It's not a terribly serious setback in the history of space flight, but it could be a serious blow to Orbital.

Their whole program is built around the idea of using old surplus Soviet-era rocket engines, originally designed for the ill-fated N1 program. (The N1 program, as a sidenote, is responsible for one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history when one of its launch vehicles had a failure shortly after takeoff. On top of a zero-for-four launch record, it's not the program I'd pick to emulate.)

My understanding of the Soviet engines is that they have some design features that make them lightweight for their output, but represent tradeoffs not typically taken on Western engines, due to the risk of "burn through". But some people--perhaps including Orbital--thought that the designers had solved the problem and the risks were overstated.

Too early to tell right now, but if the engines turn out to have a fatal flaw, that would be bad for Orbital. It'd probably be good for SpaceX, since they're the obvious alternative, but it'd leave NASA down one contractor for the commercial launch program.

Wikipedia has a much larger audience, and Slashdot is a community.

You need to figure out how to monetize it to an extent that it at least supports itself and does so in a way without offending anyone.

Good luck. I would love to see such a site get created.

Yes, but he does have a point. Slashdot is being ruined far more by the complaints than the Beta (fucking POS). So whatever damage is being done at this point is "your" fault. I put that in quotes as I don't know the extent of your involvement in the revolt.

It's very effective, but is also exactly what terrorists do. Make it so bad for the innocent bystanders that they have no option but to listen to you. I'm not the only one that senses an undercurrent of spoiled entitlement in the messages and actions either.

You guys can flame away on me as much as you want and claim I'm a corporate apologist, but that would just be reactionary, emotional, and illogical.

I'm with all of you on this. Slashdot is being ruined by corporate greed and shortsighted decisions by executives, and they are all worthless wastes of skins based solely on their actions . I have to block 9 trackers, beacons, and widgets on this site, and this site, above all others, should NOT be violating our privacy with 3rd party corporations known to be raping us in cyberspace.

However, while we voice our displeasure with what has happened to our beloved community let us not attack those who are not our "enemies", but those that have valid complaints about how we are reacting to it.

Fuck Beta is annoying from all angles.

Let's just leave and come back the Tuesday after next and see what happens.

I don't think it's possible to make a site unsupported by advertisements. Where you do plan on getting the money for hosting from? Private donors?

I might give you 20-40 a year. I think I may have given Slashdot like 60 bucks before the economy went into the shitter.

Why on earth would Adobe flash be required for anything? Every time I see Flash on the page I just come to the conclusion they had poor website designers. Seriously. Who chooses that complete waste of a corporation now? If they didn't have Photoshop I would not use a single program by their ridiculously abhorrent corporation, and I only use Photoshop because I don't consider GIMP to be an alternative that is there just yet. Getting there, but not yet.

Kudos on getting rid of the trackers, beacons, and widgets though. We would be blocking them anyways, so there is no point for anything outside of internal analytics.