It's worth pointing out that there is no company called "SpaceX". The name of the company is "Space Exploration Technologies Corporation"

If you're going to say that a company whose name starts with "Space Exploration" and whose stated goal is to "make life multi-planetary" isn't about exploration, well, please define exploration; your definition seems to differ from mine.

Apple's HTTP live streaming solution does have pretty widespread support, but it was only released in 2009. Netflix switched to Silverlight (or at least was doing public beta testing) in late 2008. It's important to keep in mind that Netflix's decision would have been based on available solutions in 2007 or 2008, not in 2012.

If Microsoft was trying for OS lock-in with Silverlight, they wouldn't have maintained an OS X version.

The reason Microsoft didn't produce a Linux version is probably as simple as marketshare: OS X likely has five or more times the marketshare of Linux on the desktop, so OS X is the natural second desktop platform to target. By the time you get down to Linux, it may simply not be worth the effort.

It is, of course, impossible that Netflix might have chosen Silverlight because of technical reasons, such as the effectiveness and seamless nature of its bitrate scaling support... If memory serves, the browser-based alternatives to Silverlight for this functionality at the time they switched didn't work as well.

No, it's obviously a conspiracy. Microsoft isn't capable of developing an effective platform for anything.

Perhaps, but today, it's not.

A modern HDD might do 150MB/s on a sustained transfer today, while on SATA2 an SSD might hit 250MB/s. A decent boost, but not substantial. Even on SATA3, you're still talking about maxing out at what, 500MB/s? This is not even an order of magnitude difference, it's tiny. It is, perhaps, 3x faster.

On random reads, on the other hand, you're talking about the difference between 0.2MB/s and 200MB/s. That's three orders of magnitude, or 1000x faster.

Which do you think is going to make a bigger difference, a 3x increase in sequential read speeds, or a 1000x increase in random access read speeds?

It's also silly talking about maxing out SATA bandwidth with a 20TB SSD... By the time we have affordable 20TB SSDs (by Moore's law, that'd be about a decade) we won't still be using them on SATA3.

Since when have solid state drives been about maxing out your SATA bandwidth? It's about random read/write speeds, not sequential read/write speeds.

SpaceX is doing incredibly exciting things, although I lost a good chunk of respect for Neil Armstrong when he sat down in front of congress and trashed the efforts of SpaceX and similar companies. He should be cheering them on and supporting them, but instead he basically accused them before the fact of endangering lives.

SpaceX's ultimate goal is to enable exploration (the name of the company is, after all, Space Exploration Technologies Corp.), but the key word there is "enable". One of the most expensive parts of manned space exploration is getting stuff into orbit. For example, the Falcon 9 payload faring is just short of being large enough to contain the Apollo command/service module combination, and the Falcon Heavy will have more than enough payload capacity to lift that into orbit. You'd need two or three Falcon Heavy launches to mount a modern Lunar expedition, and the Dragon capsule was always intended to have the endurance for a moonshot. But beyond just that, merely by acting as a space trucking company, lowering costs to get stuff into orbit, SpaceX can enable NASA (or anyone else) to mount manned exploration missions far more affordably than is possible today.

Imagine what we might have done if that money had been given to private companies like SpaceX instead. We'd probably be busy fighting a war with the mars colony for their independence by now. The entire R&D program behind Falcon 9 cost less than a single shuttle launch. You'd still have enough money left over to launch two or three times.

One of the big problems is that NASA can't effectively use what money they do get, because they don't actually build or design anything themselves. Congress, it seems, designs the rockets (the SLS seems to have been, anyhow), and private contractors rip NASA off to build them.

They did launch directly to the ISS, but they will keep their distance for a while. The three day delay is not so it can catch up to the ISS, but so that they can do lots of testing and checklists before they're allowed to actually approach the station. There are a ton of firsts happening on this mission, and everything needs to be checked out before they dock. Once they start that process, they'll get a bit closer, do some testing, get a bit closer, do some more testing, get a bit closer, do some more testing, etc. The mission checklist is pretty extensive, in terms of "approach to X metres, get go/no-go, approach to Y metres, get go/no-go, approach to Z metres, get go/no-go, etc"

We don't really need the Falcon XX for a moon or mars mission: there is no reason why multiple smaller launches by something like the Falcon Heavy can't be used. This does require orbital rendezvous, and those are hard, but not impossible.

