Rocketing into Summer, 2004
"The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?" -- <xterm>
# According to this page at the U.S. Naval Observatory, the summer solstice was yesterday evening at 8:57pm EDT. Happy summer!
# Jerry Pournelle - I am at XCOR HQ in Mojave - for today's Scaled Composites launch at 6:30am Pacific Time. Dale Amon of Samizdata.net is also there. He's got a couple of pre-launch posts up already and intends to report after the event. CNN plans to televise it. The Mojave Airport web site has more about the launch. [pournelle samizdata survivalarts]
# I discovered last night, that Knoppix-MiB will boot in Virtual PC 5.0 on our PowerBook G4. It's very slow to boot up, but is marginally usable once it gets there. Knoppix-MiB is a modified version of Knoppix designed to be stealthy. I fetched last night version 3.4 of the original Knoppix from http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de:6969/, a BitTorrent distribution. BitTorrent is a really neat tool for sharing downloads amongst lots of machines, taking bandwidth pressure off of the original source. It still took 4 hours to download, but that's because of the limitation of my DSL line. It stayed at full speed (about 42 KB/s) all evening. I was copying this to the Mac when I went to sleep last night, and my wife took it to work with her this morning, so I haven't tried it yet.