But why was he let out into the open if he was going to die? explain this...
In Soviet Russia, there is no such thing as "open". Neither in Oceania, mimicking the Stalinism as Orwell knew it. During the stalinist purges in late 30's - the ones that shocked Orwell so deeply - it was a common practice to first break down a man, and execute him only afterwards. They arrest you and they torture until you confess to anything they told you to confess in exchange for release. Obviously, even the strongest ones break down after just few weeks of torture. Then you are free... but they will still get you in a matter of months, this time a completely broken ex-man. You won't escape anywhere, you can't leave the country and NKVD will trace you everywhere within the country, even on Arctic station or somewhere in the Siberian wilderness. So you just wait for the last knocking at your door, drinking "Victory" gin and loathing yourself.
Allow me to point out that the 1984 character struggled against the reality in which he found himself.
And lost. In the end, Winston Smith is a broken person, who embraced the ideology of his torturers and quietly awaits his inevitable execution. There's no hope left.
This book instead would have us believe that humans have become such sheep as to prefer a nonexistence of life and freedom.
Orwell's point exactly.
From everything I've heard about this book, there is no specific force attempting to subvert society. Rather, individuals go along with it because they *LIKE* it that way.
Just like the citizens of Oceania or animals at the Animal Farm.
You make a very good point, but the competition wasn't to find the worst government agency, but the most invasive one. I'm not sure that Mugabe, for example, really has the resources to fingerprint everyone entering Zimbabwe. They are pretty keen on political violence and the like though.
You don't need to take fingerprints to be invasive. All you need is a local mullah, local Commitee For The Defense Of The Revolution or local secret police agent down in every village, spying on everyone. Then you have a state with no privacy whatsoever, without any computers or fingerprints, just some bamboo sticks, a couple of firearms and loooots of local agents. That's how Pol-Pot dictatorship was working (and maoist China, and stalinist Soviet Union, and Castro's Cuba etc.; with the only difference that the stick was not always made of bamboo).
But come on, Ashcroft tries to serve the public? I'm not sure who he is serving, but I don't think cracking down on dissent and launching paranoid security measures is in the public's best interest.
If a waiter serves me a juicy steak, eating it might not be in my heart's best interest and this steak might shorten my lifespan for a few months, but still the waiter serves me, because the juicy steak is precisely what I want. After all, the waiter wants to get a tip. In a democratic state, politicians offer the public stuff that might not really be in the public's best interest, but this is what the public wants. After all, they want to get reelected.
But I believe Ashcroft is most deserving of "Worst Public Servant," worldwide.
Oh, please. If you really want to take a worldwide competition, I can immediately name a few serious contenders - such as Fidel Castro (Cuba), Kim Jong Il (Norh Korea) and Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe). South America and Central Africa probably offer abudance of these, but I have no knowledge of their leader names. While I'm not a fan of Bush administration, I really can't understand the contemporary American trend for self-loathing ("oh dear, with the Patriot Act we are now the worst dictatorship of the world").
Maybe you wanted to name Ashcroft "the worst public servant that at least actually tries to serve the public"?
I can understand Servers and perhaps Engineering and/or Design, but what about Joe-Blow SixPack
If I remember correctly, Joe-Blow SixPack was convinced to switch from Win16 to Win32 by means of a song "You Start Me Up" by The Rolling Stones. My guess is that this time the argument will be quite similar - my bet goes on "When I'm Sixty Four" by The Beatles.
I can see the next article: "Understanding the GNAA"
A well written article on slashdot (and others) trollkore is always worth read. There is one on Wiki and it's pretty good, but I'd really like to read something more psychologically insightful on that. What is the goatse man really trying to communicate?;-)
I don't believe in copyright, any of it. But I still think things should have value. I just don't think that the government should grant monopolies on any idea.
What's your opinion on karma-whoring trolls, who copy/paste someone else's posts hoping to get modded-up? Is it OK to you? After all, "you don't believe in copyright, any of it".
