Nope. The SLS will launch up to 70 tons. It may one day launch more, but that'll require a whole load more development funding.

Nope. You just need more launches. If NASA are going to send humans to Mars, they're not going to do it with a single 130 ton launch.

It's going to fly once every couple of years, if you're lucky. It's going to require thousands of people to prepare it for launch. It's going to require all the facilities for those thousands of people, and more who aren't involved in the launch, but are involved in the rest of the program.

If you think NASA can fund that for $500,000,000 a year, I've got a bridge you might like to buy. Remeber, a shuttle launch didn't cost $1,500,000,000 because of the variable costs of each launch, it cost that much because of the fixed costs of keeping them flying.

SpaceX will be flying astronauts in their Dragon capsule. I believe the CST100 is designed to be Falcon-compatible, but it's unlikely to ever fly on one.

As for SLS, there isn't a single budgeted mission outside low orbit. And there's not likely to be, when it will cost billions of dollars every time it flies, due to the high development costs, low flight rate, and standing army and facilities required to launch it.

Uh, no, it's not. There's nothing 'deep space' about SLS that's not 'deep space' about Falcon 9. You can launch a deep space probe on Falcon 9, and you could launch a deep space probe on SLS if it's ever built.

SLS, as designed, is just a very expensive way to put 70 tons into orbit. Maybe, at some point, if Congress funds it, it might become a very expensive way to put 100-130 tons into orbit. Well before then, Falcon Heavy should be putting 50 tons into orbit for less than 5% of the cost of an SLS launch.

They're getting into the phone business for the same reason Apple did; to tie phone users to their app/video/ebook/music stores.

I haven't looked in detail, but I presume the phone is using their version of Android, like the Kindle?

Dude, making money is just so 19th century.

They're short more money than SpaceX spent to develop the Falcon 9.

Indeed. In fact, they've not been enforceable for over 145 years per the Fourteenth Amendment and Marbury v. Madison (Anything repugnant to the Constitution is void from it's beginnings...)

Sounds like my case. Increasing couldn't get wear contacts any more without problems, hated all of the problems of glasses, was scared of the surgery... and it was just nothing. Seriously, how can instantly improved vision not be at the top of your to-do list?

Yes. Even pilot astronauts are--or were--allowed to wear glasses or contact lenses. I believe the concern with laser surgery was about the effect of pressure changes on the eyeball.

Last I looked, you couldn't become an astronaut if you had laser eye surgery?

I would presume that TRIM marks the block as unused, so a background erase process can zero it when the drive isn't busy. From what I remember, the main goal of TRIM was to eliminate performance bottlenecks when the SSD had to overwrite previously-used blocks which the operating system had already freed up.

While true, the problem with that approach is that the SSDs compress the data you write to them to improve performance and wear-levelling. So, if you encrypt the disk at the operating system level, you lose all that.

Obviously, if most of your data is already compressed, it won't matter.

My current Intel SSD encrypts everything and has a special command to wipe the key to 'secure delete' the contents. So I'm not sure what's new here.

That's not what everything I've read about the disaster has said. The mountain has gone through cycles - whenever it collapses, the river gets moved away, and the slides stop for a time, but eventually it wears away the footings enough that it falls again. They'd even tried to prevent landslides there by manually shoring up the base back in the 1960s, but it just flowed over their reinforcements.

The waterlogging of the soil is also a necessary factor too, mind you - not saying otherwise. :)