I was thinking just that - creating a USB device that takes input from one port, and simulates a mouse on the other, is pretty trivial.

The only excuse for having less than four should be having too many other ports present to physically fit them all.

Every current Intel mobile chipset provides at least four USB3 ports, and most provide six. The only acceptable reason not to have at least four is "between all these video outputs, audio outputs, Thunderbolt port, and SD card reader, there just wasn't room for all four USB ports".

The physical USB port costs basically nothing. You can get them for ten cents apiece on Amazon - I'm sure buying in lots of thousands instead of twenty will bring that down even further. Going above what the chipset provides adds an expense, of course, but 4-6 USB ports is enough. I just don't see a reason not to populate all of them with a physical port.

* Last-minute addition: another reasonable excuse is "we routed the USB port internally to the Bluetooth and Wifi adapters". Some motherboards do things that way, and that is indeed a reasonable excuse for having only two USB ports, if using a chipset with only four USB ports. But I would argue that if you know two ports will be used internally, you should probably spring for a 6-port chipset, particularly since only the cheapest limit to four.

Valve and Bethesda made numerous mistakes with this implementation, but I still consider it a good idea. I'm definitely planning to allow paid mods in my own games, if I ever get one ready for retail. But here's where they went wrong.

1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all. Give supply and demand a free hand to set prices, and I think most average-sized mods would have been priced around $0.20. Some might have been able to sell at a much higher rate, but not many.

2) They didn't protect from fraud. As soon as the announcement hit, people started uploading mods they didn't make - there was already a massive corpus of free mods, after all, and basically no protection against this. The least they could have done is give a decent warning period, for mod authors to decide whether to start selling their mods or not, and to search for fake versions being uploaded without their consent. They didn't do that, and they definitely didn't do any sort of technical measures, like comparing uploaded mods' checksums against those already uploaded. All of that is easily foreseeable because I actually foresaw it - I've been planning how to do this in my own games, and all of that was on my list before they even announced their feature.

3) They didn't share the profit well. Valve was taking a 30% cut, which is already more than they do for full games, and then Zenimax was taking another 40%. I can see that, because the base game does a non-trivial amount of work for the mod, that they do deserve some compensation (although I'd say increased sales are the true payment to the publisher). But a cumulative 70% is just ridiculous. I'd argue that no less than 50% should go to the modder. For my own games with paid mods, I'm thinking more in the 75:25 or 90:10 range, or even 100% to the modder (because, after all, a vibrant modding community brings about more sales, so the marginal loss on hosting is more than recovered).

4) They launched it suddenly, with no notice. Nobody had any inkling it was coming, least of all the modders who would be most affected by it. Valve and Zenimax should have given at least the big-name modders some heads-up, so they could think and have time to rationally decide whether to start selling, and for how much, and to work out any licensing issues in multi-person teams. And perhaps if gamers had been able to see it coming, they could have realized it was a good thing, instead of letting the knee-jerk reaction control the debate.

They did, however, do one thing surprisingly right, which deserves recognition: they gave full, automatic refunds within 24 hours of purchase on any mod you didn't like. That's definitely something necessary, and something very surprising to see from Valve.

Hopefully they can sort out these issues with the next game they try this on, instead of giving up on what is an excellent idea.

The point is to make the account cost more than the expected value gained via scamming.

Scams, in general, have a poor success rate. There may be a sucker born every minute, but there's 250 people born a minute. Even if a successful scam nets a large gain, losing $5 on each attempt makes it a losing proposition.

Uh, you sure you were searching for the Intel 750? Because Amazon lists it for $471 for the 400GB model, or $1200 for the 1200GB model. Which is quite a bit inflated from NewEgg's pricing but not exactly the $2400 you listed.

Oh wait, I should have read the rest of your post first. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?

I've started drifting away from using Google/Bing/whatever, in favor of loading a bunch of site-specific search engines into my search bar.

So if I'm looking for, say, a specific Magic card, I don't let Google search the entire net, and find everything that happens to say "elvish mystic", giving me a ton of irrelevant stuff (even searches like "mtg elvish mystic" bring up pages to buy one instead, which usually don't have the info I'm really looking for). Instead I click an extra button to go straight to Wizard's own database page for it.

Repeat that idea for about twelve different gaming wikis, plus Wikipedia for general knowledge, and you'll have the contents of my search bar. If I were into different hobbies, I might have similar search engines for those.

A single search engine that can figure out the context of the search, then go straight to the experts for that context, would be one way to do better than Google.

Uh, the SSME engines ran off the same propellant as the rocket - LH2 and LOX. It's a staged-combustion rocket - some of the fuel and oxidizer flow was diverted to a preburner, which partially combusted them (the mixture was fuel-rich, limited by oxygen), ran the fuel-rich exhaust through turbines for the fuel and oxidizer pumps, then exhausted into the main combustion chamber where it was mixed with the remaining oxygen to complete combustion.

