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

I made the mistake of eating a hamburger in London in 2001. I was on a long business trip and just wanted something quick to eat, so I ducked into a McDonalds.

Little did I know that, thanks to the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease, this simple act would make me ineligible to become a blood donor for years to come.

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.

It's also amusing the ads and pages FB recommends to me. They seem to think I'm a black latina (I'm white, non-Hispanic).

The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications.

Please try to remember whose machine you're running on. You're a guest under my roof, and guests that behave badly do not get invited back. So no, you don't get to run code in my browser until you've earned a certain level of trust, and you certainly don't get to invite in your friends' code. (I mean, just who the fsck is rpxnow.com, anyway?)

For example, there are websites that not only don't work without JavaScript, but they fail in complex ways [ ... ]

The technical term for sites that behave this way is, "Broken."

Hence, once you remove the disable JavaScript option Firefox suddenly works on a lot of websites.

Firefox already works on a lot of Web sites. Is someone shipping FF with JavaScript turned off by default? What exactly is the alleged problem here?

Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML."

These programmers are called, "Wrong."

Back in the 1990's -- in the days of sneaker-net, recall -- macros in Microsoft Word documents, originally thought to be oh so terribly clever, proved to be a monumental nightmare for their ability to spread viruses and generally wreak havoc. It was so bad that even Microsoft was forced to admit it fscked up, and no longer executed macros in a loaded document by default, but would ask first. So you'd think the lesson on embedding executable content in what was fundamentally a document would have been learned.

Then some allegedly clever person kluges together JavaScript in an afternoon, and suddenly executable content embedded in documents -- over a genuine network, mind -- becomes a fantabulous idea again.

Uh, no, it didn't. JavaScript was a stupid idea, and should never have been allowed to happen. Unless your site is trustworthy and useful, you DO NOT GET TO RUN JAVASCRIPT.

For a few months I am consulting in San Jose and driving from Berkeley. I can't wait for all of those folks to move to the cities and get off the roads! Typical commute is 1.5 hours to drive no more than 49 miles. Even getting on the road at 6 AM doesn't beat the traffic.

I am no authority on homosexuality. All I really know is that I meet a lot of gay folks here in Berkeley, and they are every bit as nice as anyone else.

Nor am I a genetics expert. But I know enough to hold a discussion.

You are right that there may be no genetic connection with homosexuality, because it doesn't seem to be inherited in general. But there are intriguing differences such as digit ratio, and we know that many developmental differences can have a genetic factor. Who knows what we will find?

I think the flaw with your argument is that you are assuming that homosexuals don't breed. Not true, and there may also be factors increasing the success of their offspring such as small, educated and relatively affluent families.

Next, do not assume that direct reproductive success is the only possible pro-survival factor. The contribution of homosexuals to the reproductive success of their close genetic relatives or even their community may be a pro-survival factor for genes like their own.