Someone drop a 1? 13,400 sounds more believable.

Calling Bill Gates an innovator and inventor is really pushing the fanboi envelope. Businessman, entrepeneur, sure, but Microsoft's innovation was all in the lockin, nothing to do with technology.

The balancing act is almost exactly the same at the last moment of forward flight as it is at the first moment of retro burn, just in a different direction.

Aerodynamics matter very little at high altitude. They matter some at lower altitude, but I doubt they make much difference when the engine is burning.

The mass is less, and presumably easier to control, but yes, that is a difference.

The relative speeds are the same. Launch starts at 0 and increases to 1300. Landing starts at 1300 and ends at 0.

Actually, that is a small difference. Launch starts at 0, but landing ends at 2 m/s, leaving shock absorbers to reduce it to the final 0.

The tower drops away BEFORE liftoff.

And I don't mean the speed of light kind.

At 14 stories tall and traveling upwards of 1300 m/s (nearly 1 mi/s), stabilizing the Falcon 9 first stage for reentry is like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm.

EXACTLY the same as takeoff. NO difference.

The link is to sciencemag but the text says "Nature" (which should be lower case anyway).

Especially when such basic facts as the timing of the Cambrian explosion are so wrong. It was 542M years ago, according to wikipedia, or 4B years after the earth formed. This summary implies the Cambrian explosion was 3B years sooner, unless by "tens of millions" they actually mean 3000 million.

He's complaining that the money he spent to defeat the influence of money in politics didn't have any influence.

The proper lesson is that his basic thesis is wrong, that money doesn't always win elections. Meg Whitman was another example (if you have to ask who she? and what election? then you prove my point -- google "meg whitman election").

But being a statist fuck, that won't be the lesson he sees. Lessig's done a lot of nice work otherwise, but he's off the rails on this.

So it's ok for non-profit schools to push useless degrees and bad courses. Got it.

What galls me the most is the panty-wetting over a government-granted monopoly trying to maintain its government granted monopoly when that very same government tries to compete using taxpayer dollars as a subsidy.

The outrage should be against government involvement period. If governments didn't grant local monopolies, there would be real competition among the real companies, and no perceived need for the government competition which is only competitive because it has the taxpayer subsidy.

How can anyone pay lip service to free markets by regulating them?

The problem is that government regulates them as monopolies. They create the problem in the first lace by creating the monopoly, then offer to fix the problem by adding regulation. If it were a truly free market, without government sponsored monopolies, regulation wouldn't be nessary.

Look up the history of AT&T, how they were acting like a bully, but when the lawsuits began to have an effect and counter their actions, they begged the government to regulate them as a monopoly. If the government had just said no, they would have been brought to heel within a few years; the market would have worked.

It never ceases to amaze me how often I am amazed at people who cannot grasp this simple concept, that government specialized in correcting problems it created. Even that great social experiment, US alcohol prohibition from 1920-1933, was not ended by repealing the prohibition, but by changing outright prohibition to regulation.

The right to privacy is unimplementable. It basically requires hiding the truth on a massive individualized scale, and cannot be done.

If one were to attempt hiding one or a few particular truths, it might be successful for a short while, but it would be like the Soviets airbrushing former leaders out of pictures. The truth will resurface sooner or later.

And as soon as you mandate the right to be forgotten, every punk and his dog will want to protect their privacy too -- why should it be reserved only for the rich and powerful? Not only will the resultant holes in truth became ever more blatant, but the only way to hide the truth is manpower intensive, just like airbrushing people out of all those pictures. You can't automate it -- not only would it miss indirect references and intentional subterfuge, it will erase false positives and raise the ire of its false victims.

I am watching this EU court ruling with a metric boatload of popcorn. Most legislation is pretty clueless when it comes to unintended consequences, btu this one is spectacularly so.

Dang, I was going to say the same thing.

Close to the same argument I use with people who rail against dams. What about beavers? If humans throw logs and rocks and mud across a stream just like beavers, is that unnatural or natural, good or bad, politically correct or not? What if they make it out of boards instead of cut down trees? What is it's teh exact same size, but concrete? How about half the size in concrete?

I repeat, legal oppression only exists because of government. If you cannot see that simple truth, you are wilfully blind.

Primogeniture and entailment were government laws which enforced class distinctions and warfare -- withotu government creation and enforcement of classes, there would be no class oppression and warfare.

Government laws prevented women from owning property, voting, or having much freedom at all, and made marriage rape legal.

Slavery and segregation were the direct result of government laws. Society was integrating on its own until government stopped it and reversed course.

It's very simple: government creates laws to justify its oppression. You claim to get your history from the People's History. It's not much of a history if that single lesson doesn't come through loud and clear.