I think it's because they're on the hunt for the record.

I hope Chevy pounces as well. A Volt with ultra charging technology sounds awesome! Mind you, this isn't the battery technology, this is their charging tech.

As a driver of a range extended electric vehicle, I'd be perfectly happy to pay to quick charge my car at one of his charging stations. If anything it could encourage me to switch to a Tesla. Ultimately, what I want is for the battery technology to really take off. I'd rather have fewer charging stations and more robust battery technology...

I have a new car... 2014 Chevy Volt and I've found the thing pretty darn intuitive. I can do all of those functions from the steering wheel. The only exception would be if I'm at some FM radio station and I want to tune to some other FM radio station I have to use the tune scroll wheel... but I had to do the same thing on my 14 year old car I just sold.

Setting favorites is as easy as merely pressing and holding the spot on the favorites for 3 seconds... then it's set.

It makes complete sense. Why add weight and complexity when you've got a perfectly good propulsion system already on your capsule.

Let's get this baby loaded, do a couple unmanned tests, including the crew escape system and lets roll.

I have to imagine if you're the Russian Space Agency this has to be very unwelcome news.

What I like so much about my kindle is it's pure simplicity. If I wanted something that I could take notes with, I'd grab my tablet, or my desktop. Yes, you can put bookmarks in and highlight text. The only thing I can do with my kindle is read. If it were to do more, I'd be tempted to do more with it. Miles of battery life, easy to read, simple controls.

So RedHat fully certifies a stack as something that they'll support... Yeah, I don't see the problem here. If you go doing things to it that RedHat hasn't tested, don't be surprise when they won't want to support it. Considering that RedHat only makes money off of support doing anything that takes them away from that core mission is money out the window. Now if you want a blanket support contract or a per diem situation where when you get stuck with your wack ass solution they'll drop engineers on the problem... I'm sure RH would be up for that... provided they're getting paid. Otherwise you'll just taking engineers away from supporting supported configurations and sending them down support rabbit holes.

Exactly what I was thinking... Even though the courts just vacated his case, this is the best next thing... Ultimately, Russia is completely fucked in this situation. Read my older posts regarding my position on this...

s/formally/previously/g;

SpaceX is planning on doing a controlled pad landing (go watch the Grasshopper video)... no sea water will be involved. I'd imagine their contingency plan would be if there were any anomalies to ditch in the sea.

Making a comparison between the Merlin engines and the SSME's is just silly. The Space Shuttle Main Engine was an amazing piece of engineering... but it was a complicated beast that had to be completely disassembled and thoroughly examined. It's "reusability" was only in the sense that the known good parts from a formally used engine could be combined with new parts to make a new engine.

The Merlin engines on the other hand are comparably simple machines with many fewer parts and from the get go were designed for a cycle life of 40 uses.

At the end of the day SpaceX is going to do the thing that makes them profitable. If this system doesn't work, they'll engineer something else that's reliable and reuseable.

I would suspect that when Putin's involved... there's not such thing as free money... Also Russia isn't exactly soaking in cash at the moment. Ukraine's infrastructure is a mess and it's going to take a lot of money to fix it. Once your average Russian citizen sees how much it's going to cost in actual Rubles, they'll be pissed about it. There won't be anything they can do about it, not even complain, but they can be pissed about it.

If Russia decides to not fix up Ukraine just take the territory, that's going to look *really* bad too.

I'm going to set aside for a moment what Ukraine becoming part of Russia would mean for the Ukrainian people.

From a smash mouth point of view, I think it would be hilarious to watch Putin choke on the chicken bone that's Ukraine. He backed a leader that for more than 10 years bled the country dry and left it in financial ruins. The Russian minister of finance has already been bitching about how much it's going to cost to fix up Crimea's infrastructure.... Just wait until he gets the bill for Ukraine. With the west financially pulling out of Russia not to mention their dwindling tax base, combined with the 50B that Russia just spend on the Olympics... They're not in a great financial position to suddenly start pouring 10B+ a year into Ukraine. The Ukraine government is still trying to get it's hands on the 15B from the EU/US... Let Russia pick up that bill.

Now, with that all said, Russia taking over Ukraine would be ruinous for the Ukrainian people.

This is somewhat endemic of PCs at this point. We are not in the dark ages anymore... unless you're playing the latest and greatest FPS, even a 5 year old PC works just fine... At this point your OS is likely to wear out before your hardware!

I think the same can be said with tablets. My iPad 2 works just great. I have NO incentive to buy an iPad X (where X > 2). Hardware has gotten so good at this point that every "old" (i.e. ipad2) is still great.

I could be wrong on this, but I thought Pratt was going to be building the RD Amross (which is the american version of the RD-180) starting a couple of years ago. If that's the case then the RD-180's being used on the Atlas V are completely domestic.

With that all said, no bid contracts are shit. The price delta between SpaceX and ULA are large enough that provided SpaceX can demonstrate the same reliability as the the Atlas 5 (so far it has) and the same capabilities (it has) then why not go with the cheaper of the two.

Also, if my assertion in the first paragraph is wrong, then all the more reason to go with SpaceX.