Possibly. Probably not.

The failure modes for the Shuttle are unlike any other spacecraft's - even the near-clone of it, Buran. And any theoretical abort mode for it has to account for that weirdness.

First, the Shuttle has to remain intact. You can't just eject the "pilot area", because the whole thing is really monolithic. You might be able to get away with ejection seats, but that works only for a very small period of spaceflight (probably not Challenger - they'd have ejected into a fireball and coasted up to 60,000ft). They did, in fact, have some ejection seats on the early test flights, with partial crews, but they did away with them in use (letting some escape while leaving others to die was inhumane, and making all seats eject was far too heavy for the marginal benefit).

Second, the boosters cannot be shut off. That's the big safety drawback of solid rockets - you light them, and they aren't going out until they're out of fuel. This means detaching the boosters isn't going to work, because (without the drag and mass of the Shuttle holding them back) they'll just blow past the Shuttle, bathing it in hot exhaust. If my memory is correct, the Shuttle is the only manned rocket in history to use solid engines, in no small part because of this sort of problem. Even the Soviet shuttle clone, Buran, used all-liquid engines.

Third, the Main engines are nearly useless in-atmosphere. They're lit mainly because they sometimes fail to light, and having that failure occur halfway to orbit would suck. The "boosters" provide about 80% of the thrust, if memory serves. The SSMEs aren't even at full throttle for much of the flight - Challenger had just set them to full when the stack exploded. So any idea of "just floor the main engines to outrun the boosters" is ludicrous.

Fourth, these sorts of disasters happen with very little notice. Rocket fuels are generally extremely volatile - even the least exotic combo, LOX+RP1, is still liquid oxygen and high-grade kerosene. LH2 is safer than some things (ClF3 was, and still is, considered for rocket use), but it's still pretty dangerous, and when a tank of LH2 and LOX decides to explode, it's not going to give you even a second's warning. So the escape systems they did add after Challenger probably wouldn't have been usable, because it literally involved jumping out of the Shuttle.

Fifth, the Shuttle is HEAVY. Really goddamn heavy, especially since you're not going to be able to dump the payload during an abort. So you've got the crew, all their supplies, whatever they were carrying to orbit, and all the vehicle mass. Any rocket that could accelerate the Shuttle away from an exploding stack would be itself enormous, not something you could really justify launching into orbit every mission.

Because of these peculiarities, the Shuttle abort modes are along the lines of "pick where to crash" instead of "run away from the explosion". The four post-launch modes are "return to launch site", "trans-atlantic landing", "abort to once-around" and "abort to orbit" - all of which require a mostly-working Shuttle and must be used after the boosters are exhausted.

An LES like this could not have saved them, because you couldn't really use an LES such as this on the Shuttle. Modifying the Shuttle enough that an LES like this makes sense would basically require making it not a Shuttle - in fact, you'd basically end up with an Orion-like capsule on top of an SLS-like stack, because they're literally reusing that much of the technology.

Since DICE obviously isn't going to stop him from blogging here, can we at least make him an editor so he can post them himself and we can block him specifically?

How on earth do they find "pay someone a billion and a half to take this business" to be cheaper than just shutting the entire thing down? Even if the division is losing more money than that, I think you could do better by just firing everyone and burning any physical assets to the ground. The only way I think it could be otherwise is if it costs more than $1.5 billion just to shut down the division. Unless IBM is running a nuclear reactor somewhere and I just never heard of it, that just doesn't seem plausible.

Yes. That's why they haven't bothered implementing right joins, you can do every join using just inner joins, left outer joins and unions, like how any logical gate can be implemented with NAND gates.

I've never had need for a right join, and only rarely do I use a full outer join.

Left joins only, no right joins.

Don't panic.

Since when has any reasonable person given a single flying fuck what PETA thinks?

The way the orbits work, there's a period every sixteen years or so where the journey between Earth and Mars is shortest. There's a similar cycle for the longest path, eight years offset. Using this close approach is crucial - it means less fuel is needed (very important in rockets), and it shortens the crew's exposure to radiation.

The next close approach is in 2018 (it's still a two-year journey, so you'd actually want to launch in 2017). Barring a massive undertaking, bigger than Apollo, we will not be ready in time. I'd like it to happen, but it just isn't.

After that, missions become harder up to 2026, then become easier until the next close approach in 2035. That's when I think we will be ready. So my money is on a 2030's Martian mission.

Several of their "animal shelters" were closed because the government was going to force them to call themselves "euthanasia clinics" because they killed so many animals. PETA closed them rather than accept the more accurate name.

Ebola is weird.

It doesn't spread easily. The virus is basically content to sit in a corpse and multiply. It doesn't spread through air, or aerosol, or even a lot of fluids. Just blood and bile - which, granted, it does like to make you spew out, but it's not too hard to avoid unless you're trying to treat infected people or lugging corpses around.

On the other hand, just a small initial infection can be lethal. Most diseases don't spread from one particle of the virus or bacterium entering your body - most need quite a lot, otherwise they get smashed by your immune system before you even show symptoms. Ebola doesn't need much of an initial infection to turn into a full-blown case.

Given those two things, there's no surprise that Ebola so often infects the doctors who are treating it. But that's on outlier on its infectiousness - it's still not going to be a massive plague, because outside medical and funeral services, it just doesn't spread well.

The line is when the payment goes from "covering expenses" to "generating profit".

The level of astroturfing for Uber is getting ridiculous. I was sympathetic at first, because I can see how the existing monopolies are bad, but:
a) They aren't even trying to change the laws, they're just ignoring them. There are some laws that are so bad civil disobedience is a valid tactic. This is not one of those laws, and even then, when you do civil disobedience you're supposed to *accept* the legal punishment, because you *did* break the law.
b) They're astroturfing like crazy to frame the debate as "the common man versus the big bad taxi monopolies" when it's really "big international web-based corporation versus big local corporations". I don't care how many times you make sockpuppet comments about it, nobody's getting arrested for driving their grandma to the grocery store. People are getting arrested for running unlicensed taxicabs.

Licensing taxis is a good thing. The current laws may be overly-restrictive to protect existing businesses, but the spirit of the law is good. Uber? You're not. Any sympathy I once had is gone, purely because of your PR tactics. I was already unlikely to be a customer (I *have* my own car), but now I'm definitely not going to.

The SPARC processors are still doing some interesting things, and there's been some shakeups in the GPU architecture space.

Not as a main phone, hell no. But there are times when I might not want to carry my expensive, fragile phone - going to a metal show, or a bad neighborhood, or whatever.

For that, being able to pop my SIM out of my Nexus 5 into something literally a tenth the price would save a lot of hassle and cash if it gets broken or stolen, and as long as it can still make calls and texts, it will work for most purposes. There isn't a single app I rely on, even email, but I do rely on being able to make phone calls and send texts. I briefly looked into buying a second-hand phone to see if it was cheaper, and it still can't beat the price of $35.

That said, who the hell said "let's make a dirt-cheap phone OS so the entire planet can enjoy the web!" and then decided to do everything in HTML and Javascript? Even Android is better than that. That's one of the areas where you would really want the speed and efficiency of a low-level language.

Spray-and-pray is a gangster or rebel tactic. Actual soldiers use actual tactics.

Most infantry don't use automatic fire except as suppressing fire - making the enemy keep their heads down while your guys move in close enough for a kill-shot. For a while our main rifle didn't even have full-auto - late-era M16s were single or three-round-burst only. There's some exceptions for urban combat, but for the most part, if they're shooting full-auto, they don't expect to hit you, they're just making it unsafe for you to pop out of cover.