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Virgin Galactic says it has achieved another glide-test milestone in its effort to carry tourists into space.The company said Wednesday its commercial vehicle dubbed SpaceShipTwo successfully performed a key maneuver in which its twin tail booms were rotated upward at a right angle to the fuselage before safely landing

We have the technology.

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An American firm has developed a cunning, beercan-sized robot which can be shot out of a gun, stick to the side of a ship magnetically, and then climb up the ship’s side in the fashion of a pirate with a knife or cutlass between his teeth.

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I am not making this up.

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I want one.

Whether you like it or not.

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Freeberg creates a new word.

One who begins with the end in mind, such that his vision of the end result is strong, steely and unshakable, like a metal hook sunk deep into a granite wall; while any the variables involved in getting there are outside of his concern. These people can be hazardous to the success of a project if they know barely enough about the details to monopolize the political power. The tendency is for them to envision the completion of some “favorite” minor task, as the end delivery product, so their “grappling hook” vision concerns the completion of some relatively minor task rather than the completion of the overall project itself. Their knowledge is deep but narrow.

An excellent coinage, but awkward. I suggest ‘hook-head’ as being more pithy and so more likely to achieve widespread adoption.

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You know you want one.

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I SO wish I’d had these in college….

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Design and engineering firm PEGA comes to your rescue with a new composite material made of recycled paper and polypropylene alloy. Lightweight, durable, and inexpensive to produce, it acts just like typical ABS plastic — and it even comes in the classic soul-killing beige.

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Freeberg lets loose.

The sinful: ‘totally’, ‘utilize’, ‘basically’, ‘(mental) abuse’, ‘LOL’, ‘patriarchal’, ‘stereotype/stereotypical’, ‘Godess/Lilith/Earth-Mother’, and ‘alternative’.

Indeed, these are a good start.

9. Alternative

Because “pot-smoking long-haired flea-bitten, smell like Cheetos & ass” is too long.

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A new promotion by RadioShack electronics chain in the US states of Idaho and Montana is offering free guns to first-time subscribers of satellite TV service Dish Network.

They know their market.

You know you want to.

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There’s two kinds of people in this world: Those that can sleep on buses, trains and planes, and those who can’t. If you are the former, you’re welcome – TravAlert is an GPS enabled iPhone, Blackberry and Android app that allows you to get your precious ZZZs (or read a book, or listen to music) while you travel, without having to worry about whether you’ll miss your stop.

Back when I was riding buses and trains, I would have killed for something like this. It’s a great time to be alive.

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All the fun of the S.C.A. and none of the downers, sounds like.

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The idea: Take a picture of your food, send it in to Meal Snap, and after some techno-sorcery and number crunching, it’ll spit out a rough estimate of the calorie count and track it for you.

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Each of these is guaranteed to get you shot by a nervous Homeland Security  employee. (Harry Connolly obviously doesn’t spend all his time writing Twenty Palaces novels.)

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A terminal cancer patient tackled a would-be bank robber and held the suspect on the ground until police arrived because she “had nothing to lose,” the Orlando Sentinel reported Friday.

Helen Dunsford,66, leaped into action when a woman tried to rob an Oakland Park, Fla., Bank of America branch, tackling the suspect and pinning her to the ground until authorities arrived on the scene.

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The United States Navy has been working on next-gen weaponry ever since the last-gen was present-gen, and if the next next-gen ever actually arrives, well… we don’t stand a chance at lasting very long. According to Wired, the Navy’s Office of Naval Research is expecting laser technology (as it relates to weaponry) to mature in the next score, and if all goes well, a free-electron laser could be mounted on a ship during the 2020s. As of now, FELs produce a 14-kilowatt beam, but that figure needs to hit 100+ in order to seriously defend a ship; unfortunately for those who adore peace, it seems we’re well on our way to having just that.

Yeah, baby.

The Other McCain is on the cutting edge of an emerging public health issue.

We at the Institute appreciate the evident desire of women to contribute to men’s cardiovascular health by providing larger breasts for the purposes of therapeutic staring. However, it is my concern that men seeking treatment might mistakenly stare at these silicone-adulterated fakies, believing themselves to be receiving a large therapeutic dosage, and thereby in actuality under-dose themselves. This could put men at serious risk of cardiac trauma.

Your health is our chief priority.

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In most ways, Sarah McCarthy is your average high schooler. She has a job, college plans, but also a peculiar passion for a 16-year-old: She’s a vinyl junkie.

That’s right, analog. And none of that hipster new stuff or a USB-ready turntable from Urban Outfitters.

To this senior from Centreville, Md., there’s nothing like the raw crackle, the depth of sound, her delicate hand on diamond-tipped stylus to spin from the dusty stash of records she found in the basement of her grandfather _ yes, grandfather.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Today I turn the thermostats from HEAT to COOL, where they will remain until November. (What, you were expecting September? This is Dallas, homeboy.)

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The most unsung birthday in American business and technological history this year may be the 50th anniversary of the Xerox 914 photocopier. Although it was introduced at New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel on September 16, 1959, commercial models were not available until March 1960. The first machine, delivered to a Pennsylvania metal-fastener maker, weighed nearly 650 pounds. It needed a carpenter to uncrate it, an employee with “key operator” training, and its own 20-amp circuit. In an episode of Mad Men, set in 1962, the arrival of the hulking 914 helps get Peggy Olson her own office, after she tells her boss, “It’s hard to do business and be credible when I’m sharing with a Xerox machine.”

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Well, yeah, but who wears cuff links any more? These days, when you say ‘French cuffs’, most people think of Lady Gaga and some manacles.

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You’ve seen them, I’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them. Those screamingly pompous email footers that IT departments append to millions – billions? – of emails every day, urging us to “Consider the environment!” before asking “Do you really need to print this email?”

