ImperialViolet

IV now has permanent URLs for each entry into the archives for anyone who wants to link to a specific entry. Copy the link from the to the left of the time lines

This is getting silly - caffinated soap for a wake up in the shower. About 250 milligrams of caffeine per shower is absorbed through the skin. weird.

Projected deaths in a Kashmir nuclear war. Newscientist is broken with most browsers (it returns a "unavailable at the current time" page). Faking the User-Agent seems to do the trick

This paper has been doing the rounds (thanks to tav on #esp for the link). Kindof scary what a determined idiot could manage to do. So who's going to write a worm which uses stealth-spreading and strikes, encrypting all the hard drives of computers it infected? How much do you think you could sell the key for? (credit to Ian for that idea)

It seems that NASA is set on a manned mission to Mars after the discovery of millions of tonnes of ice just a meter under the surface.

So is NASA going to give up on the ISS and try to capture the nation's imagination (and wallets) with the first manned mission to anywhere since the Moon? The ISS has cost $40 billion so far (it should have cost $8 billion and been finished in 1992) and there's no end in sight. The Russians don't have the money, NASA is practically bankrupt after bad accounting practices were revealed in June 2001 and the other members (European, Canadian and Japanese space agencies) are fed up with the whole project.

Goldin (who ran NASA throughout the 90s) said NASA was going to be "Faster, better, cheaper" after the loss of the $1 billion Mars Observer. Wouldn't the faster, better, cheaper option be another unmanned mission? It doesn't have the glamour, but you have to question the reasons why NASA is doing this. Science or PR?. What does a manned mission offer?