Ariane 5 is and continues to be a success but the premise on which Ariane 5 was built -- heavy payloads -- is a small and shrinking market segment. Ariane 5 can launch two payloads, but matching payloads -- the right orbital configuration and mass constraints -- is not easy.

Arianespace hedged their bets by bringing this Soyuz launchers over to CSG with a new (ESA-funded) launchpad at Sinnamari. The much smaller Vega rocket is way off in the distance. The reasoning for Ariane 6 (not having to pay the Russians, as far as I can work out) is sound enough, but the politics (money for France for A6 vs money for Germany for revised A5) is getting in the way.

Anyhoo - the more people on _both_ sides of the argument who actually look at the data rather than just attack the conclusions, the better for everybody concerned.

Elrond: We cannot use the DCMA. That we now know too well. It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil.

Extremadura is one of the poorer regions of Spain and with the general funding squeeze trying to get the public deficit under control, I reckon they have a lot to gain from this.

Or give the pirates WoW subs. They'll be too busy with the rep grind to do anything else

I, for the good of humanity, volunteer for this strenuous task. Or at least for the good sites anyway.

While we desperately need some sanity injected into the system after the Digital Britain Bill, I suspect this is going to really favour big-media's use of our copyrighted work.

"He said the law could be relaxed to allow greater use of copyright material without the owner's permission."

There must be plenty of companies drooling at the idea of smash and grab raids on flickr accounts and GPL'd software.

Which is exactly why you will never see anything more than an expert system in space. There is no way any space agency is going to punt hundreds of millions or euros/dollars/pounds into space without a full understanding of the decision tree in the spacecraft control loop. It is hard enough at the moment without introducing outliers into the system.

Indeed. I'm not sure what the industry could do in this case. It would be up to the theatre owner to contact the musicians - which they can choose not to do. I imagine the composed would get a cut if electronic score has to be licensed for public performance (it would be slightly strange for this not to be the case).

It might be hard to find musicians later though; I'm not sure many musicians make a full time career out of this sort of work, but it might be just be the last straw - god knows I've seen enough string quartets busking these days and that can't be much of a money spinner.

All in all, it sucks to be a musician these days - composing, recording or performing seems to be a talent which is rather unappreciated (to the extent that anybody is willing to pay for what a musician produces).

Satire and journalism are not necessarily incompatible. Private Eye has mixed both for years although the loss of Paul Foot undoutably was a big loss to them.

Robledo (Madrid) was done a few years back - they had to replace the bearings IIRC. In fact it was largely due to the work on DSS63 at Robledo that NASA started to look at the DSS14.

I love how 'mercenaries' has been replaced by 'private contractors' in the minds of people, it's just really scary how Orwell knew the workings of language.

"proprietary" is just the standard terminology for data that has not entered into the public domain - used to distinguish from "published" in the sense that the data has been analysed and the results published (in a journal etc etc).

Information may want to be free, but there's plenty of people who want to keep it locked up

NASA seeks more funding for their Solar Sentinels program

The PcPro number are stupid and dumb. They assume that all 26 million customers are on 3G data plans which is fucking nonsense.

The Guardian has more realistic numbers, which judging by the nerd rage in comments above, might make Slashdot explode.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/11/mobile-data-unlimited-end

Consider: This is the UK mobile network, so NO tax dollars spent on infrastructure.