Ankaios

The Moffett Field Historical Society has a small museum (http://moffettfieldmuseum.org/) right next to the hangar which includes some neat stuff on the airship and the rest of the Navy's history at the field.

People living in an areas that get all of their electrical power from coal need to be more careful about choosing the better option, though. In those cases, something like a high-efficiency hybrid may currently win.

Also, even if they got it to work decently, I wonder how long it would take for the screens to be covered by ads or sitcom reruns.

If you have low-cost mission concepts for achieving important scientific objectives, please propose them.

Also, by the way, the first Mars orbiter wasn't in 1965—that was the first successful flyby. The first successful orbiter was Mariner 9 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_9) in 1971.

Have you actually studied the mishap? If labeling and verifying the units was done carefully it would have prevented the accident.

A millinewton/newton mix-up could easily occur in a case like this one, too. The particular numbers which were misinterpreted in MCO's case were often small, and I can easily believe no one noticing similar ones being a few orders of magnitude off. (I do have a hard time imagining it with MCO's particular numbers, though.) Similarly, you can be bitten by a meters/centimeters switch or accidentally using different representations of the same quantity, such as specific impulse and its corresponding characteristic exhaust velocity, which only differ by a factor of about 10 when both are expressed in SI units.

I maintain that the key lesson is to always label your units, and to test them carefully and routinely, including at interfaces. I believe that claiming that using English units (as gross as they often are) caused the failure misses the more fundamental root problem.

(Also, I'm not claiming that labeling and verifying units is easy. I emphasize it partly because it's hard. Little of our current software ecosystem includes any concept of dimensionful numbers.)

Also, remember, people are representing these numbers on computers. Derived units are very useful—in fact they are often critical to achieving necessary accuracies using compact representations. Further, representing quantities in terms of other unique, problem-specific units is often extremely helpful for ensuring good numerical behavior.

That's an interesting opinion. However, this isn't just "their house." They chose to provide their site as part of the Web, and some of us believe that means they'll have to cope with the broader community's norms and traditions, too, including anonymity and pseudonymity.

I'd actually vote for one change, though: I'd prefer the URL field didn't default to falling back to querying a search engine. One of my pet peeves is mistyping a URL and having my input sent by my system to Google. (That's easy enough for me to change, though, and the Firefox developers seem to be concerned enough about privacy and security to leave the ability to change it intact.)

At NASA, IIRC only ~ 20% of the funds go to civil servant salaries. The rest goes out the door in contracts, grants, etc. I don't know the fractions for other agencies.

And I trust the NSA barely at all.

In vacuuming up and blindly storing all of the descriptive data about phone calls, I am impressed that the NSA and its superiors may have managed to carry out "unreasonable seizure" without "unreasonable search."

I'd be even more impressed to see an injunction against it.

I'd prefer if browsers treated the Web as less of a black box, and if they erred more toward helping users understand the world they are exploring.

Perhaps use that to gain more attention. Picket the WWDC.