For the space station, I'm not 100% certain why they can't delay the launch until when the station is at the same position relative to the launch site originally (approximately every 90 minutes) but it could involve things like risk of space debris in the flight path or needing the airspace clear for the initial ascent and only having it cleared for a brief time on launch day. Or it could be something else. As for why each launch window is so narrow, though, that has to do with the way a rocket launches; the orbit it has to spiral out to (yes, spiral; most of the delta-v a rocket generates on takeoff is lateral, not vertical, to get it to orbital velocity) has to coincide with the ISS being at the end of the spiral when the spaceship is at exactly the right velocity. If you miss your launch window by a few seconds, the ISS will be miles away from the end of that spiral, and you'll need to go faster to catch it, which will put you in a different orbit, so you'll need to slow down, which is hard to do in space... I don't know the exact details of how much the narrowness of the window is actually required and how much is just to give the maximum margin for error on the rocket engines and fuel supply - there's always going to be some margin, because things do go wrong and NASA rightly demands extremely high probabilities of success for ISS missions - but it's not a trivial thing to miss the launch window by 10 seconds.

For this flight, I can only guess that the situation is similar but for a slightly different reason: they need to launch at a specific time of day, so that the bonus velocity from Earth's rotation flings the rocket in the correct direction. The Earth-Sun L1 is really bloody far away - about 4x Lunar orbit, further than any SpaceX craft has ever gone before, in fact - so I'm sure they're taking advantage of every bit of thrust they can get. That means launching at exactly the optimal time, and it will only come once per day for any given location (and they can't exactly pick up the rocket and move it a quarter of the way around the world to try again six hours later). They still have some margin for error - they wouldn't be using the F9R otherwise; the telescoping legs, grid fins, and reserve fuel needed to attempt a landing reduce capacity slightly - but it can't be a whole lot. It'll take something like 100 days for the satellite to reach its intended orbital point.

If you actually read the WP blurb, you'd know that the satellite's mission was suggested by Gore himself. I can't promise he was the first one to come up with the idea, or that he developed it independently, but he was the one who made the proposal to NASA.

Interestingly, the satellite was built over a decade ago; it was originally supposed to launch in 2003. They basically had to un-mothball and recondition it for this mission.

I think you may have used the distance for the Earth-Moon L1? The Earth-Sun L1 is not only beyond Geostationary, it's beyond Luna's orbit too... by a factor of approximately four. According to Wikipedia, the satellite will be at 1.5 million KM from Earth.

Sort of a nitpick, but the altitude that any given stage lofts the satellite to is really not the important point. The velocity is much more critical. To stay in Earth's orbit, you need to be going really fast. To *leave* Earth's orbit and enter the Sun's orbit, as this satellite is aiming to do, you need to be going even faster. I'm not actually sure what the flight path for something aiming toward the L1 point looks like, but it's definitely not your typical low Earth orbit or even geostationary orbit trajectory. L1 is four times as far from Earth as the moon is!

Also, this is a great use for the L1 Earth-sun Lagrange point. Normally, for something to orbit the sun with the same orbital period as the Earth, it would need to be in the same orbit as the Earth. L1 is the spot in the Sun's orbit where the Earth's gravity also pulls with such a force that the satellite stays directly between the two bodies. This means it's always on the direct line between the Sun and the Earth, which is ideal for all three of its missions: report coronal mas ejections (eruptions of solar material that can briefly but severely disrupt electronics on or around Earth) that are coming towards us, measure the light and infrared radiation emitted by the sunlit side of the Earth, and take photos of the sunlit side of the Earth.

According to TFA, it's not really "Ubuntu" in the sense that you might install on a phone with an unlocked bootloader. It's a heavily customized Android image. I don't doubt there's some Canonical-developed code that it has in common with the desktop Ubuntu bot not with either AOSP or, say, RHEL... but it's probably not the Ubuntu you tried on your Nexus 4.

Yeah, I'm guessing GP has no idea what they're talking about. I've seen CE-based "laptops", but they pre-date the (original?) EEE netbook, and they didn't generally have x86 CPUs. Not that a netbook strictly needs to be x86 (and some Chromebooks aren't), but most of them were. The Windows ones definitely run NT (XP, WIn7, or more recently Win8.x), though.

I'm not sure what this Ubuntu phone will cost, but it's specs look soundly mid-range to me. I mean, they aren't high-end, much less flagship, but they aren't low-end dross either. Nobody is going to be impressed by them, but an awful lot of people still have phones with worse specs, either because they bought a mid-range phone in the last year or because they bought a low-end phone yesterday.

The phone that the AC grandparent posted is low-end dross (actually, it's possible to get a significantly better phone for that "less than $60" if you're willing to look around a bit; the roughly-two-year-old Lumia 520 had better specs and was available for $50 or less for a while). Compared to it, the Ubuntu phone has a better display, twice the storage and twice the RAM, a much better camera... and now I'm out of things to compare, because TFA doesn't actually give much in the way of specs.

The article neglects to mention both FirefoxOS and Jolla Sailfish. While neither is available on hardware with impressive specs - the first Jolla phone is nigh-identical to this one spec-wise, but at over a year old it has more excuse - I believe Sailfish may offer you the access you desire? It's descended from Maemo, which was pretty literally "Debian Linux compiled for ARM, with a touch-focused window manager and management tools". I haven't personally used Jolla enough to know anything about how much control it gives you, but on Maemo rooting your phone was a built-in (though hidden from casual discovery) feature.

Alternatively, easily-rooted Android devices do exist. In fact, given that this device apparently runs a heavily customized version of Android (yes, I RTFA), it may even come pre-rooted; there's nothing preventing developers from doing that.