While noone denies that MPAA/RIAA goes too far these days, it's foolish to overreact the other way. If you abolish copyright, you also abolish Free Software (if there's no copyright, there's no GPL). I believe that an author should have right to his creation - I don't want to see my stuff signed by someone else. So I believe in copyright (some of it).
As a Mac user who gets games months or years after they are released for Windows, yes, market share for your OS is something you can directly profit from.
I'm a Mac user too, and I'm as much frustrated as you by the game porting lags. However, I'm not sure if we don't win in the overall calculation, if you account really all odds. After all, we are still *untouched* by the recent virus/worm/spyware/whatever wave that harmed our dear Wintel friends. It's pointless to write a virus for a platform that has 3% market share, but it's not that obvious with - say - 30%. Market share is something that you can directly profit from, yes - but you can also get damage from it. I'd rather pay $50 for a game that a Windows user can pick for $5 from the bargain bin, and not have the virus threat on my back.
Then you could recycle the tags all you wanted to. I mean really now, how hard could this be? A date tag with a serial number would allow you to reroll the serial number every year if you wanted to (or hell, every day if you use 8 digits!)
Not that easy. VIN is used to encode lots of information. The first character describes the country of origin, second the manufacturer, then you have places reserved for car type, model year, assembly plant etc. You can't recycle it without actually throwing the whole system away.
When Xerox sued Apple and lost over the use of graphic icons on a 2D screen and similarly, when Apple sued Microsoft over "look and feel" and lost; That should have established the ground rules and in my opinion, neither Xerox nor Apple had a case.
Quie contrary. The judge actually agreed with Apple claims, but also agreed that the contested UI elements were covered by the infamous 1985 licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft (Apple allowed MS to use some of its innovations). It was a bit similar with Xerox vs Apple - Xerox allowed Apple to take a peek at what's brewing in PARC in exchange for some of its stock options. So actually the great 1980's trials did not prove that "look and feel" or even the general concept of UI is not covered by copyright laws. They rather prove how foolish great companies can be when they spot a "good deal" with a cunning player. To reiterate: both Apple and Xerox signed agreement "yes, you can steal our ideas" with their future competitors.
Its (possibly) called attitude because it resembles a person's mood - whether the face is pointing up or down;)
The word comes from Latin aptus, meaning fastened or fitted. Actually, the aeronautic meaning is the primary one - originally the word was used to describe a position of an object related to some framework, backdrop or just the horizon, only in the modern times it attained the new meaning, a position of human being versus the society.
Why not make one for my vintage VW Beetle, you insensitive clod!
Buy yourself Aiwa car stereo (a brand owned by Sony). Every model they make has a mini-jack line-in socket right on the front panel. Works with an iPod like a charm. If your vintage VW Beetle has a car lighter (some had, some hadn't), buy yourself a Belkin car kit to power the iPod while driving. Finally, buy yourself a ProClip pod to mount your iPod somewhere on the cockpit. All you need now is a stock 2x minijack cable and presto, you have an iPod equipped vintage VW Beetle. However, I had an old Beetle and I had car stereo in it, but it was virtually unusable - the sound of the engine was just too loud to actually hear the music. I think you should stick to listening to the beauty of the classic sound of the boxer engine - and believe me, many Porsche and Subaru drivers sometimes open their windows, turn off their stereos and listen to the engine as the best music they have. I do.
I didn't try this particular album but I have bought some other CD's protected by SunnComm (for example, "No Roots" by Faithless) and I had no problems ripping them for my iBook + iTunes + iPod combo. In fact, in my carreer of a compulsive music shopper I have never encountered a CD that I could not rip (yes, like all of us, I heard the horror story about Celine Dion, but I also heard about crop circles and Yeti). Sometimes the ripping is just abnormally slow (2x and even less), but that's all. Maybe the copy protection is acceptable... because it doesn't work?
