And... (shifty eyes) Flash? I'm sold!

Because not once has The Doctor had to fight off lupus? Yeah, lame joke I know.

One of the Wilhelm Reich spinoffs, a bit of metal shavings, a chunk of quartz crystal, and bond the whole mess together with resin epoxy. Supposedly blocks all RF radiation.

Of course, that doesn't explain why all my wireless equipment and cel phone still work perfectly around the chunk I found, which someone ditched next to a local cel tower.

About 8 years ago, I came up with, but never penned (maybe to the benefit of all), the idea of taking the concept of The Prisoner, and the concept of reality TV and bringing them together.

The psychological aspects alone would have been awesome, get a bunch of unsuspecting "reality show" contestants together, seperate them into groups based on political beliefs, make them increasingly paranoid with each episode, force them in some way to work with/against each other, make them believe they were in fact prisoners in some kind of foreign or even an American prison camp, and totally play on that situation.

Like I said, it may be a good thing I never did that. It could have made me millions, or could for someone daring enough to do that (in which case, send me money via paypal), it could have majorly screwed things up, but it was a concept worth thinking about at least.

Annnnd that the idea of a capsule that could only be opened from the outside was ideal, along with a 100% oxygen atmosphere, and that properly insulated wiring was a "luxury option". They learned that REALLY fast. But that actually had nada to do with actual launch safety.

Now if you were to compare the launch proven Saturn V rocket to the Russian M2 rockets, THERE is the big difference:

The Saturn V was designed by Werner Von Braun, who found that several large engines were safer, because you could build in redundancies, if one out of 5 motors failed, the remaining four could get the job done.

The N1 was designed by an aircraft designer who had no previous experience building rockets, let alone rocket engines. His solution was to build dozens of engines into it, hoping for the same ratio. Of course, the fueling systems were also flawed. The Saturn V used standard hydrogen/oxygen propellents. The N1 used hydrazine/oxygen, IIRC. Hydrazine is highly corrosive, and as they didn't keep that in mind, it ate through seals like a cop at a donut shop. Whenever it did, the rockets exploded, often during fueling, in which case, anyone on site was eaten alive.

It was simply a BAD design.

Now some stuff that WAS well designed: The spacesuit. That lived on to Mir, through the ISS. A part hardsuit/softsuit, that works very nicely. But frankly, the Soyuz design is best for capsule travel. Simple launch system, simple delivery, simple, carrying capacity. Which is why it's used by two countries.

Cel phones have some measure of videophone technology built in now (unless all those CNN phone cam reports were faked). They've had video phones around for a while, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videophone, just recently the technology made it feasable.

I dunno, even when I was in elementary school, they discussed civil rights, the new deal, Kennedy's push for the moon, etc. He likely flunked elementary school history too.

This was done decades earlier, and is far more accurate:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7200374813151075996

Or at least get you a few trips through time in a DeLorean @88 MPH.

One can buy an RV with twin slideouts on each side, with equal features, for 1/100th of that price? And equal footage.

Considering there's almost 200% as many people drinking soda pop, one would think there's more of a threat from drinking a Coke than someone drinking a beer.

What a coincidence, my attempted tag which died a horrible death was: Tetrisisso80sdude

Haven't "docks" been in use since BEFORE Microsoft introduced theirs with Windows 98?

Cases in point, NeXT OS, and IBM's OS/2 4 Warp, both used docks (a dock launch bar in NeXT's case, and a task bar launch bar in the case of OS/2. The Mac OS only picked this up as an official feature with OSX, while before that, you had to run a 3rd party app to simulate NeXT OS' docks (at least back in 1992 with System 7 on).

If one was to claim copying was made, then didn't Apple swipe their docks from NeXT OS (yeah, that was also Jobs' baby), and for that matter, didn't Microsoft in fact swipe their quick launch bar from OS/2 4 Warp?

And before any Mac fans mod this down in an effort to try and rewrite history, remember that the original Mac interface itself was swiped from Xerox PARC. They admitted to it themselves, and after introducing it to the mainstream, the idea of moving an arrow back and forth between graphical icons pretty much became the defacto standard.

It's that, or spend the rest of your life using CLI for *everything*.

A few years ago, I breached the question of the digital transition for television and its inevitable environmental impact as hundreds of millions of TV sets go this route: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/21/2128220.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Actually, judging from this article, we've not only ignored the iceberg, but invited it in for a hot cup of tea, and asked how many people it would like to kill while ignoring the sinking ship entirely.

It's sad that seven years down the line, the obvious severity of the issue has not only gone ignored, but even condoned to date. Hell, even as I write this, I'm on a 5 year old Tablet PC that I also use for graphics (using an Intel graphics chipset, *gag*), most of my electronics are over 5 years old. What's the oldest electronic devices you use today, hmmmmm?

What about the absolute FIRST Doctor, from Dr. Who and the Daleks? Sure, he's human in that one, but Peter Cushing was 53 at the time that was released.