But in the long run, they won't find other jobs. The whole point of automation (and outsourcing) is that the companies using the automation pay less out in wages. When every company does this, there are no other domestic jobs being created - even the jobs creating automation get automated or outsourced. There is less consumer income and thus lower sales and less need for production capacity - it's a vicious cycle. We're only holding on in the US because consumer borrowing is so high, allowing purchasing to continue.
Companies need to understand that eliminating jobs and paying lower wages is eating their seed corn. No one company can decide to buck the tide, though, because in the short term the other companies will eat them up. Unfortunately, the only way to make progress is through regulation. Corporations must be taxed on importing low-paid labor, whether through visas, outsourcing, or importing finished goods, and must be made to share the profits of automation with displaced workers.
Automation reduces the need for workers, but it does not fix the economic system that requires everyone have a "job". Why should all the benefits of human ingenuity go to corporations? This is a problem commonly acknowledged with intellectual property, but it has other aspects - access to effective means of production and to capital are also effectively limited to corporations. What if your supermarket checker could buy an automated checkout system, set it up at work and collect their paycheck without showing up? The system is set up to prevent that happening now, but why not turn things around and require corporations to lease all their equipment from real people? Loan them the money at cost, and then you'll see real productivity improvements without forcing workers into poverty. Perhaps that particular idea isn't practical, but some radical strategy is needed - profit from automation must not be concentrated in corporations or by and by corporations will own everything.
According to Tom's Hardware, as of August 2005, the fastest flash on the market, Memina's 4GB, has 30MB/s read and 24MB/s write - assuming it's compatible with your system, which it often isn't. Yes, if someone created a RAID controller for the things, this could go to 100MB/s or more, but that isn't available yet. The access times are great, though, on the better brands - 0.5 ms for the Kingston Elite 2GB or 0.7 ms for the Memina. Crap brands can have ridiculous access times, though - nearly 30 ms.
I think the solution is to stop doing BAC tests and stupid human tricks by the side of the road and instead have a portable driving simulator in the cop car to see whether the suspect can actually drive well enough. There are people who shouldn't be driving no matter what their BAC (senile,sleep deprived, on antihistamines or opiates, etc.) and others who start off with much better than average reflexes and judgement who can drive safely despite being over the limit that the average person can handle.
Interestingly, people with high IQs also almost always have exeptionally quick reflexes - Mensa members have bertter reaction times on avaerage than NASCAR drivers.
People who want to switch from Windows and have no current Mac software will not care about natitve binaries not being out yet, since in the meantime all their Windows software will run on the Mac with virtually no overhead. Just use an old PC version of Photoshop or whatever until the OSX-Intel binaries are out. This really removes almost all the pain of switching to a new OS - it's not like the old situation where you will never see your any of your old software running with proper snap again, which always caused a lot of seperation anxiety among techies - just get the extra RAM and have XP running in a virtual machine - no worries!
It's not the water that damages electronics but rather the salts and other ions in the water that allow short-circuiting, and if concentrations are as high as in tap water will often leave conductive salt bridges between pins. (Washing ciruit boards in the dishwasher can be ok, though, if you know what you're doing.)
Deionized water temporarily has no ions but disolves some out of virtually anything, making it an undependable resistor. It also has a whopping dielectric constant that would be a bad idea in any case for a bath for high-frequency circuits designed to run in air.
Actually the lift goes when the density equals air, which I imagine would be at a compression ratio of about 15, once the gas is cool the pressure should be about 225 psi., so you'd think it would work, but for some reason (perhaps leakage, weight and complexity) they don't seem to do this. The cold from the expansion would be good for condensing extra ballast out of the water in the air just when it's wanted for landing. It seems to me this would also be a dandy way to store energy, too.
But that scenario is what would be used for a general-puurpose computing application running on 4 GPUs, which would be quite useful in a number of financial and scientific computing areas. The RAM per processor is a bit low, though.
