White Sands Missile Range is right next to the Spaceport America and has 4,000 square miles of uninhabited desert. The Army tests rockets there all the time, and sometimes closes highway 70 (which passes through the range) when they do. Since the goal of cheaper launch costs is something the miltary would find useful, I am pretty sure Spacex could come to an agreement to do some testing using the range. Before talking to the Army, Spacex would probably want to run several real tests at sea, where they would expect the landings to fail until wthe worked out all of the bugs with the aerodynmics, winds, etc. Not so much to ensure you can land on a ship, but to ensure you can land within a few miles of where you want to. If you can do that, there are lots of places you can land.

The funny thing about Sandy, is that the Capitol Weather Gang correctly predicted it about a week in advance, based on a very similar storm in 1878. We didn't quite as many SUVs nor coal plants back then.

I mean, I understand the PHB/corporate group think that thinks this useful, but why, when I can get a perfectly good non-DRM official Keurig from amazon for less than I would pay for a Keurig 2.0? And no, it is not some discontinued model, it is the #1 best seller on Amazon.

You mean like Wonko the Sane, who also lives in California? According to ancient legends, when Wonko saw instructions on how to use a toothpick on a packet of toothpicks, he became convinced that the world had gone crazy and so built the house as an asylum for it, with the insides and outsides reversed. Apparently he also received a fishbowl from the Dolphins before they left.

Right here.

You mean VI, the notepad for Unix? Since it is by default installed on pretty much every Unix system, including Macs, I would say it is cross platform. It is even easy to get for Windows. As far as stability goes, it has never crashed in the 20+ years I have used it on any platform. An it is easy to replace. All you have to do install another editor, i.e. sudo apt-get install emacs.

I don't think the command line is an issue. I don't think instructing a user to open a terminal and issue commands is any harder than having them open regedit and add obscure keys.

The really sweet spot is a well designed GUI configuration utility which allows you to generate approriate command line scripts to allow the configuration to be duplicated. Unfortunately, this is rare in the Unix world and non-existent in Windows.

Compared to GUIs, command line interfaces are stable. I am still using commands for 20+ years ago to adminster modern systems, while the recent "upgrade" to Win7/2008 has made so many changes to the interface that it seems like I have to relearn it each time I use it.

Windows has its own version of shellshock in CMD.EXE C:\Usersl>set foo=bar^&ping -n 1 google.com
C:\Usersl>echo %foo%
bar

Pinging google.com [74.125.228.105] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 74.125.228.105: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=250

Ping statistics for 74.125.228.105:
Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 8ms, Maximum = 8ms, Average = 8ms
C:\Users>
Unlike Linux, I don't think this has been patched.

In Linux, the killer feature is that each desktop has a separate taskbar. I once had several major migrations running from my workstation, and had a separate deskop named for each one of them. This feature made keeping track of the tasks in each project much easier.

In TOS, if watch The Doomsday Machine episode, it is obvious that the the damage Constellation had was caused by something like a lighter. There is some debate as to whether the model was actually one of those Revell models we used to get as kids at the local Gemco, or if it was the crappiest version of the full scale models. Given that it would be easier to generate those kinds of burns on a smaller Revell model, I would guess the former.

I once had a computer which did that, a Commodore 64. I am pretty sure most others at that time were that way too. The whole "store the O/S on a R/W hard drive" was an IBM PC/Microsoft idea, as were viruses.

A ROM based system with Ubuntu or Knoppix would be pretty sweet for surfing teh Interwebs.

In other words, stop buying shit made in China. If enough people do that then even the 1% will listen. Even in the US, it is still easy to find shit made here - you just have to look. And most of the the time the price is about the same and the quality is better.

I mean, isn't all of Apples shit made in China anyway? That would be like the US government banning GM cars.

How is that different than any other member of congress?

I'm guessing that less than 2% of you know probably what the heck I'm talking about here.

Missed it by THAT much? Agent 86 once said that after he almost shot his dick off. I wonder if he ever screwed Agent 99? Man, I used to think she was hot. And the Cone of Silence? I saw a real one in action while on jury duty once. The judge lowered this stupid contraption when he was talking with the lawyers. It made this white noise which gave everyone headaches but I had no problem hearing their entire conversation from the other side of the room...