Futurepower should have clarified: there's no 64-bit Windows build of Firefox. You can make one yourself, if you've got the know-how and the tools, but it's quite unofficial.
As you point out, the code is perfectly 64-bit clean and runs fine in 64-bit mode on other platforms. There's no *good* reason that Windows users are still stuck with 32 bits.
Yep. In fact, this was actually one of the reasons Heartbleed was so bad. Normally, anybody repeatedly attempting to read 64k chunks of heap space would hit an unallocated page pretty quickly, causing a crash alerting the victims to something being wrong. However, OpenSSL uses their own funky versions of malloc and free which pre-allocate large chunks of memory from the OS (as in, many pages), then implement their own in-process memory management on top of that. They don't free those pages back to the OS either, at least not anywhere near as soon as a sane memory manager would. This doesn't actually mean huge amounts of wasted memory - the library can mostly re-use the memory it has already requested, rather than grabbing more from the OS - but it does mean that just because something is freed doesn't mean it isn't still mapped into that process. The end result is that Heartbleed had no externally-visible evidence for the vast majority of its victims, so people didn't even know there was something to look for until the news broke.
If you do it as a commodity? Yes. Of course, the various printer manufacturers don't accept commodity in cartridges, so the whole point of your post is irrelevant. In fact, it's even *more* irrelevant because making electric car batters is a business-to-business deal, and making ink cartridges is a business-to-consumer one. B2B usually has very different markets than B2C. Ink cartridges are high-margin because they're made by the company that makes the printers, and sold to that company's existing customers who can't get the cartridges anywhere else. *IF* Tesla cars became commoditized but the batteries were still proprietary (and didn't last 10 years each...) there would be a lot more market for selling the batteries. On the other hand, if electric car batteries themselves become commodities, it'll be hard to sell them for much profit at all, or a competitor will undercut you.
Access is a joke that's actually funny. Like, "Haha, that idiot did something important in Access! Oh my $DEITY, can you believe people are that dumb?!?" Base is like an attempted joke that makes people shuffle their feet and look away from you. "Um... did you have to talk about that? Like, really, dude, not cool..."
Frontpage's descendant is called Expression Web, and in most ways it's a superior product (among other things, it has a very strict rendering engine built in, and it supports a range of languages including non-MS ones). It's still Microsoft though, non-free and Windows-only.
Well, you've got Redmond and Bellevue, which are somewhat dominated by Microsoft (similar ratio to Amazon). In the south you've got Boeing, whose ratio I don't know but it could easily be even *worse*. Then, as another poster pointed out, there's a handful of military bases in the area, which are once again going to be mostly guys.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if the ratio in King County as a whole is worse than in Seattle proper. Well, I would be just a little, but not *very* surprised.
I see a 3.5" floppy drive (not unheard of in workstation machines, especially those which interface with any kind of manufacturing equipment and therefore may still actually use them) and an optical drive (not sure what kind, but it's not from the 1980s). The chassis is nothing unusual; I've seen machines like that at offices all over the place. The monitor is unusually thick for a modern LCD, which suggests old (cheap) equipment, but not necessarily indicating any kind of fraud.
Malfador Machinations' Space Empires 5. It gets unplayably bad framerates on NVidia WDDM drivers (Vista or later), no matter what settings you tweak or compatibility modes you set. It's playable (though slow) on Intel chips from the same era and quite acceptable (if still lower than it should be) on AMD.
Ditto for my 7950, on anything from indie games that the developers will never have heard of to really weird legacy games that run like absolute shit on NVidia for some reason. For example, a DirectX 7 game that ran better on a 2008-era Intel integrated GPU tied to an ultra-low-voltage C2Duo clocked at 1.2GHz than it did on a GeForce 9600M with a C2Duo at 2.8GHz, even when both boxes had 4GB of RAM and ran Win7; but ran better than either on single-core 1.8GHz AMD chip with a low-end 2006 mobile graphics chip with Vista on 2GB of RAM (and also runs great on my current beast of a gaming box, with higher specs than all three of those put together and then doubled, which has the 7950 card I mentioned before).
Apple's OS X App Store might have restrictions (I don't know, though I wouldn't be surprised), but you can still install arbitrary programs from whatever source you like. I'm not normally one to defend Apple - they're at the forefront of the whole "people can't actually be trusted with general-purpose computers" thing, and I hate them for it - but things aren't quite as bad as you say. It's easier to put arbitrary stuff on OS X than on Android, in fact.
Oh please, you are *completely* full of shit. WP8 has Pocket File Manager, and WP8.1 has added even more support for file access (I don't know if anybody has yet published an app that uses it to make a general-purpose file browser).
