The Space Shuttle is a really weird mix of qualities. The boosters are actually very good at their job - they're extremely powerful, and surprisingly reusable. The main engines are also good - they're some of the most efficient engines to be flown, period, and they're the most efficient that ever flew regularly. Using an external tank also is a good move - it's much cheaper, and it means the only thing getting thrown away is an empty tank. On paper, the Shuttle should have been an amazing craft.

The biggest problems with the Space Shuttle are deeper.

The first problem is the choice of fuel. Liquid hydrogen is amazingly efficient, but it's both bulky (look at the external tank) and expensive. I suspect NASA thought that, by flying dozens of shuttle missions per year, they could build up a large LH industry in the US, the same way UDMH and other fuels went from chemical curiosities to made-by-the-ton commodities. That didn't happen, possibly because the Shuttle never flew as often as it was designed to. But a more conventional fuel would have been both cheaper to use, and would have allowed for a smaller vehicle.

The second problem is the airframe. The basic idea of the Shuttle is a good one ONLY if you regularly need to recapture satellites and deorbit them intact. This basically never happened. Without that, the Shuttle is a massive, heavy airframe with no purpose. This is getting fixed with SLS/Orion, which is basically a Space Shuttle with a capsule instead of pseudo-spaceplane. Well, assuming NASA actually makes it. Considering how simple the design is, I don't know why it isn't flying already, except for politics.

The third problem is the politics. To get Congressional support, parts for the Shuttle were made all over the country. That's inefficiency for the sake of inefficiency. Then, once Challenger happened, bureaucrats went through everything and OSHA-fied it. Things that were designed to be reused a few times were made disposable, or were rebuilt after every flight. Training times went through the roof. That made the program as a whole slower and less effective - so Congress started slashing funding, because who wants to fund such an ineffective program?

That third problem is honestly the biggest one. If they had been flying them according to the original plan, and using all the capabilities of the Shuttle, it would have been a great spacecraft. And you could easily use the parts of the Shuttle program to build a great spacecraft still. But you won't be seeing that from NASA, at least without some major changes in other parts of the government.

Still, I hope someone can buy up the SSME design. One of those would make a good upper stage for a heavy lift rocket.

The cars shouldn't have a manual override for emergencies - it should have manual controls for when the computers can't handle the regular driving.

Imagine this: you're driving down a country road. It goes from a 2-lane paved road to a 2-lane dirt road to a 1-lane dirt road. At some point during that progression, the AI no longer has enough information to be able to safely operate. It come to a full stop, plays a prerecorded "Manual assistance required" message, and waits for the human to start driving. Once it's back to a point where it can resume automatic mode, it waits for the driver to hand over control.

Basically, we need a manual mode because, especially in these first generations, automatic mode won't be able to handle everything. But it should only ever force a switch from automatic to manual control when the vehicle is stopped, and the driver can safely take however long he wants to start driving.

Would it be possible to build a neural net that recognizes when one of these blind spots has been hit? If it's reliably misidentified across neural nets as they claim, there should be enough common attributes for a different neural net to train on.

Some of the ones that just got upgraded will probably keep flying for another 50 years - the Air Force plans to keep flying them at least until 2040, and I see no reason why they won't just keep using it.

It's the pickup truck of strategic warfare. It's cheap, it can carry a huge payload, and it's reliable. Sure, it's slower than the speed of sound and is about as stealthy as a jackhammer, but for some jobs that doesn't matter.

To this very day, the Air Force has more active B-52s than B-1 or B-2 bombers.

Perhaps, perhaps not. But the key thing is that Apple's tablets are generalist - while they can be used for "artistic" work, they are most commonly used for casual or business use, much like Microsoft's offerings in the desktop arena.

And that gives it a certain reputation - a reputation Apple is still slightly coasting on (they've done nothing to deserve the "creative person's product" reputation for many years now, yet it's still part of their marketing). If Microsoft is smart (for once), they'll build that reputation and try to leverage that into their desktop/laptop systems, and even their game consoles.

I might have to try that, then - I'd never considered using it for that, but now that I think about it, all I'd need is a USB hub and audio adapter. If I ever get to the point of doing shows, I might have to get one.

Does anybody else find it a bit ironic that Microsoft's tablets seem to be fitting into the niche Apple's desktops once did? Being used most prominently for art and audio production? That seems to be the niche Surface fits into, while Apple and Google are making more general-purpose, lower-cost devices.

