There is a great interview with Elon Musk on youtube here. He is remarkably transparent about his reasoning. One key to his success is that he works very hard to understand motive and purpose when making decisions.

Musk makes that point that it costs about as much to fuel a rocket as it does to fuel a 747. Space launches are mostly so expensive because the vehicle is sacrificed with each launch, not because of the energy requirements for a space launch. The other big component of the expense is that rocket manufacturers charge a lot. According to Musk the value of the raw materials from which they are formed is reasonably inexpensive. Those were two hugely important realizations because they meant that space launches were not inherently expensive and therefore there is enormous potential for reducing launch costs.

By being Space X instead of Boeing the cost of launch is reduced to about 25% of conventional launches because Space X can assemble a rocket from raw materials for that much less. A re-usable vehicle, Musk predicts, would reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude.

So those are the motives and reasoning underlying the X-wing grid fins and re-entry discussed in the Slashdot summary.

"The soldiers most likely to take their own lives were men with past suicidal behavior and a history of psychiatric disorders and criminal offenses, including weapons possession and verbal assaults."

Thanks, Watson.

Hang a long conductor down towards Earth, and harvest the voltage potential.

your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being

I am not disputing that that is the best correlated variable, but in my experience it is not the lack of technical competence per se which causes problems with bad bosses but instead the concomitant pathologists exhibited by low-skill bosses to compensate for their own incompetence.

I have a story which illustrates the point: Earlier in my career I worked for a state government. One day I get to work and the lead programmer is having something of a breakdown in front of the project manager and they both happen to be standing in front of the entrance to my cubicle. So all I could do was wait there and listen. Turns out that the lead programmer had been devoting all of her time, and struggling for months, to find any way to digest and print the document files previously used in the old oracle/COBOL/dumb terminal system in our new custom client software running on OS X and which was replacing the dumb terminals. So I stand there and listen to the irate complaints from the lead programmer about how the problem was impossible to solve. At the end of the conversation I ask if she would like me to take a look at it. I was done by about 2:00pm the same day. It was easy. I just asked the DB programmer in the cubicle next to me for a sample of a document file. Looks like gibberish so I figure it's not PostScript and therefore must by PCL. Download and install the free GhostPCL renderer, an offshoot of the GhostScript project. Built and installed it. Wrapped the command-line GhostScript in Cocoa's NSTask. Threw together a GUI in interface builder. Wrote a little glue code in Objective-C to invoke Cocoa native classes for loading and displaying the output of GhostPCL and to invoke my NSTask GhostPCL wrapper. And checked the GhostPCL license, which I think might have been GPL, but since I was running it as a separate process and not modifying the source, or redistributing it outside of or organization, we were not compelled to share our custom OS X client source.

Worked great. Everyone was happy. Except the lead programmer, who was livid and from then on set about trying to make my life hell. She banned the project manager from speaking to me. She excluded me from meetings.

The fundamental problem was that the lead programmer did not know how to code. That is not a criticism of her programming skill, I mean she really did not know how to code. As in, literally, could not have programmed a single line to save her life. (Although I can not think of an actual circumstance where anyone would have to do that.) She did not understand what a pointer is. Did not now how to check code out of the repository. Would not have done any good if she had because she did not know how to build code. (In XCode. You click the build button.) Being technically incompetent, she was completely preoccupied with compensating for her own lack of skill, and it was that, not the lack of skill itself, which caused the problems.

"When I ask my other tech friends what they would do, they simply suggest changing ISPs. Nobody likes Comcast, but I don't have a choice here. I'm two years into a three-year contract. So, moving is not an option"

Moving is always an option. But you have to eat the cost of one year of Comcast. Sorry, but that's your solution.

Buy a VPS for $2 a month and relay to it over a VPN tunnel; Comcast won't be able to get their grubby paws on it.

Seriously, linking to a PDF article?

The noted gun rights advocate John Lott, Jr. makes a point here.

... consider the advice from PoliceOne, whose 450,000 members make it the largest private organization of active and retired law-enforcement officers in the U.S. It surveyed its members last March and asked, “What would help most in preventing large scale shootings in public?” Their No. 1 answer: “More permissive concealed carry policies for civilians.” (It was followed by “More aggressive institutionalization for mentally ill persons.”)

So my father grew up on a dairy farm near Frederick, Maryland in the 1940's. After the Columbine massacre I commented that that kind of thing, students shooting each other in school, seemed new and wondered what gave rise to it. He said he did not know, but that when he was in grade school, the boys brought rifles to school so that they could hunt squirrels on the walk home. There was never a problem.

Some time later I ran into ESR somewhere or other, up on his gun rights hobby horse. I mentioned the thing about the squirrels. His only comment was, "that's a healthy gun culture."

I grew up in rural Ohio where hunting was an excusable absence from school. Many of my classmates owned guns. There were never any problems with threats or gun violence.

Children own guns. And that has been going on for a while. The student massacre thing is new. Which suggests that the underlying cause of these student-on-student gun massacres is not caused by the introduction of guns.

Then what do you do when it starts throwing errors? The ISP won't help you.

Tax avoidance schemes are remarkably common among large successful coporations. Other successful U.S. tech companies exploit the "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich" loophole. Ikea pays almost no tax by incorporating in Holland and exploiting its permissive rules for non-profits.

Which raises two questions:

- Are tax rates so high that it is necessary to engage in complicated tax avoidance schemes in western democracies to be successful in business?

- Is it best that companies do avoid taxes? Do we trust Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla and Bill Gates to invest efficiently for the betterment of society more than we trust Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? And I would ask the same of the Republican counterparts of those politicians. Though that the comparison is somewhat unfair to Republican politicians because it is their objective to reduce the concentration of wealth under their own control by shrinking government, regardless of the political persuasions of those who would benefit from that dispersal of wealth. I have never understood why, for those who believe wealth is dirty, that its transfer to the political class is somehow purifying.

Life appeared when the earth was tens of millions of years old, but evolution didn't go into high gear until the "Cambrian Explosion", nearly a billion years later.

Another leading theory which explains this delay is Snowball Earth, a super ice age enveloping the entire surface of the planet.

Think about it (if you can):
Wanting something is enough to make it happen.
Wisdom of crowds.
Scientists don't know everything.
You'll be famous.

Sounds like the recipe for external validation that every GenY and Millenial are craving.

Suddenly this is the new thing. You could simply say "the thief" or "the bad guy" or "the spy", but then you wouldn't sound all Matrix.

Lighten up, Slashdot.