Well, technology aside, I think this is a great idea! Think of it: Grannie and Gramps can get their fill of their grandkids without ever having to say "So, d'ya want me to change that or should we let it ripen a bit more?" I do note, however, that there's likely a "situation-comedy" hiding in the weeds! For those of you in the UK, a "situation-comedy" is what you folks call a "drawing-room-comedy". (And, yes, American TV tends to steal all your best examples of same.)
Isn't merely shedding light very UN-green? Should't the person who posted this be severely chastised? (Maybe put on some sort of "enemies list"?)
Oh, yeah. No cheap spectroscopic humor allowed....
Shouldn't this be obvious? Not only do subatomic particles have free will, but they choose to do experiments -- ON US, as in "OK, what will the humans do to try to understand our wave-particle duality THIS TIME?"
Actually, I don't know what you meant. Reason is that I have only what you wrote to go on. When I read your post, I was suspicious of the reference to a "turbojet", so I checked several sources, all of which made it clear that the engine in the 737-100 was an early, low-bypass turbofan. This was the only fact in your post I could check. When it turned out to be wrong, that "blarney-filter" in the back of my head went off. This isn't personal, because I simply don't know you, but I hope you can understand why I was skeptical of your post.
OK, I wasn't there, but it's hard to tell where the blarney leaves off and the real story begins. One item in the story set off my "blarney-alarm", the writer's contention that the Boeing 737-100 was powered by a turbojet. Simply not true. The engine in the 737-100 was the P&W JT8D low bypass turbofan engine.
A previous post called this a nitpick. I disagree. What ELSE is blarney?
I'm pretty sure what Ryanair is actually proposing to do is cancel the *bookings* of customers who buy their tickets through 3d-parties. Of course, many airline execs can be found in their offices attaching "bull's-eye" decals to the toes of their wing-tips, so - who knows?- maybe the WOULD cancel a flight or two!
My program is actually more useful than the one in the story. I call it "Barnum". Every 60-seconds, it displays the motto: "There's one born every minute!" It then increments a counter. AND, it's only $899.99!
The poor fellow was charged with being a pornographer. His lawyer claimed there wasn't a proper legal definition of what was pornographic, and what wasn't.
The judge agreed, but added that "I know it when I see it."
The fact that junior officers leaked this story to the Washington Post is ample evidence that the corps of senior officers in the USAF is totally out of touch with the fact that we're in a war.
Of course senior officers should be more comfortable than their juniors. After all, we DO want them well rested and ready to make decisions that may very well save lives in the long run. HOWEVER, I'd tend to doubt that the above justifies the extremes to which this program has gone.
The SecDef has just fired the Chief of Staff of the USAF and the SecUSAF. Looks like he needs to prune some more deadwood!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0072472170/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=
I always recommend this book to the beginning Physics student, and I get thanked by my students often. Another bit of advice: Quite a few of my fellow astronomers have never spent much time actually looking at the night sky, either with the naked eye or through a telescope. Doing so will round out your education. (Of course, if you become a radio astronomer, as I did, you can play frisbee inside your telescope!)
Good luck in your new endeavor.
Thanks for your reply. I had begun to think no one read anything that had been posted more than a few minutes after the original item was posted.
I stand by what I wrote. We're talking about the survival of our species, nothing less. Using this post to take cheap shots at Bill Gates, et al, is just a waste of time.
Furthermore, assuming that the only choices that exist are either "big asteroid or small writing" is a bit too simple. There are a number of factors:
1. The relative velocity of the asteroid to Earth when the collision occurs.
2. How humanity reacts to the possibility that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.
3. Where the asteroid is projected to hit.
Beyond that, I believe that knowing what might be about to happen to us is a lot better than remaining ignorant. For me, that applies even if we find out too late to do anything to avoid the collision.
However, the point may be moot. My experience working on a parallel program (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Program for NASA in the 1980s) suggests that any large government agency would likely try to bury or obfuscate information about a probable collision. That was certainly the case when we were trying to get an operations plan approved. The sticking point was that none of the "suits" could agree on how (of IF!) the public would be told of the existence of evidence of intelligent radio transmissions from an extraterrestrial source! (The program was scaled-back and then cancelled long before we could obtain agreement on this point.)
I know that SETI is no longer a government program. And nor are the asteroid searches that are being conducted or are to be conducted government programs. However, you can assume that ALL such programs receive partial government funding. That means that the government will have a lot to say about what happens if we find that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.