I’ve become a real fan of Paul Carr at TechCrunch.

Fuck the environment. Print this email immediately. And then burn it.

Oh, I know the feeling.

So, for the sake of human civilization, I urge you to join the fight. Update your footer right now and help us take back our inboxes from the footer fascists. And if you work for a big company’s IT department… well… go on… you know you want to…

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Speaking of optimism….

Nick Gillespie takes the famous writer to the woodshed.

The answer, of course, is that he chooses not to. The IRS is happy to accept extra payments from just about anyone. (And speaking of which, maybe the IRS should look into King’s return based on his claim below. The upper limit of the 28 percent rate is $200,000 for a married couple filing jointly [and lower still for other statuses], which seems far below what the best-selling author would be pulling in annually.)

Every now and then the arrested adolescents of tReason magazine get it right. (Hey, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.)

If ever anyone needed evidence that expertise in one area of life is completely disconnected from the ability to find one’s butt with both hands in any other area of life, professional writers knock it out of the park.

And don’t get me started on Michael Moore….

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Airborne refueling is a very tricky operation. This is very encouraging.

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Arrrrr.

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One of the benefits of living in a modern industrial society is the people have the disposable income to indulge themselves in this sort of thing.

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And, bright fellow that he is, he agrees with me:

Piracy is not theft. If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.

TechCrunch decides to have some fun.

Now that’s comedy.

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The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in the 69-year-old contest have gone on to win seven Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry, two Fields Medals in mathematics, a half-dozen National Medals in science and technology, a long string of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants — and now, an Academy Award for best actress in a leading role.

The Natalie Portman Story — soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt.

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I want the Joe Biden map.

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Apparently, a Seattle area restaurant (right near the airport) has announced that it’s refusing to serve TSA agents in protest of the way the TSA treats passengers who wish to fly.

Now that’s comedy.

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As much as Americans might complain about rising food prices in the U.S. (even though annual CPI food inflation hasn’t been above 2% for almost two years), we’ve got the most affordable food on the planet as a share of income (see chart above).  And compared to previous years, today’s Americans have the most affordable food in U.S. history (see chart below).

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Because, you know, this is America.

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The free iPad app allows doctors to schedule patient appointments, write prescriptions and send them to pharmacies, enable reminders, take clinical notes, access lab results, and input electronic health records. The electronic medical records element is key because the Obama administration is currently offering strong incentives for doctors to start moving their health records online. DrChrono will help doctors start, finish and manage this process.

And DrChono is more than just a simple iPad app. For $99 and up, doctors can upgrade to more storage for records, and complete medical billing. The billing component is another win for doctors, who spend hundreds of dollars each month for medical billing processing. DrChrono’s system integrates with all U.S. insurance companies, even the insurance agents that only use paper billing.

If I were a doctor, I’d be all over this.

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And about fargin time, too.

Universities in Texas are set to be forced to allow students and academics to carry guns on campus, in a victory for a firearms lobby unbowed after last month’s massacre in Arizona.

A massacre that wouldn’t have happened if people in the crowd had been armed.

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What’s more, while this particular test didn’t actually involve blowing anything up, the Navy seems confident that the laser will eventually be able to do just that, as it’s just recently awarded Boeing a $163 million contract to package the laser in a weapons system that would be deployed on ships and be able to detect, track, and destroy missiles (or presumably anything else ). According the Office of Naval Research, the Navy hopes to meet that goal by 2015.

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We have the technology.

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Too bad it’s in one of the lounge areas of the Titanic.

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President Obama’s Chamber of Commerce speech singling out GE, Dow, Whirlpool, and Caterpillar for praise got me thinking: What if there were some way to invest in companies that have a close relationship to the Obama administration?

Would this be a money-making proposition, allowing an investor a piece of the upside as the companies use the power of the government to their advantage? Or would it be a money-losing proposition, because the companies whose CEOs are spending their time cultivating government relationships are doing so only as a desperate tactic because their firms are otherwise unable to compete successfully in the marketplace on the basis of the value they offer their customers?

Don’t think of it as selling out — think of it as buying in.

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A game developed by a Boston-based tech company that allows users to drive a truck full of immigrants through the desert and try not to have them tossed out is drawing fire from some immigrant advocates.

Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration, a proposed iPhone and iPad app by Owlchemy Labs targeted for release in March, lets players navigate through what appears to be the U.S-Mexican border.

As the truck drives over cliffs, mountains and dead animals, immigrants fall off the truck’s bed. Scores are calculated by the number of immigrants helped across the border.

Actually, I can’t think of anything more American.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of President Ronald Reagan.

I had the pleasure of meeting Governor Reagan in 1975 when he came to speak at the Yale Political Union, and then the honor of working on his campaign during spring break the following March. Those were good times.

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The Rebranding of Indolence as ‘Emerging Adulthood’

There is, for example, Nicole, a young woman Arnett interviews in his book who grew up in a housing project and began working at eight to care for her younger siblings. In a strikingly mature, actually adult way, she managed to hold down a full-time job, take care of her family, and earn a degree. Though this may strike some as a remarkable achievement, this view overlooks how much more fun she could have had if she didn’t have all those pesky responsibilities to weigh her down. “Is it only a grim pessimist like me who sees how many roadblocks there will be on the way to achieving those dreams and who wonders what kind of freewheeling emerging adulthood she is supposed to be having?” Henig laments. Given freedom from economic want, social mores that encourage early marriage, and limits to college access, every poor Vietnamese rice farmer and rural Pakistani bride could be going to yoga classes and selling her handmade textiles on Etsy. Wouldn’t that make the world a better place?

It’s a great time to be a slacker.

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The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.