It's not that new - google gets 654 hits of usage like "Fear and trembling in Phildickian America", "talked out of suicide by his talking mirror - a spectacularly Phildickian moment" or even "I just watched Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo", and I couldn't help but notice many Phildickian elements in the film".
Think that is a good thing? The Minority Report and Total Recall books were ridiculously antiquated and would have made terrible movies if they hadn't been changed. In Minority Report punch cards were a major plot point.
You seem to confuse Philip Dick with Arthur C. Clarke. Dick never wrote science-fiction to anticipate the future. He was more interested in exploring the inner space of human mind. And he was great doing that. You can't credit him as "the guy who predicted satellite TV relays", but you can credit him as "the guy who predicted the atmosphere of corporate paranoia of the late twentieth and early twenty first century". Take a contemporary realistic novel about the corporate world, like Joseph Finder's "Paranoia". It's so phildickian you could mistake it for a lost PKD manuscript. Dick was one of the rare SF writers of 1950's and 1960's who understood that human race will enter the world of powerful future technologies keeping their minds as fragile as ever, and was quite accurate in predicting the outcome (paranoia, drug addiction, escapism, the rise of omnipotent corporate moguls - both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are like characters from PKD novels!). So yes, he thought that punch cards will survive. But he also predicted Microsoft. His books will be antiquated only after a succesful antitrust action against MS, which means when hell freezes over.
I'd like to see more of Dick's novels get made into movies
So far, Dick's NOVELS aren't getting much into movies - the movies are actually based on his short stories and novelettes, like "Minority Report" or "We'll Remeber It For You Wholesale" ("Total Recall"). In early 1950's Dick was writing short stories like frenzy and actually each and every one of them gives an outline for a great movie. With his novels, however, we have a completely different case. Especially his novels that are more realistic than sci-fi, and this is the case of "A Scanner Darkly" (apart of some gadgets, there's not much SF in it). I'm a die hard PKD fan, so I wish this project all the best, but they are entering an (almost) uncharted territory.
From Disney: "If you accidentally damage or break one of your Disney DVDs, you can get a replacement disc for a nominal charge of $6.95. Please call (800) 723-4763 for details."
"Replacement" program? The guys at Disney must love this! Considering that Wallyworld can make money selling older DVDs for $5, Disney must do very well "replacing" titles they actually publish for $2 more per copy. What a great scam they have going!
Yeah, what a scam. They actually want to make a profit from their business! And how much would that be - according to your estimates, it could be even a whopping fiver per copy! Man, it should be banned right away.
Funny - I asked the Asimov question to the contemporary equivalent of the Asimov omniscient machine and got the same answer as people in this short story. Obviously because it was pointing to web sites about the short story itself, but...
In Post-Soviet Russia, the Country owns your meteorite as a "national property of the government". You can get arrested if you try to sell it, especially to a foreign buyer.
While your political analysis is generally correct, I think that we should remember that the famous speech given by president Kennedy to the joint session of Congress in May 1961 - "I believe that this nation should commit itself, before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth", can also be translated in your way to:
"Well, a month ago the Soviets launched Gagarin to the first manned orbital flight and all the PR spin doctoring in the world cannot make Alan Shepard's flight a match for that. Also just a few days ago the guys from CIA made complete morons of themselves in Bay Of Pigs, Cuba. It looks like we'll count another humiliating defeat in Indochina. To make things worse to me, I won the election by a very narrow margin and the Republicans can hit me that I'm soft on communism. Oh, and I need that whole civil rights movement on the South like a pain in the a** - if I'll support them, the Southern Democrats no longer support me, if I'll oppose them, all the other Democrats no longer support me. Damn, I have no movement. To the left, to the right, to the north, to the south, obstacles everywhere. So maybe I'll just move up, up and away?".
Yeah, for Kennedy the Apollo Project was nothing but a clever PR-stunt, a brilliant escape from his political problems. But decades ago all that counts is that it was one of the greatest achievements of mankind in the twentieth century. In politics, major achievements are often made thanks to petty reasons. Even if the Moon-to-Mars project is also a PR-BS for Bush, it doesn't prove nothing will come of it.
