Information wants to be free. Sony demands. Anthropomorphism requires.

Q: If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?

TOM!

"Uh, Tom... Tom... Actually, from now on, we're the comedy team of Ahjnudpippibod and Davis."

They've outgrown the confines of Guantanamo Bay.

If we look at jet aircraft, wear depends on the airframe and the engines, and the airframe seems to be the number of pressurize/depressurize cycles as well as the running hours. Engines get swapped out routinely but when the airframe has enough stress it's time to retire the aircraft lest it suffer catastrophic failure. Rockets are different in scale (much greater stresses) but we can expect the failure points due to age to be those two, with the addition of one main rocket-specific failure point: cryogenic tanks.

How long each will be reliable can be established using ground-based environmental testing. Nobody has the numbers for Falcon 9R yet.

Weight vs. reusable life will become a design decision in rocket design.

You mean it drops off too high and downrange to boost back to the launch point and too low to achieve most of one orbit before boosting back to the launch point. Right?

Take your meds, the paranoia will subside.

Maybe, but statistical thinking doesn't come naturally. People cheat at gambling by loading dice so that they come up snake eyes (say) 1 in 20 throws. They get away with it because even if you know the dice are loaded there is no way to link any particular snake eye event to the hidden weights. The victims simply subscribe it to luck, but the longer you play the more suspicious they will become of your "lucky streak". Same deal with storms, floods, and droughts.

Mwahhhahaahaaahaaaa!
-- Eric Schmidt

The documents DEMAND that the the press DESTROY SONY!

Eternal damnation in the fires of hell was not mentioned in the old testament, it was introduced by gentle Jesus in the new testament.

You obviously haven't heard of Tony Abbot's humanitarian fighter jets.

It's a long way to the shop. If you want a sausage roll.

Pieroxy(2014) or Fourier(1824)? - Tough choice.

If we are being 'serious', nobody has claimed there is such a thing, however the climate our civilization has experienced in the last 10k yrs has been in a very stable "dynamic equilibrium". That is set to change because humans are kicking the crap out of the climate system, it will fuck up our agriculture, flood our coastal cities, and cause mass migration. How much worse it gets is depends on how we behave, if continue on our current course then the laws of physics say the ocean will become acidic in the 2100's - the last time such an event happened naturally, it coincided with the worst ever extinction event known to man.

We have already got a taste of how climatic changes can cause social disruption in Syria. The "arab spring" was preceded by the worst drought in the 10ky history of the fertile crescent (the birthplace of agriculture). The 'unprecedented' drought caused people to abandon their farms and set off food riots in major cities such as Cairo and Aleppo. In Syria agriculture totally collapsed, a full 10% of the population (2M people) simply walked off their "dust bowl" farms just prior to the civil war, coincidence?

I drove a cab in Australia for 3yrs, it's not the worst job I've had but it's certainly the worst paid job, think fruit picking money. Most cabbies don't own the cab or the plates (medallion). The cab owners are the ones who are understandably getting upset since if uber is legal the plates they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for suddenly become worthless.

Uber drivers are desperate for work and silly enough to run their own car into the ground for little more than petrol money, when it's dead they can't afford a new one and walk away in a worse situation than they started. Courier companies do the same thing here in Melbourne, they call you a "sub-contractor" get you to stick a "courier" sign on your own car then you drive it at your own expense until it falls apart. And if you're unlucky enough to fuck up without the right insurance, you will be paying for it the rest of your life.

From my experience with real cabs, sticking with a regulated taxi industry is the best thing any of us can do to stop uber exploiting desperate people in a race to the bottom.