U.S. Billionaire Heads to Space Station

TurnAround writes "According to an International Business Times article, a Russian rocket carrying the American billionaire who helped develop Microsoft Word roared into the night skies over Kazakhstan Saturday, sending Charles Simonyi and two cosmonauts soaring into orbit on a two-day journey to the international space station. Climbing on a column of smoke and fire into the clouds over the bleak steppes, the Soyuz TMA-10 capsule lifted off at 11:31 p.m. local time, casting an orange glow over the Baikonur cosmodrome and dozens of officials and well-wishers watching from about a mile away."

Watch the soyuz dock

[chebucto]

Live now!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/player/no l/newsid_6530000/newsid_6539600?redirect=6539637.s tm&news=1&nbram=1&bbram=1&nbwm=1&bbwm=1 [bbc.co.uk]

If that doesn't work, look for links at bbcnews.com

Re:Does it piss anyone else off that....

[lgarner]

Not at all. First, "While at the space station, Simonyi will be conducting a number of experiments, including measuring radiation levels and studying biological organisms inside the lab."

Second, I don't see anything indicating that the US directly paid for the launch. If the Russians want to collect some money to help pay for this thing, then fine. I don't see why the US doesn't do the same- that could have meant $25million fewer of your tax dollars going into the ISS.

Re:pFirst!

[donutello]

The m_ notation indicates that a variable is a member of the class. Simonyi's version of the Hungarian notation is actually very useful. Indicating the type of a variable is mostly useless because that's something any competent IDE will give you for free. Simonyi's original concept of the Hungarian notation focused more on indicating the meaning of the variable in question, rather than its type.

Re:Harsh

[Rei]

(Slashdot is eating this post for some reason, so I'm splitting it)

For Reagan, I recommend you read more of the referenced link. I'll give a brief excerpt.

---
One of the central tenets of supply-side theory is that tax cuts actually increase overall tax collections. There is something faintly foolish about this assertion -- it's like claiming that you can make trees grow taller by cutting them down. But the supply-siders have their own statistics to quote. "During the Reagan tax-cut era," Rush Limbaugh writes, "IRS collections actually nearly doubled... from $550 billion [sic] to about $991 billion."2 This supply-side deception is as common as it is deplorable; it uses nominal dollars instead of constant dollars, which account for inflation. Here are the total tax collections expressed in both:

Tax Collections (billions)3

Year Nominal Constant (87 dollars)
1980 $517.1 728.1
1981 599.3 766.6
1982 617.8 738.2
1983 600.6 684.3
1984 666.6 730.4
1985 734.1 776.6
1986 769.1 790.0
1987 854.1 854.1
1988 909.0 877.3
1989 990.7 916.2
1990 1031.3 914.1
1991 1054.3 894.7
1992 1090.5 895.1

This chart raises two points. First, it allows you to see that real tax collections actually declined in the two years following Reagan's 1981 tax cuts. (In fact, it took until 1985 to recover the 1981 level.) This is exactly the opposite of what supply-siders had predicted. They excuse it by noting that the 1981 cuts were phased in over three years, delaying entrepreneurial investment. But, according to their theory, accumulating tax cuts should have resulted in accumulating -- not declining -- tax collections. (More)

Re:Harsh

[Rei]

Second, contrary to what Rush implies, real tax collections did not "double" between 1981 and 1989; they grew only 20 percent. This reflects the normal growth that our economy has experienced for centuries, as both our population and productivity have grown. The real question is not whether the tax collections grew, but whether they grew faster than normal under Reaganomics. They did not. The following chart shows the average annual growth of real tax collections under the last 10 presidents. As you can see, Reagan ties for 6th and 7th place:

Average Real Annual Growth of Tax Collections by President4

                              Average
President Annual Growth
Roosevelt 121.3%
Truman 3.7%
Eisenhower 2.4%
Kennedy 4.8%

Systems Hungarian vs. apps Hungarian

[tepples]

Yup, Mr. lpcszHungarianNotation himself has blasted off into space.

There are two kinds of Hungarian notation: "systems Hungarian", which prefixes variable names with low-level data types such as the common lpsz representing "32-bit pointer to string"; and "apps Hungarian", which prefixes variable names with high-level data types such as rw for "row", str for "string", n for "number of", x for "horizontal coordinate", etc. Mr. Simonyi didn't advocate the "systems Hungarian" approach as much as "apps Hungarian". Wikipedia covers the difference [wikipedia.org].