I haven't tried it, but PLA apparently works well as the "wax" in lost-wax casting.

It's worth noting that unlike Hulu/Netflix/iTunes, Auntie doesn't go out of her way to block people who take even basic measures to bypass geo-blocking.

For example, on Firefox I use the Modify Headers addon and an "X-Forwarded-For" entry with the Beeb's own IP address. (212.58.246.94) There are other addons that make it as simple as clicking on a flag. Bit easier than screwing around with VPNs or DNS spoofing.

Nor have they "egotistically proclaim[ed] that they alone can solve mankind's problems, from aging to space travel." Nor "all the talk of exploration." Nor "shoot endangered animals on safari".

Seriously, the guy is nothing but a walking strawman.

There's plenty of things you can criticise the "PayPal mafia" and NewSpace over, especially Thiel and Branson respectively, but nothing that the Professor is going on about even comes close to a valid criticism. (Or even something that has anything to do with reality.) It's bizarre that someone would say it, but crazy that a major newspaper would actually publish it.

A) "recently", for something that's over a decade old, suggests that he's only just heard about it and because he only just heard about it, thinks it's new.

B) "fleets of rocket ships" is how a child would see it. Suggesting the guy is not only ignorant, but is surrounded by ignorant people.

VG won't be doing anything special, (although even a private sub-orbital system is new; nothing like SS2 exists. X-15 with passengers and open space.)

But Musk already has the cheapest launcher on the market (perhaps ignoring a few micro-launchers), is about to develop fly-back first stage (something the industry has been wishing for since the early sixties), and is developing a private manned capsule, and is developing a heavy lift launcher that costs less than any other medium-lift launcher on the market even if they doesn't achieve reusability, and he's working with NASA to develop a Saturn V F1-class engine for a Saturn V class launcher, and he wants to go to Mars.

Not breaking new ground? What the fuck does this idiot want from them, a warp drive?

No, it's really not.

God I hate that phrase. So many failed NASA programs started because someone said "There's no show stoppers". I needs to be purged from NASA's vocabulary.

The "proper moment" is before you enter the atmosphere. So no. As soon as you enter the atmosphere, you can't do a retro-burn until you are subsonic, and you can't slow to subsonic without multiple hypersonic and supersonic parachutes. (Terminal velocity for a capsule on Mars is supersonic. You would hit the ground before you slowed enough to be able to fire retro-rockets.)

The only alternative is to have enough fuel in Mars orbit to do a retro-burn that virtually zeros the orbital velocity before you enter the atmosphere. And, by definition, that takes as much fuel as it does to launch from the surface into orbit.

Have a look at the entry sequence for MSL-Curiosity, hypersonic heat shield, supersonic drag-chutes, huge subsonic parachutes, and retrorockets, because the parachutes aren't enough to let you land on the surface. And every stage pushed the state of the art to the limits of current technology. All that just to land 900kg.

Now imagine what you'd have to add to land a multi-ton human-scale capsule...

Oh, did I say capsule? No. You have to get back home, so you need to land an entire launch vehicle on the surface of Mars. Plus all the infrastructure necessary to refuel and launch that vehicle.

Earth reentry is much easier than Mars. A nice fat atmosphere to bleed off all your velocity, down to subsonic, before you even worry about parachutes or retro-rockets. Mars' atmosphere is just awful. Too thick to be ignored, too thin to be useful. Exactly, precisely wrong.

Que? The impact force from a small asteroid impact is equivalent to a large nuke. The 20m Russian Chelyabinsk impact was about half a megaton equivalent.

A large asteroid would outstrip the effects of the entire global nuclear arsenal all detonated at the same time on a single site. Asteroids can punch through the ocean crust.

http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/

f.lux is available for iDevices, but not Android.

For Android devices there's nearly identical products like Twilight. Plus a thousand apps that dim or invert the display without affecting the colour temp.

It looks weird if you go between day/night settings abruptly. During the normal cycle, your eyes adjust as it fades/brightens, so you barely notice it. Try it for a few days. Since using it, I've reduced the night colour-temperature quite a bit (below 4000K) from where I originally set it (about 4800k), you underestimate just how much your eyes can adjust. (Use the slow-transition, the fast-transition is buggy anyway.)

Also, manually adjust the lat/long to suit your sleep pattern, rather than your actual location.

Terrorists have smuggled (small) bombs onto post-9/11 aircraft. The TSA hasn't caught a single would-be bomber.

So, schnitzel then?

Would they try to stop him?

So are about 12,000 US commercial airline pilots.

Federal Flight Deck Officer program.

Why do you think it's okay to confiscate people's property?

Even if a particular item isn't allowed on carry-on, why is it just assumed to be acceptable to permanently steal it from the passengers unless their was a suspicious of malice and it was evidence in the criminal case against them?

This is particularly true of the cannon and chainsaw. Unless the cannon had gunpowder and the chainsaw fuel, both are useless as weapons. (At best really clumsy bludgeons.) Even if you decide to not allow them in carry-on, because... {handwave} reasons... why is it necessary to permanently steal it from the passenger to use as a trophy, rather than put it in the baggage hold or allow the owners to make arrangements to reclaim their property later? (Hell, it's an airport, there's going to be a freight company like FedEx nearby. Given the number of items being taken from passengers, returning them seems a pretty simple thing to standardise.)

But look it another way, this is the cream of the crop, gathered from nationwide, the trophies the TSA puts on show to justify their existence and try to deflect criticism. And yet most of the items seem to many of us to be hysterical overreactions, that few of the items should have actually been confiscated from the passengers, and even fewer permanently.

So if that's the best of the best, how bad is the rest of the haul?

However, all non-successful attempts were stopped by passengers on the aircraft, not TSA.

TSA cannot point to a single example of a terrorist being stopped by them. Not one.

(And you know they would be shouting it from the rooftops, given that they brag about stealing items from non-terrorists as if their agents had done something good.)