I actually do. Due to what I assume is some carrier NAT issues, Google detects my entire ISP as possible bots. Every Google search I do requires a CAPTCHA.

So I use Bing for my searching. I've not really noticed any difference in quality between it and Google.

I have a Fiat 500, the non-electric one. For $17,000, it's a good car. But it's clearly a sub-$20K car - and unless they completely redesign major sections of it that are completely unrelated to the propulsion, they aren't going to be getting it to a be worth $30K even with the value of an electric engine.

Just for one example of what isn't good, the sound system supposedly supports USB. It does, technically, but it does so in the least competent way possible. You would expect it would support folders - like it does for data CDs. It does not. You would expect it to play songs in filename order. It does not. It plays every song on there, in the order of file creation. I noticed in the manual that the entertainment system runs on Windows Phone 7 - I have a very difficult time believing that Windows, in any version, has such broken support for FAT32.

Another example? The seat belt warning alarm activates even if the car is in park, within a second of turning on the car. I've had to get into the habit of buckling up before even turning the key.

The Fiat 500 is a cheap car. I'd say an electric version is worth about $25K (I couldn't actually use one myself - I use street parking, so I literally have nowhere to charge it up).

Tesla got one thing right - because electric cars, for the foreseeable future, are going to add $20K-$30K to the cost of the car, you're better off doing so in high-end cars where that's an extra 10-20%, not double the cost.

You need a new set of excuses:

There was a storm and my 3G was down.
The cloud was down. Again.
An update patch broke everything.
My laptop overheated and died, Applecare says they'll have it back by next week.
Adobe's DRM junk decided I hadn't paid them enough money and locked out all my files.

The Comet is the exact opposite of the kind of aircraft they were supposedly listing.

It was incredibly advanced for the time. The one major flaw it had was unknown at the time - the best engineers in the field couldn't figure it out even when they recovered 90% of the airframe from a crash.

In the various hearings, engineers from competing aircraft companies admitted that they wouldn't have found the flaw either, and the only reason it's Comets that flew with such a defect and not DC-8s or 707s is because the Comet came out first.

No. The driver should not be expected to react during autonomous mode, but autonomous mode should fail gracefully. I can easily envision scenarios (construction, unmarked road, adverse weather) where the best thing the AI can do is give up, stop, and let the human take over. For those situations, the car should have at least one occupant who is able to drive.

However, the AI should not just dump that responsibility back on the user. I would say that the AI can only hand over control when the vehicle is completely stopped. The human can seize or give up control at any time, but the AI has stricter limits.

No, it means he's an idiot for not asking for cash up front.

I had written up a rather lengthy rebuttal to most of your points, but then I noticed this gem hidden near the end.

You are literally claiming that it doesn't matter what the facts are, your theory says Soyuz is more reliable than the Shuttle was, therefore reality is wrong and you're right.

I can't argue with that - not because you're right, but because I can only argue using facts and logic, which evidently you want nothing to do with.

As much as I like SpaceX, a) they're far too new to compare on reliability, and b) they don't have anything comparable to Proton in lift capacity. Proton-M can lift 22Mg to LEO - over twice the capacity of a Falcon-9, closer to two-and-a-half when you count usable capacity (the landing/reuse feature requires most of their extra power from the v1.1 upgrade). The Falcon Heavy is supposed to lift 53Mg, but they haven't even built one yet, let alone flown one.

It's amazing to me just how ancient most Russian rocket designs are. The Soyuz launcher is literally based on the same design that launched Sputnik, with the addition of a second stage. And even after fifty years of iteration, they still have only a 97.5% success rate with the current Soyuz launchers (Soyuz-U, Soyuz-U2, and Soyuz-FG). That's a full point worse than the Space Shuttle (98.5%), which was a completely new design that didn't have several decades of production testing on basically any of the parts.

Proton is almost as old, dating back to the Soviet lunar program. It was actually first intended as an ICBM, to launch ridiculously heavy warheads (think Tsar Bomba on an ICBM). The changes since then have been fairly minimal, compared to the design changes American rockets went through. One of the biggest features of the latest Proton-M design is "uses less parts made outside Russia". Counting this latest failure, Proton-M has only an 88.9% success rate.

The oft-repeated engineering mantra is "quality, reliability, cost - pick two". Russia's antiquated designs don't give you quality (in terms of efficiency or even lifting power), and they really aren't as reliable as you'd expect from such well-established designs. I can only hope that they're cheap enough that it's worth it - and when you're launching multi-million-dollar satellites, maybe cheaping out on the launcher isn't such a good idea.