The LSST (and Lowel Observatory's Discovery Channel Telescope for the northern third of the sky) might literally find the asteroid that "has our name on it". So, this item heralds the opportunity we humans have to truly defend our species from extinction!
I certainly appreciate a good joke, or a bad one for that matter. And I'm definitely no fan of the overly ruthless business practices of the latest donors of the money to fund the LSST. However, just as the overly ruthless Andrew Carnegie gave away much of his ill-gotten gains, Gates, Simonyi and Microsoft are giving away much of their ill-gotten gains.
So, let's "hold our collective nose" and hope that this telescope gets online in time to fine that asteroid before it's too late. After all, the dinosaurs failed to notice what was going on in the sky until it was too late. Have we seen very many of them walking around lately?
I seem to remember a novelette by the late, great Robert A. Heinlein which suggested what our NewZealander has suggested. It was called "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag". It was a delightful little romp that was of no monumental import. (It DID demonstrate that Heinlein's mind "PROWLED", as one of his characters said of another character in another of his early works.)
I'm pretty sure I know how this team penetrates an organization's security. They just hire "Dog" the (alleged) bounty hunter to come to the town where the organization has its plant/HQ. While "Dog" is busy doing his "bull-in-a-china-shop" act, attracting the attention of every gendarme and wanted-felon in town, it's easy for the team to make their penetration into the plant!
I'm happy this was posted, because it gives me a chance to vent about how bad Firefox really is! To wit:
Ever since last spring, Firefox has been suffering from the yips, like a pro golfer who can't putt straight because he's afraid the ball won't go in. What I mean is that the software just hangs up for between 10- and 60-seconds every time a new page is loaded. I've gone through all the "here's how to solve the problem" pages I can find, to no avail. I even went back to V1.5, which does NOT suffer from the problem, but may (or may not?) have the dreaded "security vulnerabilities" about which we're warned so often. Last night, I downloaded and installed V3.0b1, and it was blazing fast, for about an hour, and then began getting the yips just like V2.whatever. This leads me to suspect that this problem might be caused by some sort of fast "fill-up" of a file with useless data or a fairly fast memory leak. Arguing against that is that merely shutting the software down and restarting doesn't cure the problem.
I've worked in the past as a scientific programmer. (I'm actually an astronomer by trade.) I've also managed fairly large engineering tasks that included programmers working for me. What I believe is happening is that the folks who are writing this software are not working in a disciplined environment where everybody knows what the product is supposed to be and where she/he fits in the effort. I'd call such a product-oriented environment. I suspect that the environment in which the programmers are working is a process-oriented one, in which the programmers are so in love with the process of writing the code that they lose sight of the fact that their code is intended to actually be USED. I further suggest that, since the customers aren't expected to pay for the product, that fact alone tends to insulate the programmers from any really aggressive accountability.
Meanwhile, I find using Firefox to be really frustrating, so frustrating that I'm using IE7 more and more, despite my distaste for anything produced by that company founded by "The Wicked Wizard of the Northwest". IE7 isn't particularly fast, but doesn't suffer from the yips.
I've also tried Safari and Opera, which seem to suffer from their own set of hang-up problems. This suggests that some upgrade to WinXPsp2 might be perfectly compatible with IE7 but not with all other browsers. Of course, "The Wicked Wizard of the Northwest" wouldn't do THAT, would he?
(Meanwhile)^2: Does anyone know of a browser that has a reasonable feature set, is reasonably fast, and just works? I'd even lay down some (weakened) US dollars for it!
(Note to any member of the Tribe of the Mozillites who might be reading this: OK, so we don't actually pay for Firefox. No matter. Somebody's paying your salary. Unless you're independently wealthy, behave like you actually need your job....)
Michael Crichton put forward this very idea in a recent novel of his, "Timeline". Despite the fact that his stuff finds its way into various slick "shoot'm-up" movies, the underlying books are incredibly well researched, and the reader can learn a lot from them. For example, "Jurassic Park" was a well-reasoned exposition on the folly of trying to understand or predict the behavior of large systems, and "State of Fear" was a brilliant look into the politics of big-time environmentalism. Please understand that I don't necessarily agree with everything Dr. Crichton writes. But he makes the reader ask tough questions and manages to teach the reader some math and science along the way. All his books are worth careful reading. This can be said about few authors.
Is this really something new? I noticed in the middle of August that the not-so-august "
Tiger Direct" was selling some of their machines with either Vista or XP. Of course, the ones that were offered with either OS were about $30 more for XP than for Vista.
