It's something NASA recently developed called a "suitlock," an updated version of the old-school airlock. Astronauts can climb directly into the suits and detach/reattach, instead of having to place the entire suit into a huge airlock and risk getting hazardous lunar dust inside the living area. In this video you can see one of the astronauts detaching from the suitlock, waving a flag, and then marching off with it:

http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/01/todays_video_na_5.html

As I mentioned in the previous thread, only a few grams of Doohan's ashes were on board, supposed to be symbolic of the whole. Celestis, the company that does the memorial payloads, will mostly likely just try launching again using part of the remaining ashes on another rocket.

More specifically, a few grams of Doohan's ashes were on board, supposed to be symbolic of the whole. Celestis, the company that does the memorial payloads, will mostly likely just try launching again using part of the remaining ashes on another rocket.

A few $100 bucks?!? The Sony Vaio TZ has a starting price of ~$1,700. I'm not sure if you can really compare it price-wise to the MSI Wind, which is $400-$500.

Concrete Jungle, the novella from the Atrocity Archives which features the CCTV cameras, is actually available for free online under a Creative Commons license: http://www.goldengryphon.com/Stross-Concrete.html

IMHO, it's quite a good read.

ahrenl and Jason:

The current assets figures you cited include things like inventory and receivables, which telephony companies tend to have much more of than Google but aren't really relevant to an auction. I suspect the more relevant statistic might be "Cash and Short Term Investments", which Google has substantially more of:

Google: $11,935,920

AT&T: $2,364,000

Verizon: $3,450,000