No Net Neutrality for YOU! Pay EXTRA for Hulu!

Did you ever see Christopher Walken in "Pulp Fiction"? ;-)

Yes, that's true. I didn't want to go into all the detail, but what is ironic is that one of the major points of the article (that it was radiation pressure from the A-Bomb that triggered the H-Bomb) was wrong and if the DoE had let it go, that would have been released as misinformation and nobody would have known. But since the DoE did get involved, that eventually led to the correct information being revealed.

I'm still astounded the editors actually sent the article to the DoE to get approval or verification.

Information wants to be free. Sony demands. Anthropomorphism requires.

Q: If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?

TOM!

"Uh, Tom... Tom... Actually, from now on, we're the comedy team of Ahjnudpippibod and Davis."

They've outgrown the confines of Guantanamo Bay.

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.

And, at this point, with two years left in his term as a lame duck, he cares about the votes he'll get because .... why?

"Robust infrastructure" is good. "Adding lanes to freeways" isn't the only way to reach that goal--and it isn't necessarily the most cost-effective use of those tax dollars. Just laying down roadbed and asphalt isn't terribly costly; call it $10 million or so per mile of 4-lane interstate. Building wider bridges, digging supplementary tunnels, constructing complex interchanges, realigning adjacent utility conduits and ramps--well, that costs quite a bit more. Expropriating massive amounts of land adjacent to existing interstates in dense urban areas - or adding parallel routes, or building stacked or buried lanes - is extraordinarily, sometimes ruinously, costly. (Boston's Big Dig cost something like $200 million per lane-mile.)

And each lane gets you about 2,000 cars per hour, at best. If you have a million people in the suburbs who want to get to work between 8 and 9am, and they're all driving their own vehicles, your system grinds to a halt unless there are 500 live Interstate lanes into the city. Worse, each additional car you add to the city means more traffic on the roads in town, and demand for parking, and production of local air pollution, and so forth. "Build more lanes" is a solution that ultimately just doesn't scale.

In contrast, bus rapid transit systems can achieve at least 10,000 passengers per hour and sometimes as high as 30,000 per hour depending on configuration. Light rail achieves similar passenger numbers. Metro (subway) systems typically top out north of 30,000 passengers per hour, per line; Hong Kong's metro system clears 80,000 per hour on its highest-traffic lines. (For those keeping score, that's enough to offset 40 Interstate lanes.)

Mwahhhahaahaaahaaaa!
-- Eric Schmidt

The documents DEMAND that the the press DESTROY SONY!

Actually, it could tie into the First Amendment. They point out that it's a journalism issue. This would be closely related to issues that journalists deal with when protecting sources. While that doesn't always work, the idea is that the press needs a certain amount of latitude in being able to protect their sources or have access to material that, for various reasons, may not be printable without consequences.

But, since the internet is an international object, something else comes into play here. In college I had a chance to meet and talk with Howard Morland, who was, at the time, semi-famous for having (inaccurately, it turned out later) figured out the linking mechanism between how an atom bomb triggered a hydrogen bomb. He had travelled around the country, doing different interviews and talking with people to figure out more about this. At the time, of course, it was all top secret. He wrote an article for a magazine called "The Progressive." Unwisely, the editors at "The Progressive" sent the article into the DoE for verification. All sorts of men in black with guns showed up and there was a huge court case. The design, which had been worked out from completely non-classified material, was given a classified status and was censored.

There was, however, one copy of the paper that had not been confiscated by the government and was with someone who, at the time, was travelling internationally. This person got it to a publication that was able to print it in their country. Once that information was published and openly available, even if it wasn't in the U.S. (and I think copies were sent into the U.S.), it became public knowledge and was no longer classified. (For details, read "The Secret that Exploded," by Howard Morland.)

So Sony may try going after Americans with that information, but once the documents become published and public knowledge, they can't really do too much about it.

At which point it's a physical (and psychological) game; at least if you are doing it right. :)