Yeah, the apps can't *see* much because they run with excruciatingly low privileges - PFM has a special capability that gives full access to some locations most apps can't access at all - but the SD card and public folders are accessible.
Tell them you're recording the conversation (even if you're not, though it's a good idea to do so). In some states you're allowed to record *without* telling them, but that wastes the deterrent benefit (useful if you actually want to be able to sue the asshole though, and yes, you can sue cops just like anybody else).
There's also the whole thing where they desgned and built a working launch system for 1/10th what NASA said it would cost, and are able to undercut even the cheapest government-backed launch providers. That's a huge deal for anybody, much less for a company that is only a few years old and was started in one of the most expensive parts of the country. SpaceX may be able to launch on an incredibly low budget, but they don't cut corners on people or location.
Grasshopper (SpaceX's initial reusable test platform) has lifted off and then recovered itself with powered soft landings multiple times. Now, it's only a single engine (basically Falcon 1 instead of Falcon 9), it launches without any upper stages (it's just the first stage all by itself, basically), and it's never reached the usual altitude of stage separation. It was a test platform, arguably not even a real prototype. On the other hand, it did successfully lift off, divert, hover, return to its pad, and make a powered soft touchdown (with impressive accuracy).
The saltwater issue is a complete red herring; SpaceX is planning to recover the rocket stages on land. Not a lot of point in having landing legs otherwise, anyhow, aside from them acting as stabilizing fins. The reason that first flight splashed down in the drink is they wanted to test the "can we kill velocity before landing" part somewhere that wouldn't make a huge mess if it failed; they certainly weren't planning to re-use that particular booster (at least, not without extensive refurb). G-shock on landing is completely avoided by using a powered landing that cuts velocity to near-zero before the legs even touch (plus having the legs absorb the shock; they're not hard to replace if needed).
I think SpaceX has an excellent chance of making this work.
The point about a soft-landing abort is actually a *really* good one. So long as they have enough fuel and engine thrust capacity to create a (balanced) 1G - which means a small portion of their entire engine capacity, especially if they burn off (or dump) much of the fuel from the first stage - the entire rocket could hypothetically abort-to-launch-pad. I don't know how realistic that is (so far they haven't actually demonstrated true recovery to launch pad of even the first stage yet, although Grasshopper and such are good prototype demos) but I suspect it's possible! That would add a degree of safety into their launch systems that nobody else has; currently, if a launch must abort after t-0, it's extremely likely that the payload is a write-off. Being able to recover those payloads would reduce insurance costs for SpaceX-launched payloads, which would make it even cheaper to launch using SpaceX.
That was the first thing I thought of as well. When the greater part of humanity becomes aware that extreme lifetimes are possible (Howard families), that spurs longevity research which ends up producing the idea of "young blood" transfusions to keep people perpetually healthy. At the time, I thought it was probably completely unscientific (that is, something he'd come up with absent any evidence it would work). Now I wonder... was there evidence suggesting this result, fifty-odd years ago?
The sheer stupidity in that statement may overwhelm everything else you've said so far. Benefiting society (the citizenry, collectively) is exactly the opposite of a zero-sum game. "Live in liberty to pursue their happiness" sounds real good until you come down with cancer, can barely afford treatment, and are left with the liberty of pursuing your happiness while lying in a ditch because you sold your house trying to stay alive. It's left to somebody to haul away your corpse when you die (what, you didn't expect the government to do it, did you? That's no part of defending people's rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness...) All your future contributions to society die with you. Even if you manage to get back on your feet, you've wasted years of productivity and probably permanently harmed your health.
Or you could live in a society where the government actually looks after its people. Yeah, you'll earn a bit less money because the government takes some to pay for all those lazy freeloaders getting expensive medical treatments, but you won't go broke trying to survive when you (or your kid, or your parent...) find yourself in the hospital. Instead, society will support you too, and when you're back on your feet you'll still be financially stable and able to resume contributing to society. Your *personal* contributions to this pool may never amount to what your treatment cost (in which case you, personally, came out ahead) or they might (if, say, you go on to develop something really significant), but society will still be better off in the long run than if they let you lie there in that ditch.
It costs less to provide housing to the chronically homeless than it costs the city to deal with the expenses of them living on the street, did you know that?
Right, because offering to turn your money into somebody else's (political) power totally isn't bribery...
