I've lost two cameras in weather balloons at a personal expense of over $500, not fun. Successfully recovering a balloon, however, very satisfying.

"...the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite...", so polar orbiting meaning instead of orbiting along with the equator or at an inclination in between, this satellite orbits at 90-degrees in relation to the equator and flies over the poles.

It would take a fairly significant change in velocity (delta-V) to get the ISS to reach lunar orbit (around 3000m/s), the existence of "mascons" within the moon make keeping anything in orbit long term very difficult (the orbit has to constantly be maintained).

I may be part of the problem. My 3 computers at work have each their own global (not-NAT) IP address, whenever I (or anyone else) get's on the secure Wifi on campus, they get a global IP, my iPhone included. I have 3 different websites with their own IP addresses, and of course my internet connection at home.

This achievement marks a milestone that gets us much closer to having these as manned spacecraft. It is likely that 2 or more of these will have had manned missions before the official Space Shuttle replacement, Orion.

Its weird that there's been so much contention with this list, in my humble experiences with photography, I related to nearly everything written on this list and could easily see the point being made about everything else.

As an avid Reaper user, first I have to point out that its NOT open source, its a commercial product just like Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cubase, etc. although development for Reaper does have an "open source-like" community aspect to it with a very active forum, etc. Recommending a DAW software platform is difficult…

There really isn't a lot extra that a still camera needs in order to be a video camera. The biggest of which is just having the capability with the camera chipset, which I believe is mostly software/firmware anyway. Other than that you have either a builtin microphone, or a microphone jack (or both), which is pretty…

From SLC here, its sad that a measure like this is actually needed. Everyday on the news or posted online is a story of someone getting hit by a train, either in person or in a car. Its almost endemic how bad the problem is, yet so easy to avoid. Its not like these trains come out of nowhere, they generally follow…

"STOP! You're all mindlessly following the wrong person, you need to mindlessly follow Rick Santorum!"

I like the mouse a lot, and I see the collective movement to eliminate it as largely a tech fad. For a device like the iPhone/iPad it makes sense, there's a minimized interface that precludes the integration of a mouse, so instead a touch screen interface substitutes for it. On the PC however, the mouse is like a…

Does schrodinger's experiement still work if you X-Ray the box with the cat in it?

Perhaps a good reason to use a hidden volume?

Relax, its not like its rocket sci— oh wait... nevermind.

A crustacean? Why not Zoidberg?

"The war on piracy" is well underway. Lets hope it can be just as successful as the first one, "the war on drugs", you know, with the blatantly biased representation of industry interests when it comes to forming new laws on the matter, the criminalization of a very large percentage of the population and of course,…

You are correct sir.

I agree, I'd really love to see SSTO demonstrated in the future, but for now multistage rockets with capsules on top is the best solution.

Without a Singe-Stage-To-Orbit capability, a space-plane design doesn't make any sense to me. The space shuttle promised to be a gateway to develop the necessary technologies to make SSTO a reality but alas, that did not happen. Many will argue that SSTO is not a feasible concept; that there's no realistic way to…

Whoever here doesn't use wikipedia damn near on a daily basis raise their hand?