In my experience with university mathematics and engineering departments, students, TAs and anyone who can get away with it use pirated copies. For analytical maths, there's just nothing better than Mathematica.

>(which I believe that would run afoul of an international treaty) Not really. The Outer Space Treaty says anyone is allowed to settle other celestial bodies and use their natural resources, it just prohibits signatories from annexing or otherwise claiming sovereignty over extra-terrestrial territories. Signatories are also not allowed to drag nuclear weapons along, and that's the gist of it. It's for the best, really - why bother colonising space if we're just going to use it to prolong capitalism, nationalism and hate?

"Metres", colonial scum.

What a bunch of seoulless, warmongering scum.

No, you need to stop giving your money to shit carriers for shit service bundled with vendor lock-in.

The video in question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=2Ivr6JF1K-8

This rocket (the Grasshopper RLV) is just a test article. It's a mass simulation of the first stage of a Falcon 9, which has been launched to orbit successfully 5 times in a row. The idea is to test and prove the re-usability concept on the Grasshopper RLV before adapting it to the first stage of the Falcon 9. They've only done small hops so far, but the plan is to continue launching the Grasshopper RLV with more and more fuel until it can replicate the trajectory of the Falcon 9's first stage and safely return, at which point they'd be ready to begin adapting the Falcon 9 first stage for a safe return and landing.

It's really a misnomer to call the space shuttle reusable. "Rebuildability" is more like it. The things had to spend months after each flight being torn apart and having every part inspected over and over and a big chunk of them replaced.
The key to economic space flight is full and rapid reusability. Payload launchers need to become as reusable as passenger aeroplanes for space flight to become routine.

NASA was still operating it and flying the missions, though. SpaceX has its own mission control centre and its own astronauts.

>3. But make sure the civilians aren't brown/muslim men "of military age", because that means they're eligible for free entry in the US indiscriminate murder program. FTFY

Just another powerpoint rocket from Putinist Russia. Like Kliper, Parom, MAKS, Rus', etc, it'll never make it into production and service as long as the official policy towards Russian rocket scientists is "the beatings will continue until morale improves".

Dammit, stop selling me longscreens and get back to making good 4:3 monitors.

How thick are you? Pretty much all of Asimov's works dealt with how ambiguous and incomplete the three laws were and how many horrible failure modes fall well within the domain of an intelligent machine following them to the letter. That was a warning not to oversimplify AI and machine ethics in general, not a blueprint.

Go back to your fallout bunker, paranoid moron.

Exactly this. I refuse to recognise the concept of owning ideas. If you want to protect your intellectual property, keep it in your head (and keep your head away from fMRI scanners). Once it's out in the open, it's no longer "intellectual property", it's free information.

They could just release a new Orange Box with all of them and call it "Valve's 3: The Game".