Hey,

one thing I haven't seen mentioned: Any wooden packaging (crates, pallets, etc.) needs to be fumigated http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISPM_15. Otherwise you'll likely have trouble clearing it on the other end.

Cheers,
Michael

I have not been involved with the system lay-out, but I can see the allure. Landing at sea helps, because:
- The population density is lower, i.e. it's easier to show that your landing doesn't endanger the un-involved public.
- Your landing point is relatively free, so you can return from varied orbits without needing excessive cross-range.

Why would you want to land _on_ the support ship/barge as opposed next to it?
- Dunking stuff into sea-water is harsh on said stuff. It can be designed around, but it constrains choices of materials etc. While solving an already hard problem additional constraints of these sorts are best avoided.
- Ships can be built in ways to almost eliminate wave-action, which would impose more (and more varied) structural loads in a water landing.

Is all this worth the trade-off of having to pull of a precision landing every time, and having to maintain/operate/design an (expensive, possibly custom) support ship?

I don't know. Mr. Bezos might know more, but I doubt that he knows for sure either.

Cheers,
Michael

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsU1t2vkURg

Hail to the King Baby!

And if he's trying to see if he can read data patterns off platters by hand from a dismantled drive, and needs a known test pattern to calibrate his equipment with?

If that's the case he'll learn that reverse-engineering is hard. In this particular case nigh impossibly hard, if it needs to be done on modern hardware. As others have said easier on MFM drives.

I've found watching the facial ticks and foam build up around the mouth from real programmers when they encounter a GOTO to be quite entertaining!

Clearly you've never met a Real Programmer.

Cheers,
Michael

Burglaries will be sorted out after a few burglars end up dead for their efforts.

So I take it you have burglaries all sorted in the US?

Cheers,
Michael

Look at the graphs, look at historical records in the rocks. Ask yourselves, did we cause global warming or are we merely part of it ? I think the graphs speak for themselves.

Yes it does speak for it self, possibly not in the way you think, though. The large scale graph shows that from -400000 to 0 carbon dioxide concentrations varied between ~190ppmv and ~300ppmv; changes occurred relatively slowly, the fastest up-ticks are on timescales of 1k-10k years (hard to be precise from this scale).
The new peak on the far right of this graph is unique in two ways:
-The absolute level is about 25% higher than any of the 4 previous peaks and about 40% higher than the average of the graph.
-The rate of change is completely unprecedented, about 90ppmv/200years, i.e. the vertical line inside the ellipse.

I am no expert in the matter, and I know that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. However, just judging from your graph, I see a unique feature in the data, nicely aliened with a drastic population increase of a certain two-legged critter (obviously not shown here) and a change of habits of said critter (massive burning of coal/oil).
So, unless you have a compelling alternate explanation I'll stick with man-made increase of CO2 levels.

Cheers,
Michael

The problem is that many sites will check if the browser is IE, and then do various workarounds. [...] if browser is IE, but version 7 then do the hack

This still means there is going to be a reasonably standard-compliant version (for IE8) which should work fine for opera, safari, firefox and friends. To me this seems to be a distinct improvement over the current state where there's sites which don't work for non-IE, period.

Cheers,
Michael

... is in front of the screen ;-)