude record he set in a balloon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNFH1Ds0rU4
Very personable guy; there's a brief interview with him afterwards.
I saved this post from alt.folklore.computers. Terribly impressive. I'm
not sure his age estimate is necessarily accurate -- the final
incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the later half of the
60s.
I don't know if some modern incarnation of the Orange Leo made it past Y2k. If it did, my guess is it will still be around for a long time...
From: Deryk Barker
Subject: Re: Multics
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.os.multics
Date: 1998/11/09
[*snip*]
When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the
customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.
BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".
Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever
commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons
Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company,
best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of
corner tea shops.
Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange
cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4
mainframe emulating a LEO.
30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....
but what would happen to Titan's atmosphere? Huge greenhouse effect?
Possibly. But not for very long, at least in the geological sense. Titan's able to maintain its dense atmosphere because it is so bitterly cold. The kinetic energy of its atmospheric gas molecules is not very high, so Titan's weak gravity is able to hold onto them. With significant heating, the atmosphere would bleed away.
Quite a lot of Titan is made out of ices. These will replenish the escaping atmosphere, for a while. But it also means that Titan's going to be steadily losing mass; as it loses its mass, it further loses the ability to hang onto its atmosphere.
Mars' escape velocity is 5.0225 km/s, and, starting from a colder location than Earth, has still lost most of its atmosphere. Escape velocity on Titan is 2.6452 km/s, barely stronger than our Moon's.
Human males have one X and one Y chromosome, and human females have two X's. But the female chicken is the heterogametic sex in that species. Hens have two different sex chromosomes, Z and W. Roosters have two copies of Z.
Are you thinking of Non-Stop/Unix? IIRC, that's the SVR4 Unix variant that was originally out of Tandem. Compaq purchased them in the late 90's, before they committed hari-kiri by buying DEC. They've subsequently broadened the Non-Stop line, taking advantage of Tandem's design experience (and brand names). I'm not familiar with anything from the Non-Stop family going over to Tarentella; perhaps you're thinking of Non-Stops running Tarentella's products?
No, the major problem (at least with the advisors in the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who tried to block funding for Columbus' voyage), was that they said that Columbus' calculations for the size of the Earth were too small. And, in fact, it wasn't really a problem. The advisors were right. Going West is a lousy way to get from Europe to India. It was Columbus' good fortune that there was a continent in between.
So, sometimes you can make the right decision for the wrong reasons. We'll see how it goes with this theory.
Jeff Boulier
That several thousand feet is ice. Given the temperature, it's pretty stable. The Amundsen-Scott base is built on top of it.
Ice also doesn't cover the whole of Antarctica; if you're worried about ice you could build your telescope right on top of the permafrost. Some pictures of the "dry valleys" are here.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
Of the 360-based operating systems, IBM's TPF has a major presence in the airline industry, but this probably isn't the system in question. TPF tends to handle ticketing and reservations. TPF stands for the Transaction Processing Facility; it's the descendant of the old Airline Control Program (ACP) developed for Sabre. Sabre in fact is still running TPF, although I believe they're busy transitioning away from the mainframe to Tandem's er I mean Compaq's er I mean HP's NonStop/UX.
Of course, it might not be an IBM mainframe at all; Unisys has a niche in the airline industry. But heck; given that this is route planning, just about anything from AIX to z/OS is a possibility. Even *shudder* Windows.
To quote in part:
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier
Sure. Because supporting Fujitsu's Primepower boxes is pretty much the same as supporting Sun UltraSPARC -- Primepower runs Solaris on Fujitsu's SPARC clones. You don't run into them all that often in the USA, but they've a strong presence in Japan and Europe.
It's not like they are already selling Fluent for Net/Free/OpenBSD, so porting and supporting the application on MacOS X would not be a trivial task.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
WebMD has an article about "pharmazooticals" here. The gila monster drug makes an appearance.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier
As a visitor to Europe (just got back from a ~three week stay), I was flabbergasted as to how crass the TV output was. Apparently it's OK to show buck naked actors and actresses on network TV cussing at each other, but they won't so much as point the video camera at a blunt butter knife.
What kind of nutty system is that?
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
Around 1920 Edgar Wallace used this scheme in one of his thrillers about "The Four Just Men". One of the group has been captured, and given the high profile of his crimes, he is being held in solitary. In order to pass along the rescue plan to their imprisoned colleague, his compatriots write a travel book that contains the scheme encoded and arrange for it to be reviewed in enough major newspapers that the prisoner can legitimately request a copy.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
Want it persistant after a reboot? Modify the settings in /etc/default/kbd
Wheeling back on topic, Mac USB-serial adapters advertised as such are kind of pricey. However, you can also buy a less capable USB-serial adapter advertised for use with serial palms and so forth. Generally, they're not as good, but will still do the trick.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
An alternative list of supercomputers is (or perhaps "was") kept by Gunter at GAPCON. He ranks sites, as opposed to individual systems. Unfortunatly, the site seems to be down right now, but the ever helpful google cache (search for "gapcon supercomputer") put the NSA at #4, behind the Japan Marine Science Center, LLNL and LANL.
