As far as I know, the only purpose of the barge is for technical development; the ultimate goal is return to launch site. I have no citation for this, but my intuition is that he won't try to deal with the Falcon Heavy boosters until the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy core are reliably returning to base and possibly even being reused.

The launch profile shouldn't change all that much for the Falcon Heavy; it's just sending more mass to the places Falcon 9 goes today.

It's not a secure password unless it is randomly generated. There are tricks you can use to make it more memorable, like using diceware instead of characters and numbers, but fundamentally if you came up with it, someone else can guess how you came up with it.

Eh.. launch vehicles are already an inverted-pendulum problem; I don't think the guidance and navigation would be an issue. I suspect the thrusters, even that size, simply don't have the necessary control authority. Besides, the ultimate goal is landing on land, so you're better off getting the rocket to be able to handle it itself. I'm sure it will be a lot easier to convince the powers that be that they can land on land safely when they can demonstrate doing it on a floating barge a few times.

That's the video from the previous attempt, which the OP was already referencing. There's no video from this attempt yet, just a couple pictures. Musk has already said we have to wait until the Just Read the Instructions returns to port for video.

This. I also use a separate diceware password for my primary email. That way if someone does manage to break/steal my password manager database, I still have secure and sole access to my email, which many sites will require for you to re-gain control of your account.

For what, +1 Irrational Fear? Seems like that should be -1 to me. You won't see ubiquitous self-driving cars until the system is better than meat-popsicle cars. Once that happens, the rational argument flips: "do you want some incompetent person driving a hunk of steel on a road near where your child plays? *shudder* Think of what would happen if that human had to react to something!"

Sure, you could say you don't think self-driving cars will ever be safer than meat-popsicle cars, but that's like saying "640 kB ought to be enough for anybody". Technology is advancing at a staggering pace, and these systems are only getting better and more reliable.

Yes. In fact hopefully it is (much) faster, since the self-driving cars will be so much more reliable than meat-popsicle cars.

First, a person can't instantly recognize anything. We have significantly longer reaction times than computer systems. If a child and a dog run out into the street at the same time, a self-driving car has a better chance of hitting neither of them. A human on the other hand will take a lot longer to start braking at all, and in all probability (if the time scales are so low), not actually put any thought or reasoning behind their reaction, they will just try to swerve out of the way, possibly resulting in both being hit.

I wouldn't really like to be liable for those things, but I wouldn't really like to be liable if I did them either. That said, you are absolutely correct in that there are deep legal questions to be answered before we can have ubiquitous self-driving cars. At first blush it seems like the manufacturers are the correct place to put the liability, as in a properly designed system, the only input the driver should have is the destination. You can obviously expect them to fight tooth and nail to not take on this liability, though. It's a very interesting question, but let's actually try to answer it instead of just saying it doesn't work in the currently existing legal framework.

That's one possibility yes, but the reason for it would be to keep the dangerous meat-popsicle cars away from the much safer, much faster, much more efficiently packed autonomous cars.

I see you don't watch the news. Trains derail all the time, wrecking much of their cargo, sometimes spilling nasty chemicals.

So what you are proposing is... a train network. That seems to have worked out incredibly well. Sarcasm aside, it absolutely has for its use-case, but you still see millions of single-occupant cars on the road every day for a reason; that's not going away.

Try digging into this list, you might be able to find something relevant through there.

That's why SpaceX is planning to put these satellites into a lower orbit at around 1200 km.

Collecting the waste heat of the exhaust is a great idea. Except in a standard car you wouldn't particularly care about getting electricity out, so you would want to feed that energy back into the propulsion system somehow... hmm, sounds exactly like a turbocharger.

I've long since abandoned Firefox, but Thunderbird is still my email client of choice. The closest competitor in the Windows ecosystem is Postbox, and it's based on Thunderbird anyway.

This.. this is... genius!! I would pay real currency for a theatrical cut, director's cut, and Kip Thorne's cut of Interstellar!

TortoiseSVN already does this. It uses the hooks in Office to create what is basically a "track-changes" copy, where previous version is the base, and new version is if you accept all changes. This is about as good as it gets to diffing Word files, and flows logically with how they were intended to be used in businesses anyway. It will do the same for Excel, but it's... a monster that should never be allowed to live.