Q: All the other big players are going "on demand". Is cloud computing the next big thing?
Debes: This "on demand", SaaS phenomenon is something I've lived through three times in my career now. The first time, it was called "service bureaus". The second time, it was "application service providers", and now it's called SaaS.

But it's pretty much the same thing. And my prediction is that it'll go the same way as the other two have gone--nowhere. SaaS is not God's gift to the software industry or customer community. The hype is based on one company in the software industry having modest success. Salesforce.com just has average to below-average profitability.

People will realize the hype about SaaS companies has been overblown within the next two years.

SaaS market will 'collapse' in two years | Tech News on ZDNet

Within hours they were prisoners. As the two entered Tskhinvali about 1 a.m. on Aug. 9, they sang patriotic tunes to avoid being shot by the Georgian soldiers they expected to be lurking in the dark.

"We thought that when we arrived at the front, they would have to give us weapons," Monasalidze recalled, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes in the living room of the house of Kharadze's parents in Tbilisi.

Instead of Georgian troops, however, they attracted the attention of a group of South Ossetian soldiers.

"They asked what we wanted," Monasalidze said. "I said: 'I'm Georgian and this is our land. We want Tskhinvali.' "

Two Georgians went to war but never got to fight - International Herald Tribune

D.J. Bernstein proposes an almost zero-effort DNSSEC alternative (Presentation)

DNSCurve... interesting.

Hacker News | D.J. Bernstein proposes an almost zero-effort DNSSEC alternative (Presentation)

These are all important questions. But the larger question for voters really is: What would he bring to the job if their ticket is elected? As we’ve learned, particularly during the past eight years with Dick Cheney, a vice president who is smart, aggressive, experienced — and is respected by the president — can have a major impact on our lives.

Biden is clearly all of those things. So if the Democratic ticket wins, how would he approach the job?

I got a chance to see his approach up close one day in early September 1999, when I was U.S. ambassador to Romania. In the aftermath of NATO’s success in stopping ethnic cleaning in Kosovo, Cabinet members and Members of Congress stopped in Bucharest to thank the Romanians for their support of NATO and get a feel for where the Balkan region was going in its aftermath.

Biden in Action: In Romania, He Mixed Intuition and Smarts - Roll Call

Sikorsky flew its prototype counterrotating helicopter yesterday (press release). Typical helicopters, however expensive, are limited to about 165 knots of cruise speed. When the helicopter is moving faster than that, the “retreating blade” is not getting enough airflow, i.e., the blade is going backward about as fast as the helicopter is going forward. This results in a loss of lift on half of the disk.

Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Sikorsky counterrotating helicopter takes flight

HORSEHEADS, N.Y., Aug. 27, 2008 – Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation today successfully completed the first flight of its X2 TECHNOLOGY™ Demonstrator, maneuvering the prototype aircraft through hover, forward flight, and a hover turn, in a test flight that lasted approximately 30 minutes.

The X2 TECHNOLOGY Demonstrator is designed to establish that a helicopter can cruise comfortably at 250 knots, while retaining such desirable helicopter attributes as excellent low speed handling, efficient hovering, and safe autorotation, combined with a seamless and simple transition to high speed.

Counter-rotating coaxial rotor helicopter... wow.

Sikorsky’s X2 TECHNOLOGY™ Demonstrator Achieves First Flight

BERLIN (AFP) - Giving up meat could drastically reduce your carbon footprint, with meat-eaters' diets responsible for almost twice the emissions of those of vegetarians, a German study said on Tuesday.
ADVERTISEMENT

A diet with meat is responsible for producing in a year the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving a mid-sized car 4,758 kilometres (2,956 miles), the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOeW) said.

Going veggie can slash your carbon footprint: study - Yahoo! News

Freshman Haskell programmer

fac n = if n == 0 
           then 1
           else n * fac (n-1)

The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer

I came across a bizarre paper recently suggesting that the LHC might be shut down. Not because of the funding cuts that have been threatening particle physics projects around the world, nor because of law suits accusing the LHC of threatening life on Earth.

No, the paper suggested that future effects caused by the production of particles, such as the Higgs, could ripple backwards in time and prevent the LHC from ever operating.

If it hadn't been written by two very well respected and accomplished theoretical physicists, I would have stopped reading at the title alone:"Test of Effect from Future in Large Hadron Collider; A Proposal".

FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News

The first exhibition race of the new Rocket Racing league went off last week at the Experimental Aircraft Association's AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisc. with one small hitch: One of the two planes originally scheduled to fly never got Federal Aviation certification and remained grounded

This could be fun. I am not a NASCAR fan, but I can appreciate the impressive engineering (esp. around the artificial, field-leveling constraints). But at the end of the day, that's a race in a circle with cars. I can drive a car, maybe not racecar driver well, but it is not that exotic. I can't drive a rocket ship.

First Rocket Race Has False Start : Discovery News