A better example for a separate propellant would have have been the V2 rocket, which burned ethanol and LOX, and had a pump powered by hydrogen peroxide.

Right on all other points, though.

Not true. Measures of rocket efficiency almost always count losses to the pumps.

That's why gas-generator-pumped rockets (like the F-1, at 263s, or the Merlin 1D at 310s) are listed as less efficient than staged-combustion rockets (like the NK-33, at 331s). The rockets are measured as a full system, not at just the combustion chamber and nozzle.

This one, I would expect, has higher fuel efficiency per kg and lower thrust per kg. Not having to burn any fuel for non-propulsive purposes will undoubtedly help its fuel efficiency, but the heavy batteries will lower the thrust efficiency. That's just an educated guess though.

Big rocket engines use big propellant pumps. The pump on the F-1 (used on the Saturn V) ran about 55,000 horsepower.

Electric motors won't do that cheaper. And they'll sap the weight of the rocket, since even a dead battery is heavy. Fundamentally, a big rocket will be better served by a gas-generator or staged-combustion cycle.

That's fine for this rocket because it's so small. The payload is 110kg. For comparable rockets, turn to Iran's unflown Simorgh, Israel's Shavit, or North Korea's Unha, all in the 100-160kg range.

To put those numbers in comparison, let's look at SpaceX. The single-engined Falcon 1 put 670kg into orbit. A Falcon 9 runs 10,000-13,000kg. And the Falcon Heavy is supposed to lift 53,000kg.

Or for an older comparison, Sputnik 1 weighed 80kg, and Sputnik 2 weighed 500kg. So they're building a rocket that couldn't even lift the second satellite to ever fly. I'm not particularly impressed.

Maybe there's a niche for small payloads like this, but in all honesty, I expect you could fly several such payloads on one bigger rocket, or just hitchhike on the spare capacity on a big satellite launch. Still, worth a shot. Just don't pretend to be playing in the big leagues.

"unlike Intel's new NVMe solution, the Kingston drive will work in all legacy platforms as well, not just Z97 and X99 boards with a compatible UEFI BIOS."

So it uses AHCI instead of NVMe, and tries to spin this off as a benefit over Intel's drive.

Bull.

Fucking.

SHIT.

AHCI dates back to 2006. It was an improvement over IDE, but it was still designed for spinning rust. No parallel queues, a paltry limit of 32 queued commands, and a design that puts a pretty substantial load on the CPU for each command used. It's something like 14,000 cycles spent in just the driver code for an AHCI command - compare 10,000 for the entire OS stack from fread() to actual bits going over the line for NVMe.

Now, it is true that NVMe isn't fully supported on older motherboards. But that's only boot support - an NVMe drive will work as a data drive on anything running a current OS (Linux 3.3+, Windows 7+). And guess what? Most motherboards that have an M.2 slot* to begin with... are NVMe-compatible. So if you're buying an M.2 drive, you can probably use the NVMe drive. And if you're building a new computer, you'll be getting one that works with NVMe.

Backwards compatibility is important. I'm not saying to discontinue SATA SSDs. But making an M.2 drive that still uses AHCI, then claiming the backwards compatibility as a benefit, is just pure marketing bullshit.

* M.2 is a weird physical interface that can be connected to up to three different interfaces - PCIe, SATA and USB. The USB is only really used for wireless cards, so that leaves PCIe and SATA. Unfortunately motherboards don't have to wire both up to the slot. You can find some cheap motherboards with an M.2 slot that only works with SATA drives. I personally refuse to count those as full M.2 slots. And both Intel's 750 (the NVMe one) and Kingston's drive being advertized here would not work in such a drive, so my point about "if you can put this drive in your computer, you can put a 750 in there and have it work" stands.

Horizontal velocity would still need to be killed. If it has too much sideways momentum at touchdown, it'll just drag and tip over, no matter how big the landing area.

SpaceX is, unsurprisingly, doing things the right way. The hard way, to be sure, but when they finally get it working by proper engineering, rather than overkill, it will be well worth it.

Wow, even when you're putting words in my mouth, you can't win the argument. That's honestly an impressive amount of non-skill, like a lumberjack slicing off all four limbs with one swing of the axe.

"We found a way to reframe the debate from 'Republicans vs. Freedom' to 'Republicans vs. Big Government', so we're going to do that both to hammer home that 'Democrats are Dictators' meme and because we're getting fat stacks of cash from the people who stand to profit from it".

That makes sense, and I recall that this is the most heavily-loaded Dragon yet, so less dV for orbital maneuvers would make for a shorter launch window.

And I did seem to be remembering things wrong - every previous CRS flight I could find a launch window for had an instantaneous launch window. I must have been thinking of the non-CRS flights.

I've seen short launch windows before, but not for ISS-bound launches. I remember previous Dragon launches having significantly longer windows to launch. Am I remembering wrong, or is there something about this launch that requires a shorter window?