I think it would actually have gone much harder for SpaceX if a F9 had exploded before Antares. Orbital is not going anywhere and will get another chance to send their payload to the Space Station. The investors in SpaceX aren't going to be flighty, and neither Air Force nor NASA are going to close the game because of an explosion, given their history.

ULA doesn't have much chance to use an explosion to their benefit without dredging up the status of their Russian engines, the multiple Delta explosions and the old Atlas one.

A Falcon 9 launch will fail. This is a given in rocket science. Remember the history of Falcon 1. They have planned to survive such a situation.

Why fly like an airplane when your mission is only to get to the ground in a soft landing? It makes the spacecraft more complicated. And it's no bargain if you have an airplane-like craft with no go-around capability like the Space Shuttle.

No building have room for elevators if they needed runways.

Please come down from whatever overheated state you're running. He did address what you wrote.

Yes, there can be unknowns. Fixing that sort of stuff is how we got from the Wright Flier to the 747.

What I don't think is likely is that the first stage will come down and they will find out sorry, there's space-rot we didn't know about before and reusability just isn't a possibility. Especially after lots of experience with the Space Shuttle.

If they do that, they've been holding back more work than I think they can. Only the first stage can be landed at present. The second stage would need a heat shield to come back.

How about calling it Fireball XL5. :-)

If ULA has the slightest bit of sense they will announce on Monday that they are pursuing re-usability. But the last I heard was that they would pursue cheaper disposable elements.

If SpaceX actually lands on the barge and flies the first stage to orbit again it's a really big deal, because it radically changes the economics of getting to space. No matter what the payload is for this demonstration. I don't know if they would get that far with this first stage, but no doubt with a later one.

Nice, thanks for the info. Nvidia would be nice, as I want to run blender. Is there a good comparison site for various laptops with high-end graphics and CPUs you know of? I've been poking around online for a while, but determining what the best supported higher-end laptops are for Linux is far from easy.

If Apple's recent stream of security failures has not convinced you to switch to Linux or BSD, you are basically hopeless.

Oh, I've been running Linux for years and years. I was going to dual-boot an apple laptop with osx+linux, but now I have no interest in having osx any more than I do windows. I'll take a look at the new dell.

My Grandmother (she is 85) has an Intel based Core Duo Macbook and Apple has stopped providing security updates [...] When we bought the machine (new) I thought the macbook would be more usable for her than a Linux laptop. While it has been a good machine, being orphaned on security updates is bad form by Apple.

It's not too late:

http://www.odi.ch/prog/macbook...
http://www.codingepiphany.com/...

We are talking apple users here, not Linux users. All three Apple users who know these steps have probably already done so. The other several hundred million are fucked, and Apple has now publicly taken a stance that they plan to hang those millions out to dry.

Ironically, I was going to buy an apple laptop for sheer convenience (and to run more recent versions of scrivener), but now I most certainly won't. Time to research good Linux laptop alternatives instead (ideally with high-end graphics capabilities that support blender's cycles module ... wonder how well Optimus is supported these days). Oh well, it will probably be cheaper anyway. Maybe I can treat myself a 4k monitor with the money saved.

DSL sends radio frequencies over twisted pair. Lots of carriers on lots of different frequencies. Radio stations actually interfere with it, for this reason some DSL systems are known to perform better in the daytime! DSL also puts out broadband radio noise.

Coaxial cable leaks too. When I lived on Long Island, I used to be able to receive it with an antenna! But it generally leaks less.

Fiber to the home is a much better option, but many locales are not being built out for it and will never be. Where I live we have ATT fiber to the neighborhood, and the last 1000 feet are copper. And it's slower than coaxial cable.

The article summary doesn't pass the mother test.

Dear Mom,

Please send UnknownSoldier to computer science school.

Explanation: he doesn't understand basic things about digital cryptographic trust systems used on the Internet.

Thank you.

:-)

I think that beep encoded temperature into audio frequency, and you could get its rough ephemerides from receiving horizon crosses at multiple locations, etc.

Yes. And there is a photo of a 25-year-old guy holding a light aluminum frame that you can use to make a "satellite". Why is he not photographed watching a launch? Because he hasn't gotten any launched yet.

Why is his radio using the AX.25 protocol with G3RUH modem, which tends to fail as a satellite link, rather than Karn's more recent satellite modem which can stand long fades as your satellite tumbles and its antenna points away from Earth? He and "RadioBro" don't seem to know better.

Why don't they tell you that you'll need your ham license, when the frequencies the radio is sold for obviously would require that?

So, a lot of stuff not real yet. But perfect fodder for a fluffy "innovator" story.