Reusability is of no ground-safety consequence. By basic physical law, these devices will be very nearly empty of fuel by the time they reach the ground -- in fact almost all fuel will have been expended within minutes of liftoff.

The first stage of a Falcon 9 has a dry mass less than a 14-seat Gulfstream V business jet, the Dragon capsule is less than 1/3rd that.

If you trust thousands of planes to fly through the air over and into major cities every day without killing thousands of people on the ground, you should trust spacecraft far, far more.

Oh please. Space operations grew directly out of unbridled Cold War militarism, and have been pure political football at least since the approval of the absolutely insane space shuttle program.

I want high taxes, I want big government, I want single-payer health care, I want a welfare and social security system that makes Scandinavia look like a libertarian wasteland. I want ten times the corporate regulation we have now.

But there is no reason for the government to be the primary driver or provider of routine space launch services, especially when it's done such a piss-poor job of it since Apollo.

Private companies like SpaceX have ample incentive to advance the state of the art in launch services and are demonstrably doing so for less than the government has ever managed before. NASA can and should take advantage of that.

I'd call that more like three orders of magnitude, and the world has been launching rockets and landing capsules since 1961. Nothing even remotely like what you are speaking of has ever come remotely close to happening.

No one launches rockets over populated areas, nobody aims capsules for populated areas, the CIA spent the 1960s recovering CORONA satellite film canisters with such precision they captured them with planes in mid-air.

Stop fear-mongering.

Americans aren't paying attention.

The RSUs in question are unvested. Apparently a change was just made by the board that means unvested RSUs will collect dividends which will be paid out upon vesting. Cook is declining those.

I can kind of understand that it would look strange to make a change like this to already-granted RSUs, but if it were that big of a concern, it seems odd that only Cook would decline the dividends, or that the board would have made the change retroactive in the first place, so I still don't entirely understand declining them.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/00011814311203...

It was quite a strange little architecture, initially. Your displayed name was whatever you'd named your character, with the distinguishing feature being an "account number" that could be re-generated by deleting a file in your Diablo directory (the corollary being if you didn't back the file up, your account number would change upon a reformat or migration to a new computer).

Hint: I'm a socialist.

Not all of us believe search engines have some magical obligation to be complete or impartial. If you don't like the results you get from one, try another.

And there was nothing particularly special about the module aside from the extreme concentration. Every piece of Java I've ever written or even looked at has this same problem on a reduced scale.

My point is to show how utterly broken and worthless the concept is. Either there's a ton of exception-"handling" boilerplate that does nothing useful, or there's "throws Exception" everywhere, itself useless boilerplate that exists only to tell the compiler to buzz off.

One Java module I had the misfortune of writing theoretically had to deal with checked exceptions on the majority of its calls, and the only possible response to virtually all of them was to crash, because in that context, it could only have meant someone had either ripped the DRAM off the board, or placed the board in a particle accelerator.

If you'd asked me what the count was likely to be, I probably would have told you something like 10-2 for Oracle.

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Groklaw-The-blog-that-...

It would certainly have been impractical for long stretches of Groklaw's history for PJ to have a day job.

http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090926131450...

I demand disclosure. Your full name, your address, your phone, bank, and tax records for the past year, social security statement, and a sworn affidavit that you have never been paid by, had any financial interest in, or were related to anyone with an interest in, IBM, SCO, Oracle, Google, Novell, and any media outlet that has ever given critical or favorable coverage to any of these companies.

If you don't comply within 24 hours, I'll assume you're simply a troll and paid shill.

Edit: Downvoters may want to consult "cooldeal"'s other comments on this very page for context. I'm simply demanding of him what he demands of others.

Florian's hand was ultimately forced because it is impractical to keep consulting for multiple large companies a secret.

So far, no one has ever found any evidence that PJ is anything other than what she says she is -- a Linux user and former paralegal. Even when Maureen O'Gara thought it'd be a good idea to stalk her and publish everything to the world, no evidence of any kind came to light.

You are proposing a criminal (yes, criminal, perjury is a crime, and sworn statements as to PJ's lack of involvement with IBM were filed in the SCO case) conspiracy spanning at least multiple large public companies, a well-known law professor, and several prominent tech journalists.