To heck with that. I would have liked to see Project Orion. That is, from a distance :-)

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 don't think you know what illegal means.

I'm not a detractor and I think hes been broken. Ceding to the 'chain of command' to disavow bad action by the organization is one of the ways fascism grows unchecked.

Don't worry. The remaining system administrators will properly triage all the work among the remaining admins.

They'll just punt all the routine boring stuff like security audits and access control management to concentrate on the more urgent firefighting, like user requests that would otherwise hold things up, and more visible projects like those new TPS cover sheets.

Its a good thing its just Snowden that would be the cause. And totally not an out of control power hungry paranoid organization that finds enemies in every crevice; that is hell bent on hiding its activities while co-opting the privacy of those they are allegedly supposed to protect. Because if it was that, it would be a horrible commentary on the state of affairs of our failed political system.

Well stated, but expect every ignoramous proclaiming a Ph.D in the US Constitution to proclaim Washington a traitor if it means the government is spying on their militia plans because we all know those who have the biggest bomb shelters during the Cold War era were typically the last person you'd want near you.

Horse shit. The US reputation has been considerably restored. What's taking damage is the fact that the entire G20 is spying on its citizenries because you a-hole terrorist factions, no matter where you are and your asinine religious zealotry abounds like to blow shit up and take innocent people with you as if that some how is going to stop any G20 nation from taking the one commodity you possess: Oil. I personally can't wait for Green Tech to take over. We can all move onward without having to spend trillions on fuel from people who can't stand us as much as we can't stand them. Perhaps then people can honestly come to peace accords and start to learn from one another, instead of wasting the patience of nations just to toot around town wherever they live.

Paul Allen was the tech brains of MS, not Bill Gates.

I laughed when you wrote,

``You truly appreciate object oriented code when you do GUI programming in a good Microsoft language.''

Tell the kid to learn ObjC/Cocoa. Then you will learn the notion of quality OOA/OOD and world-class OO Tools for UI design. Better yet, tell them to find a copy of NeXTSTEP, put it in a VM and dig for the old NeXT Dev Manuals.

Slashdot: News for the amnesiac, stuff that mattered.

Bah. They can "collate" all they like, but they are swamped by the false positive (and false negative) problem.

Of course, it sucks to be a false positive, but air travel is overrated...

Pardon me for interrupting the usual /. dialogue with something relevant to the original topic, but Ken Shirriff did a couple of teardowns a year ago that point out exactly why the counterfeit chargers are Not Safe. The safety issues revolve around poor isolation practices between the line and USB sides of some USB chargers.

Major items include
1) lack of "double insulated" construction in the internal transformer.
2) parts placement of line and USB side components on a single circuit board such that paths may be readily formed between line and USB sides from moisture, construction errors, or component failure.
3) inadequate margins between line side and USB side in overall layout of the charger internal components.

http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-quality.html

http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and-why-you.html

Aren't these units similar to the ASUS Transformer Infinity, which sells just fine at $400 or more?

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.