HOTOL, it just won't go away.

Well, you do as you please, obviously, but my experience with Seagate, and especially with its customer "care" part, has been horrendous.

I was one of those who had unknowingly bought one of their botched 1TB drives. Fortunately, I learned of the problem before I put any data on the drive, so I signed up to their customer support forum, only to find out that it is apparently moderated by the illegitimate offspring of Adolf Hitler and Lucrecia Borgia. The "moderator" on that forum, a mutant degenerate who calls himself "AlanM", not only deleted any reference to outside forums (up to and including this Slashdot article), but appears to be suffering from terminal paranoia where any remarks about his moderating are concerned.

I'd say that any company that allows a fascist to act as their online spokesperson is not worth our money, unless you happen to like fascists of course.

Some people report that after reflashing their cache is now 0 MB. As of yet nobody seems to know whether this is an artifact or true, but I would certainly not be satisfied with a firmware "repair" that disables part of my drive.

As usual, Seagate replies to the posts on its own forum with a deafening silence. Apparently they're more concerned with editing or even deleting any post that refers to Slashdot or other forums.

Could someone give the URL of the forum that gets censored on the Seagate user forum? You know, the one where the problem gets discussed without an anal moderator (who is now attempting to censor references to Slashdot on his forum!).

I'm assuming Seagate has no power to censor posts on Slashdot...

Heh. You beat me to it. Can anyone kindly give me a significant distinction between neocons and democrats? I'm not a USAnian, so perhaps the subtleties escape me...

Just to be clear, "The names are different" doesn't count.

What he said. I'd also like to add that SRBs aren't inherently more dangerous than liquid fuel boosters. What did Challenger in, were highly unrealistic specs (the "need" for reusable boosters). And Ares is basically Apollo upgraded to the "new millennium", it's supposed to be easier, cheaper and better than Apollo.

Finally, the idea that the leftover hardware from the Apollo era is fit for anything but museum display duty, is -- to put it mildly -- highly optimistic (and if I hadn't promised myself to be nicer on the intertubes in the new year, I'd have written "bloody ignorant").

To re-start the Saturn V program, you're going to need to rebuild all the factories and facilities to actually build Saturn Vs, not to mention redo a lot of development work that has been lost over the years. Also, Lunar Rendez-vous is an okay scenario if you really want to be first to the Moon; it's not exactly fit for a sustained presence though. And from a safety perspective Earth rendez-vous is vastly superior (Apollo 13 escaped by a very narrow margin and if the incident had occurred on the return voyage, American space casualties would have started much earlier). OTOH, I do like the X-Prize idea. A lot. Which means there's no chance in hell it'll ever materialize, not with socialists in power in the States.

Yes, because I obviously can store hydrogen safely at home in a balloon. Face it, as an energy carrier, hydrogen is cr*p. Its energy density, either per volume or per weight, suxx mammoth balls.