It was time to end it. Over 30 years the shuttle has done some great things, but NASA has failed to fix what was broken with the STS and failed to upgrade it properly. Privatization is the best thing we can do for space; government involvement has gotten to big, bloated, and stupid for real innovation.

Case and point- Mission Anomalies for STS-1- how many of these got properly fixed by the end of the program? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-1#Mission_anomalies

Because, Evolution has been a part of the default GNOME suite for a very long time, so as more functionality was built, developers could assume Evolution was there.

Oops.

I've always hated evolution. Thunderbird is much cleaner.

One of the few reasons I'm willing to pay so much for a new game is the fact I can trade it someday.

There's no way games with these kinds of restrictions are worth their asking price.

Minecraft.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish doesn't work with Open Source.

Wouldn't more reasonable prices for new games take the wind out of the huge second-hand games business?

And all I found was Burka Porn.

If we're going to talk about coincidences, I think it's more interesting that Amazon EC2 fell down at the same time.

What about services like NetFlix and Hulu Plus which require a PSN login? There were many people unable to access these services over the past few days (from their consoles). What do they do? Go after the service provider for a refund? Go after Sony for a refund?

When services are daisy-chained like this, I feel the bottom services carries a lot more liability than they may think.

Blu-rays are less useful to me. I only have one blu-ray player, while I've lost count of my devices that can read DVDs. But most importantly-

I can't (yet) format shift my Blu-rays. I have devices I like to watch my movies on... like, say. my PSP. I can't do that with a Blu-Ray yet, because I don't have the technology to boil all that HD goodness down to the small screen.

As such, yes, Blu-rays are cool and all, but at least when it comes to movies, less useful to me. Games? I like my PS3 games on Blu-Ray.

I've heard that the Merlin 1-c engines are about $1M a piece. And that SSME's run $50M each at the current production rates.

Hard to verify pricing for components, especially for SpaceX, as they do so much in house. Who outside of the company knows what the actual production costs of each part are? Hmmm, perhaps we can estimate the max possible cost of each engine based on launch prices and the assumption that SpaceX is not taking a loss on each launch.

A Falcon 9 launch costs $54M, and has 10 Merlin 1c engines. I'm going to ignore the cost differences between the upper stage (vacuum) and lower stage engines. If every thing else (fuel, lower & upper stages, facility lease, profit) were $0, each engine would cost at most $5.4M. In fact, looking at the announced pricing for Falcon Heavy, $110M max, with 27+1 engines, you're looking at less than $4M an engine, max.

Given the costs of the rest of the launch, and number of engines (production scaling efficiencies) involved, I don't think that a $1M per engine estimate is too far off. That puts engines at 25% of the launch costs, and I'm OK with that estimate. I know that the Shuttle SRB's are a higher percentage of the cost of a SLS, but those are an outlier. You can buy 4 Atlas CCB's (with 8 engines) for the price of 1 SRB. Given that pricing, I'm not sure that any $10M engine out there has 10x the thrust of a Merlin 1c.

So SpaceX is probably good with the whole multiple engine thing, at least on price.

I'm an alumni of the U of I, and I work here as well. I get these notifications. I thought I'd bring up 2 points:

1. Fortunately, given the spring break, the actual number of people on campus able to read this was was quite low.
2. Unfortunately, we just had a fire on Green street 2 days ago, and we got an alert from the same system informing us about it. So this warning was probably taken very seriously for those 12 minutes.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the system and I was impressed by the very explicit letter from the chief both explaining the error and accepting the blame for the mistake. She also detailed the upcoming efforts to address the error. I'd like to see the same level of accountability from my ISP or phone company.

>>AM Radio could interfere with aircraft beacons, since they're right next to each other!

These intentionally overlap. Back in the day, AM radio stations were just as useful at navigation as proper NDBs. You can tune in and listen to most of the AM band using your aircraft's (very old) ADF.