That is the way the case law now stands, but in effect the university, a supposedly private corporate individual, is claiming quasi-judicial authority over a customer who not only tas inalienable rights which cannot be contracted away, but who has paid money in expectation of a timely degree and whose contractual rights were being denied by the university on the basis of a very expansive reading of the university's rights and the student's obligations. Where's the university's consideration for getting all these supposed rights over students, anyway? He is the one paying them!
Free speech should not be subject to being contracted away in order to get an education.
Further, I think that we need a legal principle of inalienable equality before the law, that is, that no contract can create a quasi-judicial authority of one natural person or corporate entity over a natural person. I'd go further and throw out all the quasi-judicial administrative courts in the federal and state government agencies, too, because they administer what are presented as judicial proceedings and which have the same effect as far as punishments are concerned, but which rely on rules outside the statutes passed by the legislature.
The lifting body and wings allow the craft to operate under a much wider envelope of loads and bouyant lifts. A huge problem with airships is maintaining desired buoyancy despite variations in temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, fuel expenditure, and condensation or icing loading - helium is too expensive to vent when the airship is light and cannot be generated in filght as can hydrogen, hot air or steam*. Being able to descend or ascend without losing ballast or lift gas and to operate without massive ground crews and facilities should significantly reduce the operating expense associated with helium airships. The Ohio Airships people have gotten an amazing amount done with very little money, and they seem to be selling their idea effectively to US government buyers, so it seems possible that this design will avoid the fate of all the other large airship projects of the past 60 years.
The main innovation in the Ohio Airships design is in the novel rigid internal structure which uses a keel beam supported by stays (cables) from a tower in the manner of a suspension bridge. This should allow greater loads relative to the airframe mass, including positive or negative loads from the wings.
*Steam is potentially the most economical lift gas since it gives 60% of helium lift or 200% of hot air lift, is essentially free if generated as a by-product of a steam engine, and the airship envelope acts as a condenser for the engine, reducing weight. This makes both the lift gas and propulsion much more efficiently produced than helium bags or IC engines See www.flyingkettle.com for more details.
The USB in the GPX2 is not a host, so USB keyboards, joysticks and memory sticks do not work. There are some expensive special-purpose peripherals inteded for phones that could be made to work, however. The power consumption of a USB host was thought too high for the 2 AA supply, but may be included on the next model, according to the company site.
Even Drexlerian diamonoid replicators have limits. Flying cars, sure. AI, immortality, the conquest of the solar system and a technological singularity? Probably. But Duke Nukem Forever? C'mon.
Jef Raskin, the creator of the Mac, wrote a piece, Holes In The Histories in which he gives the inside story on Steve Jobs:
Another cause for inaccuracy is the deliberate misleading of reporters, coupled with some reporters' tendency to believe an apparently sincere and/or famous source. Levy's book gives prominent thanks to Apple's PR department, which learned the history of the Mac from Steve Jobs, whose well-deserved sobriquet at Apple (and later at NeXT) was "reality distortion field." Many times I had seen him baldly tell a lie to suppliers, reporters, employees, investors, and to me; Stross's book provides many examples of this. When caught, Jobs's tactic was to apologize profusely and appear contrite; then he'd do it again. His charm and apparent sincerity took in nearly everybody he dealt with, even after they'd been burnt a few times. For those who didn't know him he seemed utterly credible. In his defense it should be pointed out that some reality distortion is necessary when you are pioneering: when I am conveying my vision of the future I create a non-existent world in the minds of listeners and try to convince them that it is desirable and even inevitable. I'm pretty good at this, but Jobs is a master, unconstrained by "maybe" and "probably." His attractive creation-myth--swallowed whole by susceptible reporters--wherein Apple's computers were invented exclusively by college drop-outs and intuitive engineers flying by the seats of their pants became legend. To hear him tell it, the Macintosh had practically been born, homespun, in Abe Lincoln's log cabin. That it had been spawned by an ex-professor and computer-center director with an advanced degree in computer science would have blown the myth away. A good story will often beat out the dull facts into print.
