The engine can throttle between 50% and 100%. It is true that even 50% of just one of the nine engines is enough to shoot the rocket back towards space. Which is why it can not hover.

But hover is not relevant. Hitting zero velocity at height zero is.

Let the rocket drop freely while continuously calculating needed thrust to hit the target velocity zero at zero height. Keep dropping until your algorithm says you need 75% thrust. At this moment you relight your engine at 75%.

Now you can do a control loop with feedback to vary the throttle between 50% and 100% with the perfect descent hitting 75%. This should be plenty to do the job.

In addition you have at least two other mechanism to help a successful landing. One is the braking by aerodynamic mechanisms that can be varied. Those might be more precise than engine throttling. Another is the landing legs. They will be designed to absorb hitting the ground at a small non zero velocity.

There is no lose or win - is this the kindergarten?

I replied to one claim and one claim only: that the PC to server ratio is in excess of a million to one. That claim is so absurd that anyone not laughing their ass off is an idiot that has trouble with big numbers.

You want me to prove there are 7 billion people on earth?! You are more stupid than a kid in first grade.

This does not stand to even 5 ms of thinking. I am living in a country with 5 million people. You are claiming we have 5 servers or something like that.

Or if you are an american: How many cities do you have with more than 5 million people? How many cities with more than 5 servers? ...

Or ... there are about 7 billion people on the earth. Lets assume that each have a PC (many don't). You are claiming there are only 7000 servers on earth.

Here we have a very effective law that put a complete stop to the non-compete bullshit: any company that wants a non-compete contract will have to pay half salary for the entire period where said non-compete contract is valid.

So if you stop working somewhere, they have to keep paying you half salary, if they really think that non-compete contract is necessary. They almost never do.

No the author is lacking knowledge of such tools. There are at least three major implementations of common routing protocols for Linux.

It is actually surprisingly simple. You activate OSPF on your Linux box and it will add routes on working links and remove them again if the path is no longer viable. Works both ways too, so your routers will not try to deliver traffic to your box on a dead link. Instead the routers will route around the problem.

The car clearly lacks enough sensors to become truly self driving. How is it going to avoid changing lane in front of a faster moving car, when it has no rear facing sensor with longer range than 12 ft? How is it going to tell the difference between a pole and a child on a bicycle before doing a right turn, when it only has simple sonar sensors in that direction?

They could at the very least have added more cameras. Cameras are cheap. Why not let the computer have 360 degree view of what is happening around the car?

But it might also be that there is no way around using LIDAR. It is expensive like hell, but that might change when you need millions of devices a year.

In any case, the new Tesla does not have the hardware necessary to implement the vision of a self driving car. They know it, so that is why they call it "auto pilot" instead. It is just sad that it is nothing new. Every other car in that segment already has this "auto pilot" under different names.

What good is https going to be against the state? You think they can not coerce Verisign et al to hand over a copy of the root keys?

There was a passenger in the Tesla. He didn't get thrown out and walked away from the accident. Unburned.

Said kill switch could just limit engine power, tell the driver to stop safely before bringing engine power down to zero in steps. Basically what happens if you run out of fuel (charge). People usually do not get hurt from that.

Nobody knows what strongly typed means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

But if you are completely without power, say the RAT has failed or you had a fire that destroyed the wiring, then you will crash. There is no way for a human to control those beasts by muscle power alone, even for those planes that are not fly by wire.

Not so, This 747 went through a ash cloud from a vulcano and got their windscreen sandblasted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

As you see, they didn't eject. They landed the plane flying blind.

Next year is much sooner than SLS.

The main reason that Falcon 9 Heavy is delayed is said to be that they are sold out on stages. They can't produce them fast enough to spare some to test the heavy.

This SLS will not bring 130 ton to LEO. They are just working on the small version, that will not do much more than Falcon 9 Heavy (53 tons vs 70 tons for SLS).

The SLS project will be cancelled long before they manage to test the 130 ton version.