Don't forget the endless and amusing conniptions they give to Gerry Harvey of "Hardly Normal", king of wildly inflated prices.

Actually ME looked quite good on screenshots. It just looked bad when you used it, because the UI which looked almost exactly like 98SE would be punctuated with repetitive errors and then the whole screen would turn a familiar ugly blue colour.

And now Meg Whitman is finishing the job.

They also collect uber-fail CEOs.

I tried to make that distinction with the term 'fanboy'. People who like what SpaceX are doing without putting them on a libertarian pedestal I wouldn't put in that category.

I'm glad I'm not the only one saying it.

Musk himself isn't NASA bashing; he is extremely grateful for their assistance. Its all the SpaceX fanboys who are the problem, trying to make Falcon 9 out as the harbinger of a libertarian conquest of space. It isn't, its just a well designed rocket which the US government isn't paying massively over the odds for.

Seriously? An announcer being surprised by the abort and not being able to follow what was happening for a second is the evidence you present for your idiotic, triumphalist neoliberal beliefs? Fuck right off.

It is actually a successful abort test (albeit an unscheduled one!) Now, SpaceX knows that they can shut down the engines half a second before liftoff with no problems at all.

An engine lost on launch would've prevented the payload reaching the ISS. Aborting the launch unquestionably saved this mission (although it may yet be unsuccessful.

I admit, I've been skeptical of 'private' spaceflight, both because of the libertarian ideological bleating that seems to always be associated with it (posing a risk to gov. investment in space) and the fact that, with NASA still holding the hands of everyone, it isn't truly private. Nonetheless, today is a complete success for SpaceX. They had a problem, they dealt with it well.

SpaceX was only able to do this because the US had spent all the money doing the groundwork for them, and even then NASA held their hands quite a bit. Elon Musk himself admits this.

Even if NASA is inefficient, that doesn't prove the thesis at all. Russian (or more pertinently, Soviet) rockets are cheap and reliable.

That is the one. Those missile launchers they are deploying in London isn't for al-qaeda, its to stop a militant fringe of *CAMRA attacking the olympics :)

*the CAMpaign for Real Ale. Anyone visiting the UK who wants to sample proper British beer should look them up.

I'm sorry, but I can't see any evidence that what these machines can do can be replicated by additive processes.

Yes, additive manufacture is great, but it isn't a universal construction technique. Don't forget please, that the last country that thought you could just dump heavy industry and replace it with small scale operations didn't do very well.

The UK company is mentioned as being build up with cheap government loans, which is a half truth.

Yes, they are getting cheap loans, but only begrudgingly and only after the government had canceled a much larger loan, aimed at letting them produce "ultra large" forgings that few other places in the world can manage, mostly for the nuclear industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Forgemasters#2010_expansion

But of course, we have to spend billions turning London into a bland commercial fortress for the Olympics. This is not that surprising; money that is meant to be spend on a national level has a nasty habit of being spent within a few miles of London.

But hey, I'm sure the Coalition know what they are doing. I'm sure putting missile launchers of peoples roofs and forbidding British beer brewers from selling stuff in many of the capitals pubs is a far more sensible economic investment than developing world class forging capabilities.

Well, yes, this is something that government clearly does best. Big, chunky investments whose returns are nebulous and decades after the initial outlay.

I don't mind that much that private enterprise then builds on government work afterwards, but what pisses me right off is when private companies then decide they owe nothing to the society that hosts them, avoid taxes, and campaign for reductions in the ones they do pay.

This, of course, has the advantage for established private enterprise of kicking away the ladder of government R&D and infrastructure investment so no pesky competitors can get the same leg up.