He didn't cause the delay. If you build systems for normal users, you have to expect them to make errors, and the system has to catch those errors and handle them in a non-fatal way. If it doesn't, your system is broken.

To be fair, Sydney Airport processed 37.9 million passengers in 2013, so one or two people mucking it up ain't too bad.

And there are certainly a lot of gushing reviews and no shortage of hype.

The crotchety old man in me wonders precisely what we're going to use it for again? Apart from teh awesome!1! games.......

And with regards to old-school slashdot, need we bring up CmdrTaco's review of the iPod? There's been plenty of hatin' round these parts going on for decades now.

Did you care to read the link, which said things such as excellent resistance to UV and cosmic radiation?

Anyhoo, I guess it's an iterative process. Better wheels on the next one please guys.

Ultra low temperature silicon rubber springs to mind.

Could have bonded a couple of millimetres thickness onto each alloy wheel. It seems the wheels only break when they have no cushioning underneath them, then the point loads on the tread are too high.

Oh well, I guess they'll know for next time :-)

Still unsure as to why they didn't go with polyurethane or hard plastic wheels or similar. Probably about the same weight as the alloy ones, much less susceptible to fatigue.

Might be hard to find something that's good for those temperatures, but surely not that hard. Or were they expecting more sandy areas?

And binoculars, for that matter.

Bitscope Micro - USB , 40MS/s, USD95 in quantities of 10 or more.

Fairly decent set of software tools for it (including a basic FFT spectrum analyser and a protocol decoder that can do UART / SPI / Canbus.) Software runs on windows/linux and Raspberry Pi - You can download the software and tinker with a few bitscopes that are online to get a feel for it.

Specs here

Either that or they're using high-compression spread-spectrum data streams and it's all just slightly different noise underneath the noise.

Or we could just, like, not bother.

"HD Verified" sounds suspiciously like a way to extract more money out of someone.

"Oh, you want to watch youtube? No, no, your standard account doesn't have that level of service.You need to get a Youtube HD Verified account. Only $9.95 a month extra!"

We built a couple, with the Brits. Decided to leave those things alone.

Parts of Maralinga are still a little on the warm side because of it, so you'd think it would make a good place to store your waste.....

The LaSalle Heights Disaster occurred in the early morning of March 1, 1965 in the city of LaSalle, Quebec when a gas line explosion destroyed a number of low-cost housing units. In all, 28 people lost their lives, 39 were injured and 200 left homeless. Most of the casualties were women and children because many men had left for work. The casualties might have been higher had it not been the first of the month when many men left earlier than usual to pay their monthly rent at the rental office. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

It communicates to both cars and tells them to execute emergency maneouvers to make enough room. Failing that,, all three calculate a vector that imparts minimal g-forces to all occupants.

I can't even think of a movie (other than Gravity) that did this correctly.

'2001' did. When HAL went and cut Frank Poole's airline during his EVA, his death was shown completely silently and I think it had a far greater impact as a result.

You seem a little harsh on them.

Recovery of the booster would have been nice for investigation, but it was never intended to be flown again and was never the stated goal. The goal for that mission was a controlled descent and touch down on the ocean, which they accomplished. A 'soft-recover' wasn't the term that they were using.

This goal needed to be reached so that Range Safety at the launch pad can determine that SpaceX can reliably put a rocket down within a mile or so of a target. The next launch - in the next week or so - will attempt to land in the ocean much closer to the launch facility.

The technical difficulties of a soft landing are considerable given the hardware that they've got. With the weight of the empty booster, they can't throttle the engines back far enough to hover. So they fall towards the surface and at the right moment fire the engines to reach a computed zero velocity at touchdown. Doing this with gusty 30-40 knot winds on the surface is tough. 'Landing' on a continuously-undulating surface where there is no consistent level is tougher.

And yes, parts of this have been done before. Sure, there's open-source avionics stacks that can do this thing no problemo. But a controlled return of the first stage of a liquid fuel rocket has never been done before, and this kind of work has most certainly never been done for the relatively tiny amount of money that SpaceX has been spending. *That* is the thing that's getting tongues wagging.