Pioneering

The Pioneer space probes are slowing down, and we didn't know why for quite some time. This article seems to indicate the mystery is solved (hint: it wasn't anything too mysterious). Along the way there are many interesting and nerdy nuggets of info like what those things on the end of those poles are (radioactive power sources). Anyway, the story ends with a plea to make sure raw experimental data is kept readable though the years; one poor guy had to get transmission data off some mouldy tape that was found "under the stairs" at the JPL.

Space Game

Elite was a game that allowed you to freely explore several galaxies in a 3D spaceship, at a time when games had to fit in 32 kilobytes of memory. You show your age if you admit to playing the original game, but who cares about that when there is a sequel planned that uses the full power of modern PCs, with their hardware graphics and 8 gigabytes of memory?

Moon Bot

Astrobotic Technology Inc. (a spinoff of Carnegie Mellon University) are building a robot that will go to the moon's north pole to search for ice. Polaris is equipped with a drill to test the rocks and a fin of solar cells, which are vertical so they can capture the low-lying sun's rays. A lunar day lasts 14 Earth days, and the scientists say only 10 of those are bright enough to prospect for water at the dark poles.

Moon Lift

LiftPort, the space elevator company, has been resurrected with a Kickstarter that was funded over 1000%. The special materials required for an Earth elevator don't quite exist yet, so focus has been switched to the moon, where plain Kevlar will suffice. I contributed a small amount to this one; if you missed it, we are assured there will be other opportunities. We are not properly living in the Future if we don't have robots delivering our stuff down a ribbon to the surface of the moon!

New Robots

Robots have been helping in factories for some time now, but this one is different, and not just because he has a face. Baxter is a gentle robot; this means he doesn't have to be put in a cage like his predecessors. He is slow and careful enough to not hurt puny humans when they inevitably get in the way. To program him, you can take hold of his arm and show him what to do. In the future, robots will be our friends, only rarely going back in time to kill our ancestors.

Lawyers

Slashdot has a nice write-up of the nearly 10-year saga of SCO and it's legal action to basically inflate their share price and scare people from using Linux. They claimed they could prove Linux stole code from Unix, which they owned, and sued IBM who were distributing a version of Linux. This gamble initially worked, but it gradually became clear their code evidence was wrong and they did not even own Unix. But, as the article says, the "legal juggernaut ... could not be stopped". Well it's rolling to a halt now as SCO are bankrupt (again). While this is a good write-up (Groklaw has the most detailed), as one of the comments mentions, there is no naming of who perpetrated this. Most of the blame goes to crazy CEO Darl McBride, but also there is good evidence that a certain major software company bankrolled the action. Seems their latest operating system wasn't selling very well. *cough*vista*cough*

Monkeys

Note to self - if I get a black touchscreen phone, I must build a charging station for it like this:

Swords

Someone's email this week reminded me I have a Neal Stephenson link in my To-Blog queue, so here it is:
CLANG!
No, I didn't just drop something, this is a new project of his, on the Kickstarter "Crowd Funding" website.
Although he is best known for writing sci-fi, a few of these novels reveal he has a strong interest in the low-tech pursuit of sword fighting. He has also noticed that modern computer games do not do it justice (pressing a button to swing a sword is not much fun). So he is co-founding a company to make a swing-able game sword. The main video is worth watching as it is quite amusing; I haven't watched the update videos near the bottom yet. They have only 9 days to go to reach their target... perhaps they will make it, who knows?

Phonecall

*riiiiing*
"Hello, is that NASA? Hi. I'd just like a quick word about your space telescope. Yeah, the Hubble one. I heard it was getting old and you haven't been able to get enough money together to buy a new one. It just so happens we have two spare to give away. Do you want them? No, I didn't give my name, and I can't tell you who I work for. They are good ones - you just need to strap on a few cameras and put 'em on a rocket. No, I'm serious, really. Shall I tell the boys in the warehouse to ship 'em over? Hello?

Tubes

I initially thought this article, Return of the Vacuum Tube, was about how tubes are still being used in high-end amplifiers, but no, it is about a new version of the old ones. The researchers have found a way to embed very tiny tubes is silicon, and anything in silicon is easier to mass-produce. Although not technically a vacuum or a tube, these hybrids of old and new turn out to be faster and less prone to the cosmic rays of space. The work was done at NASA. Perhaps they'll collaborate with the nanodiamond guys and make Space Transistors.

Robot

The title of this page from Project Hexapod is "Stompy Is Coming". It is a spiderbot the size of a car that carries two people.
I think this is a Good Thing.

Voting

Apparently, when electronic voting is mentioned I tend to go on a bit. So I'll keep this short.
Internet-based voting systems are a bad idea because they are easy to manipulate undetectably. If a paper ballot is suspect, there can be a re-count - not so when it is all computerized. There is a lot of malware out there on home computers and phones which could so easily be re-purposed from stealing your credit card number to changing your vote, and no-one will know it happened. And then someone evil will be elected; for instance, Bender.

Engineering

Highlights from the life of Ralph H. Baer:

1. Escape from the Nazis to the US
2. Teach yourself to service radios in New York
3. Work for Military Intelligence in WWII and become handgun expert
4. Help train Allies in Europe to use foreign weapons
5. Return with eighteen tons of foreign small arms for use in exhibits
6. Receive the first Television Engineering degree
7. Become chief engineer at a defense contractor
8. While there, secretly invent and build the first television video game
9. Invent the light gun, the first video game peripheral
10. Invent the electronic Simon game
11. Donate all prototypes to the Smithsonian
12. Receive medal 

Engineering doesn't seem like a boring profession now, eh?

Weather report

"Six more weeks of Winter"
 -  Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, 126th Groundhog Day

Free data

If you are at all interested in fair and easy access to government data, this guy will probably become one of your heroes. Be it patents, laws, books in the Library of Congress or just some simple tax information, he wants to have it available for free online so the people who paid for it, the tax-payers, can use it. The above linked speech is a little long; the takeaway is that good things will happen, and money will be saved, if only there was a policy of scanning everything. Just make the data available in bulk; internet volunteers will make sense of it.
He cites several historical bureaucratic leap-forwards which were not expensive, just backed by the will to do it right. He also mentions these IT horror stories, which nicely illustrate how bad things are:

• The Electronic Records Archives (a general government archive) are handled by a meager 100Tb system that cost $250 million, a figure which does not include any backup or working internet connection. The servers are actually physically transported in a van to the various places that supply data and processing.
• The IRS make nonprofit tax returns available only on DVDs. The files are not in searchable form, they are just millions of images. Many of these images contain social security numbers of school children because "A CIO at Treasury told me he thinks they're prohibited by law from redacting those numbers as that would be altering a government document."
• There is a disturbing trend towards agencies being tricked by corporate lawyers when they do try to scan their archived data. Take the case of the Government Accountability Office; a corporation now owns the exclusive rights to the Federal Legislative History.

ac.uk

I notice that there are mutterings about teaching programming in UK schools, which I think is a good thing. At the very least it will help people understand a little more about that thing you have to sit in front of in the office everyday. Fostering early programming interest is also important; I had to be obsessed enough to teach myself until I got formal instruction at college. At least home computers are ubiquitous now; I didn't own a PC till I was 19, and I had to build it myself (amazingly, I did use it for other things than playing Doom). The $25 PC could make a big difference to schools.