You're a bit out of the loop. State sponsored? They've been financially self-sufficient for some time now. No tax subsidies are involved. Nor are they a monopoly, other than getting to use "United States" in their title. They face competition from at least 3 other delivery services and end up cheaper than all of them.

Point c was recently rendered moot by the following breakthrough, already being licensed: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/03/12/mit_scientists_charged_up/

Enjoying your PDP-8?

Windows 7 will support 256 cores in the 64-bit version. Microsoft has made significant tweaks to the thread dispatcher code to make this possible. A good discussion can be found here: See http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Mark-Russinovich-Inside-Windows-7/

The article bases its claim that T-Mobile had the biggest problem on "PC World reporting that one customer complained they were unable to make or receive calls throughout the entire morning leading up to Obama's appearance." One customer!

Actually, much of the rocket design is fresh thinking with extreme reliability in mind. This includes reducing failure modes by design but also extreme monitoring of each of the rocket's systems. Of course, the very nature of technological advance is building on the shoulders of what came before. It's why every generation doesn't start with stone tools and move up from there. NASA had German V2 rocket technology and its designers at its disposal, for instance.

Anyone who's actually been following Microsoft's rather frank information on Windows 7 understands that Vista was the code-base overhaul and that Windows 7 is not and was never advertised as repeating this exercise. Neither OS X nor Linux variants revamp their entire kernel architecture at each new release. However, Windows 7 does update their kernel with a new modular structure(min-win) that allows it to be more resource efficient and for unneeded portions not to load. Other aspects of performance have been gone over with a fine-toothed comb, such as windows not currently visible not consuming machine resources. The GUI has also been overhauled for usability, including fine tuning of user access control. There are at least as many updates and improvements in this OS as users are accustomed to with major releases of the other two major competitors.

Is there something wrong with the angle? Sun-synchronous orbit means that each time the satellite appears over that same university campus, it will do so at the same time of day. So, unless you see multiple shadow angles implying that the image was taken over multiple passes and that the shadow angle changed with each pass, I don't see what's specifically unimpressive about the orbit. Can you explain your observation?