With the entry to sub-orbital flight, and even orbital flight, becoming ever so slightly easier, the obvious thought of space porn kicks in. Who wouldn't want to see two or more people going at it like rabbits in a weightless environment (or at least trying to go at it like rabbits in a weightless environment)? Sadly, Virgin Galactic has turned down a $1 million offer to do just that. The offer was made by an unidentified party who was willing to put the money up front to do a space porn movie. Considering that a flight aboard VG costs $200,000 for a two-hour flight, $1 million doesn't seem too bad. Though how much you could actually do and perform in two hours is debatable. And what if one or more of the actors gets sick?

This past weekend, Trixter — a self-proclaimed IBM PC historian — picked up some old software for his archive. What he didn't count on was a couple of additional Avantage titles that had never been released into the wild. If this weren't enough of a find, one of these titles provided Trixter with an interesting puzzle: the diskette for Mental Blocks is apparently hand-formatted to work on both C64 and IBM (on a single side, not the "flippy disks" of old). Quite an interesting little piece of history.

xp65 writes with the just-announced success of Elon Musk's SpaceX's long efforts to reach orbit with a privately-developed launching craft: "T+0:08:21 Falcon 1 reached orbital velocity, 5200 m/s Nominal Second stage cut off (SECO) — Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!" dbullard adds "This was a completely new vehicle — it's not using any previously developed hardware. All developed from scratch. No government supplied hardware, Russian engines, or old ICBM motors. My hat's off to the employees of Space X — all 550 of them. (Note — no 'cast of thousands,' just 550). They've got video of the entire launch."

An SFGate article looks at the still rocky road that Google and YouTube are traveling as they try to iron out after-merger details. Hanging in the air are things like the Viacom takedown request, competition from Joost, and deal-making with organizations like the NBA and BBC. They're also concerned about little things like, you know, making money. From the article: "Tensions [with IP holders] haven't reached lawsuit status -- yet. Such a fight could be long and costly, but with Google's backing, YouTube could afford it. And that may be why media companies have held back so far, [IP lawyer Lee] Bromberg and others said. Google and YouTube have something to gain from deal-making, too. For the company to make money from advertising -- and the potential is huge, with an estimated $70 billion to $80 billion spent in television advertising -- Google and YouTube need the premium videos. Because viewers are more likely to watch these clips than myriad user-generated ones, advertisers are willing to pay more for them. "