The great SciFi writer Larry Niven's already created what you wish to implement. It was known as the "Amalgamated Regional Militia", and it worked about as well as any large government bureaucracy could be expected to work.
Meanwhile, who's to say that the propeller in question is the "real" one, or just one put out by the Navy to be photographed? For that matter, does anyone believe that the "real" Area-51 would be located within a taxi-ride of Las Vegas?
I worked at a Deep Space Network Station (Goldstone) in the mid-70s, and then at the DSN headquarters (doing radio astronomy)at JPL in Pasadena, CA, from 1978-1993. BanjoBob is right to be amazed by the technology of that time, primitive though it might seem compared to what we have today. A few details:
1. As I remember it, the computers that served as the "Telemetry & Command Processors" were SDS-930 16-bit minis. They were so reliable that I remember going an entire year at the Goldstone DSS-12 station without either of them failing! The machine that decoded the telemetry and fed it to the TCP was an Interdata-4. It was also very reliable. However, the software that was doing the decoding occasionally got lost, and would go to its highest memory address and crash there. The address was "FFFF" in hex, so, of course, when that happened, you were "FFFFed"!
2. The big dishes then were 64-meters across, big enough to play frisbee inside them, which I did once, and VERY carefully. Those antennas are now 70-meters across. The first-stage amplifiers were both extremely high gain (about 45-dB at 8.5-GHz), and cooled to an extremely low temperature with liquid-Helium, so the whole receiver behaved as if its physical temperature was about 11*-Kelvin. So, the receivers contributed very little noise of their own to obscure the weak signal. Thus, these antennas were and are among the most sensitive on Earth. As I remember it, for the data rate currently being used by the Voyages, the sensitivity of the antennas was about -176-dBm, or about 176-dB less than one milliwatt of received power! With the improvements since then, it's likely about 3-4-dB better than that.
If you'd like to read more, just click on over to:
http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/95_20/95- 20.pdf
I got an email last week from TigerDirect. They were selling a whiz-bang bare-bones system for a fairly low price. A couple of things stood out:
1. They were selling it without an OS at all!
2. The ad said something like: "You're gonna need an OS. Add WindowsXP Home for $149.95 or WindowsVista Home for $119.95." That might have been a misprint, but I read it over a coupla times to make sure it wasn't me misreading it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a misprint, but rather, the result of the fact that "Big Brother Bill's OS Shop" is really trying to get folks to buy Vista, even to the extent of discounting it 20% compared to its predecessor, or, of course, raising the price of XP....
Back in the 90s, McDonnell/Douglas developed a testbed for a "single stage to orbit" vehicle called the "Delta Clipper", aka the "DC-X". (Such a vehicle could take off from Earth's surface vertically, accelerate to orbital altitude and velocity, and decelerate from orbit and land vertically. Integral to such a vehicle would be an engine that is both easy to gimble, so that the direction of thrust could be easy to change for modifying the path of the vehicle, and also throttleable, so that only the amount of energy needed for each particular phase of an orbital mission would be consumed.) The DC-X was not large enough to reach orbit. Far from it. Its only task was to demonstrate its ability to perform the hardest task an SSO vehicle must perform: taking off vertically, translating horizontally, and then landing on a different pad than the one from which it ascended.
We've done the hard part. The DC-X worked, and then the whole thing was killed by NASA's dead-bang incompetence. We ought to have a Single-Stage-to-Orbit vehicle operating NOW. And, if we did, we wouldn't be worrying about how we'd land on Mars. We'd just build an SSO tailored to Mars, take it there, and "use it in reverse"!
Oh, and if we don't want to do that, we could just hire Burt Rutan to do it for cost plus 10%....
Sorry, don't have time to read every (or even many) post(s). I apologize if I've repeated what others have written.
I'd suggest that the general idea to major in CS over IT is correct. The reason is that fields like IT are more devoted to learning a lot of information (not to make a bad joke), whereas CS if much more devoted to learning concepts. Once the information is obsolete, the absence of understanding basic concepts won't stand an IT major in good stead. Also, if you've taught yourself how to learn, you can pick up whatever specific information you need to know to do a job. Picking up concepts on the fly might be a bit harder.
I'd also suggest that you take as much math as you can, because it will be useful in your profession and hone your analytical thinking skills. Finally, get a well-rounded education. If we are to function in the here and now, it's important to understand how we got here, both historically and culturally.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, technology aside, I think this is a great idea! Think of it: Grannie and Gramps can get their fill of their grandkids without ever having to say "So, d'ya want me to change that or should we let it ripen a bit more?" I do note, however, that there's likely a "situation-comedy" hiding in the weeds! For those of you in the UK, a "situation-comedy" is what you folks call a "drawing-room-comedy". (And, yes, American TV tends to steal all your best examples of same.)
