See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bion_(satellite) It's the 12th in a series of missions that have been (infrequently) flown since the 70's.

Can you imagine how pissed-off Disney would be if Song of the South , the full version of which has never been released on US home media, suddenly went public domain because it had never been released?

While that idea means companies wouldn't necessarily lose profit, the fact they would lose control (and the ability to suppress undesirable works) would mean they'd hate it and lobby heavily against it.

Excellent points.

Unlike the 70's or 80's terrorist, the modern one is expecting to die or spend the entirety of their life in prison as escaping the law simply won't happen. So one would expect them to be looking for simple plans with a high chance of success to avoid their 'sacrifice' being in vain.

Instead, there does seem to be a succession of broken-up terrorist cells, who devise bizarre, baroque plots that take so long to plan and set up that they invariably show up on various intelligence services' radars, long before they're even close to executing their plan. I assume they're then carefully watched, and allowed to proceed just long enough to thoroughly incriminate themselves. In fact, one such bunch has just been sentenced in the UK - http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/18/luton-terror-plot-four-jailed

I suppose the odd thing about the Boston two (assuming it was just them) is that they deviate from this pattern.

Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Terrorists fixate on certain targets, such as airplanes. We all know that if you wanted to disrupt air transportation these days, the airplane itself is one of the least vulnerable targets, but they keep focusing on the airplanes.

There are excellent reasons for them fixating on airplanes. If you tale a look at the history of non-vehicle suicide bombings, you'll find they rarely kill more than a dozen or so people. I'm guessing, but I assume that's the ideal circumstance (from the terrorist's PoV) when he or she detonates the largest bomb that can feasibly concealed on the body, in the middle of the densest crowd.

A much smaller bomb smuggled onto a plane will bring it down, killing perhaps 300 or 400 – around a factor of 30 more.

Would you prefer your NATO liberators arrive in F-14s or Yugos?

You are aware the Grumman F-14 Tomcat was retired by the US Navy in 2006, and is now only flown by the Islamic Republic of Iranian Air Force?

I don't know about Yugos.

See Schneier: The Internet is a Surveillance State

So, not only is every action, every message, every visited website recorded. But it's also going to persist forever and will, ultimately, be probably be the most concrete mark made by your existence on this planet.

Though I'm not sure it'll be much use to future historians; I'm sure the information will be heavily paywalled as some deranged capitalist is bound to think the porn habits of people who've been dead 200 years still has commercial value.

"... has no chance of striking Earth"

Famous last words.

Because the laws of dramatic irony obviously trump the laws of physics.

Why all the civil-liberties hand-wringing? Just how hard is it to read some of the papers on stylometric analysis to see what markers are used, then write a script that randomises them but preserves the sense of the text. Make it a Firefox plugin so it's done automatically. It's a better solution than using Google translate to go English to $language, $language to English.

For extra fun, change your text so its stylometric markers match up with E. L. James, or the leader writer of the Washington Post.

I should point out that aside from the Hindenberg, the only time airships ever went down in flames was during World War 1, when they were being shot at. Even then, German Zepplins could take a lot of damage, and it was only when British aircraft started carrying a mixture of explosive and incendiary rounds (called Buckingham and Pomeroy mixture, after the inventors of the two bullet types) that they could feasably destroy a Zeppelin. Even then, aircraft attacking Zeppelins sometimes found themselves firing hundreds of rounds, at a range too close to miss, and having no. Remember, today we don't doubt the safety of 747s, simply because World War 2, B-17 bombers used to come apart when they were shot at enough.

Also during World War 1, the British operated hundreds of SS Class, Coastal Class and NS Class, non-rigid blimps. Not a single one was lost to fire during 10's of thousands of flying hours. Admittedly, several WW1 British airships were destroyed in a catastrophic fire in a hanger, but that was because one Darwin Award nominee decided to get busy with testing a radio, while he was standing in a puddle of petrol that was leaking from a broken fuel tank.

So I'm inclined to write off the Hindenberg as a on-off, at a time when aircraft routinely dropped out of the sky. I might even go so far as to give a tiniest whisker of credence to the conspiracy theory, that it was down to an anti-Nazi saboteur.

Now, I fully appreciate hydrogen dirigibles will absolutely never, ever, ever, fly again simply because of PR and (well justified) safety fears. But I guess my point is that they could be made safe, or at least, safe enough if there was a need.

require 44–107% of the total nitrogen and 20–51% of the total phosphorus

I don't understand how the nitrogen and phosphorus is consumed. Presumably the end product is supposed to be some kind of hydrocarbon fuel. In which nitrogen and phosphorus are neither needed, nor particularly desirable.

If the two end up somewhere else, in some waste product of the process, then why can't the waste be processed and the two elements recycled?

Really nice but...

It acts as a host though a microUSB. And exactly how many mice, keyboards, memory-sticks etc use that?

So it looks like the first job on getting one would be to de-solder the socket and try and replace it with a full size USB.

Meh... A better solution would be to get a minion to carry your camera/monitor combo on a chain around their neck.

It'd be like you were Dr. Theopolis and they were Tweaky.

Umm... all the above options.

Given my book collection ranges from a 1766 edition of Robert Andrews's translation of Virgil (mainly of interest because it was printed by John Baskerville) worth about £400, to a tatty, 1980's pb of one of Doc Smth's Lensman books that cost 20 pence in a charity shop.

... but why don't they build the rocket on the take-off location and remove the building instead? It seems like a smaller effort, no?

This is exactly what's done in some circumstances. During the 80's, there were plans to launch shuttles from Vandernberg AFB in California. The West-Coast launch site was known as SLC-6 and, if it had ever been used, would have worked in exactly this way. The downside is that the launch site is tied up for many months at a time. I believe SLC-6 was intended to handle around one launch per year.

When the plans for Kennedy were laid out in the early 60's, the method of getting to the moon was still being decided. Early on, the leading option was Earth orbit rendezvous, which would have required two Saturn 5 launches per mission, with the rockets launched within hours of each other. Having a central assembly building with a capacity for several Saturn 5s [1] and three separate launch sites (although only two were actually built) was seen as the best way of doing this. Everything there now is a legacy of this, early-60's planning.

However ESA in Kourou and the Russians in Baikonur do the same thing - separating assembly and launch sites. The hassle of having to move rockets about on the ground is more than made up for the fact that your launch rate isn't bottle-necked by the number of launch pads. And remember, the number of launch pads is always going to be limited as they have to be separated by many miles of empty land for safety reasons. Even on the Central Asian steppes, you'd only have space for so many.

[1] I believe it could potentially accommodate four at various stages of assembly but don't quote me, I'm likely misremembering the exact number.

This is all about the moon's 14-day, Lunar–night power famine. The solution is simply to use solar power satellites sitting at one of the Earth-Moon Lagrangian points, where the solar collectors will be in perpetual sunlight. Perpetual power means always-on growing lights so the problem is solved without the need for RTGs, and their pretty horrible thermal inefficiency (not to mention the problem of where do you get all that Pu239 from).

The main problem with using solar power satellites for supplying power to the Earth (the huge cost of launching them into space) is neatly inverted in the Lunar context as, by placing a solar colony's power hardware in space, you have a large mass of hardware that doesn't have to be soft-landed on the moon, representing a substantial saving.