Granted, it sounds improbable. But still - this is what knowing your computing science archeology is good for.
Not really. I think a more plausible scenario would include some sort of extreme modding of one of the astronaut's iPods. The scenario you described can justify much better the good ol' "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" or "Yes, but can it run Linux/*BSD" slashdotisms rather than computing archeology. The point is that in contemporary world we are surrounded by partially defunct, morally obsolete or just battered computer junk that can be used as a source for a new machine. My old Amiga 1200 or my old Playstation 1 that I no longer use (but keep them just for sake of nostalgia) have much much more number crunching horsepower than all the computers of the Eniac/Colossus/Zuse age. Hell, they are more powerful than the on-board computer that landed Apollo on the Moon. So in the scenarios like you describe, people would rather scavenge for digital junk just in their bedrooms (or even pockets), and quickly find some powerful enough chips (in their toasters or anything).
And then - yes - one of the astronauts could proudly say. "See, years ago I was participating in a Slashdot discussion on how to turn Graphite Apple Airport Base Station into an embedded Linux-based fuel-cell powered Nethack game console. You laughed that I must be crazy - who's laughing now?".
You forget fans of automobiles, they obviously care how their products look!
In fact, it's rather difficult to find fans of anything that don't care how their products look - with x86 computers being the only odd exception. Fans of automobiles, home cinema, audio systems, motorcycles, biking, hiking, surfing, wine tasting etc. - they all care very much about the look. They wouldn't accept the ugliness of a plain, nondescript beige-box like your average PC (try selling such a nondescript surfing board or mountain bike!). Why x86 computer fans accepted it, it's actually a very interesting question.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone know how progress is going on a mozilla port to AmigaOS?
I heard they finally shipped the T-Shirt.
But why was he let out into the open if he was going to die? explain this...
In Soviet Russia, there is no such thing as "open". Neither in Oceania, mimicking the Stalinism as Orwell knew it. During the stalinist purges in late 30's - the ones that shocked Orwell so deeply - it was a common practice to first break down a man, and execute him only afterwards. They arrest you and they torture until you confess to anything they told you to confess in exchange for release. Obviously, even the strongest ones break down after just few weeks of torture. Then you are free... but they will still get you in a matter of months, this time a completely broken ex-man. You won't escape anywhere, you can't leave the country and NKVD will trace you everywhere within the country, even on Arctic station or somewhere in the Siberian wilderness. So you just wait for the last knocking at your door, drinking "Victory" gin and loathing yourself.
Allow me to point out that the 1984 character struggled against the reality in which he found himself.
And lost. In the end, Winston Smith is a broken person, who embraced the ideology of his torturers and quietly awaits his inevitable execution. There's no hope left.
This book instead would have us believe that humans have become such sheep as to prefer a nonexistence of life and freedom.
Orwell's point exactly.
From everything I've heard about this book, there is no specific force attempting to subvert society. Rather, individuals go along with it because they *LIKE* it that way.
Just like the citizens of Oceania or animals at the Animal Farm.
You make a very good point, but the competition wasn't to find the worst government agency, but the most invasive one. I'm not sure that Mugabe, for example, really has the resources to fingerprint everyone entering Zimbabwe. They are pretty keen on political violence and the like though.
You don't need to take fingerprints to be invasive. All you need is a local mullah, local Commitee For The Defense Of The Revolution or local secret police agent down in every village, spying on everyone. Then you have a state with no privacy whatsoever, without any computers or fingerprints, just some bamboo sticks, a couple of firearms and loooots of local agents. That's how Pol-Pot dictatorship was working (and maoist China, and stalinist Soviet Union, and Castro's Cuba etc.; with the only difference that the stick was not always made of bamboo).
But come on, Ashcroft tries to serve the public? I'm not sure who he is serving, but I don't think cracking down on dissent and launching paranoid security measures is in the public's best interest.
