But it does not allow rockets to reenter the Earth's atmosphere at orbital velocities, slow down, and land.

How about the Moon and Mars? It seems to me that the fuel capacity of Dragon isn't enough to do both lunar descent and ascent just on the Super Draco thrusters and the trunk's fuel capacity.

The impressive part is that they do it with an actual rocket that is 106 feet tall, and that they have launched it 7 times with 0 failures.

Using the same engine, rather than treating the engine as a disposable object that only performs one burn in its lifetime. Most rocket engines can't be throttled, can't be shut down and then restarted in flight or otherwise.

The tricky part is going to be for any stage to have enough delta-V to return to the pad after lifting a payload to orbit. Also, as far as I can tell, this takes a drag chute for lower stages, and a re-entry shield for upper ones.

Bruce

http://www.globalenvision.org/2011/08/18/used-soda-bottles-light-world-free

So people in third world countries should just save up for 15 years to buy a commercial lighting system?

This isn't about commercial use in wealthy areas, it's about giving light to the various areas in the world with "shack cities", where a few thousand people just shove up tin roofs and live in close proximity.

It is both novel and beneficial to those people.

Please think before you spew.

Here comes step 2:

We'll beam him cheesy movies,
The worst we can find.
It'll have to receive and record them all,
And we'll monitor his hard drive.

And because our robot can't control
Where the movies begin or end.
It'll try to have enough free disk space
With the help of its human friends.

From the summary:

I guess that's why you won't see them with an Android load and a discount. MS has probably contracted with ASUS not to do that.

Do you need to force them? Every four years there's a great opportunity to really change things, and that's just at a head-of-government level - I don't know anything about how Senators or Congressmen are voted in (I'm Australian), but it seems like the ballot box is a good place to start.

It seems (from reading /. and other sites) that even seriously committed Democrats aren't happy with how the last "Change" you were promised worked out. The two party option seems to be killing you guys. Get some independents in there.

To an outsider it just looks like there's no difference at all between the parties, and that everything is set up to try to force people to think "well if I don't vote [Republican|Democrat], then those damn [Democrats|Republicans] will get in!"

Do you REALLY not understand the difference between yelling at someone in person, which includes the threat of physical altercation even if no DIRECT verbal threats are made simply due to presence, and a nasty email dressing someone down?

If you stand at my front door and shout obsenities at me while refusing to leave then it's assault in most jurisdictions. Doing the same in an indirect manner, even over the phone, isn't.

That's not QUITE how debouncing works, depending on the circumstances. Debouncing is more of a "sticky" state change than a delayed state change.

If you're not pressing a key, and haven't been for a few mS, and then press it, the state change is registered instantly. Debounce then keeps you from "unpressing" the key until XYZ mS have passed to filter out stray switch glitches.

As long as you're not trying to press a key on and off faster than the debounce time it's not actually slowing down your response time. That initial press, and letting go of a key you've held more than "X" mS, will always be "instant".

So a debounce doesn't work like a capacitor, smoothing out the signal, it acts more like a triggered latching circuit.

Fwiw I know heaps of people here in Australia that have never bought from Amazon; as you speculate the shipping costs remove a lot of the benefits for the casual item. Because of often hyperinflated costs here though it's still sometimes cheaper to pay the huge shipping costs, but most people I know don't bother or end up shopping an an alternative store.

I buy all my books from Book Depository (which iirc is now owned by Amazon, so that may count :) because they she from the UK and somehow have no shipping charges.

If you actually care about this stuff though, you basically have to vote Greens - they (thanks to Senator Ludlam) have a good track record in fighting this sort of thing. The two main parties have shown not only that they're on board, but there's basically no room for compromise.

I've bought a bunch of books from Baen - Baen are the only place I've found that I can access easily from Australia that simply will just sell me a .epub file that I download and put wherever I want.

I would love to buy more, but they simply don't have the range.

Your description and outrage is how MANY people feel about the GPL vs the LGPL.

Free software advocates would argue that your users are "running" your software, and thus are owed the source code.

If you are running a forum you ARE running software as a service.