The USSR was launching nuclear-powered RORSAT satellites as late as 1988 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A). I don't *think* there's any treaty that prohibits doing so again, and the only difference between a satellite and a spaceship is the ability to maneuver within and/or leave orbit. Orion (nuclear pulse rocket) is prohibited by treaty, because it involves intentionally detonating nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, but there's no reason you couldn't launch a contained reactor.

As for VASIMR, it's a very cool idea and one that may eventually see use either supplementing or replacing current ion engines, but it's not really a replacement for an NTR. 100x the thrust of an ion engine is somewhere in the neighborhood of what you might get from, for example, an Estes model rocket solid fuel engine. Sure, it'll run a lot longer, but its absolute thrust (never mind its thrust to weight ratio) is still minimal ("abysmal" might be more accurate) for spacecraft purposes. It's fine for long missions where you don't need any quick vector changes or a particular rapid voyage, but it would take one a ludicrously long time just to break out of Earth's gravity well if it started from LEO.

How the fuck are you still able to post at a default score of two when you are both blatantly talking about things you don't begin to understand (looking at only the change in gravitational potential energy but not the change in kinetic energy, saying shit like "So the efficiency of the Saturn V was 0.184%, not because it was a "bad" rocket, but because it was a rocket.", etc.) and also accusing *other* people of being stupid? Nathanbp, among others, posted a very clear rebuttal to your bullshit, and you not only didn't address it you insulted them for it. Go learn even the basics of orbital mechanics, and the basics of rocketry (specific impulse, the rocket equation, what delta-V really means, etc.), then come back.

As of this writing and with the way I have my account set up (close to default), your original post is at -1, none of your others in the thread are at higher than your default level of +2, and people pointing out how utterly wrong you are have hit +5 at least twice. Your response to such well-reasoned line-by-line rebuttals as that of brambus is, I quote, "Bloody moron." To that, I can only say: yep, you really are.

Yes yes yes but PARTY POLITICS! SOLIDARITY!

Seriously, people are *IDIOTS* when politics come out. One of the forums I hang out in refers to the phenomenon as "politics is the mind-killer". It turns normally rational people into raving lunatics at a sport competition, except with less cheering and (somehow) even more bullshit.

Yeah, I wouldn't take this to anybody who came up through the force. Go *RIGHT* over their heads, even if you have to take it to the state capitol.

Eh, biggest objection to XP post-SP2 was that it hung around for too long, while the rest of the world moved on. 32-bit only (the 64-bit version is actually Server 2003 without the Server-y bits, and not fully compatible with 32-bit XP even aside from driver issues), no ASLR (at the time XP launched, DEP support was pretty cool; by the time it went out of support an OS without ASLR couldn't be called "secure" with a straight face), one-way firewall (Vista added bi-directional filtering and a lot more control, though at least XP had *a* firewall), running as a daily user was a total pain if you weren't an Administrator (I know, I did it for months), and so on. Yes, these are mostly security concerns, but that's a pretty critical aspect of an OS for me. With that said, in the spectrum of Windows releases, XP SP0 was pretty much a bad skin on top of 2000 (which had plenty of its own issues, but XP SP0 didn't really *fix* most of them). SP1 helped a little but SP2 was really where the difference was made. Unfortunately, SP3 was little more than a roll-up of previous updates, and Vista was delayed again and again, then shipped as a reasonably secure but pretty buggy OS. There really needed to be an SP4 (or a real SP3) for XP that back-ported some of the important stuff from work on Vista, or an earlier and less-ambitious Vista (or at least NT5.3) release to fill the gap.

There's a program (free, though you may have to sign in with a Microsoft account) for getting OS updates on Windows Phone direct from Microsoft, without waiting for OEM or MO updates. It's called Preview for Developers, and has been available for well over a year. Despite the name, it's release software - same version that people on the normal upgrade path eventually get - and available to anybody who bothers to set it up. There's already a new version of the program for WP10, though it's not active (i.e. you can't actually use it to install WP10) yet.

"run the OS on top of DOS like Windows was previously doing" - you're aware that there were Windows versions between 3.11 and XP, right? None of them ran on top of DOS. Hell, I'll even ignore the fact that the GPP explicitly called out Windows 2000, which (being NT-based) was *exactly* as DOS-based as XP.

The 9x family (95, 98, ME, and their various releases/service packs) booted up through some DOS code, but DOS was basically no more than a bootloader for them. This OS family ran 32-bit protected-mode kernels (DOS was 16-bit Real Mode; no virtual memory, user/kernel separation, or process address space isolation). 9x ran on the FAT filesystem, like DOS, but supported long file names and Unicode, whereas DOS was limited to 8.3 names and 8-bit characters. 9x had a preemptive multitasking scheduler, unlike DOS which had no multitasking support at all (some previous software, such as Windows 1.x-3.x, had a cooperative multitasking scheduler on top of DOS but could not pre-empt a long-running process). 9x could and did run background processes (what a Unix user would call daemons), which was impossible on DOS. 9x had a hardware abstraction layer, allowing processes to share access to hardware such as mice and sound cards without requiring each program to have its own hardware drivers and take total control over the hardware the way DOS programs did.

Claiming that Windows pre-XP ran on top of DOS is just false. It used some DOS code in a few places and used DOS to bootstrap itself, much like a modern bootloader, but that's it. All of the core functions of an OS - the hardware interface, task management, memory management, and file management - were handled by Windows-specific code. The UI was 32-bit and Windows-specific. The 16-bit APIs were still present but the system call interface (kernel32.dll) was 32-bit and Windows-specific. It's true that you couldn't start 9x without DOS, but DOS was not running in any meaningful sense once 9x was.