If you and your fellow plutocrats / apologists for the same want to put your money into actually *implementing* political ideas, go ahead. I do it myself, slightly indirectly; I vote for higher taxes on people in (and above) my tax bracket, because I can afford it and it is a historical sociological fact that societies do better when those at the bottom are taken care of (there are limits to the truth of that, but we aren't even vaguely close to them). Note that I didn't say "I vote for people who say they're going to impose higher taxes"; I said I voted for the taxes directly. That's usually not viable above state level, but it's a thing I do nonetheless, and nobody gains power from it. The closest I come to giving money to politicians is donating to the ACLU and the EFF, who use that money to pay legal expenses for things I generally strongly agree with. What ideas are you putting your money into implementing?
If you instead want to put your money into buying votes in favor of politicians, you're just buying power (for somebody else, but they owe you, so you're buying it for yourself too). The primary beneficiaries in such a situation are the politician whose power you bought (corruption) and you, who turned your wealth into power (plutocracy). Society doesn't benefit at all, except to the extent that somebody who owes their power to a rich minority is going to use that power for the benefit of everybody (heh, I *almost* managed to type that with a straight face). Therefore, it is not in society's best interest to allow buying votes... and don't kid yourself, that's exactly what campaign contributions amount to.
True democracy is a terrible system at the large scale. A republic is better, but still has a lot of issues.
Sadly, they're both better than what we have now, which is effectively a plutocracy. I'm not sure how to solve all the problems our system has, but I can come up with a good number of them. Getting money (from wealthy donors) out of elections is a big one.
I love in WA, and I did the same thing in the 2012 presidential election. That is, I voted for a third-party candidate who I actually largely agreed with (and whose platform I'd like to see the main parties address) because, even though I really didn't want Romney to win, voting for Obama in a winner-takes-all state that was called blue when barely 1% of the vote was in really *is* throwing away my vote, far more than contributing to the ~1.1% that my preferred party got in WA (though it was lower internationally).
The neat thing about such third-party votes is that if they ever get even close to upsetting the status quo (doesn't mean they have to *win*, just put "WA is a safely blue state" at risk, for example) the major parties will try to win those voters by adopting elements of the relevant third-party platform. This isn't as good as actually having more than two meaningful platforms, but it's a lot better than the "a vote for a third party is a wasted vote" drivel that so many people seem to actually believe.
True, but at least Luke (and even R2, once he got to a technician) survived *despite* having somebody get a lock on them. The rebels had smaller numbers of pilots; they needed each individual fighter to be as effective and survivable as possible. It also took a second or so of continuous fire for a TIE fighter to kill an X-wing; that doesn't sound like much, but it's that much more time to break lock, have your wingman kill him, etc,
TIEs were cheap in other ways too: no hyperdrive, no heavy weaponry (except the bombers, which were rather un-agile). They were strictly anti-fighter craft. With that said, if you were willing to absorb the losses of putting ships like that up against X-wings and A-wings, they *were* effective.
TIE fighters had no deflectors; a single shot usually killed them. The quad rapid-fire weapons of an X-wing were serious overkill for them. A volley of shots like the one that leaked a hit through to damage R2-D2 would have destroyed most imperial fighters outright.
X-Wings (all rebel fighters, actually) had deflectors. There are any number of scenes that mention them. They weren't generally intended to stand up to capital ship batteries, but rather as protection against enemy fighters. TIE-Fighters (and bombers) did not have deflectors. They were mass-produced, cheap, crappy ships that didn't even possess hyperdrives (unlike the rebel fighters). However, your typical Star Destroyer could carry and man a *lot* of TIE fighters.
In a way, it's actually kind of funny how X-wings were so weapon-heavy when their primary opposition could probably be one-shot-killed by a single reasonably large infantry weapon. On the other hand, TIE fighters were primarily anti-starfighter, wherein "quantity has a quality all its own" makes a fair bit of sense because they could win a war of attrition with cheap fighters. The job of taking out rebel capital ships was usually left up to the (typically much larger) imperial capitals.
X-wings, Y-wings, and B-wings were designed to be effective against heavy targets (A-wings, which traded some firepower for greater agility, were the preferred rebel anti-fighter fighter), and while each one was individually superior to a TIE-fighter, the empire had a lot more TIEs than the rebellion had fighters of any kind. However, rebel fighters could effectively destroy Star Destroyers, and were also far more survivable in combat.
SpaceX Falcon boosters are already quite capable of in-air restart; it's a critical part of their reusable first-stage design (the first stage re-lights at low elevation for a powered touchdown). As for accuracy of payloads, that's one of the critical requirements for ISS transfer, which they have demonstrated repeatedly now. Reliability remains to be seen; they've had no catastrophic failures yet (and they've had at least one sub-last-second automatic launch scrub when the computers detected a problem) but as rocket companies go, they're young yet.
