For anybody who doesn't know about it, http://spacexstats.com/index.p... is a neat site that lists upcoming SpaceX missions with countdowns to expected launch times, or estimates where the exact time isn't yet determined. It also has some statistics (though, sadly, they're almost always out of date) about things like launch records, flight times, payload mass, and so on. Obviously not as useful as SpaceX.com itself on launch day, but handy for checking when launch day will come (or when, for example, the first flight of a new vehicle is expected). It also has links to info about past launches.

I'm not affiliated with the site in any way (if I were, it'd keep those statistics better up to date) but I thought it might interest some other folks who like to follow SpaceX. Oh, and for the record, the link to tomorrow/today's launch is http://spacexstats.com/mission...

Brilliant! You're arguing to reinstate the bans against interracial marriage.

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And what gives him the authority to dictate to NASA how to run their space program?

Mostly the fact that he was one of the most prominent and well-rounded planetary astronomers and astrobiologists in the world, and the fact that he had a pretty good batting average in predicting conditions on Venus, Europa, and other bodies that were later confirmed. Sagan didn't dictate the Voyagers' itineraries, but NASA sure as hell wanted to know what he had to say.

Whichever one has a Steak'n'Shake.

$4.99 double steakburger combo and a kickass chocolate milk shake? I'm in.

I believe Voyager 1 still hasn't passed pluto if projected back down onto its orbital plane.

Voyager 1 is almost 20 billion miles away from us now, and is traveling about 35 degrees out of the ecliptic. Some really rough trigonometry shows that if you project that down onto the ecliptic, it's still about 16 billion miles away from the Sun, which is almost three times the length of the long axis of Pluto's entire orbit.

Just because you can't quickly and easily remove it yourself doesn't mean that it's not removable. It is removable, you just need some time and tools to do it.

Remove the battery on an iPhone 6 in 27 easy steps. After that, reassembly is simply the opposite of disassembly!*

You just need some time and tools to do it!

*: You hope.

Hard to concentrate when you can smell your neighbor didn't shower this week.

Fortunately everyone in my office bathes regularly, but we do have an office manager that believes too much perfume is merely a starting point. Seriously, I'm four cubes down from where she works and I can tell when she's arrived to within five minutes.

I'm going to assume you've been doing the /. equivalent of living under a rock, since this question comes up (and gets answered) every single time this topic is discussed, and that's a lot. But what the hell...

Landing on solid ground is, generally, preferable. However, unlike the ocean where you can tell all the boats to get out of a safety zone, land has these inconvenient things like buildings and infrastructure that can't simply be told to stay away for their own safety. Until it was clear how precisely SpaceX could bring the rocket down - and remember, we're talking about something returning from the edge of space, at supersonic speeds, with barely any fuel remaining, in a maneuver that had never been attempted before - it would have been foolish to bring the rocket down anywhere near any inhabited regions. Given the geography around the launch sites they use, that means the ocean is the best bet by far.

Also, sometimes they may not have a choice. The rocket *really* doesn't have a lot of fuel left as it returns, and it's going really, really fast in a direction that is decidedly away from the launch site (but not fast enough to make it all the way around the world, or the second stage wouldn't be needed to actually achieve orbital velocity). SpaceX pulls a lot of cool tricks to guide the rocket's return, like using the stage as a lifting surface (with a truly abysmal lift/drag ratio, I assume, but they're also trying to scrub speed) while controlling it with little folding grid fins (which are quite effective at those speeds). However, at the end of the day, even Falcon 9 may not have the fuel margin to return to the spaceport after launches even though it has enough fuel to launch *somewhere*. The center core of the Falcon Heavy - which flies for much longer than the F9 first stage - will be much too far downrange to boost back to the spaceport in most cases. Thus, for FH's center core, the barge may be the only landing option. Landing on a ship may be harder than landing at a conventional spaceport, but the ship can be almost anywhere there's ocean, while land-based spaceports are not noted for their mobility.

Now, with all that said, the goal is to, eventually, be able to land at the spaceport. The next F9 launch after this one will, according to a cool site called SpaceX Stats, attempt to return to the launch site and land there. This presumably demonstrates that SpaceX has been found to have sufficient precision in the first-stage landing attempts so far for it to be safe to land near people and expensive buildings. I wish them the very best of luck!

