The big problem with using the ISS to do this type of mission is that the ISS is in the wrong orbital plane to easily launch flights to the moon. While it's not impossible to fly from the ISS it will be far more costly(in terms of fuel) to do so. Basically as long assembling the mission at the ISS is less costly than a single launch into the correct orbital plane this might be feasible.

I remember seeing an interview with a cold-war military scientist that was working on a automated nuclear powered bomber. And even though it never got out of concept phase, they had already figured that after it had dropped the bombs that they would have it fly race track patterns over the USSR. Because it had a rather radioactive exhaust and it was a feature that they had planned on using. So DARPA thought of radioactive military vehicles in the 60's.
         

If you haven't seen most Japanese Phones, they tend to be larger on average than American cell phones. The iPhone is about the same size as most phones here in Japan. It is a little wider but thinner than most phones but it is very normal in terms of bulk(volume).

In fact one of my Japanese friends just brought home a 32gb iPhone two days ago. So I asked him why he bought the 32gb version vs the 16gb. For him at least it came down to comparing features of the iPhone vs other Japanese cell phones. He felt that the extra space allowed the iPhone to be a computer replacement. Why having having 32gb vs 16gb suddenly makes it into small computer vs a big cell phone, I don't know. He also said that softbank(a cell phone company here in Japan) is pricing the iPhone very competitively.

He feels he bought a small computer that can make calls and not really a cell phone. Maybe that is why... 16gb of storage for a computer would be nothing... but 32gb would be far better at least if you think of the iPhone as a small computer and not as a cell phone. That might be why the 32gb version is selling far more than the 16gb version.

Mainly because you wouldn't need any source code to do any of the localization. Not to say they wouldn't have access to development tools built for WoW or that they wouldn't have a very good idea how the game was put together internally.

They might even be able to take the WoW engine and mod it heavily into a new game... but the core would still but the same under all of those changes. I doubt they could even change game mechanics. But maybe they don't want to... It would look like a new game but have the feel of WoW. Which might be just what they are looking to do.

The problem with metered service is the downward cost of bandwidth over time. Ten years ago I remember paying about $1000 month for 3mbit of connectivity(At a data center). Today I could get 60-100Mbit of connectivity for the same cost. Bandwidth isn't like electricity, if it was it would have cost 10cents per kw/h in 1999 but today it would only cost 0.1cents per kw/h...

Any comparisons between Electricity and Bandwidth will always fail due to the massive downward cost of bandwidth. I would be fine with bandwidth metering or caps if they were tied to the real cost of providing the bandwidth. But I don't see how any system to measure this cost would be free of corruption or provide encouragement for infrastructure upgrades.

The real issue isn't that the government can't price a service correctly. If anything is unfair about the government providing services it's how they can cut through government policies and basically get stuff done if they want too. Granted, that isn't always the case... but at the very least the government tends not to have to worry about intervention at the same level(city/state/federal). In this case it's city gov vs TWC(backed by state gov) but at the city level once they wanted to deploy their own network they were able to do so.

The real question is why couldn't TWC compete? I think the answer to that is basically lack of focus and they are searching for short term profits. Any large Isp could kill a local network... really it wouldn't be hard. They could bring in so much bandwidth and price it cheaper than the local network. But they don't do so... they aren't willing to take the hit on the bottom line in the short term to lock up the area over the long term. If TWC was a local company that had the powers to do the same things as the Government and the outlook to give up short-term profits for a customer base over the long-term they wouldn't have any problems competing.

As much as you can complain about how Verizon FIOS service is a total lock-in. I think they have the winning move long term. They give you access to massive amounts of bandwidth today, they remove any current POTS service(the lock-in) and they have the headroom to grow in the future. This makes it possible for them to ALWAYS have the bandwidth advantage if they chose to pay for the upgrades. They have been willing to pay for a costly roll-out that should give them long-term benefits.

This really is a something that has been around for a long time. One of the most interesting uses I have found for it is; simulating the effects of satellite Wan connections. Most of these links have about 600ms of end-to-end latency and without something like this simple tc command it is difficult to simulate this without actually hooking up to a real satellite connection.

Other uses; I once bandwidth limited one of my old roommates. Every week I would shave a little bit more bandwidth off of his connection. I think I started at about 500kbit and by the end of the semester I had him down to about 16kbit. We were waiting to hear him say something about the slow Internet connection. The whole time he didn't say a word and he just assumed that his computer was slowly dieing on him. ^^

Is this the second major hole in the Standard Model? I know neutrinos having mass is sort of a hole. But this sounds like a much larger break with the Standard Model. Anyone following this have more information?