Space Process Asteroid Mining

"the size of 2012 DA14 puts the asteroid's dollar-value in the twelve-figure range, with lots of valuable metals and liquids that could be harvested automatically and fired back to orbit around our planet to be used in orbiting manufacturing facilities."

Manufacturing would be stupid in Low Earth Orbit. There are enough hazardous bits in orbit now without putting a factory up there to spread out even more bits of paint, bolts, hammers, etc.

A far better place for the space lasers and space manufacturing would be at the Lagrange Points. Specifically at L2 solar wind would help push any debris out into the solar system and away from Earth. Shielding, its necessity and its weight, becomes the real issue because outside of LEO, and Earth's protective magnetic field, the full radiative brunt of the Sun requires such to keep people alive long term.

And, until methods less costly than $10,000 plus per Kg of payload to LEO or beyond come into play, all of this talk of factories and lasers in space is quite frankly just that, talk.

<grabs sides of walker with June 1978 copy of Popular Science tucked under arm and shuffles away from keyboard muttering bitterly about Solar Stirling Engine Generators, gravity wells and whippersnappers>

3 Com and early Ethernet

Once upon a time 3 Com shipped a customer a whole bunch of 10 meg ISA BUS Ethernet network cards, about 200 if I remember correctly, and these were fitted into shiny new 486 processor boxen and duly connected to 10 meg Ethernet hubs and switches for their data processing folks who were moving into a nice new office.

When it came time to test, nothing seemed to work correctly and even the tier 3 engineers were stumped by the fact that pings and trace routes would go nowhere. Much finger pointing and recriminations ensued until someone brought in a Network General sniffer and did some packet captures.

It turned out that all of the 3 Com network cards had been accidentally burned with the same mac address and that mac address was the only one that showed up in the packet traces.

I was a remote technician on maintenance support for the hubs and switches and was just as amused as everyone on our team that the problem was not ours, good times.

Just had another look here and...

"white knuckle ride for the main payload box:"

Shirley you meant "white knuckle ride for Paris' main payload box"?

Sticks with the format better, 'eh wot?

My kids were impressed

I told them about this when my wife asked what I was doing in front of my laptop, and when I told them about a paper airplane that sailed from 89,000 feet above the earth and was successfully recovered in the woods of Spain my boys thought it was cool. My wife reasonably wondered why people would do such a thing and both my boys and I rounded on her to say things like, "because it's cool, and awesome", etc. Good geek entertainment is what the boys and I surmised as was the intention of this, yes?

Good work to all again, thanks for truly inspiring entertainment/achievement.

Congratulations

Followed this from the beginning and am pleased it went so well. This is fine geek entertainment by any standard. Well done, cheers.

Laws of Robotics

"Rather, Povše contended, he had instructed his metal henchman to attack the other scientists in order to discover better ways to program robots not to hurt people. "

Apparently this is how it starts.

Magnetics

He succeeded in attracting the attention of the law.

Zeros and Ones moving about...

...faster?

Cool. Inevitably we will be telepathic and all knowing with the proper upgrades, eh?

How not?

If they were collecting SSIDs, how could the "software" not gather all "payload" packets? Special filter forgotten to be activated? Sounds doubtful.

More to the point, ad nauseum, is why did Google see a need to be about collecting SSIDs, or any other wireless information while photographing the neighborhood(s)?

Specifically targeted spam^H^H^H^H Unsolicited Commercial Email.

Just a theory, but if you live in a specific demographic neighborhood, and they *only* wanted your SSID, and then *accidentally* picked up your ISP, and account information, sending you direct email on behalf of <insert name of local or national advertising client here> would fit nicely into a clever plan of advertising revenue generation.

I suspect the theory being that if their client's email gets past our spam filters, we might be persuaded or influenced by the UCE.

(Black Adder reference alert> A plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel.

The lawyers will make a deal to drop everything once they know the fix is in, money will change hands. Nothing to see here folks,<except another path for the inexorable stream of spam> move along.

What?

"SA vultures under threat from brain-smoking gamblers"

I would think that smoking *any* part of a carrion eating bird would be a gamble, and thought from the title that was what the article was about, i.e.

"I'll bet you won't smoke that vulture brain..." etc.

I remember...

... accessing usenet through a netcom unix shell account with a 2400 baud modem and until .html came along it was all we had to communicate. There were many fine ASCII artists that made amazing graphic pictures with nothing but letters and symbols from the keyboard.

