It was to include a static fire. The engines would have ignited and burned for a few seconds and then shut down. The explosion happened during fueling, so it didn’t get to that point, but the engineers were going to fire the rockets.

Partly so that the test can include the satellite. For example, they’ll switch it to internal power. It makes the test more complete, and closer to what will happen with the actual launch.

Indeed. There may be some other layer in the future that is even better than the current candidates, for example due to the advent of nanotechnology. Or maybe that will mark the end of the Anthropocene instead.

“a free (albeit watered down) internet will push existing internet providers to do better” - or a free version might push cheap versions off the market entirely, even if the cheap versions are “better” ethically. It’s hard to compete with free.

I don’t think we need to look any further than Musk’s statement in this article. If this had been an initial shockwave propagating at the speed of sound, there may not have been time for a hypothetical Dragon 2 capsule to escape. That it was a relatively slow event, meant there was plenty of time. Had this been a…

I’m guessing when a mix of liquid oxygen and refined kerosene wants to burn, no fire suppression system is going to put it out. They do have a deluge system which soaks the site with water, but that’s more to dampen the acoustic vibrations than to deal with heat. Also, letting it burn out is probably safer than…

It depends on what happens next. Any perturbation to the status quo can lead to war. A dinosaur-killer might not wipe us out directly, but it could leave us fighting over scraps, and some of us fight dirty.

I’m not saying the French are right. I’m explaining their position in way that outsiders might understand.

It would be loosely comparable to wearing swastics and Nazi regalia on a German beach, or making a bonfire out of American flags in America. Symbols matter to some people.

Obligatory XKCD:

Ah; it’s probably because it’s an old article. It dates from 2013. It might be nice if that were highlighted.

This article appear for me on Gizmodo as “Shared by io9", but it does not appear on http://io9.gizmodo.com/. Why is that? It seems like something is wrong. I normally read io9 and not gismodo, so I am missing out on these articles.

Venus is sometimes called “the evening star”, and sometimes called, “the morning star”. There must have been a moment when somebody realised they were the same thing. For me this is one of the earliest examples of science as a unifier of phenonema, analogous to discovering that electricity and magnetism are two…

Liz doesn’t have psychic powers, does she? She gets memories of dead people by eating their brains. I’m only 3 or 4 episodes in, but we’ve had a proper non-sentient zombie in a pit, and it’s hard to reconcile that with Beth saying the show doesn’t have any actual zombies. She does come across as ignorant about the…

Subtlety. I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

The way I remember it, you could double-cross the various factions any number of times, and they’d always forgive you and offer you more missions. That made it seem like a game without consequences for me.

I’m currently replaying Thief: Deadly Shadows and finding it stands up surprisingly well. Not as good as Metal Age, but enjoyable if you like sneaking. I intend to get at least as far as The Cradle episode; I may stop there and play DX:HD instead, but I want to replay The Cradle because I remember it being rather…

Or you could use KeePass and sync it yourself through DropBox. That would be free.

They may be thinking of David Brin’s Uplift series. Where a sentient species can only become sentient through being modified by another species that is already sentient. There’s a galaxy full of them. They are all trying to figure out who uplifted humans and then disappeared. Partly because the client species owe…

Or you could compare it to buying an American flag for use as toilet paper, or some other profane purpose. I’m not American myself, but from what I’ve heard they get really uptight about it.