A robotic, remotely-controllable plane completed the first unmanned crossing of the Pacific Ocean yesterday, taking off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and touching down in Adelaide, Australia. The plane is a Global Hawk reconaissance and surveillance plane, produced by Northrop Grumman and not anticipated to be in active service until around 2005; it will be participating in military exercises in Australia for the next week. This plane ain’t no tiny whirlygig, either; it’s 44 feet long, and its wingspan, at over 116 feet, is longer than that of a 737.
Once again, Dahlia weighs in from the Supreme Court, and this time, Clarence Thomas speaks!
Great headline of the day: FAA Orders Jam Nuts Inspection. I knew that the airlines were becoming more concerned with passenger comfort and safety, but I guess I didn’t realize how far they had gone…
Wow, this not-so-little bug sucks. The short form of it is that there’s a way to disguise non-text files as text files (actually, any file as another type of file) in Windows; when the user double-clicks it, it will execute as whatever real kind of file it is (e.g., a big whopping virus, or a trojan that just deletes everything on your computer, or whatever). BugNet has a self-extracting archive file that (safely) demonstrates the bug.
My cellphone company is growing and growing. Originally, I was concerned that I had chosen a company which was too small and wouldn’t be able to handle any significant growth; now I’m worried about it getting to be too big to maintain good customer service.
The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (the highest state-level court) ruled today that a man must continue to make child support payments for a seven-year-old girl despite conclusive DNA testing which shows he’s not the father. The ruling hinged on the fact that dad waited too long to challenge paternity; what a load of crap. (I tried to find a copy of the decision, but it appears that Massachusetts is still stuck in the 1980s — the only way to get decisions is via a dial-up bulletin board system.)
In looking through my archives to find the other two times I’ve talked about forced child support despite proof of non-paternity, I noticed that the majority of news articles I’ve linked to over the life of Q Daily News don’t exist anymore. That just plain sucks.
Screw the X-ray — they should get an MRI of the Liberty Bell. Oh, wait, no….
I admit it, I signed up for Salon’s premium content today. I really like Salon; I like the mix of traditional news and more colorful content, and I can’t say that the occasional dip into sex and the general liberal slant hurt the site at all.
