Anybody knows what the liability is when parts of somebody's rocket land on somebody's home and kill someone?
This thread has quite a few examples of rocket components falling on houses, so it seems the risk is actually pretty high.
Do government representatives come and indemnify the victims?
And then, what's going to happen for private launches?
 

You can use USB sticks or SD cards instead of SSDs. They start at about 4$. Probably the cheapest and most convenient boot device one can get...
SSDs are hard to get for less and 60$ and more like 100$.
So for a Mythtv box, I think I'd just use USB sticks.

Actually it's pretty much a story if it's low-level employees doing it.
Come on! the MPAA and RIAA are always trying to get ISPs to police their customers and make sure nobody is using their connection to pirate stuff.
But then they can't even block their own freaking employees from going to torrents and pirating copyrighted works?

I mean, it should be easier to control employees than customers, no? So this makes the point of the ISPs that have long said that they can't monitor their customers and make sure they don't pirate.

The article says
"any of their books exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days:"
So you get your freedom back in 3 months.

This brings us to the core issue: power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
a typical nuclear power plant is such an enormous effort and investment with so much money and power involved over such insanely long periods of times (it's likely some will operate for 100 years) that many actors involved stop being human and rational as you justly outlined above.

Smaller scale distributed systems that don't involve such intense issues are less likely to corrupt people. They could be nuclear, solar, wave based or anything, but what's important is to avoid the 'too big too fail' and the 'what are a few human lives in the balance of something that benefits so many people'.

As far as I am concerned, I'd want code multiplexing or other interference avoiding techniques. And then full encryption with authentication to make sure the components that have been paired and only them can give each other orders.
I mean, this is going to be some guy's way of commanding his limbs. Nobody wants a script kiddie to be able to play Darth Vader's grip of death with a poor guy's 'Luke' prosthetic arm that did not have adequate protection...

Company A has a contract with Groupon, they are offering a crazy deal for promotional purposes.
The deal is usually at a loss for them and Groupon provides a couple things to the business:
- a lot of advertisement to people eager to read about deals
- a simple way to explain the deal is for one time only and you can't come back and bargain to get the same deal again: it's a groupon, once the groupon is done you don't expect to have this deal on the table again.

Your idea sets a precedent of bargaining which is not very good for the business.

That said, a variation of your idea is for a competitor of Groupon to offer a similar deal to company A but with better terms. Groupon takes 50% of what the customer pays, so there is a LOT of room to undercut them for anybody able to deliver the goods on the advertisement/traffic part.

You need to unlock the boot loader first and I have yet to read any news about that :-(

It's very disappointing that the boot loader should be locked as 99% of the Nook users would use the Nook software without any hacks anyway if it wasn't locked.

This just means that they won't get all the free press the Nook Color got everytime a cool hack made it the tablet to have. For instance, this tablet ran a hacked version of Honeycomb BEFORE the first demo of the Motorola Xoom which was to be the first Honeycomb-based tablet. The Nook tablet probably won't ever get such claims to fame.

There is also a partition on the Nook tablet that is reserved to content you buy so I am thinking this must all be part of an effort to have strong-looking DRM to get content deals or something similar.

That's not the point.
The idea is that it costs a lot to make fuel here and then send it into space.
So if you want to power a spaceship to go to Mars or Saturn or anywhere, using fuel is expensive.
But these guys are saying: have robots harvest it on the moon, stockpile it and then when Nasa or anybody wants fuel in space, they can just rendez-vous with the stockpile and get some fuel that never had to be hauled from Earth.

Another post said a bottle of water in space costs 20000$. So if they can make a 1000 kg stockpile and sell it, they have 20 million dollars.

It seems that interplanetary science missions use a lot more than that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaur_%28rocket_stage%29), like 5000kg.

So basically, they could make up to 100 million $ just providing the fuel of a single space probe.

So there is definitely an interest although I do find the profits a bit small given the complexity of the undertaking.

That's too bad for you. Did you try Ebay or something like that?
The Nook Color is a very nice device for hacking or just reading books.

Barnes and Noble did the world a favor and maybe we can all return the favor.
Amazon accepted to pay Microsoft while Barnes and Noble is fighting them over their absurd patents.
At the moment many are wondering whether to buy a Kindle Fire or a Nook Color or Nook Tablet.

I have a Nook Color and I love it.

The stock software is ok and color children books are nice, so I would happily recommend the product to non technical people.
The stock software can also do youtube videos etc.

For me, the killer feature was the micro SD card that is bootable. I put Cyanogenmod on it, got the Google market etc.

This lawsuit makes me want to recommend the Nook to more people. I used to feel the kindle fire was just the same (minus the micro SD so hacking is a bit less friendly).

But if Amazon is paying Microsoft, then buying a Kindle Fire is scoring against the Open Source camp.

If you plan to root, I recommend the Nook Color or Tablet.
There is a micro SD slot in there that is bootable. A real joy: just copy Cyanogenmod on the micro SD(an Android distribution with good Nook support), put the micro SD in the slot, turn device off, turn on and boot into an Android environment where you are in full control and enjoy Google Market access (the hack for that is easy actually on Cyanogemod).

I'd pay the extra money (50$, so 250$ total) for the Tablet as it is much faster than my Nook Color but the Color can already do cool stuff.

Not sure why everybody seems to be ignoring Nook in this discussion. The device is much more open thanks to the micro SD (reflashing the device is definitely not in the same league as just copying a file on an SD card).

Not the same ISPs. ANY ISP that is on the traceroute to uncensored websites allowing https.

And the local ISP won't even know there is anything special with the network traffic as this uses public steganography in encrypted data streams.

Only somebody who has the private key can know the data are "special". So the only remaining attacks on this are:
- steal a private key from a trusted organization
- spoof a private key (Bad people can create the "TRUSTME" service, get people to trust it and spy on them)
- block all https traffic to any ISP than does not want to help the spying government.

Owning the local ISP used by "TELEX" users does not accomplish anything so this is a definite improvement.

Nice list.
It really gives me an idea of how to evaluate Microsoft's purchase of Skype for 8 billions...
2014: , Facetime or Google Talk and lingering Skype.
But hey, it's Microsoft, they can afford to lose 8 billions...