For example, the Saturn V took 119 tons to LEO, and a Falcon Heavy will take 53 tons (with 70 a possibility with a new second stage under development). Two Falcon Heavy launches, which would cost in the ballpark of $200m, has the lift capability of a manned lunar mission. Mars would require more launches, but when you can launch 15 Falcon Heavies with the capacity of almost seven Saturn V for the price of a single shuttle launch, well, it changes everything.

The SLS is estimated to cost $41 billion for R&D and four launches, and is expected to have a cost-to-leo of $8500 per pound. SpaceX is claiming that the R&D on their Falcon Heavy will be ~$2.5 billion, and they'll have a cost-to-leo of $500-1000 (with the lower figure depending on them getting stage recovery working).

Why does the SLS need to exist? It won't be able to do anything that projected private sector products won't be able to do for a fraction of the cost.

Let me put it in perspective: the Falcon Heavy is projected to put cargo into orbit for 3% of the cost of the shuttle (~1/30th the cost).

Would it have? The F9 can operate normally with one engine failure. It can definitely do this after launch, although I'm not sure it can launch normally with one failed. In any case, there was no need to do that because they clamp the thing down so that they can abort a launch if they have to.

The hold-and-release launch system they use (which many rockets don't) is what allows them to do this. They light up the engines, do their checks, and then if they're satisfied they release the clamps and launch the rocket. If they don't like what they see, they abort.

From a technical standpoint, a Falcon 9 can operate normally with one engine failure, so they could probably have just shut off the affected engine and launched anyhow. Of course, they'd have no margin for error at that point... And they had no pressing need to launch now, since this wasn't a critical launch (it's not like the astronauts on the ISS are running out of food and will die if the delivery is late)

That said, while Space X touts the reliability of the Falcon 9 due to being able to continue with one engine failure, that only applies to the first stage... The second stage only has one engine. Wouldn't this be a single point of failure? They can suffer an engine failure so long as the engine that fails isn't the one critical out of ten total engines?

I'm not sure I understand your question. If you watch 6 hours of IPTV per day, why do you have a TV bill? Because then you wouldn't be watching 6 hours of IPTV per day...

My 6 hour a day figure is not for me personally, who lives alone. It's a reasonable sounding number for a family household. People watch TV at different times or on different screens. If you're talking two parents and three kids, that's just 1.2 hours per day per person.

My ISP, on their basic service level, has a 75GB cap for $30, a 300GB cap for $35, and unlimited for $46. That's reasonable. That is giving you the option to pay a bit extra to cover the costs of heavy use, or save a bit of money if you have light use. Either way you get an affordable option.

... Really? Do you really think "megabytes per month" is a useful measurement rather than "megabits per second"? When somebody talks about cost-per-megabit, they pretty much always mean "per second".

50 GB = 50,000 MB
50,000 MB = 400,000 Mb
400,000 / 60 (seconds per minute) / 60 (minutes per hour) / 24 (hours per day) / 30 (typical days per month) =~ 0.154 Mbps
$10 * (1 / 0.154) =~ $64

Sigh... Uncompressed 1080p is not 4 GB per hour. Let's do the math:

1920 (horizontal pixels) * 1080 (vertical pixels) * 24 (bits per pixel) * 30 (frames per second) * 60 (seconds per minute) * 60 (minutes per hour) = 5,374,771,200,000 bits per hour
5,374,771,200,000 / 8 (bytes per bit) / 1024 (bytes per kilobyte) / 1024 (kilobytes per megabyte) / 1024 (megabytes per gigabyte) =~ 625 gigabytes per hour

625... Where the heck did you get 4 from?

BluRay is 1080p. Typical BluRay bitrates with AVC are 15 to 30 megabits per second (depends on the movie). Trying to do 1080p with 4 Mbps is is a bit much. 720p at 4Mbps is possible at acceptable quality, but it's still conservative. In fact, it's roughly half the bitrate that Bell Canada uses for their IPTV service FibeTV.

I also never said that $20 for 50-100GB is reasonable. I said $10 for 100-200 GB is reasonable.