Many of my problems with Into Darkness had to do with problems with the film itself, rather than as a Star Trek fan. Now, I've still got problems with it as a Star Trek film, but more on the level that they poorly copied something existing instead of coming up with something new. I think that the elements that they copied didn't work because they were trying to force many of them in for the purpose of making references rather than to make the film work. Even then, that's not really a problem because I'm a fan, it's a problem because of lack of originality, something not unique to Trek.

My main problems, though, were that they decided to fill the film with too much deus ex machina. It's like they wrote themselves into corners, and then decided to just do crazy stuff to resolve it that didn't make much sense, or that seem like they didn't think through the plot consequences. Like the whole "Did they just cure death with the magic blood? So death isn't a problem going forward?" issue.

That's not bad Trek, that's bad film-making.

Musk has stated that due to lack of geographic obstructions, there could be up to an order of magnitude less hops in space while passing the signal from satellite to satellite. Of course, that assumes that the routing latency in the satellites is similar to a traditional router.

I was referring to the mirror episodes, not the series in general.

Let me know when I can call up NASA for a ride to space that I can afford on the salary of a software developer and then I'll care about the negative implications of the private sector developing ultra-cheap spaceflight.

These are low-earth orbit satellites. Musk says he's expecting latency around 20-30ms. That's much higher than DSL or cable are capable of, but should be low enough for twitch gaming.

The satellites aren't very far away, and light travels much faster in vacuum than through fibre optic cable.

So, having never seen the original episode that they're continuing, you don't really have any basis for comparison, then, do you? You've just seen a bunch of spinoff stuff that didn't live up to the original.

I found episode 1 a bit iffy, but episode 3 (the mirror-mirror continuation) was much better. I haven't had a chance to watch episode 2 yet.

One satellite per $10 million launch (what Virgin is claiming with their network), or ten satellites per $60 million launch (what SpaceX is actually doing with Iridium NEXT). Which one is costing less per satellite?

While true, a good chunk of the PC market and all of the mobile market is going through DRM protected solutions such as Steam.

The 5% was including both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Their marketshare has tanked in the recent past, and it's likely that people were only using them because they were free. Once free alternatives like Google Docs came around that better integrated with other stuff users were doing, the free desktop office suites took a big hit.

I prefer Tassimo :P

The Office Open XML format (ending in .docx for word documents) is supported by Microsoft Office 2007 (released in 2006) and newer, as well as OpenOffice. In order to find a release of Office that doesn't support it, you'd have to go back to Office 2003.

Unfortunately, as of a little over a year ago, Office 2003 was still in use by ~28% of businesses. Of course, there's overlap, so 85% also used Office 2010.

Notably, OpenOffice's marketshare has crashed. The same statistics show that it was at 13% usage in 2011, and 5% usage in 2013. It seems to have been largely replaced by cloud solutions, since things like Google Docs has the primary feature that most people used OpenOffice for: the price.

Proprietary formats can't be universally judged as good or bad. There are plenty of counter-examples in both directions. For example, the lack of DRM in the Atari 2600 killed the videogame industry by allowing a huge flood of low quality games to flood the market, and the presence of DRM in the NES revived it by allowing Nintendo to act as a gatekeeper to stop that from happening.

It has landing legs. When it hits at a 45 degree angle (that's a lot more than "slightly wrong"), the legs on that side break and the engine assembly smashes into the landing pad.

SpaceX is putting six Orbcomm G2 satellites in orbit per F9 launch, and they're putting ten Iridium NEXT satellites in orbit per F9 launch. Neither set of launches seem to be anywhere close to mass limited, which would indicate possible cost saving measures when building the satellites (you can build them a bit heavier if it saves money or increases on-orbit endurance).

What the actual limit per launch is, I don't know, but it's demonstrably much higher than two satellites. I suspect it would be more limited by the number of times the second stage can reliably relight, or how much delta v each satellite is capable of after release.