It's probably possible to make a computer a hundred times faster than it is today, but a million? Not likely using known physics.
I'd say they'll get at least a million million times more powerful before the limits are reached. K. Eric Drexler's book Nanosystems has detailed and thoroughly analysed designs for mechanical molecular computers that would perform up to 10^16 instructions per watt and could store nearly 10^21 bytes per cm^3. That would be about 10^9 times as powerful as today's computers on a per-watt basis. A 1cc 100KW computer could deliver 10^15 MIPS. Of course molecular electronics would be even faster than the mechanical designs.
At some point progress will come to a close, but the fundamental physical limits are pretty far out there. A hydrogen atom has a theoretical maximum information content of megabytes. Degenerate matter computers could potentially be many orders of magnitude smaller than ordinary atoms would allow. Artificial pseudo-atoms of any imaginable size and shape are being constructed from experimenter-created forces in the lab and could also open the possible designs of computers. Quantum superposition of states in computers could allow using astronomical numbers of virtual copies of the computer, potentially surpassing the theoretical capacity of a conventional computer using all the mass in the universe. Even without talking about physical limits in the grander sense, forseeable molecular nanoechnology will allow atomically precise computers of millions of tons consuming quadrillions of watts. That kind of power is as far beyond what today's computers can do as an abacus is from the combined power of every brain in Earth's history.
If Bush's actions were legal, then why did one of the FISA judges just resign in protest? The FISA court approves essentially every application it gets, and the application can come after the spying. The only reason Bush would need to bypass the secret rubber-stamp court is if he was monitoring things that even FISA would not approve. Anything of a nature that even FISA wouldn't approve would almost automatically be a serious crime, hence an impeachable offense.
Your post could give people the mistaken impression that this patent is 10 years old, but actually it wasn't filed until September 20, 2000. In fact it doesn't even reference any patents before 1995 and astonishingly only a handful of non-patent references. I think that this will be reexamined and the patent-holders will be found to have failed in their duty of candor and thus to have perpetrated a fraud against the PTO. The claims are all clearly either anticipated in the art or obvious applications of existing art to forseeable future problems.
There were no real cutbacks during the shuttle design - quite the reverse - there were absolutely fraudulent initial cost estimates that ballooned. If ther were any way the hardware capability could have been made for the $ claimed or with the design offered, the design would have stayed closer to the initial conception. In fact, if the shuttle had been built as originally designed, at best it still would not have come close to the reliability or cost estimates that it's backers originally claimed, and this should have been clear from the beginning to anyone looking at the numbers.
Ramjets weren't "drawing board" technology - the V-1 was a pulsejet, for instance. Ramjet designs have been around since 1908, and pure ramjets have been flown since at least 1949! The starting velocity can easily be provided by various catapult and other first stage designs that are mostly even older. Besides secret military craft, ramjets are still used in missiles, as well as the remaining few SR-71s, so there is no denying they work or that they were available when the shuttle was being designed. The Isp of ramjets is better than rockets from mach 0.5 - about 9 and with 1950 tech can achieve a thrust/weight ratio of 40. Today we could do 3-4x better. They also have no moving parts, unlike the fragile, dangerous turbo-pumped rockets used for space launch today. The fact is that the design of spacecraft is governed by the profit/stasis/rent seeking motives of parasitic aerospace conglomerates rather than by engineering or customer cost-efficiency concerns.
"If MS don't like the rules, they are perfectly free to take their ball and go home. "
No, they aren't. The EU can revoke the legal fiction of MS's intellectual property rights and put MS products in the public domain if MS tries to pull out of the market.
