There's only one thing learned from the Shuttle debacle. Namely, don't let NASA build and fly its own launch vehicle.

The shuttle was a bit of a boondoggle, but you are blaming NASA, when in all honesty it had many congress-critters and Air-force fingers involved in its design and deployment. It's rather disingenuous to place all the decision responsibility solely in the hands of NASA.

Guess I'll jump in and say my goodbyes as well. Been a long time lurker from almost the beginning. Truely a day to remember. Thanks for the good times and memories taco.

P.S. As the reactors in Fukushima demonstrated, the pilots don't even have to target the reactor building to achieve their objective.

I wasn't aware Fukushima was hit by a Cessna. I'll have to try my Google-foo to find more info on that.

-90% of German (or American) plants would not withstand impact of a plane bigger than a Cessna

False:
In the United States, the design and thickness of the containment and the missile shield are governed by federal regulations (10 CFR 50.55a), and must be strong enough to withstand the impact of a fully loaded passenger airliner without rupture. http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part050/part050-0055a.html/

The very fact that the Drake equation got you to discuss its particulars in detail is evidence that it is not entirely useless.

you can grow an ounce worth about $6000/> Cop math?

You don't think building a satellite that can withstand the harshness of space, using the best tech that was available at the time back before the 2004 launch date, (it was built long before then) and results are still being evaluated, and .... there was no foresight??? Wow. Seems to me there were some smart cookies that work on these things and they thought a lot of this through as best they could using "decades of research and testing" to their best advantage. Oh, that's right, its USA, bash on.

I was rather curios about the 'dead code' elimination... That would seem to me to be one of the first things to go solve, if nothing is pointing to that particular code portion, simply do not compile it. I must be missing something where that would not be one of the first targets to eliminate.

Hmm, yea I forgot about that award. Already have it, but might as well get a refresh on that one.

Their chat client is king in Asia. I have no idea how they make money on that though. I have gmail for personal/friends, but still use my yahoo mail for my business and spam accounts. The community games section seems popular too, again I have no idea how that makes money.

I still read slashdot in classic mode. Even got an email from them asking for commentary. I keep trying the 2.0, but it just isn't as good as the classic system.

OT: My login did that yesterday, now it is back to classic discussion again today.

I was really thinking of a 'Phone Home' system. I've been stuck with the task of licensing software before, and I had to be honest with management (showing them how many DRM systems have been broken before) that all licensing systems rely on security through obscurity in the end... since you have to give them the software/content to begin with. That was rather uncomfortable for me, but it was the honest truth. I didn't really have a comment regarding chip producers, so maybe I'm off-topic on that idea.