If a waiter serves me a juicy steak, eating it might not be in my heart's best interest and this steak might shorten my lifespan for a few months, but still the waiter serves me, because the juicy steak is precisely what I want. After all, the waiter wants to get a tip. In a democratic state, politicians offer the public stuff that might not really be in the public's best interest, but this is what the public wants. After all, they want to get reelected.
But I believe Ashcroft is most deserving of "Worst Public Servant," worldwide.
Oh, please. If you really want to take a worldwide competition, I can immediately name a few serious contenders - such as Fidel Castro (Cuba), Kim Jong Il (Norh Korea) and Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe). South America and Central Africa probably offer abudance of these, but I have no knowledge of their leader names. While I'm not a fan of Bush administration, I really can't understand the contemporary American trend for self-loathing ("oh dear, with the Patriot Act we are now the worst dictatorship of the world").
Maybe you wanted to name Ashcroft "the worst public servant that at least actually tries to serve the public"?
I can understand Servers and perhaps Engineering and/or Design, but what about Joe-Blow SixPack
If I remember correctly, Joe-Blow SixPack was convinced to switch from Win16 to Win32 by means of a song "You Start Me Up" by The Rolling Stones. My guess is that this time the argument will be quite similar - my bet goes on "When I'm Sixty Four" by The Beatles.
I can see the next article: "Understanding the GNAA"
;-)
A well written article on slashdot (and others) trollkore is always worth read. There is one on Wiki and it's pretty good, but I'd really like to read something more psychologically insightful on that. What is the goatse man really trying to communicate?
I don't believe in copyright, any of it. But I still think things should have value. I just don't think that the government should grant monopolies on any idea.
What's your opinion on karma-whoring trolls, who copy/paste someone else's posts hoping to get modded-up? Is it OK to you? After all, "you don't believe in copyright, any of it".
While noone denies that MPAA/RIAA goes too far these days, it's foolish to overreact the other way. If you abolish copyright, you also abolish Free Software (if there's no copyright, there's no GPL). I believe that an author should have right to his creation - I don't want to see my stuff signed by someone else. So I believe in copyright (some of it).
The caselaw SCO was citing is used when the author is dead (...) It completely falls apart since most contributors are still alive
Well... since SCO looks quite desperate now, they might try to solve this problem in the simplest possible way...
As a Mac user who gets games months or years after they are released for Windows, yes, market share for your OS is something you can directly profit from.
I'm a Mac user too, and I'm as much frustrated as you by the game porting lags. However, I'm not sure if we don't win in the overall calculation, if you account really all odds. After all, we are still *untouched* by the recent virus/worm/spyware/whatever wave that harmed our dear Wintel friends. It's pointless to write a virus for a platform that has 3% market share, but it's not that obvious with - say - 30%. Market share is something that you can directly profit from, yes - but you can also get damage from it. I'd rather pay $50 for a game that a Windows user can pick for $5 from the bargain bin, and not have the virus threat on my back.
Then you could recycle the tags all you wanted to. I mean really now, how hard could this be? A date tag with a serial number would allow you to reroll the serial number every year if you wanted to (or hell, every day if you use 8 digits!)
Not that easy. VIN is used to encode lots of information. The first character describes the country of origin, second the manufacturer, then you have places reserved for car type, model year, assembly plant etc. You can't recycle it without actually throwing the whole system away.
When Xerox sued Apple and lost over the use of graphic icons on a 2D screen and similarly, when Apple sued Microsoft over "look and feel" and lost; That should have established the ground rules and in my opinion, neither Xerox nor Apple had a case.
Quie contrary. The judge actually agreed with Apple claims, but also agreed that the contested UI elements were covered by the infamous 1985 licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft (Apple allowed MS to use some of its innovations). It was a bit similar with Xerox vs Apple - Xerox allowed Apple to take a peek at what's brewing in PARC in exchange for some of its stock options. So actually the great 1980's trials did not prove that "look and feel" or even the general concept of UI is not covered by copyright laws. They rather prove how foolish great companies can be when they spot a "good deal" with a cunning player. To reiterate: both Apple and Xerox signed agreement "yes, you can steal our ideas" with their future competitors.