<grasps sides of walker handles and shuffles away from keyboard muttering bitterly about how good the whippersnapper facebooking twitterers have it these days>

@AC, I'm not a betting man, but I'd say that.. #

50,000 Quatloos on Jason Chen NOT being invited to the 4G launch.

60,000 Quatloos on Jason Chen being charged, convicted and imprisoned by the California authorities.

30,000 Quatloos on Jason Chen escaping the above with only probation.

@Doubleplusgood!

First goodthink I had too.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

I did not know what to expect from the title to this article. I was not disappointed. Thank you El Reg for stellar coverage of this epic event.

Brilliant, cheers.

@Alan W. Rateliff, II

I use the AVG on my traveling lapdog, and McAfee on my home pc that the missus uses. When I bought the lapdog, it came with AVG free. When it expired I reloaded it and checked the box to say I would participate in development, so far, so good. It has been 4 months and counting and this thing has not been any trouble at all.

As far as large networked environments go, it is obvious that paying for the right to use comes with much needed support.

As far as the DAT update spitting up a dialog box saying "Your version of the Engine is out of date, and this DAT update is about to destroy your machine, continue, Yes/No?" Is likely something they could have done had they tested it before releasing it.

Terminator, obviously the machines and their programmers are to blame.

5301 engine doing just fine on boxen with DAT 5664

Apparently this is only affecting folks on the 5100 engine. Official support has ended for 5100.

Could McAfee have bothered to test the DAT 5664 with a few boxen running the 5100 engine before forcing it out the door as a sort of a quality assurance initiative? If, and when, they found *something bad*, perhaps a delay in the release whilst sending out stern reminders? For the sake of their own CYA for instance.

That sort of fluff markets to the paying masses better than crippling the systems of anyone who hasn't had a chance to roll out the new engine due to the labors of change control scheduling.

Unfortunately, it appears that lots of folks were running 5100, and on *big* *important* servers no less.

We need a horror story thread here, methinks.

@BEWARE/WARNING before installing !!!!

No trouble with the bookmarks, or the download speed, however, AVG 8.5.339 safe surfing app is now gone. I was getting used to the green check marks next to my search results, alas.

Of course, this gives me something to do for the next few days, that being looking for the add on support updates.

Contractors!

Why not recycle code, it worked fine the first time, eh?

95 degrees Fahrenheit = 35 degrees Celsius...

...is the average daytime temperature in Brooksville, FL during this time of year.

I was just there today, and I can tell you firsthand it is like being in an oven outside of the air conditioned buildings.

It is cruel that they are telling city employees to dress appropriately as just about everyone I saw was wearing as little as possible outdoors. Girls in bikini tops and guys going shirtless in shorts, etc. Ah, Florida in the summer, good times.

Steven King, anyone?

"The Minuteman 1's missile guidance computer was a bleeding-edge 24-bit microcomputer made by Autonetics Division of North American Aviation."

Autonetics Division of North American Aviation. A subsidiary of North Central Positronics no doubt.

Great article, and the usual great comments, this one not withstanding.

@Simon

"It's now called the Flying Pig flu!"

Thanks. I now have a mission. If *anyone* mentions this swine flu to me in the next couple of weeks in passing, I now know what to say. "You mean the pig flu that has avian and human components as well?" "Yes, I have heard they are calling it the Flying Pig flu!"

You are now "they", Simon.

Dangerous if not done correctly

Some guys in Canada started a huge grass fire with propane and oxygen trying to eliminate varmints like at the end of Caddyshack.

http://wcco.com/video/?id=39769@wcco.dayport.com

Propane, Oxygen and an ignition source, what could go wrong?

Parsing error

"Brazilian ejected as lingerie arouses border staff suspicions"

Stopped reading at staff, while wondering who the border was and where he was staying when he met the Brazilian with the lingerie, was she ejecting from a cake, wardrobe, etc.

Time for a quiet lie down now methinks...

WHY?

If this was a vengeance thing, the perpetrator(s) are less than scum. If this was to cover some bank heist with the alarms down, then I'm still waiting for that story to break.

The union contract just expired so the vengeance angle is there, but, FFS, this is not the way to get a good contract from management.

Either way, I hope they catch them. Knocking out 911 service to thousands of people is stupid and mean, despite any reasons the morons had for doing this.

It might be expensive to do, but how about a centrally controlled magnetic lock/unlock system for these 100lb. manhole covers and or a silent alarm system?

The cops could be waiting at the top of the hole just as they were on their way back up.

"Pardon me but if you are not an authorized worker here I will have to arrest you now", said the officer, etc.