I dunno, I thought my write up on Ars was pretty good.
-Lee

Yes, I contacted JSC PAO and they unequivocally said that there are no "virus epidemics" on the ISS. There is no current outbreak of anything, stuxnet or otherwise. Kaspersky's comments weren't about an ongoing event—rather, they are off-the-cuff unsourced remarks that could refer to any number of past incidents.

Winter. It's the best three weeks in Texas, and the only time you're able to go outside without becoming sticky with sweat after 15 seconds at any time of the day or night. Plus, you get so sleep with an actual blanket, instead of the thinnest sheet you can find. It's great to actually be able to wear normal clothes outdoors—layers! Suits! Coats!

Summer is my least favorite. Sure, you can go to the beach, but it lasts eight months, from April through November, and every second of it is an experience in humid misery. You spend your time dashing from one air conditioned space to the next, dreading your $400 monthly electricity bill (because of your home's central air), and dreaming of what it feels like to be cold.

If I could move, I would. Unfortunately—perhaps BECAUSE it's so miserable down here—home prices are ludicrously reasonable, so I stay.

That's insane. If someone steals my credit card number, there's fast and quick legal redress. The most inconvenient part is waiting for the credit card company to overnight me a new card.

Paypal, on the other hand, can lift actual money right out of the checking account they insist on linking to my account and actually defraud me. There is literally no instance where simply using a credit card number is less safe than dealing with paypal.

Probably too late to pick up any moderation points, but no. The CAD files are considered export-controlled technology and are not publicly available. I asked this specifically when I was talking with the engineers involved in the effort. It's also why the article I wrote (linked up-thread) lacks images of the disassembled F-1 engine and its components. I desperately wanted to photograph the lab and its awesome assortment of rocket parts, but NASA and the US government did not allow pictures of export-controlled technology.

The "paperwork" has never been lost—every shred of documentation is intact and on file. In fact, engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center have been spending the past year busily disassembling and working with components from several stored F-1 engines. They've constructed highly detailed CAD models of the engines, and even done hot firing on one of the gas generator segments.

I penned a very detailed piece on this over at Ars Technica earlier this year, including photos and video of one of the gas generator hot-fires. The piece includes multiple interviews with senior propulsion scientists at MSFC, and thoroughly debunks the "but the blueprints are lost!" urban myth.

I'd very much have to disagree. Atari games were often quite opaque—Yar's Revenge is a good example of a game that didn't make a lick of sense unless you'd read the manual. There wasn't room on the ROM for any handholding. Plus, most games had dozens of different modes of play available through the game select switch (like Combat, or Space Invaders), and figuring out the differences between them absolutely required a manual.

"Because, in my eyes, when people stop getting paid for what they do, they'll stop doing it."

The creation of art is not, nor ever has been, dependent on remuneration. People don't exclusively create to be compensated. People have always created things. It's what we do.

It may be valid to worry that unrestricted copying of things—be those things paintings, songs, sculptures, stories, programs, or whatever—could potentially lead to a reduction in people who earn a living exclusively from creating those things, but it takes a powerfully broken worldview to even begin to think that people only do create stuff so that they'll get paid.

MOCR 2 was used for every manned Gemini flight except for Gemini 3, and every manned Apollo flight except Apollo 7. MOCR 1 was used for ASTP and all Skylab flights.

I use Windows at work, because work says I have to. I have a Windows 7 laptop loaded down with management agents and security agents and update agents and all kinds of other agents, which makes IT security comfortable. If I wiped it and loaded Linux, or God forbid if I brought my MacBook from home in to work, my network port would be disabled within seconds and I'd get a fun walk-up visit from security a minute later.

My job requires me to shuffle around MS Office documents, do e-mail, and use web-based tools. There's nothing there that can't be done on another platform, but Windows lets my work keep tight, locked-down tabs on my laptop. The need for that control is at least in part driven by the vendors selling those lock-down solutions. There is a fear- and risk-management-based culture in IT security these days, and Windows is the platform that has the tools that companies have been told they have to deploy to keep things safe.

I'm 33, and I've worked for a single large aerospace company since getting my undergrad degree 11 years ago. I started off as a desktop support guy making $42k, and then was bumped to $43k after a year, then to $45k after another year, then to $46k after another year. In late 2004 I was promoted to junior sysadmin and was bumped to $50k, and through yearly raises got that up to $55k by 2006, when I transferred formally from sysadmin to the enterprise architect side of the house. That got me a bump to $68k, which brought me up to the minimum salary level for that position, and then between 2006 and mid-2010 the pay rose to $74k through those yearly incremental raises.

In 2010 I was a senior architect, making decisions that directly affected the technology direction of a Fortune 50 company with $65B in revenue, making $74k a year. It was nice, of course, and the job was fun, but the compensation just hadn't scaled to the job. There were other benefits--outstanding and near-zero-cost insurance, stock, a functioning pension program, and as near a thing to stability as it's possible to get in an American job--but I wanted more money, so I left. Now I work as a presales engineer (that's "engineer," not real engineer) at one of the same vendors that used to sell to me, making $120k. I would have had to stay at the first job for another 20 years to hit the same level of salary. More, I left on excellent terms, and I wouldn't mind going back there some day.

This experience echoes that of my much-older peers at the aerospace job, where I was one of the only folks in the group less than 50 years old. All of them, without exception, had left at some point for between 1-5 years and then come back, bringing with them a large salary bump. Even in a company that gives you near-guaranteed 2-5% incremental raises, the only way to get a massive salary increase is by leaving.