Its (possibly) called attitude because it resembles a person's mood - whether the face is pointing up or down ;)
The word comes from Latin aptus, meaning fastened or fitted. Actually, the aeronautic meaning is the primary one - originally the word was used to describe a position of an object related to some framework, backdrop or just the horizon, only in the modern times it attained the new meaning, a position of human being versus the society.
Why not make one for my vintage VW Beetle, you insensitive clod!
Buy yourself Aiwa car stereo (a brand owned by Sony). Every model they make has a mini-jack line-in socket right on the front panel. Works with an iPod like a charm. If your vintage VW Beetle has a car lighter (some had, some hadn't), buy yourself a Belkin car kit to power the iPod while driving. Finally, buy yourself a ProClip pod to mount your iPod somewhere on the cockpit. All you need now is a stock 2x minijack cable and presto, you have an iPod equipped vintage VW Beetle. However, I had an old Beetle and I had car stereo in it, but it was virtually unusable - the sound of the engine was just too loud to actually hear the music. I think you should stick to listening to the beauty of the classic sound of the boxer engine - and believe me, many Porsche and Subaru drivers sometimes open their windows, turn off their stereos and listen to the engine as the best music they have. I do.
I didn't try this particular album but I have bought some other CD's protected by SunnComm (for example, "No Roots" by Faithless) and I had no problems ripping them for my iBook + iTunes + iPod combo. In fact, in my carreer of a compulsive music shopper I have never encountered a CD that I could not rip (yes, like all of us, I heard the horror story about Celine Dion, but I also heard about crop circles and Yeti). Sometimes the ripping is just abnormally slow (2x and even less), but that's all. Maybe the copy protection is acceptable... because it doesn't work?
It's not that new - google gets 654 hits of usage like "Fear and trembling in Phildickian America", "talked out of suicide by his talking mirror - a spectacularly Phildickian moment" or even "I just watched Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo", and I couldn't help but notice many Phildickian elements in the film".
Think that is a good thing? The Minority Report and Total Recall books were ridiculously antiquated and would have made terrible movies if they hadn't been changed. In Minority Report punch cards were a major plot point.
You seem to confuse Philip Dick with Arthur C. Clarke. Dick never wrote science-fiction to anticipate the future. He was more interested in exploring the inner space of human mind. And he was great doing that. You can't credit him as "the guy who predicted satellite TV relays", but you can credit him as "the guy who predicted the atmosphere of corporate paranoia of the late twentieth and early twenty first century". Take a contemporary realistic novel about the corporate world, like Joseph Finder's "Paranoia". It's so phildickian you could mistake it for a lost PKD manuscript. Dick was one of the rare SF writers of 1950's and 1960's who understood that human race will enter the world of powerful future technologies keeping their minds as fragile as ever, and was quite accurate in predicting the outcome (paranoia, drug addiction, escapism, the rise of omnipotent corporate moguls - both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are like characters from PKD novels!). So yes, he thought that punch cards will survive. But he also predicted Microsoft. His books will be antiquated only after a succesful antitrust action against MS, which means when hell freezes over.
I'd like to see more of Dick's novels get made into movies
So far, Dick's NOVELS aren't getting much into movies - the movies are actually based on his short stories and novelettes, like "Minority Report" or "We'll Remeber It For You Wholesale" ("Total Recall"). In early 1950's Dick was writing short stories like frenzy and actually each and every one of them gives an outline for a great movie. With his novels, however, we have a completely different case. Especially his novels that are more realistic than sci-fi, and this is the case of "A Scanner Darkly" (apart of some gadgets, there's not much SF in it). I'm a die hard PKD fan, so I wish this project all the best, but they are entering an (almost) uncharted territory.
