If you have any invites left, and the inclination to continue being absurdly generous please send to balser@gmail.com

Can you recommend a good hat manufacturer?
And do you think I should go with tin-foil or aluminum?
Are there substantial gains from using both in the same hat?
If so which format and orientation makes it harder for the liberal-media-communist-big brother-alien-welfare recipients to control my mind?

Well yes, yes you are.
1. The budget wasn't slashed a program was canceled. Total expenditures on NASA are up in the proposed budget.
2. Ares I wasn't sending a person into space until 2017 at the earliest, meaning this price increase was preordained when Bush decided to stop production on the SSLV.
3. The current contract structure encourages slow and wastefully spending by contractors. Complete 80% by targeted completion date and then ask the government for the necessary money to finish the work. The new contracts approach would play for product delivery, saving money in the long run.

So on behalf of those who will still need jobs in 20 years, I see this change as a wonderful improvement.

PID stands for Proportional, Integral, Derivative, it is a type of feedback control. I'd be surprised if the vehicle didn't have one of these and it itself is the source of the problem.

Actually, the reason the Japanese did not rapidly surrender immediately after Hiroshima is more complex. Bureaucratic inertia insured a pretty slow response. (The leaders did not even meet for two days following the attack, and debated the issue for half the day) The Emperor himself had been pushing for peace for some time following the Japanese defeat at Okinawa, but the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender, as well as political subterfuge by Stalin (who played on Japanese hopes of Soviet assistance while preparing his own attack against Japan), fed fire to an already heated debate among Japanese leaders. In an all-too-familiar story, political infighting prevented the country from taking prompt, sensible action.

> For a brand new product vs an iconic powerhouse, that is little short of amazing.

I look at it the other way: a brand new product SHOULD be doing well compared to a similar product that is three years old and is largely unchanged.* "Iconic powerhouse" or not, a new product should be doing SOMETHING other than just sitting there getting crushed.

* Other than GPS, videorecording, and 3rd-party apps--which OTHER smartphones had BEFORE the iPhone was even out (so their introduction, while nice, wasn't earth-shattering)--little new of substance has been added to the iPhone since its introduction in January 2007. (Plus faster networking and a better camera and more storage, but that's just "it gets incrementally faster/better over time" like ANY technology.)

Again, the Flyer was powered with a gasoline engine IIRC. A powered heavier-than-air machine is an "airplane", not a "glider". It doesn't matter if it requires ground-based infrastructure to launch. So yes, they invented the first airplane that could do figures of eight.

As for Joe Sixpack, he's a moron who probably also believes the Earth is 6500 years old and that Sarah Palin would be a good President even though she thinks Africa is a country (or, he's a moron who thinks Barack Obama is a great President who's going to keep his union job secure). What he thinks about who invented the first airplane is irrelevant to anyone with an education.

Its good to know the fair use defense was only 1 of 3 positions in the brief.
1. Fair Use
2. Unjustified use of settlement negotiations, resulting in a damaged jury
3. Excessive Fines

2 is big since it undermines both the truth of a 'fair trial' and is the source of the defendants 'admission.'

There are many approaches that are MOSTLY the same effect, but not quite. The nice thing about using actual separate processes is that a nasty memory corruption bug only kills the one process. With threads, one scribbling on memory can easily take them all out. The drawback is that it's a bit harder to share a lot of state (though there are many options for that).

The Liam Hoekstra article makes it pretty clear that the kid has a very high metabolism. From an evolutionary stand point there is no reason that this would have evolved before these days of plenty. In the past any kid that needed this many calories would have died from starvation long before he got old enough to procreate. We're optimized for performance per calorie, but the calorie restriction has become a lot easier to meet recently.

Posting to undo accidental moderation.

There is a video with physicist/programmer Brian Beckman talking about how it's harder to model a car than a plane in a video game. I'm not sure that's relevant here but you're comparing two different classes of vehicles. (It's an interesting video anyway.)

If you prefer, imagine a choice between two doors: behind door A is the job of your dreams, behind door B is the woman of your dreams. There isn't a right answer.

The woman in my dreams is always rich ... therefore no need to even consider door A.

BTW an American plug can handle 15 amps easily; it's how I run my spare heater.

Yeah. But 15 amps on a 110V socket isn't as much power as 15 amps on a 220V socket.

Of course, you can change the breaker that's in use to increase the current that the socket can handle. Check that it's rated for the increased power draw, but you can get 30A, 45A, 60A and 100A breakers in North America to replace the standard 15A breaker that most sockets run on.