No, they were just trying to fake their flights around the moon. "See, we really sent a probe around the moon, here's the proof, we've photographed the Apollo landing site!". In reality they just photoshopped a lander and craters on some sandpaper.

Yes, they first tried to do it in the Nevada desert, but they couldn't get the sound right.

O, yeah, when a flaw is found in iOS, you can just switch to Android and buy all the same apps you had on iOS. And then when another flaw is found in Android a couple of weeks later, you switch right back to iOS again. This time it's even easier because you only have to rebuy the apps you bought since the last switch. And if both platforms have open holes at the same time, well, just use an oldfashioned dumb phone for a while. Oh, you might even try a Microsoft phone (do they still make those?) for a while. See, plenty of options!

Same for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Just buy multiple versions of all the apps you use in the office and you're all set. Or maybe try Haiku, I hear it has zero exploits in the wild.

Take a look in your KeyChain to see what else it stores that you may not even know about. Logins for websites, for example.

They will get backdoored as well, since most politicians keep using normal civilian tools (hotmail, iPhones, USB sticks, etc.) no matter what ultra-secure tools you offer them.

No, the article says that 1 kg would have been enough to completely power the entire mission, and only 2 grams would have been needed for a combination of Plutonium heating and solar power. That last option would have been enough (according to the article).

Oh, yeah, 2 grams of plutonium will totally cause that kind of destruction.

If it has a half life longer than humanity's been in existence, it can't be very radioactive.

And what does a few grams of plutonium have to do with nuclear power plants blowing up?

Apparently, enough people find these interesting and vote them up every time so they keep appearing on the front page of Slashdot. I know, democracy is a bitch. Personally it doesn't bother me too much.

The problem is probably that funding research is a different budget than funding launches. So they will prefer to postpone the research and pay more for the Russians to do it, rather than save money in the long run by letting SpaceX finish their program and then do the launches much cheaper. That's the way bureaucracy works.

Especially after the Russians refused to sell their rockets to Elon when he went there many years ago.

But then again, money is money, and they need funding for manned missions to develop the Mars project, so who knows.

That may be a good idea for valves that open and close regularly. But for valves that only open in an emergency, it's probably better to just put them in parallel. 2s2p is more likely to fail closed than 2p. Anyway, I'm sure they thought of that.

Thank you for your exhaustive reply, that was very informative indeed. I wish they would just build lots of those reactors and get rid of the old ones, rather than extending the old ones because "nucular is dangerous so we don't want to build any more".

Then what happened in Fukushima? That meltdown was't so benign, was it? Overheating, production of hydrogen, explosions, etc... When all that could have been avoided if the whole thing had been designed with materials that melt at much lower temperatures so the material is dispersed when the reactor starts to overheat.