Yes, you're the only one. What is this DC-X you're talking about?

Kidding. I was there at White Sands for the first public flight. Freaking amazing seeing a rocket launch, climb out, ... and then just stop, hanging in the air exactly the same way, as Douglas Adams would put it, that bricks don't. Translated sideways and then landed.

A bunch of the DC-X folks later went to work for Blue Origin where New Shepherd does something similar (but higher). As TFA mentions, SpaceX's own Grasshopper also did that in the early Falcon days.

Nobody wants to launch on D-4H because it's as expensive as hell, several times what a Falcon costs. The goal for Starship is to launch in the price range of a Falcon-9, and then bring that cost even lower (because the only thing expended will be fuel).

As far as payloads, SpaceX alone has thousands of Starlink satellites to launch. A cluster of 60 maxes out a Falcon-9, so Starship will reduce the cost for those.

Starship will succeed if all it does is launch Starlink satellites, because SpaceX is going to make a boatload of money off it's LEO internet system.

Telnet is not a tty serial connection.

You can do telnet over a serial connection (eg, using SLIP), but they're different things. It's also not uncommon (or wasn't in the past) to have some kind of ethernet-to-serial box so you could do those "tty only" diagnostics remotely (but that's not what they're talking about).

TFS says telnet, above poster says tty. So which was it?

For those wondering, since it didn't appear in TFS anywhere. The exact rate today is 1 SFr = $0.99, it's been sliding a bit over the past month.

By comparison, the US $1000 bill hasn't been printed since 1945, and although technically still legal tender, was officially withdrawn in 1969 (which means the Fed started destroying such bills turned in by banks). They're worth more than face value to collectors.

Not really. First Sale Doctrine applies. If I buy a physical copy of a book, I can give or sell it to somebody else, but then I won't have it any more. It's even legal to "edit" the book by marking it up or cutting and pasting and then to sell that modified physical copy.

Some textbook publishers have gone to some great lengths to get around this, everything from trying to ban the import of used copies from other countries, to publishing new "editions" with almost nothing changed but the end-of-chapter questions or links to a website they can make obsolete annually.

Yep. A lot of Amazon Kindle content is DRM-free also, but not all. My books are all DRM-free, but there's no obvious flag in the sales page details (you have to interpret what it means by unlimited devices, lending enabled, etc).

Calibre is a pretty good program for both converting ebooks between formats and managing your collection.

So you shine the blue light at the surface, and slowly lower a platform into the resin. A technique which I'm sure is already in use. (It's analogous to selective laser sintering ... hard to shine a laser through metal powder.)

Although, on my home machines I never left. Firefox isn't perfect, but at least it lets me run NoScript.

Just as well. A browser monoculture, whether the old IE or the new Chrome, is and was never a good thing, however much web developers might think so.

While not perfect, it seems to me that a filtering proxy would take care of a lot of ads, at least those from 3rd party ad-servers.

Not quite. It was insulating foam falling off the tank.

Nobody thought that would be a problem, because foam, right? Unless that foam happens to get accelerated by a 500 MPH relative windstream.

Who gave you the idea that Republicans were libertarian? Democrats?

Both sides slander libertarians; they don't want an effective third party.

Gilligan, little buddy, is that you?

"The conclusion was very, very strong just from looking at this picture that these objects had been ejected from the central galaxy, and that they were initially at high redshift,

Were that the case, shouldn't we also be seeing ejected objects with a high blueshift? Why are they preferentially being ejected away from us?

This is probably a stupid question because I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet, but why would you want a 000 file? That's just an inode and a chunk of disk space that can't be used for anything.

Oh. It still has attributes. It can be used for something.
Never mind.

The kind who edits the stuff he gets paid for, but doesn't worry too much about unpaid postings on Slashdot.

While it's true that anyone who has been paid even a penny for their writing could call themselves a professional writer, there are bodies who vet their memberships for a certain minimum income and quality of publication. Not that I care what you think, but for others who might, I'm an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, SFWA, (which has professional requirements for membership), and of the Colorado Authors' League (ditto).

Of course if you've been around the business long enough, (I doubt you have, with your high six-digit number), you might recall my name from the masthead of Byte Magazine, as Contributing Editor, Software.

Cheers.