Helicopters work well on Earth for several reasons - first, our oxygen-bearing atmosphere means we don't have to carry our own oxidizer, just fuel, which makes it far more mass-efficient. Then our thick atmosphere means you get a lot more lift for a given amount of airspeed.

I have no doubt that you could get a rotorcraft to work on Mars. It's a question of whether it will work better than alternatives - such as the rockets used by Curiosity. But in essence this will have to be a rocket-powered rotorcraft as well - either rocket-like gas generators, or electric motors would be needed to work in the oxygenless environment, and I don't see electric being feasible in this situation. It then comes down to "is it more efficient to use the fuel+oxidizer to turn a rotor at supersonic speeds, or use it as a rocket?"

I'm no rocket scientist, but it seems to me that the simple extra mass of the rotor is a big strike against it being a good alternative to rockets, never mind the thinner atmosphere.

The problem is that this is not a consumer product - it's a development kit. It isn't ready for consumers yet, and is intended only for use by developers so they can have something ready when the retail version is available.

Reselling to non-developers might give Oculus a bad rep because they're being judged by an incomplete product that wasn't supposed to be used by such people. So I can see why Oculus is trying to avoid this happening.

My problem with SLS is that it's a rocket built almost entirely on existing tech, and it's still taking them this long to develop it. You're taking existing engines, existing boosters, and (in some configurations) existing upper stages, and yet you still have nothing to show after three years and millions of dollars? Not to mention all the design work you could reuse from almost identical programs that got scrapped - I'm sure there's work from Ares V that could be reused.

Well, that's what the court is for. They get to decide if deleting this email is the right thing to do or not.

Who else would you suggest? Goldman Sachs is out, obviously. Would you rather Google be the one to decide?

If Google is really just trying to show how flawed this is. After all, if you search him (I popped over to google.co.uk as I'm in the US) that blog certainly does not come up, but about the entire first page of hits (especially if you throw bbc in as well) is about how that page will not come up because of this ruling...

That's for one track, not stereo. It would actually be about 69.12 MB/min or 4.14 GB/hr uncompressed, so, using conservative estimates, 3.105GB/hr FLAC.

Most people are wise enough not to bother with 192KHz, although some could argue for 96KHz, which still puts you at about half of the figures I stated above for a stereo track. 350MB is a 35 minute album done in 44.1KHz/16 bit at uncompressed or likely 44.1KHz and 24 bit done in FLAC or with really good FLAC compression, 48 KHz/24 bit.

This brings up a quick question for the GP, Joe, with the size of hard drives/solid state these days, why should you be so worried about file size? Audio quality makes a big difference in both perception and experience. 350MB for a high quality (audio quality not necessarily musical) album is a better way to enjoy a good (musical) album than a crummy 256 kbps MP3.

Or someone pays for a license for speech to text implementations. Just because it's Linux, doesn't mean there can't be commercial software on it, commercial licenses available, etc. The kernel should not have non-open source code in it (although, there's ways around this ala nVidia drivers), but other than that, why would it matter that Linux doesn't have open sourced speech to text and patents aren't in the public domain?

I've never eaten any food from Sweden, other than a few candy fish. Is it logical for me to doubt the existence of Swedish agriculture based on it not affecting me (as far as I know)?

I'd like to know where you're finding them for $15, because I can't find any for less than $30 or so in stores around here. They'd be perfectly fine earbuds for $15. The problem is that stores are selling those $15 for at least twice that.

I use cheap $15 earbuds myself - after spending $80 on a headset that broke repeatedly and didn't even sound that good, I swore off expensive headphones in favor of something I could regularly throw into a river and still spend less.

Okay, let's say you have two cars, a Porsche and an NSX (representing a photon and a neutrino, respectively). Both are limited by the same speed limit, which they always travel at (the speed of light).

Well, due to some weird quantum mechanics, every so often that Porsche splits into a pair of motorcycles, because apparently they got bought by Wayne Enterprises or something (in actuality, they split into an electron and anti-electron). They almost immediately join back together (forming a photon again), but while they're motorcycles, they are affected by wind (gravity). They still can't break the speed limit, but sometimes it slows them down just a bit.

When you're traveling almost literally between galaxies, that little bit of slowdown for tiny snippets of time can really make a difference. In this case, the NSX made it here a few hours earlier.

What kind of beer are you drinking!? A basic guideline showing quite the opposite: http://www.menshealth.co.uk/lo...

Net neutrality isn't about forbidding high-traffic companies from finding efficient ways to handle that traffic. Doing what Netflix usually does, having a local cache server hosted within the ISP, works because it reduces the amount of traffic leaving the ISP. As long as the ISP charges the same amount to everyone doing so (0 is a good amount - it's a benefit to them - but if they want to charge a nominal fee, fair enough), it's neutral.

Net neutrality is about not letting ISPs slow down traffic unless they get paid twice.

If the only difference between two sites is that one paid the danegeld and the other didn't, they aren't making one faster - they're making the other slower. Deliberately degrading the performance of everyone else is NOT neutral.

It does seem rather similar - a large cluster of cores, laid out in a grid topology. Perhaps they're doing something different with the cache coherency? I couldn't find too much on how Intel's handling that, and it seems to be a focus of the articles on this chip.

Er, Wallops is a launch site, like Canaveral. Pretty much anyone can launch from there - the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport is located there. If you're referring to OSC, who are the major non-government users of Wallops, you're being needlessly confusing.

Also, OSC is good at cobbling together pieces. The Minotaurs are recycled ICBMs, either Peacekeepers or Minuteman missiles. The Antares uses Russian engines, a Ukrainian-designed first stage, then an off-the-shelf solid-fuel second stage. They do remarkably good work considering their limitations, but much of the work of "getting to space" was already done for them, they just had to make it work with their payloads and launch facilities.

SpaceX is doing everything from scratch - much more expensive, but it has the advantage of not making them reliant on anyone else. OSC is already in trouble because Russia is cutting off their supply of engines for Antares. They'll also be in trouble if the US military ever cuts off their supply of old missiles, either because they need them as missiles again, or because they've simply run out. OSC does good work, but they seem to be a dead-end in the long term.

What, exactly, does this mission get us?

The composition of asteroids is fairly well-known, both from the numerous meteorites we've recovered, and from the numerous spacecraft missions, including a sample return (Hayabusa). Unmanned probes can't do nearly the same scope of exploration as a manned mission, but asteroids are small. Does one even deserve a manned mission, much less several manned missions?

What is there to be gained from an asteroid capture and manned exploration? I'm all for manned exploration, but it seems like Mars or Titan or something might be a better target.