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.

Second all of that from Germany.

Energy companies - privatized. Prices have gone up, service is still good mostly because of government regulations, the market is now largely dominated by less than 5 big energy companies. Only recently thanks to renewable energy have smaller, local players re-emerged.

Public transport - long distance privatized. Service down, delays up, lots of smaller stations have been closed and lines discontinued, government subsidizes the whole thing still.

Telecommunications - privatized. Looked like a success for many years, but now that the old monopolist has stopped being a dominant player (it wasn't broken down like AT&T), service is going down the drain and prices are secretly climbing (base fees are low, nobody dares being the first to raise them, but they're all adding all kinds of additional charges, reducing service for the base fee so you have to buy a higher contract for the same, etc.)

Pensions - being dismantled as we look. We had a great state pension system. It survived both world wars and managed to pay out pensions even when the rest of Germany was flat broke. Heck, even in the few years after WW2 when Germany didn't exist at all and it was just an occupied zone. Now the state pension system is being systematically dismantled by politics while private pension funds and insurances work hard to convince you that you absolutely need them or you'll be poor when you are old.

The examples go on and on and on. In the end, it is quite clear that what my old philosophy teacher in school said was right: capitalism, communism, fascism, extremism, islamism, doesn't matter, be aware of everything that ends with -ism.

The free market is a cute idea and it works great for trade. But don't make it a religion. Many human endeavours are not trade and not suitable to be treated like that. I hope we all agree that things like art and love fall into that category, so we should be open to at least discussing if health, transportation and communications might fall into it as well.

The same is true for communism. The idea that every is equal is great for politics, and a lot of what's wrong in the west today is caused by our hidden abolishing of the "one vote per citizen" rule by allowing campaign financing to dominate the results instead of votes. But again there are lots of areas where treating everyone the same is not the right approach. Education, science, sports and business are all places where it's good if people start out with equal chances, but as their talents and abilities emerge, they need to be treated differently. And planned economy has been pretty much proved to be a disaster, too.

In every other -ism you will always find at least one small grain of truth. Maybe even ISIS has a right idea in its idiology somewhere. The problem is always if you think you can explain the whole world by one truth, one interpretation, one approach.
But religion doesn't built space ships, and science doesn't write operas, and capitalism doesn't create families.

Mostly because it makes a fucking lot of sense to not dig up the street every time someone switches to a new ISP.

Told kid about nano-cam dust today. He's only 4 years old, so he didn't know about them yet, and I'm trying to teach him basic hygiene. I explained for that for nearly a a hundred years we have all lived in an environment where other peoples' cameras are always in our homes. We track them in, on our shoes. The AC intake blows them in. The servers the cameras send video too, aren't owned by people who are practicing subterfuge. It's not like they snuck "spy" dust onto our porches in the hopes we'd track them in. It just happens; it's an inevitable consequence of the stuff blowing around everywhere.

My great grandparents complained about it. They thought they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes, because nanotech was new. They didn't see the dust, so they didn't know it was there. In the absence of sensual confirmation, the default expectation (at least to the layman) was that it wasn't there. That was naive, but my grandparents didn't work with nanotech or even use consumer models themselves, so perhaps their ignorance could be forgiven. (Just as my own ignorance of hyperspace can perhaps be forgiven, since I'm not a miner.)

My grandparents, though, grew up with the stuff, though it was still a bit expensive, so it wasn't totally ubiquitous yet. By their time, almost everyone at least knew about it, and if in a gathering of any five people you were to say "nobody sees me inside my home," chances were there would have been a few guffaws and someone would likely point out that the statement was likely incorrect. Sometimes the stuff got innocently tracked into your house, and sometimes it was manipulated into getting there, through subterfuge. The law and social norms lagged, though, and people debated privacy a lot.

By the time their children (my parents) grew up, though, it was all over. Everyone knew about nano-cam dust, and unless you did a rad-flash a few minutes earlier, fucking in your own bed was just as public as doing it in Times Square.

And now my kid knows too. It's just something everyone is expected to know about and deal with. If I were to write a story about it, I think I would set the story in the time of my grandparents, back when society was truly conflicted and in the midst of change. I bet those were interesting times.

I agree that there's the difference of book or not, but frankly speaking, most christians known only the summary version of their holy book and never actually read it, so the difference is, again mostly semantical.

That christians today don't want to kill unbelievers and heretics anymore has little to do with christianity itself and a lot with the enlightenment and the secularisation of society and politics.

If you were going to ask a "someone" how they meant to define "derived work", you would ask Congress, not the author(s) of one out of a million contracts which happen to make use of that term.

You're right that it's upsetting that (mostly) people who don't really work with copyright would end up answering it, but that's the nature of law, or at least until you start electing[/appointing/etc] authors. (Cynic: or until those people start funding election campaigns.)

It's only after you have determined that something is a derived work, that you go study licenses. Until that point, licenses are irrelevant.

I've heard that so often, it's time to burn the strawman.

In "such situations" (red flag right there - vague specification), only the pre-planned, very bad guys with proper resources and connections are armed like the military.

Most bad guys are lacking either the resources or the connections or the patience to jump through all the hoops that you need to jump through to acquire, say, an assault rifle illegally. In my country, which has strict gun controls, very few crimes involve weapons of any kind, and in those that do the weapon is almost always either a knife or a pistol. That means regular police can engage the criminal.

Semantically correct, but the step is so thin it's not a surprise so many christians throughout history thought otherwise.

If you know (not suspect or think, but know by divine message from the creator himself) that everyone who doesn't join your faith is doomed to eternal suffering in this world and the next, and their children and their children as well, you either feel a strong impulse to teach them the "truth", or you're not really serious about it.

This.

Or maybe someone should just fork islam and create a non-violent branch that kicks out all the "kill them for..." parts. OTOH, that is also long overdue for christianity.

Like it or not, there are different types of extremism.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6ccC...

That's half a joke, and half true. In some circles, you are considered an extremist if you are rude to others while addressing whatever the issue is. In other circles, you're not an extremist if you kill people over the issue, only if, say, they were children.

They may or may not be cowards, but unless they are stupid, they would simply choose a different target - a day care center or a school, for example.

If you think guns make you more safe, you're an idiot. The numbers are in and the differences between comparable countries are tiny. The main factors in safety have nothing to do with gun ownership.

It is apparently normal that organisations for social change attract extremists, and many of these organisations fail to guard against the takeover by people who are just more fanatical, and thus dedicated. I've witnessed the same with the german Pirate Party, which used to be about digital rights, and nobody cared. Then it got a few percents at some elections and appeared on the radar. These days, it is about feminism, drug policy, political refugees, city planning and whatever other pet topic some troll pushed through.

Greenpeace always had this activism thing and at the time when the public largely didn't care about the environment, that was probably the right thing to do, to get attention. But as with all things, you have to continuously make it bigger to get headlines again, especially if you have reached your goal and people do pay attention already. And if you go more and more extreme, sooner or later something will break. People die (already happened), or things like this.

What an opportunity to give the unnecessary ad hominem back. The key-word was "experiment". The point is not that this is how software development be, but that teaching people to think first, then design correctly, then implement is the proper approach instead of the "tinkerer" one where you write down what comes to mind and then tinker with it until the compiler is happy.

That, exactly, is how all these errors that the compiler doesn't catch happen.

The experiment is not about avoiding compiler errors. If you thought it was, you didn't understand it one bit.

How does it handle dynamic sites? If the answer is "not at all" as with previous projects of this kind, it's dead on arrival.

Most of the web is dynamic today, and almost all of the interesting sites are. How many of us would be reading /. if it didn't have comments and moderation?