Helicopters work well on Earth for several reasons - first, our oxygen-bearing atmosphere means we don't have to carry our own oxidizer, just fuel, which makes it far more mass-efficient. Then our thick atmosphere means you get a lot more lift for a given amount of airspeed.

I have no doubt that you could get a rotorcraft to work on Mars. It's a question of whether it will work better than alternatives - such as the rockets used by Curiosity. But in essence this will have to be a rocket-powered rotorcraft as well - either rocket-like gas generators, or electric motors would be needed to work in the oxygenless environment, and I don't see electric being feasible in this situation. It then comes down to "is it more efficient to use the fuel+oxidizer to turn a rotor at supersonic speeds, or use it as a rocket?"

I'm no rocket scientist, but it seems to me that the simple extra mass of the rotor is a big strike against it being a good alternative to rockets, never mind the thinner atmosphere.

The problem is that this is not a consumer product - it's a development kit. It isn't ready for consumers yet, and is intended only for use by developers so they can have something ready when the retail version is available.

Reselling to non-developers might give Oculus a bad rep because they're being judged by an incomplete product that wasn't supposed to be used by such people. So I can see why Oculus is trying to avoid this happening.

My problem with SLS is that it's a rocket built almost entirely on existing tech, and it's still taking them this long to develop it. You're taking existing engines, existing boosters, and (in some configurations) existing upper stages, and yet you still have nothing to show after three years and millions of dollars? Not to mention all the design work you could reuse from almost identical programs that got scrapped - I'm sure there's work from Ares V that could be reused.

Well, that's what the court is for. They get to decide if deleting this email is the right thing to do or not.

Who else would you suggest? Goldman Sachs is out, obviously. Would you rather Google be the one to decide?

I've never eaten any food from Sweden, other than a few candy fish. Is it logical for me to doubt the existence of Swedish agriculture based on it not affecting me (as far as I know)?

I'd like to know where you're finding them for $15, because I can't find any for less than $30 or so in stores around here. They'd be perfectly fine earbuds for $15. The problem is that stores are selling those $15 for at least twice that.

I use cheap $15 earbuds myself - after spending $80 on a headset that broke repeatedly and didn't even sound that good, I swore off expensive headphones in favor of something I could regularly throw into a river and still spend less.

Okay, let's say you have two cars, a Porsche and an NSX (representing a photon and a neutrino, respectively). Both are limited by the same speed limit, which they always travel at (the speed of light).

Well, due to some weird quantum mechanics, every so often that Porsche splits into a pair of motorcycles, because apparently they got bought by Wayne Enterprises or something (in actuality, they split into an electron and anti-electron). They almost immediately join back together (forming a photon again), but while they're motorcycles, they are affected by wind (gravity). They still can't break the speed limit, but sometimes it slows them down just a bit.

When you're traveling almost literally between galaxies, that little bit of slowdown for tiny snippets of time can really make a difference. In this case, the NSX made it here a few hours earlier.

Net neutrality isn't about forbidding high-traffic companies from finding efficient ways to handle that traffic. Doing what Netflix usually does, having a local cache server hosted within the ISP, works because it reduces the amount of traffic leaving the ISP. As long as the ISP charges the same amount to everyone doing so (0 is a good amount - it's a benefit to them - but if they want to charge a nominal fee, fair enough), it's neutral.

Net neutrality is about not letting ISPs slow down traffic unless they get paid twice.

If the only difference between two sites is that one paid the danegeld and the other didn't, they aren't making one faster - they're making the other slower. Deliberately degrading the performance of everyone else is NOT neutral.

It does seem rather similar - a large cluster of cores, laid out in a grid topology. Perhaps they're doing something different with the cache coherency? I couldn't find too much on how Intel's handling that, and it seems to be a focus of the articles on this chip.

Er, Wallops is a launch site, like Canaveral. Pretty much anyone can launch from there - the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport is located there. If you're referring to OSC, who are the major non-government users of Wallops, you're being needlessly confusing.

Also, OSC is good at cobbling together pieces. The Minotaurs are recycled ICBMs, either Peacekeepers or Minuteman missiles. The Antares uses Russian engines, a Ukrainian-designed first stage, then an off-the-shelf solid-fuel second stage. They do remarkably good work considering their limitations, but much of the work of "getting to space" was already done for them, they just had to make it work with their payloads and launch facilities.

SpaceX is doing everything from scratch - much more expensive, but it has the advantage of not making them reliant on anyone else. OSC is already in trouble because Russia is cutting off their supply of engines for Antares. They'll also be in trouble if the US military ever cuts off their supply of old missiles, either because they need them as missiles again, or because they've simply run out. OSC does good work, but they seem to be a dead-end in the long term.

What, exactly, does this mission get us?

The composition of asteroids is fairly well-known, both from the numerous meteorites we've recovered, and from the numerous spacecraft missions, including a sample return (Hayabusa). Unmanned probes can't do nearly the same scope of exploration as a manned mission, but asteroids are small. Does one even deserve a manned mission, much less several manned missions?

What is there to be gained from an asteroid capture and manned exploration? I'm all for manned exploration, but it seems like Mars or Titan or something might be a better target.

That's why you lead with the definition when explaining it. You don't even have to agree with it, you just have to understand that that is why it's named the way it is.

"Client" being "user-facing computer" and "server" being "user-remote computer" is a different definition - just as valid a definition, and perhaps a more common one, but as long as you can explain the definition X uses you should be good.

The best way to explain it, that I've found, is this:

A server lets clients access a shared resource. On a file server, it's storage. On a web server, it's documents. On a compute server, it's processing. On an X server, the shared resource is the display, and clients are given access to it.

It's been known for years now that Japan and Germany are "nuclear-capable" nations. They have everything they need to start a nuclear program, and could probably get there in a year if they wanted to.

Up to now, they haven't wanted to. Japan, however, is threatened by not one but two nuclear-armed nations. China is looking to expand everywhere, and is particularly ready to fight over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands (brief aside: if you look at them on a map, they're closest to Taiwan - let's give it to them and piss both China and Japan off, if they can't find a way to just share the oil). And then there's North Korea, which has practically made a cult out of hating America and Japan, and has been lobbing missiles towards Japan just to get attention. They haven't been stupid enough to actually attack them yet, but I certainly can't fault Japan for getting concerned about it.

I live in a rather small apartment and would really like a triple monitor setup. So I prefer smaller hardware. I'm also nearsighted and usually take my glasses off when computing for a long period, so smaller, closer displays are actually more relaxing. But to each his own.

As far as which is technically better, I haven't seen any solid comparisons. G-Sync does use proprietary hardware in the display, which means it has the potential to do a lot more. FreeSync works with existing panels provided they support V_BLANK, which isn't many yet, and none are exposing it to the GPU.

FreeSync has been incorporated into the DisplayPort standard (as "Adaptive-Sync", an option in DP1.2a and 1.3) but no displays have made it to market yet. G-Sync has the advantage of shipping, but unless it's either far superior in a technical manner, or Nvidia flat-out refuses to support Adaptive-Sync, I expect it to die sometime next year when the competition arrives.