Isn't merely shedding light very UN-green? Should't the person who posted this be severely chastised? (Maybe put on some sort of "enemies list"?) Oh, yeah. No cheap spectroscopic humor allowed....
Shouldn't this be obvious? Not only do subatomic particles have free will, but they choose to do experiments -- ON US, as in "OK, what will the humans do to try to understand our wave-particle duality THIS TIME?"
Actually, I don't know what you meant. Reason is that I have only what you wrote to go on. When I read your post, I was suspicious of the reference to a "turbojet", so I checked several sources, all of which made it clear that the engine in the 737-100 was an early, low-bypass turbofan. This was the only fact in your post I could check. When it turned out to be wrong, that "blarney-filter" in the back of my head went off. This isn't personal, because I simply don't know you, but I hope you can understand why I was skeptical of your post.
OK, I wasn't there, but it's hard to tell where the blarney leaves off and the real story begins. One item in the story set off my "blarney-alarm", the writer's contention that the Boeing 737-100 was powered by a turbojet. Simply not true. The engine in the 737-100 was the P&W JT8D low bypass turbofan engine. A previous post called this a nitpick. I disagree. What ELSE is blarney?
I'm pretty sure what Ryanair is actually proposing to do is cancel the *bookings* of customers who buy their tickets through 3d-parties. Of course, many airline execs can be found in their offices attaching "bull's-eye" decals to the toes of their wing-tips, so - who knows?- maybe the WOULD cancel a flight or two!
My program is actually more useful than the one in the story. I call it "Barnum". Every 60-seconds, it displays the motto: "There's one born every minute!" It then increments a counter. AND, it's only $899.99!
Let me get this straight: The government can steal from citizens with impunity. And this is different how?
The poor fellow was charged with being a pornographer. His lawyer claimed there wasn't a proper legal definition of what was pornographic, and what wasn't. The judge agreed, but added that "I know it when I see it."
The fact that junior officers leaked this story to the Washington Post is ample evidence that the corps of senior officers in the USAF is totally out of touch with the fact that we're in a war. Of course senior officers should be more comfortable than their juniors. After all, we DO want them well rested and ready to make decisions that may very well save lives in the long run. HOWEVER, I'd tend to doubt that the above justifies the extremes to which this program has gone. The SecDef has just fired the Chief of Staff of the USAF and the SecUSAF. Looks like he needs to prune some more deadwood!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0072472170/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller= I always recommend this book to the beginning Physics student, and I get thanked by my students often. Another bit of advice: Quite a few of my fellow astronomers have never spent much time actually looking at the night sky, either with the naked eye or through a telescope. Doing so will round out your education. (Of course, if you become a radio astronomer, as I did, you can play frisbee inside your telescope!) Good luck in your new endeavor.
Thanks for your reply. I had begun to think no one read anything that had been posted more than a few minutes after the original item was posted. I stand by what I wrote. We're talking about the survival of our species, nothing less. Using this post to take cheap shots at Bill Gates, et al, is just a waste of time. Furthermore, assuming that the only choices that exist are either "big asteroid or small writing" is a bit too simple. There are a number of factors: 1. The relative velocity of the asteroid to Earth when the collision occurs. 2. How humanity reacts to the possibility that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. 3. Where the asteroid is projected to hit. Beyond that, I believe that knowing what might be about to happen to us is a lot better than remaining ignorant. For me, that applies even if we find out too late to do anything to avoid the collision. However, the point may be moot. My experience working on a parallel program (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Program for NASA in the 1980s) suggests that any large government agency would likely try to bury or obfuscate information about a probable collision. That was certainly the case when we were trying to get an operations plan approved. The sticking point was that none of the "suits" could agree on how (of IF!) the public would be told of the existence of evidence of intelligent radio transmissions from an extraterrestrial source! (The program was scaled-back and then cancelled long before we could obtain agreement on this point.) I know that SETI is no longer a government program. And nor are the asteroid searches that are being conducted or are to be conducted government programs. However, you can assume that ALL such programs receive partial government funding. That means that the government will have a lot to say about what happens if we find that an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.