"They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

He would have been more proper in saying, "The Constitution does not grant the government the power to abridge the right in question which they already hold".

Indeed.

And the only licensees I'm aware of for the 2.4GHZ Part 15 ISM band are HAMs.

Which are about the friendliest bunch around when it comes to talking about RF, even if they are licensed for tens-of-Watts and you are an unlicensed, must-accept-interference consumer.

> hurricane hugo

That was a disaster. The insurance companies, like Allstate, couldn't afford to pay all of the claims so they lied and cheated their way out of the vast majority of them. When Hugo hit, I lived between Florence and Conway. All of the homes in our neighborhood had damage. About a fourth were so damaged they were later torn down. The head of our HOA worked for Allstate, so most of us in the neighborhood had Allstate since he was a great guy. After Allstate refused to pay a single valid claim, he ended-up leaving town. The town him and his wife were from, where both sets of his children's grandparents live, and where he had a business he had grown for over thirty-five years. While we all hated how Allstate screwed nearly the entire neighborhood out of our houses, Allstate screwed his family out of their lives.

You're in good hands, with Allstate.

Well, you're on the right path: Pale Moon doesn't have pdf functionality OOTB. Look for and destroy a pdf.js in your profile directory, perhaps? Because whatever you have isn't getting updated, and according to TFS, that can be a problem from time to time.....

And yes, again: Firefox's pdf viewer is disgusting. Gmail's JS-based viewer actually provides presentable documents, and they seem to even print OK, but Firefox's interpretation of pdf (IN THE SAME BROWSER!) reminds me of the early days of Ghostscript, or maybe even Freetype -- a million years ago, before they got the kerning right. Or even close. At all.

So Myanmar is the metric version of Burma?

I have three access points at my house: One on the second floor, one in the basement, and one in the garage. (The AP in the garage is a repeater, with a hacked router doing bridged client mode (not wasteful WDS) wired to another hacked router being a simple access point.)

I didn't always have to do this: Back before the neighbors all had Wifi and a million Wifi widgets all streaming Netflix and Youtube, I had reasonable coverage all over my house and yard with a single WRT54G with a parabolic beer can on one of its antennas.

But now I have to do this just to get a simple Pandora stream running reliably in the garage (20 feet from the house), much less the garden at the back of the lot.

I try to use it efficiently, with the radios only putting out enough power to do an effective job. I manage channels carefully, so that the most-used channel in the neighborhood is the one that is in the basement (where it radiates least), and the least-used channel is used in the garage (where it radiates most), to help mitigate co-channel interference. I always hard-wire my devices if they allow me to do so, to keep wireless spectrum available -- even though I rent (old houses can be ridiculously easy to non-permanently cable).

But when I can sit in my living room and see 17 access points that don't belong to me, with manufacturer-default SSIDs, I know I'm amidst hordes of folks who are using the spectrum for fixed devices: The streaming box by the TV, the old desktop in the kid's bedroom that does Youtube livestreams 8 hours a day -- that sort of thing.

And that's just inefficient use of the spectrum. Fixed devices should be wired if at all possible: Period.

If pre-terminated cat5 cables were cheaper (and I know that quality cables can be very cheap indeed, but they're pretty bloody expensive at Wal-Mart), I think I'd see a bit less of this problem. When it comes to buying a $20 wire to hook up the Fire TV to the 75Mbps modem, or buy a pizza to go with that streaming movie: It seems that most buy the pizza.

I can't say that I blame them. But I roll my own wires, or buy the $2 Chinese imports from deepsurplus.com which seem to be as good as anything else, so I get pizza -and- high-quality streaming -and- improve spectral efficiency of the neighborhood.

Oh look, somebody else who apparently doesn't understand how computers work. How do you expect to stop a program[me] from changing a setting in another program[me] when they both run under the same privileges? Chrome has to store its default search provider configuration somewhere. The Java installer can edit that "somewhere" and change the stored configuration. Even if Chrome stores its search configuration in "the cloud", the installer could just use Chrome's cached credentials to change the configuration there.

The only way to change this is if apps don't have the ability to interact with each other's data (something like the isolation/sandboxing used for mobile apps). Anything else, any setting that you (the user) can change, any software running on your behalf can change (whether you want it to or not). I'd expect readers of this site to be able to grasp that, but it keeps coming up so maybe not...