More launches mean more cost, especially if you're scattering it across launch pads located around the world. There aren't many sites that can handle significant launch masses: Cape Canaveral, Baikonur, Plesetsk, French Guiana, Jiuquan (China), Satish Dhawan (India), and Tanegashima (Japan). So you have enormous coordination between nations that have widely varying launch experience for their heavy lifters, that use different technologies and procedures, and have different goals for their space programs. This doesn't even get into the politics of "What do you do for me if I agree to lift this 15T payload into orbit?"

It also would cost more fuel, since launching from different locations means having to match inclinations. This has already led to one major limitation with the ISS, since its inclination is a compromise between the ideal inclinations for Cape Canaveral and Baikonur.

On top of that, you add complexity in having to dock so many more times, increasing the risk of an incident. While the potential loss from a single large launch is significantly more than that of a single small launch, the cumulative risk of any loss is greater with multiple launches. Putting a thousand tons into orbit would take eight SLS launches, but a minimum of 44 launches of the Delta IV Heavy or Proton, currently the heaviest launchers available.

I would rather see projects like the Falcon XX or MCT encouraged, and I expect they'll be showing up on the test schedule around the same time as the SLS. But NASA is going to have their own path despite the costs, and so they may as well work on an SLS-class launcher. If nothing else, it will give SpaceX (and maybe others) something to aim for and probably provide some valuable lessons along the way.

For one thing, that is likely the storage size, not the transfer size which is likely going to be way less due to compression.

The transfer size probably is smaller to some degree. But to hit that uncompressed volume of storage size, there is going to be a lot of data with poor compression rates. I expect that a lot of pristine, high-resolution digital video is in that, and that certainly won't compress all that well.

But as you point out, those can be terabytes in size. Even with the potential value of that, most people aren't going to download the raw files, and fewer still will go through the work of converting them to lower-res files more amenable to download. I'm not saying it won't happen, just that I think it's unlikely. Sony has more to worry about from the financial and personal information that was obtained than the revenue loss from any movies that were downloaded.

Why do random words? Use a sentence. I do that for many of my passwords. You get upper and lower case letters, symbols, and maybe even numbers, and it's not hard to go past 20 characters. It's highly customizable for each user and much easier to remember.

The problem with this is that there are still too many systems that have length caps that are too short. Not really many solutions for limits of 16, 10, or even 8 characters.

While I'm not terribly enthusiastic about the Orion project, I do give them some credit that you clearly don't. A moon mission is to be possible with a single launch, similar to the Apollo missions. (I think a near-Earth asteroid will also be possible in one launch.) I believe a Mars mission is expected to be 2-3 launches, with the last one the manned launch, followed by docking in orbit and then leaving for Mars.

The setup flying from the Delta IV Heavy is only part of the stack. When the SLS launches, it will have a payload capacity of 130 tons, compared to the Delta IV Heavy's 23 tons. (The Saturn V could lift 118 tons.) That's a lot more hardware and fuel that can be lofted.

IIRC, the Coast Guard sends out a helicopter to warn them out of the area with loudspeakers. Failure to comply results in a visit from a Coast Guard boat, and that's where things can get expensive.

A lack of sufficient auditing capability is what has kept CACert out of most browser CA bundles.

StartSSL.com provides free entry-level certificates with some level of verification, enough at least to satisfy the major browsers.

Presumably there will be a collision detection mechanism that nixes the old certificate and alerts you to such changes by e-mail.

Yes, there are ways around it, but that's true of any CA.

Heh.

Anyway, thanx for posting.

OK, i misunderstood what expat meant. I thought it had to do with revoking citizenship. There i go not looking up words again.

Who knows, maybe i'll take a peek at reddit again someday.

expat? I don't remember that.

reddit is a cesspool, so i rarely bother with it, even when it shows up from a search.

I (like to) think i would pay for a service where someone filtered slashdot & reddit comments to what is actually informational, interesting, and truly funny. IOW, what comment moderation was intended for.

Now that I think about it, if Philae did not bounce off of the comet, then the screws must be doing their job and I would think the harpoons might not be needed at all. I would assume the harpoons were in the plans because the engineers couldn't be sure the screws would work on the surface of a comet.

My understanding is that the harpoons were one of two ways that ESA was going to secure the probe to the comet. There were also screws that were supposed to attach the legs to the surface. So if they can still fire the harpoons they ought not have an issue with Philae flying off into space, but does anyone with more information on the relative strength of each? And if the harpoons could not be fired... what is the real risk of the probe shifting? I mean what would cause it to shift in the first place once settled on the comet?