That's no moom...

Wait. What?

Yo momma's so fat, astronomers can use her to detect cosmic rays.

There we go. I knew there was a kitschy joke in there somewhere.

Ariane 1 - second and fifth launches failed
Ariane 2 - only 6 launches, first failed
Ariane 3 - fifth launch failed
Ariane 4 - eighth launch failed
Ariane 5 - first launch failed, two partial failures in first 11
Atlas A - only 8 launches, 5 failed
Atlas B - only 10 launches, 3 failed
Atlas C - only 6 launches, 2 failed
Delta - first launch failed
Delta II - first twelve successful, partial failure on the 42nd launch which substantially reduced the satellites operational lifespan (55th was first total failure)
Falcon 1 - only five launches, first three failed
Falcon 9 - first twelve launches successful, although a secondary payload on the fourth launch was aborted as a precaution
Long March 1 - only 2 launches, both successful
Long March 2 - first launch failed
Long March 3 - no complete failures in first 11, but 1 and 8 were partial failures
N-1 - only four launches, all failed horribly
Proton - third launch failed
Proton-K - second, third, fourth and sixth launches failed
Proton-M - eleventh launch failed
Saturn I - only ten launches, all successful
Saturn IB - only nine launches, all successful (unless you count Apollo 1 - it didn't launch but still killed three astronauts)
Saturn V - second launch (Apollo 6) failed, Apollo 13 doesn't count because it was a payload, not launcher, failure
Soyuz - third launch failed, with fatalities
Soyuz-U - seventh launch failed
Soyuz-FG - first twelve launches successful (all 46 to date completely successful, including lots and lots of astronauts delivered to ISS)
Space Shuttle - first twelve successful (19th was first partial failure (ATO), 25th was first full failure)
Titan I - fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth and tenth launches failed
Titan II - ninth and eleventh launches failed
Titan III - first and sixth launches failed
Titan IV - seventh launch failed
Zenit-2 - first and second launches failed

Falcon 9 will remain one of four until it beats (or fails to beat) Shuttle's record, probably sometime in 2016. Then it's likely to take many years to beat Delta II (which had a three decade head start). It may only beat Soyuz-FG if the Russians foul up, since they're still being launched quite regularly.

No, we won't.

This is a major fallacy of economic thinking that really needs to be put to bed. It isn't true. Thinking like this is the basis for the Trickle Down Theory of economics, which has been soundly falsified. No, we won't always want more. Unbridled all-consuming unsatisfiable greed is a neurosis. It is abnormal and very unusual. Adults who suffer from the condition are considered stunted, little more than children. Children are expected to grow out of it, if they ever go through that phase at all. If you always want more, everybody around you thinks there's something wrong with you, and will usually avoid being around you any more after a while.

Normal people, by definition most people, are satisfiable. And satisfiable without actually all that many resources, in the grand scheme of things. Yes we all want more than a 19th century standard of living, but that's because the ancient Romans had a better standard of living than most of the world in the 19th century. It didn't take much to do better than that. Our needs get satisfied in a hurry. A variety of food, some indoor plumbing, and a roof that doesn't leak covers most of it. Add on some form of personal transportation if you live in a large, mostly empty continent like North America, and you're done. The wants that go on top of that are actually quite minimal. Almost nobody has more than two cell phones, and the vast majority of the world has only one. Practically every type of consumer electronics and appliance follows the same pattern. People have one cell phone, one tablet, one laptop, one desktop (they forgot they had), one blender, one microwave, one toaster oven, one deep fryer. The only people who have six cell phones are neurotic or app developers (but I repeat myself).

Yes, once you have one of everything, you can just go bigger. But again, there are pretty serious upper limits. Most people don't want a 700 room palace on the order of Versailles. Even those who did had a tendency to stuff 3000 permanent residents into that space. Most people don't want their own yacht, let alone their very own cruise ship, or there would be many more yachts in the world. So it goes for every thing you can possess.

So no, most people won't always want more. Most people in developed nations are quite satisfied with what they have. Sure they dream about palaces and fleets of sports cars, but drop unlimited funds on their cringing heads and they still won't buy all that. They'd be uncomfortable trying to live in a palace.

People's needs can be trivially satisfied. People's wants can be easily satisfied. Whither now your broken economic system that requires unlimited growth?

Held against them or affect their careers? I don't read mainstream news or pay attention to celebrities, so when this story hit the Slashdot front page, I didn't recognize any of the names, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the people named are all pretty girls. I'm quite certain that in Hollywood, naked pictures of already famous pretty girls are only a help to their careers, not a hindrance. With the possible exception of Disney stars, but that's probably only momentary. They'll just sign with Sony instead.

All the false outrage over naked people is just that: false outrage. The rumor-mongering, scandal-spreading, gossip-loving general public laps this shit up and begs for more. It sells papers (metaphorically), it drives hits, it pushes up ratings, and a bunch of pretty girls are going to see their star currency ratings climb substantially for a while.

In the end, much sound and fury signifying nothing.