The LSST (and Lowel Observatory's Discovery Channel Telescope for the northern third of the sky) might literally find the asteroid that "has our name on it". So, this item heralds the opportunity we humans have to truly defend our species from extinction! I certainly appreciate a good joke, or a bad one for that matter. And I'm definitely no fan of the overly ruthless business practices of the latest donors of the money to fund the LSST. However, just as the overly ruthless Andrew Carnegie gave away much of his ill-gotten gains, Gates, Simonyi and Microsoft are giving away much of their ill-gotten gains. So, let's "hold our collective nose" and hope that this telescope gets online in time to fine that asteroid before it's too late. After all, the dinosaurs failed to notice what was going on in the sky until it was too late. Have we seen very many of them walking around lately?
I seem to remember a novelette by the late, great Robert A. Heinlein which suggested what our NewZealander has suggested. It was called "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag". It was a delightful little romp that was of no monumental import. (It DID demonstrate that Heinlein's mind "PROWLED", as one of his characters said of another character in another of his early works.)
I'm pretty sure I know how this team penetrates an organization's security. They just hire "Dog" the (alleged) bounty hunter to come to the town where the organization has its plant/HQ. While "Dog" is busy doing his "bull-in-a-china-shop" act, attracting the attention of every gendarme and wanted-felon in town, it's easy for the team to make their penetration into the plant!
I'm happy this was posted, because it gives me a chance to vent about how bad Firefox really is! To wit:
Ever since last spring, Firefox has been suffering from the yips, like a pro golfer who can't putt straight because he's afraid the ball won't go in. What I mean is that the software just hangs up for between 10- and 60-seconds every time a new page is loaded. I've gone through all the "here's how to solve the problem" pages I can find, to no avail. I even went back to V1.5, which does NOT suffer from the problem, but may (or may not?) have the dreaded "security vulnerabilities" about which we're warned so often. Last night, I downloaded and installed V3.0b1, and it was blazing fast, for about an hour, and then began getting the yips just like V2.whatever. This leads me to suspect that this problem might be caused by some sort of fast "fill-up" of a file with useless data or a fairly fast memory leak. Arguing against that is that merely shutting the software down and restarting doesn't cure the problem.
I've worked in the past as a scientific programmer. (I'm actually an astronomer by trade.) I've also managed fairly large engineering tasks that included programmers working for me. What I believe is happening is that the folks who are writing this software are not working in a disciplined environment where everybody knows what the product is supposed to be and where she/he fits in the effort. I'd call such a product-oriented environment. I suspect that the environment in which the programmers are working is a process-oriented one, in which the programmers are so in love with the process of writing the code that they lose sight of the fact that their code is intended to actually be USED. I further suggest that, since the customers aren't expected to pay for the product, that fact alone tends to insulate the programmers from any really aggressive accountability.
Meanwhile, I find using Firefox to be really frustrating, so frustrating that I'm using IE7 more and more, despite my distaste for anything produced by that company founded by "The Wicked Wizard of the Northwest". IE7 isn't particularly fast, but doesn't suffer from the yips.
I've also tried Safari and Opera, which seem to suffer from their own set of hang-up problems. This suggests that some upgrade to WinXPsp2 might be perfectly compatible with IE7 but not with all other browsers. Of course, "The Wicked Wizard of the Northwest" wouldn't do THAT, would he?
(Meanwhile)^2: Does anyone know of a browser that has a reasonable feature set, is reasonably fast, and just works? I'd even lay down some (weakened) US dollars for it!
(Note to any member of the Tribe of the Mozillites who might be reading this: OK, so we don't actually pay for Firefox. No matter. Somebody's paying your salary. Unless you're independently wealthy, behave like you actually need your job....)
Michael Crichton put forward this very idea in a recent novel of his, "Timeline". Despite the fact that his stuff finds its way into various slick "shoot'm-up" movies, the underlying books are incredibly well researched, and the reader can learn a lot from them. For example, "Jurassic Park" was a well-reasoned exposition on the folly of trying to understand or predict the behavior of large systems, and "State of Fear" was a brilliant look into the politics of big-time environmentalism. Please understand that I don't necessarily agree with everything Dr. Crichton writes. But he makes the reader ask tough questions and manages to teach the reader some math and science along the way. All his books are worth careful reading. This can be said about few authors.
Is this really something new? I noticed in the middle of August that the not-so-august " Tiger Direct" was selling some of their machines with either Vista or XP. Of course, the ones that were offered with either OS were about $30 more for XP than for Vista.
