The Chair Force Engineer has a photo tour of the Eclipse manufacturing plant. Let’s hope that in a few years, these will be pictures of suborbital vehicles under construction.

…to commemorate the anniversary. Windows 95 debuted ten years ago today.

WSJ (subcription required) has an opinion piece about replacing onsite pilots with remote pilots. My contribution on the subject is here. Check out patent disclosure 20020128746 for more uses of teleoperation. Go here and search for inventor dinkin and air in any field.

Bob Moog has died. It’s hard to overestimate how much he changed the face of modern music.

I wish I could figure out which small, public companies are going to benefit from this.

Here’s an interesting new phishing scam:

Rather than posing as a bank or other online business, spear phishers send e-mails to employees at a company or government agency that appear to come from a powerful person within the organization, several security experts said…

…Unlike basic phishing attacks, which are sent out indiscriminately, spear phishers target only one organization at a time. Once they trick employees into giving up passwords, they can install Trojan horse programs or other malicious software to ferret out corporate or government secrets.

And this was interesting as well, which raises the issue of what constitutes an order from a commanding officer:

At the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., several internal tests found that cadets were all too willing to give sensitive information to an attacker posing as a high-ranking officer, said Aaron Ferguson, a visiting faculty member there.

“It’s the ‘colonel effect.’ Anyone with the rank of colonel or higher, you execute the order first and ask questions later,” he said.

But if on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog, how can you tell that someone is a colonel, let alone your colonel? There’s a long tradition of written orders having to be obeyed, but have emails acquired that attribute by default? If so, it may need to be rethought, given the nature of the technology.

Speaking of Thomas James, he has an amusing tale from the Mars Society Conference.

[Update a few minutes later]

I was about to do a radio interview with a German radio station about evolution and intelligent design when I posted this, so I didn’t get a chance to finish the thought with a similar supporting anecdote of my own.

I have a dear old friend (who will remain nameless) who is also a victim of the Mac cult. He swears by his Mac, and professes hatred of PCs and a mystification about why anyone would buy them when they could have a Mac. But when he shows me things on it, there are invariably problems with it that, if it were my machine, would cause me to toss it into the sea in frustration. Yet he seems almost blind to it, even as he asks for help in doing things that it won’t let him do.

This is an interesting breakthrough in energy generation, but I doubt it will be practical for transportation. Though it does bring a whole new meaning to the old urban myth about running a car on water. In this case, beer might be more effective, as long as someone else was behind the wheel.

[Update at 5:15 PM EDT]

Eeeeuuuuwwww…

Here’s another application for this amazing liquid.

Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

Dig in…

This is an interesting breakthrough in energy generation, but I doubt it will be practical for transportation. Though it does bring a whole new meaning to the old urban myth about running a car on water. In this case, beer might be more effective, as long as someone else was behind the wheel.

[Update at 5:15 PM EDT]

Eeeeuuuuwwww…

Here’s another application for this amazing liquid.

Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

Dig in…

This is an interesting breakthrough in energy generation, but I doubt it will be practical for transportation. Though it does bring a whole new meaning to the old urban myth about running a car on water. In this case, beer might be more effective, as long as someone else was behind the wheel.

[Update at 5:15 PM EDT]

Eeeeuuuuwwww…

Here’s another application for this amazing liquid.

Food scientists working for the US military have developed a dried food ration that troops can hydrate by adding the filthiest of muddy swamp water or even peeing on it.

Dig in…