Wrong, it's a new zombie strain, carried by rodents and cats from Japan; I suspect it is entirely distinct from the zombie strain seen in Florida, originating in Cuba.

Depends on what you are trying to do -- you are often limited by your downlink capabilities, so downloading large quantities of data is expensive. Sometimes you are also limited by on-board data storage or throughput. Pre-processing data on orbit and downloading the results can dramatically increase the capabilities of the spacecraft, if the data processing is a known problem and you are able to throw the MIPS at it.

Speak for yourself, thank you very much.

Congratulations, SpaceX; this is a turning point in our space age =)

I've been saying it for a while now.. rocket science is easy. It, and the associated orbital mechanics, are governed by a relatively small handful of equations, and most problems have been solved already. Rocket engineering, on the other hand, is still a very tricky and complicated business.

Consider the readership demographic: either you already know what AMOLED is (it is fairly well known in mobile tech circles), or you are sufficiently cognizant to look it up yourself.

Fair enough, but I'd hardly say that La Tuque's third-party Internet infrastructure is representative of Canada "as a whole".

Depends on your area, obviously, but there are definitely third party Internet providers out there. I'm on Teksavvy myself; never looked back after switching away from Rogers.

Try again; I get a 300 GiB/mo cap at 24vMbps/1^Mbps for ~$50/mo. Get a better service provider (read: get off the incumbents).

Addendum: the problem with doing two cubes in inverted Molniya orbits is that nobody goes there, which means you are going to have to secure your own dedicated launch, which is very expensive. The benefit of chaining a number of nanosats in standard LEO sun-synchronous polar orbits is that everyone goes there, which means hitching a (cheap) ride as a secondary payload is much more feasible.

Lol. Try Antarctic Broadband -- nanosattellite cube (20cm x 20cm x 20cm) with Ka-band bent-pipe transponder capable of connecting mobile ground stations in the Antarctic circle to permanent stations off-continent. Launch a demonstrator for a few million, show that you can achieve the link, then follow on with duplicate-build cubes as benefits become realized.

If you want to put more eggs into fewer baskets, with a lower long-term cost, you can do two cubes in inverted Molniya orbits with long loiters over the southern pole; same Ka-band payload can be used, but you'll probably want larger cubes to match the end-of-life power.

Around here, we like to call that QA with a capital "eh?"

This is my understanding as well, and appears to be precisely the complaint that LightSquared is making. Based on this, it is my opinion that the FCC is at fault here -- they should never have granted LightSquared the license for these frequencies in the first place if they did not intend to honour said license.

Did you just self-comment yourself into irrelevancy in a single post? Impressive.

So what? It's been said a thousand times that this type of driving is not the norm; that's seven hours of driving, which is not something people do everyday. If you do, then this car is not for you (also, you might want to invest in an airplane; it would save you a great deal of time in your life). If it's something you do once or twice a year, then you could always fly, take a bus, or rent a regular car, if you really wanted to have an electric for the rest of the time (you've given no indication what your actual day-to-day driving is like).

For Ss and Gs, here's a few things my regular gasoline Chevy Malibu can't do: tow a ski boat, carry a load of firewood, seat 10 people, climb mountains offroad, fly through the air (in a controlled manner, anyway), plow the streets in winter, or dive to the bottom of the ocean (and resurface, anyway). If I wanted to do any of those things, I would choose the right tool for that particular job. Note that there is no one vehicle that can do all these things.