The Japanese, original trade name for Speed Racer seems appropriate for this free-market, astronomical triumph:

A privately funded and constructed spaceship returned to California's Mojave Desert today after a successful mission to become the first non-governmental craft to leave the Earth's atmosphere.

SpaceShipOne, financed by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen and designed by Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites, landed at about 8:15 a.m. California time at the Mojave Civilian Aerospace Test center, where it was launched about 90 minutes earlier. The launch and landing were televised.

...If the altitude of 100 kilometers is confirmed, the team will later compete to win the $10 million Ansari X prize. The award was set up by the non-profit X Prize Foundation of Missouri to encourage missions allowing the public to travel into space. To win it, the same craft, able to carry three people, must be successfully launched and landed twice within a two-week period.

In fact, a 100-kilometer crest has been confirmed. Virtual champagne, if it suits your fancy? Glenn Reynolds is starting a roundup of reactions.

In case you missed it: NASA has compressed Opportunity's voyage across the surface of Mars into a still-frame animation. Want to see your tax dollars hard at work? Take a look at "90 Sols in 90 Seconds."

Our full-time construction supervisor's new Latitude D600 laptop arrived today and I'm in the process of breaking it in. A dedicated 2k man, I've never used Windows XP before, so the introductory screens are new to me. Either Microsoft or Dell had a mind to run mellow dance beat on top of a i-v⁶-VII-IV progression and I like it, though it's a little suggestive. Dell computing, brought to you by the Pet Shop Boys?

ACTUALLY: Make that New Order. Or both bands.

IBM researcher and prognosticator, Stuart Feldman:

IBD: What will be happening on the Web in 20 years?

Feldman: You'll see many more of the big macro shifts you're already seeing. Big industries will not only change how they do certain things, but who does them. The definition of what business you're in will start shifting. The meaning of industrial sectors will start changing.

IBD: Can you give an example?

Feldman: In the airline industry, the meaning of what constitutes an airline will change. In 20 years, it will be harder to say if airlines are the people that fly planes, or those who do the computer processing that make the flight possible, or the people that market these flights.

IBD: What do you mean?

Feldman: A single company won't be running an airline. An airline could be made up of several different companies, many of them Web-based. The people that organize the trips won't be the same people that run the planes.

An interesting, if somewhat jargony, look into what is obviously a long and prosperous life ahead of interconnectivity. Six years ago a class I took in Modernism spent a session on the internet — it was quite new in 1998, a repository for goofy fansites, barely used as a medium for commerce and unknown to a great number of Americans, as I had only been introduced to it two years before. As I recall, the tenor of the discussion was probing and tentative; nobody really knew what the internet's potential was, while at the same time the intellectual exchange was still saturated with dystopian fears of losing humanity to electronica. "What good is the internet?" went the professor's question. I answered: it had provided me with more than enough. That school year I was spending great amounts of spare time cobbling together electronic music on my computer. Many of my samples were collected around campus — miking myself banging on metal, clicking wet canvas, pushing sturdy drafting tables across linoleum, the usual — but a notable portion of them were stock samples or loops. I'd start at an audio forum and run through links until I found myself at FTP caches or web catalogs, and download sizeable zipped files of fifty or more rhythm and percussion sounds. Where else could I have found them for free? I can't say — the computing market hadn't produced any discrete, inexpensive, high-capacity media like today's compact discs at that point. I didn't know any people around campus who shared my hobby, much less a tempermental Zip drive.

Frankly, if it weren't for the internet, I could not have accomplished what I did. So I answered that despite all the social, technical and financial pitfalls of the "World Wide Web," as it was marketed in those days, my access to needed tools was more direct than any other known arrangement. "In my line of work," I said, "the internet empowers the individual. It empowers the individual." Decentralization was the vanishing point on networking's horizon then, and is still now. That bodes well for all of us, particularly for trailblazers like Feldman.

Defeating the enemies of freedom just became safer, more effective and infinitely cooler:

Troops can throw it around a corner, through a window, up the stairs, on the roof or in a cave and the rugged Dragon Runner will land on its feet and continue its mission. The Dragon Runner, a 9-pound rear-wheel drive robot, is designed to save lives by allowing tactical troops to "see around the corner" in an urban environment. The 9-pound portable surveillance robot is designed to save service members' lives by allowing tactical troops to "see around the corner" in an urban environment.

Funded by the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the Office of Naval Research in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, the baseline model uses a wireless modem and UHF video transmitter. A rear-mounted handle allows for easy handling and pull-pin power on/off operation. The front-mounted tilting camera provides video feedback.

Army Col. Bruce Jette, director of the Rapid Equipping Force, Fort Belvoir, Va., was one of the first to use the Dragon Runner in the caves of Afghanistan. "We lost a couple of (robots) to improvised explosive devices, but that's OK – it wasn't soldiers. Robotics (in the field) is working."

Technologists routinely overplay their hand by suggesting that tasks requiring the best attributes of humanity — wit, courage, ingenuity and spontaneity — can and should be relegated to robots. Until scientists create cybernetic neural networks that can become greater than the sum of their parts, our metal-and-plastic friends will remain exciting and humorous reflections of ourselves — but only reflections, their intelligence strictly artificial. Death is tragedy; electronic breakdown is not. We might someday build them with enough soul to win the hearts of sentimentalists and judiciaries, but for now robots will do for the most dangerous, perfunctory tasks. Run, Dragon, run.

It's like Gattaca without custom-engineered supermen: Cassini-Huygens nears the planet Saturn. Awe-inspiring photography ensues.

Undisturbed and undeterred, Spirit and Opportunity continue to explore Mars. Opportunity has finally reached a targeted crater, with rock-grinding to begin tomorrow.

Last week Extremetech showed us the computing world's hybrid darling, the small form factor PC case. This week, they show how to put one together. I'm still unsure as to whether assembly is more trouble than portability is worth.

PURTY: Elsewhere on the magazine's website, a PC case roundup just happens to include another microcase, Antec's Aria. These units are not for want of good design aesthetics, that's for sure.

This sounds about right:

Forty percent of U.S. households are expected to own at least one digital camera by the end of 2004 and more consumers are printing their digital pictures at retail shops, according to a recent study.

...Ownership of digital cameras will rise this year by one-third from about 30 percent currently, as consumers become more comfortable with the devices.

My two years of photography classes in college left me with both a respect and admiration for the arduous process of exposing, developing and printing images with analog camera film. But while I'll keep my grandfather's Nikon F as long as it continues to function, the sheer convenience and ever-increasing quality of a digital camera — even a modest Kodak model — made a convert out of me. Yes, all things digital depreciate and pale in comparison with their successors, much more so than analog technology - at some point, however, one needs to simply step onto the train. I've zeroed in on the highly regarded Olympus C-5060, and before my expected trip to Albany in May, I'll be applying a four-year-old gift certificate towards a purchase. I'm looking forward to bringing slices of life to five megapixels near you.

This is as close as you can get these days to building your own laptop: Extremetech Magazine is running a series on small form factor PCs, the latest rage in DIY fashion. Their early favorite is the Athenatech MicroATX A106, selling for a reasonable price on NewEgg. Ain't she a beaut? Extremetech's next installment will discuss how exactly all the necessary hardware will fit in such a tiny tower.