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Submission + - SpaceShipTwo Makes First Powered Flight

zamboni1138 writes: After years of design and development work SpaceShipTwo made it's first powered flight Monday morning over the Mojave Desert. The spacecraft was carried to launch altitude by WhiteKnightTwo, released and climbed to 56,000 feet during a 16-second burn. The craft was built by Scaled Composites for Virgin Galactic who plans to eventually start space tourism flights.

Comment Way too little, way too late (Score 1) 130

Well thanks guys, but come on. $15 or a free bumper? After 18+ months?

I already got my free bumper just after I got my iPhone 4. It was, and still is, a piece of shit. It completely ruined the look and feel/smoothness of the phone, messed up the top jack so that the audio aux out to my car was useless and made getting the phone out of my pocket a nightmare. After a few days I ripped it off my iPhone and literally threw it out the window of my car in a fit of rage. It's in a ditch on the side of a country road. It played out like a scene from Penny Arcade.

Comment Re:Is it feasible to bounce the beam off satelites (Score 1) 291

Perhaps you could convert old school drive-in movie theater screens into reflectors.

Or better yet, adapt them into some kind of capacitor to store the laser energy until needed.

But you would need to be very careful with your targeting. I seem to remember an experiment in the mid '80s using similar, albeit much less advanced, technology that caused untold damage to at least one network's television relay satellite. The same incident reportedly destroyed or severely damaged several consumer televisions throughout North America.

Bitcoin

Submission + - MtGox.com Bitcoin trading site compromised (mtgox.com) 3

Beardydog writes: Bitcoin trading site MtGox.com has suspended operations for the rest of the day after illicit access to at least one account resulted in a steep drop in the price of Bitcoins on the site. Commenters to the support page for the event are reporting that a list of usernames and associated email addresses and password hashes have been posted online. MtGox are currently planning to roll back all of the day's trading, email notices to all affected users, and require replacement passwords for affected accounts.

Comment Re:If Linux kernels had microsoft names (Score 1) 378

Microsoft didn't give up the version numbers after Windows NT 4. I've posted this before, so here goes again:

Windows NT 4 = Windows NT 4
Windows 2000 = Windows NT 5
Windows XP = Windows NT 5.1
Windows Vista = Windows NT 6
Windows 7 = Windows NT 6.1

Don't believe me? Open up your favorite browser in Windows and check the User Agent string.

Comment Re:OK, maybe I'm a bit grumpy today. (Score 3, Insightful) 226

Because you can't make fun of Neil Armstrong, von Braun or Rutan. Except, of course, for their hair cuts. They are engineers after all.

Look at all of these 100's of posts you're talking about. The ones rated at +2 are all jokes, or jokes of old jokes. Or requests to end his TV show. The man can literally be made fun of thousands of different ways, time and time again, and people will eat it up.

What are you going to say about Neil Armstrong that is funny, or honestly hasn't been said before?

And yes, you appear to be in a worse mood than myself, which is saying a lot.

Comment Not to be a nit pick (Score 1) 244

Seriously, pilots almost never say over. I'm not exactly sure when this stopped, but I never used over at the end of my transmissions.

Usually pilots start every request with who they're calling and their callsign, either full or short (on the West coast of the US you can usually get away with just your make and last three characters after your initial transmission to a controller. If they are getting instructions or information from a controller they usually end their acknowledgement with their callsign. Examples:

(Cessna 182) N12345: "Seattle Center, Cessna one two three four five, with you, level four thousand"
Seattle Center: "Cessna one two three four five, radar contact, local altimeter two niner niner two"
N12345: "two niner niner two, Cessna three four five"

Seattle Center: "Delta six seven eight, descend and maintain flight level two two zero"
(737) Delta 678: "Down to two two zero, Delta six seven eight"

The real question is: Can this be used to eliminate that terrible noise that happens when two users try to transmit on the same frequency at the same time?

Image

The Push For Colbert's "Restoring Truthiness" Rally 703

jamie writes "A grassroots campaign has begun to get Stephen Colbert to hold a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to counter Glenn Beck's recent 'Restoring Honor' event. The would-be rally has been dubbed 'Restoring Truthiness' and was inspired by a recent post on Reddit, where a young woman wondered if the only way to point out the absurdity of the Tea Party's rally would be if Colbert mirrored it with his own Colbert Nation.'"
Space

Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242

likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

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