The EU can seize MS property to satisfy judgements or fines, including any and all intellectual property, including source and binary code under license to companies or institutions in Europe. Governments can do anything they like to corporations and are under no compulsion to treat them as equals in any way. In fact, they can wipe out all stock and notes issued by a chartered company, simply by declaring the company non-existent and/ or seizing all the company's assets. That might or might not be legal, but the thing is, sovereign governments don't have to obey any law.
The EU hasn't even begun to get nasty on the govenmental scale. If they wanted to, they could designate MS a terrorist organisation and seize all its money, and lock up all its people in Europe. The EU won't go that far, because they have less disruptive ways of getting obedience from MS, but those softer ways work because it is tacitly understood how far a government can go.
Transcriptionists using "a word-processing system centered on troff and ed"?! For patents? What sick sadistic bastard thought up that? I'll take bamboo splinters under the fingernails instead, thanks.
No, I think the two blue keys with the white arrows are the space keys. Ergonomically, that makes the most sense as the shift and num keys wil be convenient to the thumbs. Also the shift and num keys do nothing by themselves and are thus immune to stray keypresses. The SpFn key is a symbolic shift key to get at the extra characters on the main keys.
Except, of course, for the fact that Marconi stole all of his ideas from Bose -
THE WORK OF JAGADIS CHANDRA BOSE: 100 YEARS OF MM-WAVE RESEARCH D.T. Emerson 1997 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium Digest, Volume 2 pp. 553-6
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Just one hundred years ago, J.C. Bose described to the Royal Institution in London his research carried out in Calcutta at millimeter wavelengths. He used waveguides, horn antennas, dielectric lenses, various polarizers and even semiconductors at frequencies as high as 60 GHz; much of his original equipment is still in existence, now at the Bose Institute in Calcutta. Some concepts from his original 1897 papers have been incorporated into a new 1.3-mm multi-beam receiver now in use on the NRAO 12 Meter Telescope.
"The Shuttle has been a problem, and that can be traced to the programs cuts and compromises..."
No, it can be traced to the fact that the Shuttle is and always was an lousy design. Carrying wings and landing gear and using side-slung boosters that increase the frontal area is just stupid in a spaceship. The shuttle is not reusable without spending more in refurbishment than it would cost to build a throw-away booster. Using the same resources intelligently one could achieve several times better $/kg to LEO, and practical designs to do that have been proposed continually for several decades. Technologically, aside from using better fuel (H2 instead of alcohol) the shuttle is a step back from the V-2. In fact, the Germans had the tech to build a ramjet 2nd stage that would put the specific impulse of the Shuttle to shame, even using alcohol as fuel. The shuttle design was obsolete before it got off the drawing board and its failures were in its engineering. The initial estimated costs, launch frequencies and payload estimates were simply fabricated.
The Shuttle program has been a huge debacle that has set the US space program back 50 years. (Yes, 50 - in 1960 we could start a program to get to the moon in under 10 years. In 2005 we need 15-20 years lead time to do the same thing.)
Slashdot Mirror
"When the cashiers find other jobs ..."
But in the long run, they won't find other jobs. The whole point of automation (and outsourcing) is that the companies using the automation pay less out in wages. When every company does this, there are no other domestic jobs being created - even the jobs creating automation get automated or outsourced. There is less consumer income and thus lower sales and less need for production capacity - it's a vicious cycle. We're only holding on in the US because consumer borrowing is so high, allowing purchasing to continue.
Companies need to understand that eliminating jobs and paying lower wages is eating their seed corn. No one company can decide to buck the tide, though, because in the short term the other companies will eat them up. Unfortunately, the only way to make progress is through regulation. Corporations must be taxed on importing low-paid labor, whether through visas, outsourcing, or importing finished goods, and must be made to share the profits of automation with displaced workers.
