Sony should say screw you to North Korea and release the entire movie for free on the internet. Make sure everybody has a chance to see it. Of course they won't because they still have to monetize it somehow, but it would be something to say "we're not going to give in".

The hosts file doesn't scale. It's only useful for LAN traffic and has a last ditch hack anymore. Especially since if a site is being attacked by a media cartel, they're probably going to have to switch servers a few times.

The balancing act is almost exactly the same at the last moment of forward flight as it is at the first moment of retro burn, just in a different direction.

Aerodynamics matter very little at high altitude. They matter some at lower altitude, but I doubt they make much difference when the engine is burning.

I was a regular user on groklaw as well. She quit because she was a private person and email was no longer private. You may be able to protect the contents of your email by encrypting it (assuming that the encryption hasn't been intentionally compromised, which is NOT a safe assumption), but that doesn't encrypt the "From/To" fields. PJ quit the internet (not just groklaw) because she's a private person who didn't want to be watched.

You have your view, I have mine. Everyone else can read what she wrote and decide for themselves.

This will of course fail if the site you are trying to visit is virtually hosted. Even if you know the IP, you have to tell the proxy/load balancer what site you are trying to load.

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.

It's not really 404 hijacking, it's DNS resolution failure hijacking. If you get a 404, then you at least got to the site. Anyway, DNS hijacking is why I don't use my ISP's DNS.

I know all that. Don't forget, I've lived here my whole life and know the mailbox companies. Let the Caymans and Co have them. It's not as if they actually leave money here (tax rates close 0 benefit no one except corporations).

This is really not a good approach to using public key crypto. The private key shouldn't be on the servers, it should be on the client. I know it's a pain to handle per-file backups and especially deltas when everything is encrypted, but that's the tradeoff for proper security. In fact there's really no need for expensive public key crypto here at all. Just have the client use a cheapish symmetric key (AES256 perhaps) and send only encrypted data to the servers. There's no need at all for the servers to ever have the data in the clear.