This might as well be how Blackberry, Nokia, and Palm blew it. And I'm probably leaving off a few companies.

IMO it all comes down to arrogance about your own platform. In Nokia's case that was Symbian.

It forces me to do thing in a way that bugs me. I don't like having to search for things I want, I like ot put them where I feel they should be. Hiding things from the user ala the menu system in Offices past is a good example of this. I don't work the way it wants me to work so I end up spending more time fighting the OS than I do things I want to do.

In short, this pisses me off. Last time I played with it there weren't enough customization options to make it not annoying enough to use so I went to Mint. For the moment, Cinnamon is more than good enough for me so I haven't tried 13.04 enough to say that it has gotten better. That said there is no reason for me to go back.

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

This tech is old, they are called "ringtones" by others. They transfer information quite reliably telling others, "The phone is owned by a total *sshole" when certain things play with near 100% accuracy. MS is probably going to use this to patent ringtones, and start suing android vendors.....

            -Charlie

"I have never understood why listening to morons on CNBC, Fox Business, or anywhere else was any different from listening to some guy screaming on a street corner."

Two differences. For the guy on the street corner, you have to go outside. Secondly, said guy screeming about the impending space eel apolcalypse because people have lapsed from believing in the book of Jed The Holy Phebotomist could possibly be right. That is about the sum of the difference if you don't count such tangential things as looks, shoes, and holes in clothes.

                  -Charlie

I don't hate it but the UI annoys me to the point that I can't use it.

While I haven't used the Google service yet, I see similar problems in a lot of public areas like airports where I happen to find myself a lot. It seems to be more of an issue with the non-direct data traffic like the auth services, ads/gateway tasks, and DNS. More often than not it is one of these 'services' that are unrelated to the traffic that are acting up.

One example is the wi-fi networks in the Minneapolis or San Fran airports. You can log on, and then getting an IP, getting on the "I agree" screens, the videos you have to watch etc etc are all dog slow to one degree or other. The Delta lounge in the Minneapolis and San Fran airports are very extreme examples of this problem especially when they were T-Mobile (damn their black souls). You would 'get on' and then nothing or something trivial really slow.

Once on you would have decent ping times and some speed tests would be OK but anything that needed 'extra services' was pain. Changing your DNS to something you have or a know fast provider helped a lot which tells me the NAS/Radius/whatever server they use was overwhelmed. Now that I am thinking about it I should do a traceroute next time I am on to see what is happening in more detail, I am curious.

My first bet is that the majority of these services go through a single auth/security box that is under-CPUd and forces everything out a single overloaded link. If anyone has the time. I also wouldn't be surprised if DPI had a hand in it too, especially from Google.

"Why cant i record on my Xbox offline and transfer the resultant file to a PC that can upload for FREE?"

Because Bing wouldn't know how to find it, duh. :)

The big problem with this post is that it misses the entire point of the problem. You can make Gauss guns with ease, they work, and they fire things at high enough velocities to destroy hardened armored targets. That is not a challenge, the problem is making them last more than a few shots before they self-destruct.

This story was all about a low velocity gun that can fire more than 10 bolts at low speed. Again not a big deal. The problem is that they are using low power (relatively) to do this and it lasts a "long" time. When you up the power to useful level, it rips the rails us, oxidizes/burns them, warps them from heat, and all the other problems that are real engineers are struggling with.

In essence the OP says that they can avoid all the consequences by avoiding the useful effects of the device. Great, how can this not be considered a step forward! I can make a 500MPG car that doesn't actually move very fast and isn't large enough to carry a can of beer much less a person, is that too a massive advance in tech? Idiots.

Given the publicity he gave Samsung, did they pay him the $500 in the end?