Falcon Heavy would indeed fill a currently serious hole in our launch capability. In theory, it's a simple design - three Falcon 9 first-stages glued together - but SpaceX has been putting a lot of effort into perfecting the Falcon 9 and they'll need some time to adapt that work to a reliable, full-performance Falcon Heavy. On the other hand, at least it's in development! With well over twice the payload capacity of the Delta IV Heavy and nearly 3x that of the Atlas V, it will be a game-changer if it can be flown at anything like the prices SpaceX is predicting.
Right, because there's never critical vulnerabilities in widely-used open source software. I mean, anything as sensitive as, say, an SSL library would obviously be thoroughly tested and code reviewed to prevent any kind of trivially exploitable error that looks like something a CS freshman student might make. Thank goodness neither OpenSSL nor GnuTLS are required by any common free software, for example...
Slashdot Mirror
Futurepower should have clarified: there's no 64-bit Windows build of Firefox. You can make one yourself, if you've got the know-how and the tools, but it's quite unofficial.
As you point out, the code is perfectly 64-bit clean and runs fine in 64-bit mode on other platforms. There's no *good* reason that Windows users are still stuck with 32 bits.
Yep. In fact, this was actually one of the reasons Heartbleed was so bad. Normally, anybody repeatedly attempting to read 64k chunks of heap space would hit an unallocated page pretty quickly, causing a crash alerting the victims to something being wrong. However, OpenSSL uses their own funky versions of malloc and free which pre-allocate large chunks of memory from the OS (as in, many pages), then implement their own in-process memory management on top of that. They don't free those pages back to the OS either, at least not anywhere near as soon as a sane memory manager would. This doesn't actually mean huge amounts of wasted memory - the library can mostly re-use the memory it has already requested, rather than grabbing more from the OS - but it does mean that just because something is freed doesn't mean it isn't still mapped into that process. The end result is that Heartbleed had no externally-visible evidence for the vast majority of its victims, so people didn't even know there was something to look for until the news broke.
If you do it as a commodity? Yes. Of course, the various printer manufacturers don't accept commodity in cartridges, so the whole point of your post is irrelevant. In fact, it's even *more* irrelevant because making electric car batters is a business-to-business deal, and making ink cartridges is a business-to-consumer one. B2B usually has very different markets than B2C. Ink cartridges are high-margin because they're made by the company that makes the printers, and sold to that company's existing customers who can't get the cartridges anywhere else. *IF* Tesla cars became commoditized but the batteries were still proprietary (and didn't last 10 years each...) there would be a lot more market for selling the batteries. On the other hand, if electric car batteries themselves become commodities, it'll be hard to sell them for much profit at all, or a competitor will undercut you.
Access is a joke that's actually funny. Like, "Haha, that idiot did something important in Access! Oh my $DEITY, can you believe people are that dumb?!?"
Base is like an attempted joke that makes people shuffle their feet and look away from you. "Um... did you have to talk about that? Like, really, dude, not cool..."
Frontpage's descendant is called Expression Web, and in most ways it's a superior product (among other things, it has a very strict rendering engine built in, and it supports a range of languages including non-MS ones). It's still Microsoft though, non-free and Windows-only.
Well, you've got Redmond and Bellevue, which are somewhat dominated by Microsoft (similar ratio to Amazon). In the south you've got Boeing, whose ratio I don't know but it could easily be even *worse*. Then, as another poster pointed out, there's a handful of military bases in the area, which are once again going to be mostly guys.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if the ratio in King County as a whole is worse than in Seattle proper. Well, I would be just a little, but not *very* surprised.
I see a 3.5" floppy drive (not unheard of in workstation machines, especially those which interface with any kind of manufacturing equipment and therefore may still actually use them) and an optical drive (not sure what kind, but it's not from the 1980s). The chassis is nothing unusual; I've seen machines like that at offices all over the place. The monitor is unusually thick for a modern LCD, which suggests old (cheap) equipment, but not necessarily indicating any kind of fraud.
Malfador Machinations' Space Empires 5. It gets unplayably bad framerates on NVidia WDDM drivers (Vista or later), no matter what settings you tweak or compatibility modes you set. It's playable (though slow) on Intel chips from the same era and quite acceptable (if still lower than it should be) on AMD.