From Disney: "If you accidentally damage or break one of your Disney DVDs, you can get a replacement disc for a nominal charge of $6.95. Please call (800) 723-4763 for details." "Replacement" program? The guys at Disney must love this! Considering that Wallyworld can make money selling older DVDs for $5, Disney must do very well "replacing" titles they actually publish for $2 more per copy. What a great scam they have going!
Yeah, what a scam. They actually want to make a profit from their business! And how much would that be - according to your estimates, it could be even a whopping fiver per copy! Man, it should be banned right away.
Funny - I asked the Asimov question to the contemporary equivalent of the Asimov omniscient machine and got the same answer as people in this short story. Obviously because it was pointing to web sites about the short story itself, but...
In Post-Soviet Russia, the Country owns your meteorite as a "national property of the government". You can get arrested if you try to sell it, especially to a foreign buyer.
Heck, do the airlines build the airports, or even the terminals, themselves? Hell no
Hell yea..
While your political analysis is generally correct, I think that we should remember that the famous speech given by president Kennedy to the joint session of Congress in May 1961 - "I believe that this nation should commit itself, before this decade is out, to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth", can also be translated in your way to:
"Well, a month ago the Soviets launched Gagarin to the first manned orbital flight and all the PR spin doctoring in the world cannot make Alan Shepard's flight a match for that. Also just a few days ago the guys from CIA made complete morons of themselves in Bay Of Pigs, Cuba. It looks like we'll count another humiliating defeat in Indochina. To make things worse to me, I won the election by a very narrow margin and the Republicans can hit me that I'm soft on communism. Oh, and I need that whole civil rights movement on the South like a pain in the a** - if I'll support them, the Southern Democrats no longer support me, if I'll oppose them, all the other Democrats no longer support me. Damn, I have no movement. To the left, to the right, to the north, to the south, obstacles everywhere. So maybe I'll just move up, up and away?".
Yeah, for Kennedy the Apollo Project was nothing but a clever PR-stunt, a brilliant escape from his political problems. But decades ago all that counts is that it was one of the greatest achievements of mankind in the twentieth century. In politics, major achievements are often made thanks to petty reasons. Even if the Moon-to-Mars project is also a PR-BS for Bush, it doesn't prove nothing will come of it.
Granted, it sounds improbable. But still - this is what knowing your computing science archeology is good for.
Not really. I think a more plausible scenario would include some sort of extreme modding of one of the astronaut's iPods. The scenario you described can justify much better the good ol' "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" or "Yes, but can it run Linux/*BSD" slashdotisms rather than computing archeology. The point is that in contemporary world we are surrounded by partially defunct, morally obsolete or just battered computer junk that can be used as a source for a new machine. My old Amiga 1200 or my old Playstation 1 that I no longer use (but keep them just for sake of nostalgia) have much much more number crunching horsepower than all the computers of the Eniac/Colossus/Zuse age. Hell, they are more powerful than the on-board computer that landed Apollo on the Moon. So in the scenarios like you describe, people would rather scavenge for digital junk just in their bedrooms (or even pockets), and quickly find some powerful enough chips (in their toasters or anything).
And then - yes - one of the astronauts could proudly say. "See, years ago I was participating in a Slashdot discussion on how to turn Graphite Apple Airport Base Station into an embedded Linux-based fuel-cell powered Nethack game console. You laughed that I must be crazy - who's laughing now?".
You forget fans of automobiles, they obviously care how their products look!
In fact, it's rather difficult to find fans of anything that don't care how their products look - with x86 computers being the only odd exception. Fans of automobiles, home cinema, audio systems, motorcycles, biking, hiking, surfing, wine tasting etc. - they all care very much about the look. They wouldn't accept the ugliness of a plain, nondescript beige-box like your average PC (try selling such a nondescript surfing board or mountain bike!). Why x86 computer fans accepted it, it's actually a very interesting question.