Radioactive waste + the majority of the world's most dangerous species = ... ? Godzilla? Hundred metre diameter spiders? Snakes the size of the great wall of China?

Roller coaster tech has resulted in more roller coaster tech, nothing else.

Did you have a point or were you just trolling?

Virgin Galactic is like extended warrantee on your rotary dial phone. The future isn't that.

"Don't complain that these front runners get bragging rights to almost space, because soon you and I will be able to go all the way into actual space for far less."

Eh, they are so much welcome to it. What I'm saying is that almost-space is not space at all, rather some dumb Disney limbo where the victims are beguiled into thinking they are astronauts.

And yes, space will soon be comparatively cheap; but it will always be expensive.

Fair point, I'll give you that. But this makes it still worse -- why on earth should we (as a species) be expending so much money (== resources) on such a futile endeavour? Personally, I'd be ashamed to take part in this.

Well, ok, it's still really cool, even if it's totally useless!

It will not be useful, not ever, despite your most desperate wishful thinking. Your argument is invalid. 'Straight up' will never work (unless you have enough delta v to escape Earth's gravity, but that's not what we're talking about).

Infrastructure? This is not a driver for infrastructure. Oh wait -- you count Disneyland as infrastructure. Nuff said.

A Mig29 ride would surely be a lot of fun!

But I'm certain that going up in a Dragon would beat that by at least an order of magnitude.

This is just insane. Going to 50 miles, or 62 miles, or even 200 miles straight up is utterly pointless. It does not advance us at all. It's a gimmick for people with too much money and not enough brain cells. Yes, it might be 'space' (for a few minutes) -- but so what?! This is really old tech. The USA did this in the 50s.

Getting to orbit is a lot harder, yes; but that's an actual achievement, instead of a publicity stunt. You can actually do useful stuff once you're in orbit. You can't do that from a jumped-up fairground ride.

I expect this whole fiasco will quietly fade from the public eye, once the backers realize that they've invested heavily in a pig in a poke. If they are smart, they won't plough (plow, for Americans) any more cash into this travesty.

It's a numbers station.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Perhaps this is one of the most piercing forms of trolling?

Look where that got the electrical engineers.

http://news.slashdot.org/story...

On a related topic, I had an issue with my motherboard, which hasn't been resolved. It's an Asrock Z87 Extreme4. Running Windows 7 - I notice that the first hyperthread of my i7 4770k is pegged at 50%. Lots of digging, it looks like it might be a faulty design, putting the intel management engine and the USB subsystem on the same interrupt. What do you lot think?

http://forum.sysinternals.com/...

Thanks -- I didn't really expect to be able to look at it!

I would be interested to see this book -- is there any way to get a copy?

Oops, correct, neither of those are fraud. But all are stealing, whether that is illegal or not.

This is, simply, fraud. It's the same as snatching a purse or looting a shop.