If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

hrm, for me it was the wildly obscure articles that I thought expanded my horizons the most. I had other subscriptions (e.g. WebTechniques, JDJ) for narrow-focus learning.

but blame does not fall squarely on NASA ... Given that there is so much real waste, I don't understand the need to latch on to myths like this.

Your criticisms about precision are valid. There are multiple levels of meaning, though, and for some audiences "is NASA a good mechanism for humans to explore space?" is well answered by less-precise stories like this one.

This story illustrates one example - one Mississippi Senator uses NASA as his personal coke-n-whores vehicle. "Should we be funding public agencies to explore space?" is a valid question and this gives one anecdote about how such good intentions are perverted and abused. Elon Musk doesn't build $400M towers he's not going to use to get coke-n-whores (isn't a Model S good enough for that?)

1) What are the remedies for breach of the terms of the GPLv2?

This one is easy - if there's a breach then the license is void and Copyright is the effective law. Code was copied without permission, which becomes a copyright violation, and remedies are already established for that.

GPL is entirely based on the teeth of copyright - almost every OSI license is. If you hate imaginary property then you might question your use of licenses that depend on it.

So asking the creators of the GPL in this instance will get you nowhere because their opinion on the matter lacks any weight, its what the actual wording says which determines what you are beholden to.

Most prose can be interpreted in multiple ways and not every interpretation occurs to every human at every time. Courts are well aware of this, which is why they will only ever offer an Opinion about what things mean - never claiming to offer the Truth. Even SCOTUS only offers opinions.

Now, those courts will also issue orders to men with a violent streak to enforce their opinions, so effectively they are Law. But never Truth, which is why subsequent cases can overturn previous ones. This also means that Law is never Truth, only the prevailing view of the status quo of a given time.

Those "First Nations" killed off previous nations, so that's more revisionist bullshit.

It's really all lazy white people who don't feel like saying, "Apache", "Cherokee", "Iriquois", "Abanake", etc. - maybe because their ancestors' guilt is more apparrent with the specificity.

Any drive to collectivize those nations (not tribes) is an attempt to negate their value. Sure, they shared a common enemy but that's about it.

So Google is using its massive wealth to at least make a few small dents in the central planning quagmire that has granted all sorts of telecomm monopolies and seriously screwed up the progress of technology; everywhere Google exerts some competitive pressure the incumbents react and/or people get Google Fiber connections directly, improving their conditions, but ...

what we need more of is central planning, and less capitalistic drive to outcompete the extant market players. Sheesh - some people just can't handle cause and effect.

Get the HGST "NAS" SATA drives, if you don't need SAS - they are much better than the standard SATA drives, meant for real storage duties - pretty much what nerds need for home. Great ZFS performance. Three year warranty is good enough.

If I did my math right, this 8k display has more ppi than my main 24" display. This really changes my conception of what my workspace will look like in 3 years. A 55" display "wall" would be worth a substantial investment. I would save a couple grand for something that dramatic.

most of the "hate" posts are his sockpuppet accounts, trying to raise his profile and name recognition. Clever marketing - go follow his amazon referral links now.

And if it were still a standalone company, I'd find no surprises here. But I'm not sure I'd want to go after *anything* that's under the umbrella of Blackberry right now. In Ford's shoes, I'd've probably just gone with some embedded Linux and called it a day. Unless, of course, they were able to get Blackberry to give them one of those, "You go under, we get the source code" clauses.