Fine. Go have a ball in your own playpen then. I won't even consider any system except Intel with Intel graphics. It works aces for me. So we cancel each other out.

If this gets ported to FreeBSD I say hurrah and many thanks to HardenedBSD!

couldn't have bore

Actually, if you value literacy, pretty sure it's "I bear" -> "I bore" -> "I [could] have born/borne". But what do I know.

Shut the fuck up, nameless twit

"The sourceforge.net website is temporarily in static offline mode. Only a very limited set of project pages are available until the main website returns to service."

Sound familiar, anybody?

I use Arch BECAUSE it is a rolling release. It is utterly preposterous to use it IN SPITE of it being a rolling release, and to wish it wasn't.

Mine NEVER breaks, by the way. And it always has the latest version of everything. None of the bad old days of CentOS, with million year old versions of gcc, vlc, mplayer, ffmpeg, etc. Every release of every non-rolling distro is hopelessly obsolete from the goddam day it comes out.

And what's more, do not want any psychos who would be associated with this shit to be outside of solitary confinement either.

Good luck Escape Dynamics, you have a very good project.

That sure as hell remains to be seen. Some of us would see it as clinical insanity.

What has surprised me is that there has been no real attempt to move the launch platform up to 80,000 feet or so using gas balloon technology. I would have thought this would be feasible, and could result in a substantial fuel saving.

Picking a launch vehicle more ar less at random, an Atlas V grosses 334,500 kg (737,400 lb). Now, at 80,000 ft (24,400 m) the lift of helium is 0.0375 kg/m^3. Even if the balloon and suspension massed nothing whatsoever, it would have to have a volume of 8.92 million cubic meters - 44.6 Hindenburgs in size. Counter-intuitively but still most impressively, a sphere 257 m (840 ft) in diameter would do it. But then again, such a balloon and suspension sufficient to lift 334,500 kg would be anything but zero mass. Most high altitude balloons lift only a few hundred kg of payload at most, which is why they do not suffer from scale problems like this.

Hydrogen has a tad more lift, but only a few percent, so the ludicrousness of the scale would not be appreciably affected, plus you'd have to be damn sure you wouldn't have to worry about static buildup in the extremely thin plastic film of the balloon.

Using either helium or hydrogen, you'd have to figure out how to inflate such a colossal structure in the open without it being wrecked by the tiniest zephyr.

Now, since the whole idea is to reduce that 334,500 kg gross weight by saving on fuel mass, it wouldn't be quite that bad, but clearly bad enough to be a spectacular non-starter.

I am thinking an air-breathing ramjet winged first stage would have more potential. It strikes me as spectacularly stupid to use rockets, with a gigantic oxidizer flow rate when the atmosphere is full of oxygen, all the way from zero meters; especially during the first few seconds when the fuel and oxidizer is getting sucked out faster than a cheap hooker could dream of, while the vehicle is barely moving at a snail's pace.

according to ISO blabla#000134 it needs 7 leds (or something like that) to malfunction to define a monitor as "defective".

A pixel on an LCD monitor is not an "LED". If it has LEDs at all, they are just backlights.

I did approximately 650 miles one day. I drove to the hospital to visit my uncle, and back again. It was, oh, about maybe 16-18 hours without a real rest and I was half the age I am now. I sure as hell couldn't do it now.

Most cars can't make 500 miles between refuelings

Plenty of them do, though. Mine does. Every time. In fact, my record (both directions on a closed course) is 798 miles. In a very normal car; not even a hybrid.

I've never heard of a U.S. state that has a law against "accelerating too fast" as long as you aren't racing another vehicle and you don't break traction for an extended period of time or commit some other moving violation in the process.

Only every single state in the union, that's all. If the cops don't like the cut of your jib, their racket is to nail you for "exhibition of speed" or the equivalent (I know it's really acceleration, not speed, but you're not going to win the argument with ol' man law by dazzling him with grammatic precision - please trust me on this). Completely aside from obvious no-nos like drag races, street races, peel outs, skidding, sliding, and drifting, any suggestion of "showing off" is your doom, but you can also be written up for doing it alone on a deserted stretch of road. And the old ruse of "gee officer, the car surprised me, I wasn't trying, I had no idea the car had that much power" also usually doesn't fly at all.

Finally, "breaking traction for an extended period of time", are you kidding? Just barking the tires instantaneously is a no-no.

the government will get involved in bigger and bigger ways NO MATTER HOW UNHAPPY IT MAKES PEOPLE

You don't have even a glimpse of an idea what unhappy is. If they become unhappy enough they will rise up, your heroes will LOSE, and all the apologists for the apparatchik will be in real danger of getting caught in the cleansing. At that point you can either smarten up, or go down fighting. I don't much care which.

too expensive for what it is

Purely subjective by definition. Agreed it is a lot of $, but I'd rather have high end options available than no high end options available. Lenovo has an INSANE profusion of models, most of them much cheaper.

too heavy

Not necessarily, for what you're getting (hey, we're both subjective here)

the touchpad is too big

Really? Well, I would never use it. I wish like hell it wasn't there, and the keyboard was moved downward, but I'll never win that argument in the marketplace.

and not centered

It's centered with respect to the space bar, not with respect to the body. Is there some reason you find that objectionable? I am fairly sure many objections would be heard if it was offset from the space bar.

numeric keyboard is useless most of the time

Pure taste. Opinion on this will be divided.

3 usb ports? for this size I expected 4

Completely agree. At least they are all USB3. My pet peeve is the inclusion of fucking useless USB2 in this day and age.

mini-displayport? why not hdmi?

HDMI is obsolete crap. I'd much rather have the much more capable mini-DP. You can always use a mini-DP to HDMI dongle. I do think the VGA port is borderline silly nowadays, but it can be convenient for use in presentations.

Not mentioned, so I'll mention them: (1) I wouldn't even consider for an instant any laptop without a trackpoint plus hardware trackpoint buttons, this one passes; (2) I wouldn't even consider for an instant a laptop without an ethernet jack, this one passes; (3) note an SSD is available as an option, good; (4) I wish like hell there was an option for Intel graphics rather than the power hog discrete graphics crap.