Well, you heard wrong. SpaceX has launched satellites and delivered cargo to the International Space Station. And to find this out all you had to do was go to their website and click on "NEWS".

Why would they need a new OS? When Microsoft introduced the concept in 2002, they simply added the features into XP.

*kaff* 1992.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

I used one of the early tablet/laptop convertible computers. Underpowered, underwhelming. The hybrid tablet/laptop has a thirty year history of failure. Microsoft kept trying it and kept failiing. A device that you can hold comfortably in your hand will never be the same device you want to sit in front of for hours doing work. Either the device will be too big to hold or the screen will be too small to work at for long periods. Since you're going to have different hardware anyway, you might as well have separate OSes and interfaces that take direct advantage of the hardware differences.

A lot of things were coded crappily 25 years ago; that much time takes us all the way back to 1989 when the Morris worm waltzed across what passed for the Internet in those days. Given that we still haven't engineered away buffer overflow vulnerabilities after all that time, it's unsurprising that we haven't come close to fixing all the other stuff.

Hey, maybe that's what previous 2-hour marathon attempts have been missing, that motivational electrical shock grid rolling along right behind the athlete at 2:00:01 marathon pace!

Thinking about Card's Hierarchy of Foreigness will give you an idea what these people are trying to accomplish.

http://ansible.wikia.com/wiki/...

They are basically trying to have chimps and dolphins reclassified as raman, not as humans, not as djur. Raman don't get citizen rights such as voting, but the non-state related parts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ought to apply to them as persons.

http://www.un.org/en/documents...

"Teleportation must be invented. If we don't invent teleportation, China will throw nuclear bomb everywhere. Especially now everyone can live forever."

-- Alex Chiu

But what if the Chinese themselves invent teleportation? What then?!

Yikes. I don't think I'd want to be in the line of fire if one of those many rotors decides to let go.

I was hoping for something smaller. Something between sedan sized and this thing. But if I could ride somewhere in this thing, get out of it and have it fly off and park itself elsewhere, then fine. Otherwise parking is going to be too much of a hassle.

Or quadracopters, if you prefer. We have already have these cheapo drones that will basically fly themselves with the operator only telling them in a rough sense where to go. Why can't something like that be scaled up to carry people, with a similarly simple interface? I'd much rather see that than any kind of fixed wing flying car that you would need to drive to an airport just to take-off.

Why not? Siri does. As an exercise, try to get Siri to find pictures of "nude women on the internet", something a monkey typing at random into a web browser could find. Siri draws a blank.

... we just disconnected Russia from the Internet right now?

sendmail was written to solve a problem that doesn't really exist anymore: gatewaying mail between networks with wildly different mail formats and addressing schemes. Fortunately for all of us, RFC 821 and 822 won. 8-bit clean networks won. So the big Swiss Army knife of converters and production rules isn't needed to deliver mail anymore.

... the fix may already be in. Hard to believe that it's been ten years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

... but it is a problem now because the rabble can afford it.