Automation reduces the need for workers, but it does not fix the economic system that requires everyone have a "job". Why should all the benefits of human ingenuity go to corporations? This is a problem commonly acknowledged with intellectual property, but it has other aspects - access to effective means of production and to capital are also effectively limited to corporations. What if your supermarket checker could buy an automated checkout system, set it up at work and collect their paycheck without showing up? The system is set up to prevent that happening now, but why not turn things around and require corporations to lease all their equipment from real people? Loan them the money at cost, and then you'll see real productivity improvements without forcing workers into poverty. Perhaps that particular idea isn't practical, but some radical strategy is needed - profit from automation must not be concentrated in corporations or by and by corporations will own everything.
John Brunner predicted event futures markets, ubiquitous computer networks and network worms in his 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider.
According to Tom's Hardware, as of August 2005, the fastest flash on the market, Memina's 4GB, has 30MB/s read and 24MB/s write - assuming it's compatible with your system, which it often isn't. Yes, if someone created a RAID controller for the things, this could go to 100MB/s or more, but that isn't available yet. The access times are great, though, on the better brands - 0.5 ms for the Kingston Elite 2GB or 0.7 ms for the Memina. Crap brands can have ridiculous access times, though - nearly 30 ms.
I think the solution is to stop doing BAC tests and stupid human tricks by the side of the road and instead have a portable driving simulator in the cop car to see whether the suspect can actually drive well enough. There are people who shouldn't be driving no matter what their BAC (senile,sleep deprived, on antihistamines or opiates, etc.) and others who start off with much better than average reflexes and judgement who can drive safely despite being over the limit that the average person can handle.
Interestingly, people with high IQs also almost always have exeptionally quick reflexes - Mensa members have bertter reaction times on avaerage than NASCAR drivers.
People who want to switch from Windows and have no current Mac software will not care about natitve binaries not being out yet, since in the meantime all their Windows software will run on the Mac with virtually no overhead. Just use an old PC version of Photoshop or whatever until the OSX-Intel binaries are out. This really removes almost all the pain of switching to a new OS - it's not like the old situation where you will never see your any of your old software running with proper snap again, which always caused a lot of seperation anxiety among techies - just get the extra RAM and have XP running in a virtual machine - no worries!
It's not the water that damages electronics but rather the salts and other ions in the water that allow short-circuiting, and if concentrations are as high as in tap water will often leave conductive salt bridges between pins. (Washing ciruit boards in the dishwasher can be ok, though, if you know what you're doing.)
Deionized water temporarily has no ions but disolves some out of virtually anything, making it an undependable resistor. It also has a whopping dielectric constant that would be a bad idea in any case for a bath for high-frequency circuits designed to run in air.
Actually the lift goes when the density equals air, which I imagine would be at a compression ratio of about 15, once the gas is cool the pressure should be about 225 psi., so you'd think it would work, but for some reason (perhaps leakage, weight and complexity) they don't seem to do this. The cold from the expansion would be good for condensing extra ballast out of the water in the air just when it's wanted for landing. It seems to me this would also be a dandy way to store energy, too.
But that scenario is what would be used for a general-puurpose computing application running on 4 GPUs, which would be quite useful in a number of financial and scientific computing areas. The RAM per processor is a bit low, though.
That is the way the case law now stands, but in effect the university, a supposedly private corporate individual, is claiming quasi-judicial authority over a customer who not only tas inalienable rights which cannot be contracted away, but who has paid money in expectation of a timely degree and whose contractual rights were being denied by the university on the basis of a very expansive reading of the university's rights and the student's obligations. Where's the university's consideration for getting all these supposed rights over students, anyway? He is the one paying them!
Free speech should not be subject to being contracted away in order to get an education.
Absolutely right.
Further, I think that we need a legal principle of inalienable equality before the law, that is, that no contract can create a quasi-judicial authority of one natural person or corporate entity over a natural person. I'd go further and throw out all the quasi-judicial administrative courts in the federal and state government agencies, too, because they administer what are presented as judicial proceedings and which have the same effect as far as punishments are concerned, but which rely on rules outside the statutes passed by the legislature.
