Columbia's demise was based on something that most folks figured would not ever happen

I think a more accurate statement would be that foam shedding and damage to the orbiter improperly became a normal and accepted consequence of flight prior to both the Challenger and Columbia accidents, just like the O-ring erosion and failure-to-seal issues were known to be a problem as far back as 1977 but weren't considered a big enough deal by management to halt the program until the new joints could be implemented. In both cases, concerns with the possibility of the failure modes eventually observed were brought to management and dismissed.

A couple of years after the accident, Charlie Bolden said, "I spent fourteen years in the space program flying, thinking that I had this huge mass that was about five or six inches thick on the leading edge of the wing. And, to find after Columbia that it was fractions of an inch thick, and that it wasn't as strong as the Fiberglas on your Corvette, that was an eye-opener, and I think for all of us ... the best minds that I know of, in and outside of NASA, never envisioned that as a failure mode."

Really? Was there really no one in the entire organization involved with safety that knew how the damned thing was built?

They were testing a commercial craft, no different conceptually from the guys Boeing hires to give an aircraft fresh off the assembly line a quick spin around the sky.

Conceptually perhaps, but the devil is in the details. Kerosene is a *much* safer fuel to work with than what SS2 was using, and there are a whole bunch of other problems that can come into play when you're 60 miles up, having gotten there by flying almost 3,000 mph. It's not a very commonly explored flight envelope.

The red bull space dive thing just had a guy in a spacesuit.

You're right that we're not talking about a Mach 25+ reentry, but Baumgartner and Eustace jumped from less than half the altitude the Virgin craft will be reaching.

In fairness, I would say the guys who are flying these things know damned well what the risk is, and would fight tooth and nail for the opportunity to do it.

To me, it'd be a hell of a lot better to be able to say I died advancing the state of aeronautical science (whether for profit or not) rather than just fading away in a nursing home somewhere. At least something useful would be learned, and I'd feel that my death brought others some benefit.

Do you really think that Comcast hosts Akamai servers for free?

I've read that they do charge, and I've read that they don't. It's in their best interest to do so, unless you have a citation to the contrary.

They intentionally dumped this traffic on the connections of the ISPs who wouldn't give them free expansions, in hopes that the customer complaints would force their hand.

Except you're not telling the full story. Netflix was well aware of the potential congestion issues, and offered their to place their own CDN boxes at no cost to any ISP that asked in order to alleviate this. Comcast chose not to avail themselves of this offer, as they couldn't double-dip if they did.

You can't just ignore the entire OSI model like that, and the fact there's an application level request being sent from Comcast to Netflix for the traffic received DOES most definitely factor into it. That a layer 7 request/response is being implemented by means of layer 3 activity doesn't change the fact that the layer 7 request from Comcast was the ONLY reason that the subsequent Netflix traffic was generated and received.

The fact is that traditional peering simply doesn't work when dealing with hugely asymmetrical networks like the average ISP. Comcast isn't transiting the Netflix traffic to another network, they're routing it directly to a Comcast end customer. IMO this wouldn't be an issue if Netflix weren't competing with Comcast's own content offerings.

Kevin Beary, the former sheriff of Orange County, FL did something almost as bad a few years back. A lady wrote a letter to the local newspaper criticizing the department and him personally, and he looked her up in the state database to get her address, and sent a nastygram back to her. Of course he didn't face any responsibility for his actions, even though they were clearly in violation of federal law.

And the lady was right - he IS fat.

Rather, this is one case, where the only person to stand up against government surveillance spent 6 years in prison (plus lost his job and a lot of money paying for lawyers before that).

Plus Qwest almost certainly got blacklisted from certain government contracts as a result, if what Nacchio says is true.

"Innovation You Can Count On, But Too Many Pieces To Count"

Actually, it went boom, fell down, and we got a second boom for no added charge.

but there will be launch failures, most not at all related to politics

Unfortunately, one American launch failure that resulted in the loss of seven lives was completely due to internal politics.

Bennet should learn how to program and then add some value to the world, instead of giving opinions and hoping someone else will.

He actually can program, but the circumstances of his departure from Microsoft are still rather mysterious to me. Sorry Bennett, "Term. type: Voluntary" and "Term reason: Resignation" don't tell the whole story, especially when you haven't been any more forthcoming on the subject.

they will usually let you out of the contract as long as you do it as soon as the changes are made

Of course they do. You can't unilaterally make a material change to an existing contract and force the other party to abide by it. That's why they say "by continuing your service you indicate your agreement with the new terms".

If they advertise unlimited peanuts, and you ask for more peanuts, and they don't give you more peanuts, or they give you fewer peanuts than you can consume, then it is not unlimited peanuts.

They could also take an unreasonable amount of time to give you more peanuts, but given that there are a lot of restaurants that use this tactic with their AYCE offerings and none that I know of that have been successfully sued for it, it's still probably not a good example.