And in the case of properly utilized public/private key encryption, see both the sender and the recipient. You will need both private keys to decrypt the message. And no, the mail transport and storage host should not have either private key.

I don't see large numbers of people moving to seasteading, which is a much closer analogue to space settlement.

Having said that, I don't think any of the four destinations is any indication at all of the will present to move to such places. All four are very capital-intensive places to live, but with the massive concentration of wealth happening in the US and around the world, very few people with the will also have the capital to do anything about it. With respect to the fourth destination, space, only one person in the entire world has both the will and the capital: Elon Musk.

There may be hundreds of thousands, even millions, who are willing to risk the frontier, but only a handful of them are suicidal about it. They're the ones who signed up for a one way trip to Mars. The rest are aware that it takes a significant amount of money to do such a thing, and they're aware they don't have that kind of money.

Bullshit.

Density of gasoline: 0.73 kg/L
Typical gas tank capacity: 57 L
Typical number of fillups per year: 52

0.73 * 57 * 52 = 2200 kg/year.

Gasoline contains various different organic molecules starting from hexane and running up through decane. Hexane is C6H14, so the carbon makes up 84% of the mass. Octane is C8H18, so the carbon makes up 80% of the mass. Call it 82%.

A single average-sized car emits 1800 kg of carbon every year. Less than 2 metric tons.

Yeah, NSA is busy upgrading all their gear. They took out Charter earlier this week. Today it was Time Warner's turn. They'll get to Comcast in a day or two.

That would be the MBA who said no we can't afford to buy that much connectivity, cram it all through one connection. 'cause we need more PROFIT! MOAR!

I have no doubt at all that Oracle committed fraud and lied a lot. I have no doubt Oregon's project management failed to give adequate oversight to the project, failed to adequately specify the project, and repeatedly changed what little specification they provided.

Neither matters. I have no doubt this lawsuit will ultimately fail, because the Oregon attorney general doesn't have the technical ability to prove the fraud and lies. The state has already proven they don't understand what they're doing. We're about to get a second demonstration.

What corporate shills? SpaceX is not publicly traded. They're privately held and self-funding from their own profit. What is said about them on random Internet discussion forums has absolutely no affect on their continuing success or failure. They will have to have a satisfactory explanation for the contracts people who have put down heaps of money to buy launches, but none of those conversations will involve random Internet discussion forums.

We're spectators, having a rather short and noncontroversial discussion about a small explosion in the sky. What are you, that you feel obliged to shit on the subject? A corporate shill perhaps? Employed by a SpaceX competitor?

Probably not. You're just a random Internet misanthrope.

He was probably referring to the elemental weight, not the weight used.

It's not much of a risk. Every single battery chemistry has been played with, at one time or another. And by that I mean rigorously and exhaustively scientifically investigated. In consequence, not only has everything been tried, but we now know what works and why it works. That's why it's science, and not merely engineering.

Lithium will always remain a preferential element because it's the element that is the strongest reducing agent in the periodic table, short of hydrogen, which is too hard to hold on to. The stronger the reducing agent, the higher the voltage a cell can develop and the better a battery can be. At the other end, you want a strong oxidizing agent. Fluorine would be ideal, if it wasn't such a viciously strong oxidizing agent that it eats your whole battery, not just the electrons you want it to. Presumably this situation is what the spokesdroid was referring to, without explaining what the hell he was talking about.

Lithium is the cathode of choice since it's a metal that can be conveniently nailed down while still possessing a very good electrode potential. As an ion, it's nicely compact, being the lightest of metals, so it migrates through a battery most conveniently. What to pair it with is a little more complicated, and the subject of much research. This is where manganese, cobalt, and carbon come in. Various combinations of those elements and their immediate neighbors on the periodic table are used to make anodes. Some work better than others. Some may work better yet depending on how they're assembled.

Rest assured, whatever develops in terms of battery assembly, lithium will remain the cathode, and much of the macroscopic assembly will be the same or close enough to the same that the gigafactory will always be busy. The assembly and packaging to be done is fairly common, regardless of chemistry.

You're probably correct, at least for the prospects of an initial outpost. Except for freezing sewage. I can't imagine they'll ever have excess sewage to freeze. All that water gone to waste. Not to mention valuable nitrogen and readily metabolizable organic material. More likely it will get processed and its constituent parts reused, and fairly quickly. Yes using human waste as feed stock for food plants is a little risky, but the chill and near vacuum conditions allow for industrial processes that could mitigate the risk rather cheaply. It certainly won't be an option to once-through all that material. A closed cycle will be required.

Cubes do seem to be likely, for an extended period, despite the issues with pressurizing them. Ease of precise assembly and speed of assembly will be the watchwords for building pressure vessels.

In any case, it'll be Elon Musk making the real decision. I suspect hexagons will get short shrift.

You forget who Comcast owns. They wholly own NBC and Universal Studios, two major sources of Netflix content. And they're already screwing with the availability of NBCUniversal content on Netflix. If Netflix tries to play hardball, a whole boatload of shows and movies will just vanish out of their catalog.

A media company that owns the last mile is an abomination, and the FTC should do something about it.