Yaknow....

I think its way past time I was asleep. I tried at midnight, and it didn't work. I tried again around 4:00 am and nada. But, I think this time should do it.

See yall on the flip side!

Fly Virgin Galactic!

Interesting tidbit in space news:

The X Prize, funded by the Ansari family of Dallas, was dreamed up nearly a decade ago as an incentive for development of commercial manned rockets that would make space flight a possibility for civilians.

It appears to have achieved that goal even before the first competitive flight.

Richard Branson, the airline mogul and adventurer, announced in London on Monday that his Virgin Group plans to offer passenger flight into space aboard rockets based on SpaceShipOne by 2007.

The plan calls for an investment of $108 million in spaceships and infrastructure for what will be called Virgin Galactic, with fares starting at $208,000. The company believes it will fly 3,000 people into space in its first five years.

So, I don't know if they will be commercially successful, but I think this bodes well.

Nuclear Microbatteries.

I just read a wonderful article about nuclear microbatteries. I had not previously considered the production of nuclear power in this manner before. I do have two predictions:

1) They will work well enough to become a commercial success.
2) They will become commercial AFTER they invent a new name for it.

Does anyone else remeber when Magnetic Resonance Scanning was called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance? They had to remove the word Nuclear before they could sell the technology very widely.

JPEG Virus.

I used to tell folks that you couldn't catch a computer virus just from looking at JPEGs. That isn't true any more. Both standard Linux and Windows systems were recently found vulnerable to similar buffer-overflow attacks in image decoding software. I've already patched my Linux box to close the (currently known) security holes related to this problem, and I SEEM to recall having patched my Winbox as well, but I should probably double-check that.

Now, a vulnerability is one thing, but an exploit is something else. Well, now an exploit has been written and released into the wild. Its targetted at Windows users, natchurly. You can find more infomation about it here.

India Planning an Unmanned Moon Mission.

First China, and now India are getting into space in a big way. All I can say is, its about time.

The Danish Answer to ThinkGeek.

If you live in the EU, then the Danish Nerdorama site may just be the best place to get those geek toys that are so essential to our collective wellbeing.