have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

How dare they include the Me163 Komet in a list of "worst planes" -- it was a groundbreaking craft (in more ways than one -- get the pun?) which highlighted the innovation (and desperation) of the Germans near the end of WW2.

Yes, the choice of fuel components made it horrendously dangerous and the limited flight-times did reduce its utility but it was undoubtedly *the* fasted aircraft of WW2.

Alarms simply tell you you've been robbed.

A far more effective strategy is to ensure that anyone entering your house uninvited will find it impossible to stay long enough to steal your stuff.

To do this, you want lots of *internal* sirens that run at 120dB+.

If the intruders ears start bleeding as soon as they enter the building, they will retreat at a very hasty pace.

That's how my alarms are configured. They ring me over the cellular network and generate an internal sould level that is intollerably loud (as I have discovered on the two occasions I forgot to disarm the system myself) :-)

If he's going to get your iPad he might as well take some life-long hearing damage with him :-)

Fortunately I still have some of those old Kodak Gold CDRs that were guaranteed to last 100 years!

How do I claim on that guarantee now I wonder? :-(

Don't believe it... just understand that in NZ, the authorities are much better at hiding it.

Corruption, hypocrisy and graft remains rife in this country it's just that we're a nation of 4.4 million sheeple who really don't give a damn.

The great Kiwi saying "she'll be right" is killing this nation because nobody is prepared to stand up and speak out when they see people in power doing bad things and abusing that power.

BMI is not perfect. However, unless you are a weightlifter or outrageously fit (not just "skinny fit", but bulging muscles) it's a pretty good indicator. And it's pretty easy to know if you are in the extremely fit part - if you're thinking about it, you aren't.

The GP did write for scientific computation. Fortran maps naturally to scientific calculcation, and doing linear algebra in Fortran rather than C is faster to develop, easier to read and faster to run. That doesn't meant that Fortran is a good fit for everything, I pity the developer trying to implement an SQL database or an operating system in Fortran. But for scientific computation, it's often extremely competetive.

If Boeing was interested in getting people into space, more than a handful of them would be there. The fact is that it has taken a company that was outside of the system, with a tiny fraction of Boeing's funding, to make more progress than Boeing has.

And of course it's in the U.S. interest to make sure the Russians have an active and completely up-to-date source of rocket engines for their nuclear missles.

In this vein, I wonder what it is we are paying the Chinese to do?

"a very unique milestone in space exploration"

WTF?

"unique" is not a relative adjective. There are no degrees of "unique". Something is either unique or it's not.

Aaargh!

That's why there are no such words as uniquer or uniquest

</rant>

A large number of companies from all over the world set up shell companies in Africa.

And my Cassio FX-115, going strong since the very early 1980s and it has *never* needed a replacement battery (perhaps because it's totally solar powered).

Why is it that the ads in mags like Byte were a key part of the reason I bought the magazine -- but banners and online ads have become little more than annoyance and irritation?

The old print-media ads were informative and didn't slow down my reading in anyway so I guess they were excellent "secondary" content.

There's no way I'll patronize any site that uses full-page interstitial advertising -- yet the full-page ads in Byte and other printed mags were things I often read from start to finish.

Is it just me or have others had the same experience?

I think we need to take a serious look at the "many eyes" theory because of this. Apparently, there were no eyes on the part of parties that did not wish to exploit the bug for close to two years. And wasn't there just a professional audit by Red Hat that caught another bug, but not this one?