The lifting body and wings allow the craft to operate under a much wider envelope of loads and bouyant lifts. A huge problem with airships is maintaining desired buoyancy despite variations in temperature, altitude, barometric pressure, fuel expenditure, and condensation or icing loading - helium is too expensive to vent when the airship is light and cannot be generated in filght as can hydrogen, hot air or steam*. Being able to descend or ascend without losing ballast or lift gas and to operate without massive ground crews and facilities should significantly reduce the operating expense associated with helium airships. The Ohio Airships people have gotten an amazing amount done with very little money, and they seem to be selling their idea effectively to US government buyers, so it seems possible that this design will avoid the fate of all the other large airship projects of the past 60 years.
The main innovation in the Ohio Airships design is in the novel rigid internal structure which uses a keel beam supported by stays (cables) from a tower in the manner of a suspension bridge. This should allow greater loads relative to the airframe mass, including positive or negative loads from the wings.
*Steam is potentially the most economical lift gas since it gives 60% of helium lift or 200% of hot air lift, is essentially free if generated as a by-product of a steam engine, and the airship envelope acts as a condenser for the engine, reducing weight. This makes both the lift gas and propulsion much more efficiently produced than helium bags or IC engines See www.flyingkettle.com for more details.
The USB in the GPX2 is not a host, so USB keyboards, joysticks and memory sticks do not work. There are some expensive special-purpose peripherals inteded for phones that could be made to work, however. The power consumption of a USB host was thought too high for the 2 AA supply, but may be included on the next model, according to the company site.
Even Drexlerian diamonoid replicators have limits. Flying cars, sure. AI, immortality, the conquest of the solar system and a technological singularity? Probably. But Duke Nukem Forever? C'mon.
It's probably possible to make a computer a hundred times faster than it is today, but a million? Not likely using known physics.
I'd say they'll get at least a million million times more powerful before the limits are reached. K. Eric Drexler's book Nanosystems has detailed and thoroughly analysed designs for mechanical molecular computers that would perform up to 10^16 instructions per watt and could store nearly 10^21 bytes per cm^3. That would be about 10^9 times as powerful as today's computers on a per-watt basis. A 1cc 100KW computer could deliver 10^15 MIPS. Of course molecular electronics would be even faster than the mechanical designs.
At some point progress will come to a close, but the fundamental physical limits are pretty far out there. A hydrogen atom has a theoretical maximum information content of megabytes. Degenerate matter computers could potentially be many orders of magnitude smaller than ordinary atoms would allow. Artificial pseudo-atoms of any imaginable size and shape are being constructed from experimenter-created forces in the lab and could also open the possible designs of computers. Quantum superposition of states in computers could allow using astronomical numbers of virtual copies of the computer, potentially surpassing the theoretical capacity of a conventional computer using all the mass in the universe. Even without talking about physical limits in the grander sense, forseeable molecular nanoechnology will allow atomically precise computers of millions of tons consuming quadrillions of watts. That kind of power is as far beyond what today's computers can do as an abacus is from the combined power of every brain in Earth's history.
If Bush's actions were legal, then why did one of the FISA judges just resign in protest? The FISA court approves essentially every application it gets, and the application can come after the spying. The only reason Bush would need to bypass the secret rubber-stamp court is if he was monitoring things that even FISA would not approve. Anything of a nature that even FISA wouldn't approve would almost automatically be a serious crime, hence an impeachable offense.
Your post could give people the mistaken impression that this patent is 10 years old, but actually it wasn't filed until September 20, 2000. In fact it doesn't even reference any patents before 1995 and astonishingly only a handful of non-patent references. I think that this will be reexamined and the patent-holders will be found to have failed in their duty of candor and thus to have perpetrated a fraud against the PTO. The claims are all clearly either anticipated in the art or obvious applications of existing art to forseeable future problems.