12475.7 - (09-JAN-2002) [NSA]
National Security Agency,Fort Meade,Maryland,US
1) Cray X1-3/192 2457.6
2) Cray T3E-1200E LC1900 2280
3) Cray T3E-900 LC1324 1191.6
4) SGI 2800/250-2304 1152
5) HP SuperDome/552-512 1130.5
6) Cray T3E-1350 LC800 1080
7) SGI 3800/400-1064 851.2
8) Cray T3E-1200E LC540 648
9) Cray T3E-1200E LC540 648
10) Cray T3E-1200E LC540 648
11) Cray T3E-1200 LC404 484.8
12) Cray T3E-1200 LC284 340.8
I think much of his information comes out of press releases, leaks, submissions, etc. The record for the NSA hadn't been updated for a while, but this may give you an idea of what they might have been running not very long ago.
The modern stuff is all well and good, but what's really fascinating is his list of the top computing sites in 1956. (Or search google for 1956 computing sites and click on the cache.) Here's the top two. Rating is in OPS:
583733.3 - [ONR]
Office of Naval Research,Arlington,Virginia,US
1) MIT Whirlwind 1 500000
2) ERA Atlas 2 83333.3
3) ERA 1101 200
4) ERA Atlas 1 200
253787.8 - [MIT]
MIT,Cambridge,Massachusetts,US
1) MIT TX-0 166666.7
2) MIT Whirlwind 2 45454.4
3) IBM 704 41666.7
Note that the supreme super-computer of that era, the Whirlwind, is quite a bit slower than your pocket calculator.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
McKillip also wrote three science fiction books, all out of print: the standalone Fool's Run, and the "duology" Moon-Flash and The Moon and The Face. Fool's Run is quite good; very cleverly plotted. I've always liked her writing, but McKillip is a bit surreal for some.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier
Sun's market cap. is 11.9 billion dollars.
Apple's market cap. is 5.82 billion dollars, about half that of Sun.
There are certainly advantages to technology deals between the companies -- both use openfirmware , after all. Rumor even had it that inside apple native versions of MacOS "classic" were built and running on SPARC hardware, and Sun released a version of Solaris 2.5.1 that ran on PowerPC. But I see a merger as being unlikely. Although Quartz on Solaris would be fun!
If Sun is going to be bought, the only deal that makes sense to me would be a purchase by Fujitsu. I can't see Sony jumping into the server business, nor Dell going mano-a-mano with Microsoft.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier
Apropos of the Leo mentioned in a previous slashdot story.
I saved this post from alt.folklore.computers in 1998. Terribly impressive. I'm not sure his age estimate is neccessarily accurate -- the final incarnation of the Leo ceased to be manufactured in the latter half of the 60s, so it may be a bit younger.
On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past some organization having been forced to make something like the orange leo y2k compliant.
Yours Truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
From: Deryk Barker (dbarker@camosun.bc.nospam.ca)
Subject: Re: Multics
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers, alt.os.multics
Date: 1998/11/09
Peter H. Coffin (hellsop@execpc.com) wrote:
: Barry Margolin wrote:
:
: > For that matter, how many portable OSes have been implemented by *anyone*?
:
: The most current OS/400 (v4r3) will still run programs compiled on the
: System 38 tranparently. That's 10-15 year old object code over at least
: one complete architecture change. The machine also has a history of
: being able to run in System 36 mode, over that same architecture change.
:
: I'm not sure if that counts as a ported OS or not, and I do work for
: IBM, so I'll stop now...
Peanuts.
When my wife was working for Honeywell, in the 1980s, one of the
customers she had dealings with was British Telecom.
BT, at one location, had what they called the "orange Leos".
Now, for those who don't know this, the LEO was the world's first-ever
commercially-oriented machine (1951). Even more amazingly, the Lyons
Electronic Office was designed and built by the J Lyons company,
best-known as manufacturers of cakes and for their nationwide chain of
corner tea shops.
Anyway, an "orange Leo" was an ICL 2900 mainframe (they came in orange
cabinets), emulating an ICL 1900 mainframe, emulating a GEC System 4
mainframe emulating a LEO.
30+ year old executable code over 3 architecture changes....
If he [Clarke] had [filed a patent for geosynchronous satellites], he would almost certainly by now be far and away the richest man on the planet.
Clarke published his idea in 1945. The first geosynchronous satellite, Syncom I, wasn't launched until 1963. Clarke's patents would have run out by the time geosynchronous communications satellites began filling the skies.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier
I don't think that anyone besides the UK, US, and France is currently capable of making "large medium term troop deployments on a global scale". China and India would have insurmountable logistical issues invading Iceland. Even Russia seems better defined a regional powerhouse, although sheer size makes its region large.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier
Let's rephrase that: there *might* be hundreds/thousands of Pluto-sized objects. But we certainly haven't found any yet!
- Pluto - 2300 km
- Quaoar - 1300km
- Varuna - 900km
- Ceres - 479km
- Chiron - ~175km
Note that Quaoar, the largest of the bunch, is half Pluto's size and barely larger than Pluto's moon, Charon.As long as Pluto is substantially larger than any other known transneptunian object, it doesn't seem like we would need to worry about planetary definitions.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
As I recall, Miss Jennifer 8 Lee used to write for the Washington Post. Her middle name really is "8". I don't know why they stuck the period after it. I mean, it's not like her middle name was 888 or 8isenough or anything like that.
I believe Harry S Truman was another fellow whose parents inflicted an odd middle name upon him. His middle name was S.
Sincerely yours,
Jeffrey Boulier