At the point where the booster separates, it has burned most of its fuel, and weighs a fraction as much as it did at launch. As a result, it requires far less fuel to kill its velocity and put itself on a trajectory back towards the launch site than the initial launch did (far less mass to accelerate on the return trip).

It does still require some extra fuel (hence why they talk about having to use expendable Falcon 9s for missions that are close to the max payload capacity until they can get Falcon Heavy flying), but for small to medium sized cargoes, they have the fuel to burn.

They're not out $35, it's basically a jammer, and only works while in range of the chromecast's wifi.

A wifi jammer would make the chromecast just as inoperable.

By your reasoning, Dell doesn't accept credit cards either.

*shrug* I don't see why that would be a big deal. I'm Canadian, where in a majority government, the prime minister can basically do whatever he wants for four years. The limitations are what the supreme court says will fly with the constitution, and the knowledge that if you do something too unpopular, your party will lose the next election and somebody else will get to form the government. Or if you go way too far overboard, you might have a cabinet revolt to pick another party leader (and by extension prime minister).

The american system where the leader of the country is at odds with the representatives seems very inefficient to me. Why is the person ostensibly leading the country not the one deciding what the government should do? Why else are they the leader of the country? I don't see how American governments can get anything done without the stability of a leader empowered to make decisions that have impact.

Corporal: Sir.
Dark Helmet: What?
Corporal: We've identified their location.
Dark Helmet: Where?
Corporal: It's the Moon of Vega.
Col. Sandurz: Good work. Set a course, and prepare for our arrival.
Dark Helmet: When?
Corporal: Nineteen-hundred hours, sir.
Col. Sandurz: By high-noon, tomorrow, they will be our prisoners.
Dark Helmet: WHOOOOOOO?!?!?

The American constitution grants their federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce. Laws forbidding an out-of-state manufacturer from selling directly in a state would seem to fall under that category. The constitution does not expressly forbid such activity, so far as I can tell, but it does mean that the federal government has the jurisdiction to override them.

Yep, you're right.

VR and AR are something, as are things like the Google Glass, but another one is EVFs (electronic viewfinders), which typically use microdisplays.

Then again, these microdisplays already feature pixels FAR smaller than what they're claiming these new "nanopixels" are.. the article is kind of confusing. They seem to be claiming pixel sizes a bit less than half what an iPhone has, but there are already smartphones out there with pixel densities almost double the iPhone (like those phones with 1440p displays), and microdisplays go many *times* more dense than that, so... what's new here exactly?

Cliff Bleszkinski's about to make you his bitch. Suck it down.

Cars have to deal with traffic. Amazon already has same-day delivery by road in some cities, but not in 30 minutes.

It's not just HTPC. Digital audio is also used for spears that use a digital connection (my 15 year old 4.1 PC speakers do), any USB headset, etc.

The number of hardware channels supported isn't really relevant anymore, since Windows moved to an all-software based sound architecture years ago (with Vista, I think it was?)

If you're using HDMI or some other digital output, the "hardware in the middle" isn't generating any audio, it's just passing along the digital information that was generate in software, or better yet, if you're bitstreaming, stored in the original recording.

Heck, when you're using audio over HDMI, your soundcard isn't even involved in the process, it's your videocard that's handling the audio data.

Soundblaster cards haven't done FM synthesis for decades. If you want to experience that today, you're going to want to do that with an emulator. Luckily, there are lots of Yamaha OPL-3 (the chip that the SB16 used for FM synthesis) emulators available. DOSBox has several, I believe.

And those noise problems don't matter if you're using digital audio connections, say over HDMI or TOSLINK or S/PDIF. In fact, if you're doing digital audio over HDMI, you're not even using your onboard sound, you're using your videocard's sound output.

Even then, the signal-to-noise ratios of onboard has been good enough for years now. Sure, you might notice a slight difference with a good pair of headphones, but in practice, not so much.