There were no real cutbacks during the shuttle design - quite the reverse - there were absolutely fraudulent initial cost estimates that ballooned. If ther were any way the hardware capability could have been made for the $ claimed or with the design offered, the design would have stayed closer to the initial conception. In fact, if the shuttle had been built as originally designed, at best it still would not have come close to the reliability or cost estimates that it's backers originally claimed, and this should have been clear from the beginning to anyone looking at the numbers.
Ramjets weren't "drawing board" technology - the V-1 was a pulsejet, for instance. Ramjet designs have been around since 1908, and pure ramjets have been flown since at least 1949! The starting velocity can easily be provided by various catapult and other first stage designs that are mostly even older. Besides secret military craft, ramjets are still used in missiles, as well as the remaining few SR-71s, so there is no denying they work or that they were available when the shuttle was being designed. The Isp of ramjets is better than rockets from mach 0.5 - about 9 and with 1950 tech can achieve a thrust/weight ratio of 40. Today we could do 3-4x better. They also have no moving parts, unlike the fragile, dangerous turbo-pumped rockets used for space launch today. The fact is that the design of spacecraft is governed by the profit/stasis/rent seeking motives of parasitic aerospace conglomerates rather than by engineering or customer cost-efficiency concerns.
"If MS don't like the rules, they are perfectly free to take their ball and go home. "
No, they aren't. The EU can revoke the legal fiction of MS's intellectual property rights and put MS products in the public domain if MS tries to pull out of the market.
The EU can seize MS property to satisfy judgements or fines, including any and all intellectual property, including source and binary code under license to companies or institutions in Europe. Governments can do anything they like to corporations and are under no compulsion to treat them as equals in any way. In fact, they can wipe out all stock and notes issued by a chartered company, simply by declaring the company non-existent and/ or seizing all the company's assets. That might or might not be legal, but the thing is, sovereign governments don't have to obey any law.
The EU hasn't even begun to get nasty on the govenmental scale. If they wanted to, they could designate MS a terrorist organisation and seize all its money, and lock up all its people in Europe. The EU won't go that far, because they have less disruptive ways of getting obedience from MS, but those softer ways work because it is tacitly understood how far a government can go.
Transcriptionists using "a word-processing system centered on troff and ed"?! For patents? What sick sadistic bastard thought up that? I'll take bamboo splinters under the fingernails instead, thanks.
Loading the left pinkie with the high-frequency letters "a" "i" and "e" is not very ergonomic either.
No, I think the two blue keys with the white arrows are the space keys. Ergonomically, that makes the most sense as the shift and num keys wil be convenient to the thumbs. Also the shift and num keys do nothing by themselves and are thus immune to stray keypresses. The SpFn key is a symbolic shift key to get at the extra characters on the main keys.
THE WORK OF JAGADIS CHANDRA BOSE: 100 YEARS OF MM-WAVE RESEARCH
D.T. Emerson
1997 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium Digest, Volume 2 pp. 553-6
National Radio Astronomy Observatory
"The Shuttle has been a problem, and that can be traced to the programs cuts and compromises..."
No, it can be traced to the fact that the Shuttle is and always was an lousy design. Carrying wings and landing gear and using side-slung boosters that increase the frontal area is just stupid in a spaceship. The shuttle is not reusable without spending more in refurbishment than it would cost to build a throw-away booster. Using the same resources intelligently one could achieve several times better $/kg to LEO, and practical designs to do that have been proposed continually for several decades. Technologically, aside from using better fuel (H2 instead of alcohol) the shuttle is a step back from the V-2. In fact, the Germans had the tech to build a ramjet 2nd stage that would put the specific impulse of the Shuttle to shame, even using alcohol as fuel. The shuttle design was obsolete before it got off the drawing board and its failures were in its engineering. The initial estimated costs, launch frequencies and payload estimates were simply fabricated.
The Shuttle program has been a huge debacle that has set the US space program back 50 years. (Yes, 50 - in 1960 we could start a program to get to the moon in under 10 years. In 2005 we need 15-20 years lead time to do the same thing.)