After you pay, the google maps locates the panhandlers location, and routes around it. They could charge for this service as a micro payment, and then give the money to the pan handler.

The booster can indeed make it back uprange to Kennedy Space Center, and they've leased a landing pad for it there. Besides the turn-around burn, they tilt the booster against the airstream and let aerodynamics push it back uprange during that 78 mile descent.

If there's one thing they should work on, it's not thrusters but having the capability to throttle to hover. That would potentially change the entire low approach. It is complicated by the fact that engine performance goes nonlinear in the low range.

The firewall-like software (the one that the school district is complaining about because it was bypassed by students) seems to be sold through Apple (here is the pricing sheet, but it's a pdf). Also, Pearson is a formal ConnectED educational partner of Apple (I'm not sure if that means Apple gets a cut of that contract, but I would think it does).

On an unrelated note: I actually don't know how Sphero actually made that list of Educational Partners. I suppose that by Apple's definition, any toy that can connect to iOS automatically makes it worthy enough to be considered educational.

Here is the barge on the way to port, possibly with debris onboard. Here's a video of the landing shot from the barge itself. And I am waiting to see the barge from the Carnival Fascination webcam.

A video from the barge is now online here. If you step through the final frames, you can see that the camera mount ends up knocked over and pointing at the ocean, but the lens and its cover are unbroken and all we see flying appear to be small debris. So not a really high-pressure event.

From the wiki article you cite:
Broken Encryption

The encryption system used in the three ballot was broken by a correlation attack devised by Charlie Strauss[5] who also showed how it could be used to prove how you voted [6]. Strauss's attack relied on the fact that not all receipt strips can pair with all cast strip pairs since proposed triplets with 3 or 1 vote cast in any race on the ballot (not just one race of interest) can be rejected since the strips could not be from the same ballot. Since there are far more vote patterns on a typical United States precinct ballot than there are ballots cast in a precinct, statistically nearly all of the ballot pairs cast can only be paired uniquely with one receipt strip kept by the voter. This allows a the voters votes to be known by anyone with the receipt. Furthermore a voter conspiring to prove their vote (for money, coercion, or posterity) could mark all the strips in a unique previously agreed pattern that would assure recovery. Rivest et all, acknowledged this logic error in their concept[1], and revised the schema to require tearing off each race individually (destroying the correlation of the races) and having theoretically traceable tracking numbers on each race-level receipt. While this did restore the unbreakable aspect of the scheme, arguably the proliferation of receipts and chopped ballots rendered the mechanics of processing the votes or for a voter reviewing a receipt significantly complex, thus defeating its intended simplicity.

It's very tempting to think this should work like an airplane. Lots of people wrote that it was "too hot", etc. But it isn't an airplane. The plan was really to approach at 1/4 Kilometer Per Second, then brake at the very last second.

Obviously Crew Dragon, which carries people, will approach differently. But it's a lot lighter.

In the F9R test videos they catch some of the backscatter from the engine and seem to catch fire. Maybe they were trying to avoid that. They are very light carbon composite. Or perhaps they mess up the airstream for precision navigation, or they don't like the 250 m/s wind.

It looked to me that the barge was structurally undamaged but that some heavy equipment on the deck was forcibly ejected. It's clear to see in the HD version. Those 1000 HP thrusters are expensive, and it looked to me like one of them going overboard. But I suspect they were prepared to lose more than one vessel in testing this.

And I bet there was a range safety self-destruct charge onboard. F9R blew itself up with one. But it was probably so safe that it didn't go off.

Good lord, that did not make the problem better, you just have all the problems of both and none of the advantages.

And a photo of any such paper would allow you to prove how you voted which is antithetical to the secret ballot. Conversely a photo of a marked paper ballot is not proof of how you voted since it's not counted until it is invisible in the ballot box or optical scan. The voting machine makers tried to do something like that with a rolled continuous paper ballot printer the voter could see. However these tape ballots which were longer than a football field proved impossible to manipulate for recounting. With cut sheets it's easy to divide them into piles for any race and then have the observers help you recount the piles. takes very little time to sort and recount fixed page paper ballots for any given race being recounted. Not so with the toilet paper rolls. Furthermore, paper jams and printer malfunctions made these unreliable. paper ballots don't have that problem and if the opscan jams they can be counted later after putting them in a locked ballot box.

finally when a machine does go down or a church bus shows up to vote all at once, long lines ensue. When pen breaks on a paper ballot you get more pens, and you can have as many voting stations as you like.

Finally, which record is the actual record in case of a discrepancy? the electronic one or the paper one? ideally you want one tracable to the voters makrking action not her click-through glance at a printed paper ballot. With DRE's the errors happen during the clumsy touch screen process. (e.g. if you can't make a fist with one finger extended (people with R. Arthtrhitis can't) then you can't use a touch screen accurately. the touchscreens get out of calibration and programming errors result in incorrect recording of votes. pens on paper are generally more accessible (even though DREs can offer some handicap accessible features) and record the voters intent directly.

faster? no slower. precint counting is not the slow part. the optical scans of paper count instantly. the rate limits are how may voters can vote at the same time (paper ballots win) and the protocols for collation to central tabulation of the precints (for which there's not any difference between opscan and a DRE voting machines).

Remember the reporters asking what was holding DC-X up? They couldn't see the rocket exhaust.

I sneaked inside of the Rotary Rocket the last time I was in Mojave. Someone left the bottom hatch ajar. But there wasn't a way to climb up to the cockpit from in there. Lots of pigeon droppings and it's used to hold the equipment for the multimedia kiosk nearby. Sad to see.

I learned an important lesson from Open Source, and it applies to SpaceX too: Things work a lot better if you just give the engineers the freedom to do engineering.

I think that in government projects and in most larger companies we tend to devalue the technical people in favor of the nontechnical. And we don't give them much power to actually run things. And then we wonder why efficiency is so low.

It has certainly given me ideas for how to run my own company.