Some kid, hearing his slashdot-reading parents discuss this, decides to "play doctor" and stuffs his little brother into a trash bag? The industry will have to react by poking air-holes in all plastic bags. Wait, they do that already! Every new zip-top sandwich bag I fill with liquid seems to come pre-perforated.

Wouldn't it be easier to make a Kakapo-scented TRAP?

If you can't get rid of the predators, at least help the predators select out their taste for Kakapo

Offenders can't stop. They're all afraid of Amazon's one-click patent.

BTW, the link will take you to a website where you will be asked if you want to see the patent, and if you click yes, you'll go to a page that lists several patents (along with lots of ads), and if you choose the right link, you might get to see the patent. Good luck.

But according to TFA...

Do you want your local supermarket to "get the hint" and stop selling toilet paper?

Just because they didn't want to lift a finger to do something as simple as dial a telephone, that doesn't mean they need to ban it for the rest of us. The Senate is FAMOUS for passing laws that affect them (or affect everyone except them - you know, we get Social Security, they get a really sweet pension).

If they deem a website to be "bad", I have no problem with them blocking it from their own servers, but leave me alone. I can block things at my router quite easily, thank you. Should I be afraid that the Senate will try to ban toilet paper, because they can't manage to wipe their own asses?

I looked at all the videos available for the flight. It is obvious that the flapping is maintaining flight - if he just started gliding at the release point, there is no way the flight would have been as long. This is probably the best view, and it also lets you hear what this thing sounds like when it flaps.

Yeah, I get it. Popcorn in the Sea of tranquility, Re-heated Pizza in the Ocean of Storms, and a nice cup of tea in the Messier crater. Microwave map of the moon, indeed!

Hmmm, the link looks like it has been slashdotted, but since it says "archives," it might not even be the right one. Maybe they meant this one?

As inspiring as the STS program was, it's time to move on. Thinking about a craft that weighs several thousand tons being used to move crew and cargo into space on the same ride just doesn't make sense. We can send an unmanned cargo ship into orbit quite easily, without needing all of the protection that a "human cargo" would require. Having a tiny Orion spacecraft bring the people makes a lot more sense.

How did we get into the "combined crew & cargo" paradigm? Perhaps it was because of the difficulty in providing unmanned vessels that made it to the specified destination, or perhaps it was because the Gemini and Apollo astronauts really hated being compared to the "chimp in a suit" and forced NASA's to put people on every ship.

I'll just be glad when I see something smaller than a double-wide mobile home being used to ferry the humans into space.

I bought a Peek a couple of months ago. It has filled a need for me quite well. Even though the original device and software was a bit rough, it did the job. The company has been releasing beta versions of a new firmware for a while, and this week they announced new HW as well (although the real news is in the new firmware). I thought others would want to know about this device, because I can't be the only one who needs to keep in touch via email and SMS, and doesn't want a pricey data plan to do it.

If that's spam, fine. I thought it was a worhtwhile announcement, so I brought it to /.

It seems as though Crunchgear Ubergizmo, Engadget and other sites thought it was worth mentioning.

I have no financial interest in Peek, other than the $10/month I send to them for my service

"Baptize an alien?" I guess they had to drop the old euphemism - "nail an altar boy in the rectory."

and I can get out of all those volunteer jobs they make us parents do at our kids' school? Sweet!

But when you catch the "track" to gain orbital velocity, wouldn't that just decay the track's orbit? You'd have to keep adding energy to the "track." I thought the rail gun concept was trying to avoid having to generate all that energy in space (thereby avoiding the need to launch all that extra weight)?

built alongside the crawlerway? Just when I thought real estate prices in the Space Coast of Florida couldn't drop any lower, now we have sonic booms being generated at ground level just a couple miles from Merritt Island and Cocoa Beach.

In related news, I just opened "Space Coast Window Repair."

According to TFA, the sled will be "hitting speeds of about Mach 10." That's fast, but then the TFA says, "electric tracks catapult rollercoaster riders daily at theme parks. But those tracks call for speeds of 60 mph -- enough to thrill riders, but not nearly fast enough to launch something into space. The launcher would need to reach at least 10 times that speed"

Sorry, but 10x roller coaster speeds isn't close to Mach 10.

NASA is on to something interesting here. It would seem that MagLev is required (no wheels can handle that speed), and it would be interesting to see what kind of acceleration they can get out of LIM's. Rocket propulsion seems a waste in this application. It might help bullet-train technology, and we can get some new spin-off inventions from NASA.

No, I don't think De Beers will be funding NASA. They may start blowing up any attempts to get into space. They might even want to take out the ISS (and as anyone who has seen Congo can tell you, with De Beers' massive diamond-powered lasers, the ISS is a sitting duck!) You see, they already have enough (should I say more than enough) diamonds. They just have to stop everyone else from getting access to diamonds, which would cause the price to fall.