My impression was that Stansted was at least an hour's ride from anywhere that I wanted to be. Now, if you happen to live there (and lots of folks do) it might work out.

I'm a little scared about flying on Ryanair anyway. But then again, even Lufthansa screwed up with their discount airline.

I remember being in a train station in Italy and seeing a train for Egypt. NY to SFO is 2915 miles, about 60 hours driving (I did it in that long, a long time ago) and theoretically 10 hours on a Japan-class high speed rail and 6 hours for a flight plus 3 for logistics. So given that the rail is city-to-city and has an hour for departure logistics and 15 minutes for arrival logistics, it's not that far apart. Now, put a shower on the train and a full-recline bed and I'm sold.

I just drove the I-5 all of the way from LA to San Francisco yesterday as I'd brought a carful of test equipment to an engineer there. I didn't fly because of the freight I had, but in general train transport is better for carrying a lot of baggage. Less handling, less fees for freight.

Also, planes can't compete when there's a good high-speed rail, because of their logistical complications. Airports are usually far from town and require their own train to get to. Nobody takes a plane instead of Eurostar. While Southwest will survive on its many other routes, their SFO to LAX route is doomed.

Having traveled extensively in Europe, and having enjoyed never having to use a car and rarely needing a plane because their trains are so fast, cheap, and efficient, I marvel at the idiocy of our citizens, it's not the government's fault, in not having insisted on keeping and improving rail since the 40's. Americans are total retards about this, they can't ever have any excuse.

What I am getting from the videos is that this test was a success but that there was indeed an engine failure and the system recovered from it successfully by throttling off the opposing engine. There was less Delta-V than expected, max altitude was lower than expected, downrange was lower than expected, and that tumble after trunk jettison and during drogue deploy looked like it would have been uncomfortable for crew.

This is the second time that SpaceX has had an engine failure and recovered from it. They get points for not killing the theoretical crew either time. There will be work to do. It's to be expected, this is rocket science.

It sounds to me like the launch engineers were rattled by the short downrange and the launch director had to rein them in.

They might not be programming languages per se, but I've spent a lot of time with autohotkey, NSIS, apple applescript and the like. The one thing all of these have in common is quick, clean looking applications with a narrow degree of focus; automation and deployment.

I've done some pretty nice tricks with them, mostly from a IT side of things. I've done a few applications with autohotkey. One startup I worked at couldn't really customize their helpdesk system, but wanted more info from tickets. I made a nice little app that took it from editing a txt file, to a few tabs of checkboxes, radio buttons, etc that would copy the answers to the clipboard.

Automator has helped me tons, especially when creating apple accounts. I started with a script I found, and I've been customizing it for our own needs within the company. We have a few services that only have a web interface to administrate them. Using the appleIDautomator script as a base, I've been able to tweak it to set these up as well.

Finally did an active directory rollout a few weeks back and needed to bundle meraki, bit9, and forsit's profile migrator. Bundled all 3 setups in NSIS. I've done even better installers than that with NSIS. I took a 7 server JBOSS application, bundled mysql, apache, etc and made an installer that even did CRC checks on the files post install. Meh, it did all kinds of crazy stuff, changed the machine name, added entries to the hosts file. It cut the install time down from 40 hours to 4.

Unlike internal combustion engines, electric brushless motors can last pretty much forever. Drivetrain wear is probably the #1 reason cars depreciate in value. If there's no wear, there's no depreciation.

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.

OK, I will try to restate in my baby talk since I don't remember this correctly.

Given that you are accelerating, the appearance to you is that you are doing so linearly, and time dilation is happening to you. It could appear to you that you reach your destination in a very short time, much shorter than light would allow. To the outside observer, however, time passes at a different rate and you never achieve light speed.

I am having an equally hard time thinking of how Earth is more habitable than Mars while atomic bombs are going off or impactors are impacting. If you wait a while, sure it's more habitable than Mars. But for that moment, no.

I get these every damn day. You would think these folks might take the time to look at where I live (it's on my resume) and compare that to where they want me to work. Never happens.

To an outside observer. I don't think it's the same in the inertial frame.

Before we call this real, we need to put one on some object in orbit, leave it in continuous operation, and use it to raise the orbit by a measurable amount large enough that there would not be argument regarding where it came from. The Space Station would be just fine. It has power for experiments that is probably sufficient and it has a continuing problem of needing to raise its orbit.

And believe me, if this raises the orbit of the Space Station they aren't going to want to disconnect it after the experiment. We spend a tremendous amount of money to get additional Delta-V to that thing, and it comes down if we don't.

Thanks!

Brian Webb isn't listing this on his Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule yet. I think he's going to wait until someone official tells him a date.

With some optimism that might only be thousands of years rather than hundreds of Millions.

But it's only necessary for Earth to be uninhabitable for a short time to end the Human race. And that can happen due to man or nature, today. If people aren't somewhere else during that process, that's the end.