The great SciFi writer Larry Niven's already created what you wish to implement. It was known as the "Amalgamated Regional Militia", and it worked about as well as any large government bureaucracy could be expected to work. Meanwhile, who's to say that the propeller in question is the "real" one, or just one put out by the Navy to be photographed? For that matter, does anyone believe that the "real" Area-51 would be located within a taxi-ride of Las Vegas?
I worked at a Deep Space Network Station (Goldstone) in the mid-70s, and then at the DSN headquarters (doing radio astronomy)at JPL in Pasadena, CA, from 1978-1993. BanjoBob is right to be amazed by the technology of that time, primitive though it might seem compared to what we have today. A few details: 1. As I remember it, the computers that served as the "Telemetry & Command Processors" were SDS-930 16-bit minis. They were so reliable that I remember going an entire year at the Goldstone DSS-12 station without either of them failing! The machine that decoded the telemetry and fed it to the TCP was an Interdata-4. It was also very reliable. However, the software that was doing the decoding occasionally got lost, and would go to its highest memory address and crash there. The address was "FFFF" in hex, so, of course, when that happened, you were "FFFFed"! 2. The big dishes then were 64-meters across, big enough to play frisbee inside them, which I did once, and VERY carefully. Those antennas are now 70-meters across. The first-stage amplifiers were both extremely high gain (about 45-dB at 8.5-GHz), and cooled to an extremely low temperature with liquid-Helium, so the whole receiver behaved as if its physical temperature was about 11*-Kelvin. So, the receivers contributed very little noise of their own to obscure the weak signal. Thus, these antennas were and are among the most sensitive on Earth. As I remember it, for the data rate currently being used by the Voyages, the sensitivity of the antennas was about -176-dBm, or about 176-dB less than one milliwatt of received power! With the improvements since then, it's likely about 3-4-dB better than that. If you'd like to read more, just click on over to: http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/95_20/95- 20.pdf
Ah, yes, studies of studies. What's next? Studies of studies of studies?
I got an email last week from TigerDirect. They were selling a whiz-bang bare-bones system for a fairly low price. A couple of things stood out:
1. They were selling it without an OS at all!
2. The ad said something like: "You're gonna need an OS. Add WindowsXP Home for $149.95 or WindowsVista Home for $119.95." That might have been a misprint, but I read it over a coupla times to make sure it wasn't me misreading it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a misprint, but rather, the result of the fact that "Big Brother Bill's OS Shop" is really trying to get folks to buy Vista, even to the extent of discounting it 20% compared to its predecessor, or, of course, raising the price of XP....
Uh, actually, I'm old and a bit slow, so it took me about 2-seconds to come to the conclusion that this story "isn't even wrong"....
Back in the 90s, McDonnell/Douglas developed a testbed for a "single stage to orbit" vehicle called the "Delta Clipper", aka the "DC-X". (Such a vehicle could take off from Earth's surface vertically, accelerate to orbital altitude and velocity, and decelerate from orbit and land vertically. Integral to such a vehicle would be an engine that is both easy to gimble, so that the direction of thrust could be easy to change for modifying the path of the vehicle, and also throttleable, so that only the amount of energy needed for each particular phase of an orbital mission would be consumed.) The DC-X was not large enough to reach orbit. Far from it. Its only task was to demonstrate its ability to perform the hardest task an SSO vehicle must perform: taking off vertically, translating horizontally, and then landing on a different pad than the one from which it ascended. We've done the hard part. The DC-X worked, and then the whole thing was killed by NASA's dead-bang incompetence. We ought to have a Single-Stage-to-Orbit vehicle operating NOW. And, if we did, we wouldn't be worrying about how we'd land on Mars. We'd just build an SSO tailored to Mars, take it there, and "use it in reverse"! Oh, and if we don't want to do that, we could just hire Burt Rutan to do it for cost plus 10%....
Sorry, don't have time to read every (or even many) post(s). I apologize if I've repeated what others have written. I'd suggest that the general idea to major in CS over IT is correct. The reason is that fields like IT are more devoted to learning a lot of information (not to make a bad joke), whereas CS if much more devoted to learning concepts. Once the information is obsolete, the absence of understanding basic concepts won't stand an IT major in good stead. Also, if you've taught yourself how to learn, you can pick up whatever specific information you need to know to do a job. Picking up concepts on the fly might be a bit harder. I'd also suggest that you take as much math as you can, because it will be useful in your profession and hone your analytical thinking skills. Finally, get a well-rounded education. If we are to function in the here and now, it's important to understand how we got here, both historically and culturally.