I really enjoyed this commentary. An extract:

"Eighteen months ago, after the slap-stick bumbling and embarrassing forelock pulling by New Zealand authorities to their United States counterparts was revealed, I was moved to wonder if Dotcom was in fact a computer virus, slowly infecting our senior politicians and agencies of state, and transforming them into figures of fun.

Whether he is a virus, or a puckish imp, sent by the gods to mock those who would rule over us, Dotcom continues his uncanny facility to bring out the ridiculous in them."

Wherever you stand on his legal issues, business ventures and politics, he is great entertainment.

In the above book, a Martian space elevator fails (more specifically, is induced to fail by the deliberate application of high explosives.) The result is highly destructive. The Martian equator is no longer an imaginary line, but rather a prominent physical feature.

There are plenty of scientists out there who poach free online data sets and mine them for additional findings.

And this is a good thing, despite your word "poach". Analyses which would not have occurred to the original experimenters get done, and we get more science for our money. For many big data projects (e.g. the human genome project, astronomical sky surveys), giving 'poaching' opportunities is the primary purpose of the project.

A former boss of mine once, when reviewing a paper, sent a response which was something like this:

"This paper should absolutely be published. The analysis is completely wrong, but it is a wonderful data set, and somebody will quickly publish a correct analysis once the data is available."

Now I need to stop wasting time on /. and return to my work in hand, which, as it happens, is 'poaching' data from
Ingman, M., H. Kaessmann, S. Paabo, and U. Gyllenstern. 2000.
Mitochondrial genome variation and the origin of modern humans. Nature 408:708--713.

I'm not comparing non-reusable rocket to reusable rocket. I'm comparing reusable rocket which returns to launch pad with reusable rocket which lands downrange of launch pad.

Other replies I have (above) say they do indeed intend to land back at the actual launch site.

Maybe the 'boost back' is just while they're developing the system, and 'land at Kennedy' is the long term plan.

OK, so I'm officially amazed.

Fuel is cheap when it is sitting in a tank on the ground. Fuel at 100 km altitude and 5km/s speed is a very different story. Fuel which you keep in stage I for 'boost back' is fuel you aren't using to put your payload into orbit, meaning you have lower maximum payload.

A parachute doesn't solve the problem of your stage being hundreds of km downrange from the launch site. A parachute can help in any of my three proposed scenarios. (I think you'd need to jettison the parachute and drop for a bit before firing the rockets, because I don't think you want to try to land while attached to or entangled in a chute. This is what Curiosity did on Mars.)

Nice idea, but they are landing something that looks like a pencil on its end. They need somewhere rock solid to put it down.

Ha! I'm going to beat him to it. I just need to steal some super-rare crystals stored at Los Alamos first, to complete my shrink ray. And a white kitten.

How does this work? The rocket will have gone far down range before the first stage separates.

* First stage reverses direction and comes back. Very fuel expensive, I'd be amazed if they're planning this.
* First stage does one 'orbit' (technically it would still be 'sub-orbital') and returns to launch site from opposite direction. Requires that the stage has sufficient energy, and requires some cross-range maneuvering unless you launch from the equator.
* Summary is incorrect, and stage landing site is not the launch site.

In any case, you really want your landing site to be in the middle of nowhere because some failure modes will result in a high energy impact.

I tried a couple of Honor Harringtons but gave up in disgust at the author's political strawmanning.

In those books, a character can't be pacifist without also being cowardly, hypocritical, corrupt and Machiavellian. Only characters who adhere to a particular militaristic mindset can be good people. Although they were otherwise mostly good, this aspect killed my enjoyment.

Also, one chapter started with a short paragraph which managed to gratuitously specify about eight statistics on some (real current world) handgun. I think it was the worst paragraph I've ever read in professional fiction.

My first cell phone (c. 2004) was a hand-me-down of a hand-me-down. It got dumped in recycling when they shut down the cell tower network it relied on.

Second phone was bought new, but close to cheapest available at the time. (It could send and receive text messages!) It got accidentally left in an airport.

Third phone was similarly cheap and new and is my current phone. It has a colour display! And a camera!

I've just been handed-down an Android phone a few days ago but haven't had time to try it out yet.

I'm intending to keep the previous phone anyhow. My internet banking uses text messages for two factor authentication. It is handy to have something too dumb to run malware.

P.S. In /. beta, I couldn't see any comments to the poll. I'm allowing scripts from slashdot.org and fsdn.com.

Here was I thinking they'd released a Minecraft clone.

I had a house-mate once who was a (non-UK) law enforcement officer, and he talked about "moving surveillance" (i.e. trailing suspects in a car.) They'd typically have three cars in such an operation, so that they could take turns being close to the suspect without arousing suspicion.

He said that according to the law, officers fully obeyed road laws during such an operation, but unofficially, it was impossible to do so. Once he got pulled over by a traffic cop, who, seeing his radio, maps etc. and badge, profusely apologized and sent him back on his way.

I imagine that moving surveillance is what they are envisioning 'spies' using this power for, rather than using an Aston Martin to chase an assassin motorcyclist through a built-in-middle-ages town on market day.

I do think it is better to recognize the reality of the situation, then you can put regulations and guidelines around what is and is not acceptable. You can't issue guidelines on how to handle a situation you pretend doesn't exist.