Exactly. The described mode of operation does not really compute. Transition from wing-lift atmospheric flight to orbit requires A LOT of additional energy, so the plane taking off from a runway and then boosting itself to orbit does not seem physically possible. Launching a smaller orbital vehicle from a large carrier plane is another matter... but this would simply be an airborne ballistic/orbital launch, something much different from X-37B that stays in orbit for months and actually more similar to recent American commercial attempts (cf. the White Knight).

That's because it was taken from afar. Juno's orbit is highly elliptical and the photo was taken as proof-of-concept on the outbound leg. Wait till it starts taking pics around the next nearest approach...

Perhaps in the Land of the Free, but it isn't necessarily so in all of the world. Relatively small labor regulations like in Europe, e.g. forcing a one- or two-month termination period, can do wonders simply by forcing the directors to think in terms longer than the next week to quarter end.

I have worked in several European offices of both US and European software companies and this small thing does wonders to both workplace atmosphere and relative balance of power. And it does not really significantly hamper the company, contrary to what MBA types will keep telling you - it is bullshit that multimillion corporations are today forced to reorient at a day's notice.

Binary deltas do not solve the problem of HAVING TO RECOMPILE everything that uses the fixed library. On the oher hand, when a shared library is updated itself, everything that uses it, including closed-source third-party software, suddenly gets the benefit.

As for updated libraries breaking stuff, I honestly don't remember such case, and I have been using Linux as a sole workstation OS for well over 10 years now. Anyway, there are dynamic linker vars like LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH/LIBPATH that can be easily employed in such a case.

Moreover, how do you imagine "fully portable, self-contained binaries" for GUI programs? Statically linking half of X11 and GNOME/KDE/ into each calculator program? Well...

Oh yes, because having to upgrade half of the system because a bug in some library was finally fixed is sooo much better...

That is... not true, at least for Poland. I happen to live there, you see, and health insurance does not expire with unemployement benefits. It is tied to unemployed *status*, not benefits, and as long as a person is registered as unemployed, they have their health insurance paid by the State, whether they are still eligible for the benefts or not.

A very successful Saturn orbiter mission, Cassini, has been going on for years. Numerous moon flybys, lots of interesting data, pretty pics as well.

Beyond that, the main problem is cost. Uranus is four times farther away from the Sun than Jupiter, Neptune is six times farther away. Travel by direct transfer requires burning lots of fuel in Earth orbit, which makes it very expensive. Using gravity assist requires lots of time, and a long mission requires employing personnel and devoting resources for many years, which is also expensive. Not to mention that the probe must survive ten or twenty years in space and only then perform the actual mission, which makes the design expensive as well.

The singular pair of Voyager missions was only possible thanks to very lucky arrangement of planets at that time. Unfortunately, this won't repeat any time soon.