And that's why it's a good thing that FH will be using the same parts as F9, only with a few struts added. Don't need heavy launches? Simply don't strut it together, and make three regular launches!

But don't limit your thinking to what we do now with what we have now. Just like with oil reserves increasing as the price of oil goes up (due to cost of recovery), the things people will want to launch rockets for will increase as the cost of launches goes down. And likewise, as the cost of heavy launches comes down, people will start building bigger stuff (or stacking multiple payloads) to make use of it.

To be completely fair, it wasn't the SRBs that killed Challenger, it was the side-mounted configuration that killed both Challenger and Columbia.

Sure, if you don't mind waiting for it to get there. For a manned mission, probably not so much.

I've only bought one LED bulb so far. It lasted maybe 3-4 years, but I would leave it on a good portion of the day. Of course the LEDs will last that long, but the weakest link is the power supply, specifically any electrolytic capacitors in it. I took it apart so I can play with the LEDs but haven't gotten around to it yet. I replaced it with an extra CFL I had lying around. Maybe I've been lucky, but I haven't had much problem with CFLs dying. If I had been having problems with CFLs, I would have bought more LED bulbs by now.

Also the fragile base class problem.

It works really well for embedded programming, especially when you don't have a heap. And anywhere you would consider using a bunch of function pointers, using virtual methods instead will make for a lot cleaner code. Also, classes can be used as an API for hardware devices, something I learned after being introduced to mbed.

3. Throw rocks or beanbags or some other kind of projectiles at it.

4. Point frickin' lasers at it, especially if it has a camera.

And #2 assumes that it would use GPS for guidance. If it's a video link to a human operator, it's not going to much. Better yet if the drone has a camera and computer vision using the street grid and buildings as a reference of where it is. After all, you only really need GPS when you're in the middle of nowhere.

Sharks, hell, where's the popcorn?

The thing is, Canadians have been Spocking their five dollar bills for decades. What surprised me was that they're still doing it after the bill was redesigned.

And after doing a google image search, it seems there have been a few people who tried it with the US five dollar bill too. Abe Lincoln's beard makes him look like Mirror Spock though. And the new Canadian five has also been Snaped.

Don't forget to scrub those EXIF tags! Otherwise it might end up automatically pegged on Google Maps.

Corn syrup is probably why I stopped drinking Coca-Cola and switched to (aspartame) Diet Coke. It just didn't taste as good, though in recent years I've heard that may be because its flavor is more temperature-sensitive, and aspartame isn't. (Then I gave up DC so I wouldn't have to maintain a consistent caffeine dosage to avoid headaches, but I do get CFDC in the gold cans from time to time.)

But I also liked the original formula (with sucrose), enough that I could tell the difference in an unexpected blind test. When "New Coke" was about six months old, my mom took me along to a car repair place. They apparently were big on buying sodas by the case. I opened a can of Coca-Cola, took a sip, my eyes got big, and then I noticed the promo offer on the can from just before New Coke. Supposedly switching to HFCS was in fact not the motivation for making New Coke, it just happened to be at the same time.

Of course by that time, none of the kids knew who that bald guy was.

I think it's time for another Ask Slashdot about backups...

I think the main thing needed is LBA support. It's a bit hard to configure CHS on a device with no user interface. 160MB is probably large enough, any smaller might not be. It can be confirmed by going into the BIOS and seeing if the drive was configured with CHS or LBA (though it might still support LBA even if configured with CHS). Also, the adaptors generally don't have 44-pin laptop IDE connectors, so he'll either need to get an external case or a 40-to-44-pin adapter.

Even if your FUD was true, I don't think he particularly cares about putting it back into his Windows 3.1 386 laptop . I've never had anything like this happen, and I've done everything short of throwing drives in the air and juggling with them. Perhaps you're just "magneto-static" and shit breaks whenever you touch it.