Ditto for my 7950, on anything from indie games that the developers will never have heard of to really weird legacy games that run like absolute shit on NVidia for some reason. For example, a DirectX 7 game that ran better on a 2008-era Intel integrated GPU tied to an ultra-low-voltage C2Duo clocked at 1.2GHz than it did on a GeForce 9600M with a C2Duo at 2.8GHz, even when both boxes had 4GB of RAM and ran Win7; but ran better than either on single-core 1.8GHz AMD chip with a low-end 2006 mobile graphics chip with Vista on 2GB of RAM (and also runs great on my current beast of a gaming box, with higher specs than all three of those put together and then doubled, which has the 7950 card I mentioned before).
Apple's OS X App Store might have restrictions (I don't know, though I wouldn't be surprised), but you can still install arbitrary programs from whatever source you like. I'm not normally one to defend Apple - they're at the forefront of the whole "people can't actually be trusted with general-purpose computers" thing, and I hate them for it - but things aren't quite as bad as you say. It's easier to put arbitrary stuff on OS X than on Android, in fact.
Oh please, you are *completely* full of shit. WP8 has Pocket File Manager, and WP8.1 has added even more support for file access (I don't know if anybody has yet published an app that uses it to make a general-purpose file browser).
Yeah, the apps can't *see* much because they run with excruciatingly low privileges - PFM has a special capability that gives full access to some locations most apps can't access at all - but the SD card and public folders are accessible.
There's also homebrew, like https://wp8webserver.codeplex.... or http://forum.xda-developers.co...
Tell them you're recording the conversation (even if you're not, though it's a good idea to do so). In some states you're allowed to record *without* telling them, but that wastes the deterrent benefit (useful if you actually want to be able to sue the asshole though, and yes, you can sue cops just like anybody else).
There's also the whole thing where they desgned and built a working launch system for 1/10th what NASA said it would cost, and are able to undercut even the cheapest government-backed launch providers. That's a huge deal for anybody, much less for a company that is only a few years old and was started in one of the most expensive parts of the country. SpaceX may be able to launch on an incredibly low budget, but they don't cut corners on people or location.
Grasshopper (SpaceX's initial reusable test platform) has lifted off and then recovered itself with powered soft landings multiple times. Now, it's only a single engine (basically Falcon 1 instead of Falcon 9), it launches without any upper stages (it's just the first stage all by itself, basically), and it's never reached the usual altitude of stage separation. It was a test platform, arguably not even a real prototype. On the other hand, it did successfully lift off, divert, hover, return to its pad, and make a powered soft touchdown (with impressive accuracy).
The saltwater issue is a complete red herring; SpaceX is planning to recover the rocket stages on land. Not a lot of point in having landing legs otherwise, anyhow, aside from them acting as stabilizing fins. The reason that first flight splashed down in the drink is they wanted to test the "can we kill velocity before landing" part somewhere that wouldn't make a huge mess if it failed; they certainly weren't planning to re-use that particular booster (at least, not without extensive refurb). G-shock on landing is completely avoided by using a powered landing that cuts velocity to near-zero before the legs even touch (plus having the legs absorb the shock; they're not hard to replace if needed).
I think SpaceX has an excellent chance of making this work.
The point about a soft-landing abort is actually a *really* good one. So long as they have enough fuel and engine thrust capacity to create a (balanced) 1G - which means a small portion of their entire engine capacity, especially if they burn off (or dump) much of the fuel from the first stage - the entire rocket could hypothetically abort-to-launch-pad. I don't know how realistic that is (so far they haven't actually demonstrated true recovery to launch pad of even the first stage yet, although Grasshopper and such are good prototype demos) but I suspect it's possible! That would add a degree of safety into their launch systems that nobody else has; currently, if a launch must abort after t-0, it's extremely likely that the payload is a write-off. Being able to recover those payloads would reduce insurance costs for SpaceX-launched payloads, which would make it even cheaper to launch using SpaceX.
That was the first thing I thought of as well. When the greater part of humanity becomes aware that extreme lifetimes are possible (Howard families), that spurs longevity research which ends up producing the idea of "young blood" transfusions to keep people perpetually healthy. At the time, I thought it was probably completely unscientific (that is, something he'd come up with absent any evidence it would work). Now I wonder... was there evidence suggesting this result, fifty-odd years ago?
The sheer stupidity in that statement may overwhelm everything else you've said so far. Benefiting society (the citizenry, collectively) is exactly the opposite of a zero-sum game. "Live in liberty to pursue their happiness" sounds real good until you come down with cancer, can barely afford treatment, and are left with the liberty of pursuing your happiness while lying in a ditch because you sold your house trying to stay alive. It's left to somebody to haul away your corpse when you die (what, you didn't expect the government to do it, did you? That's no part of defending people's rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness...) All your future contributions to society die with you. Even if you manage to get back on your feet, you've wasted years of productivity and probably permanently harmed your health.
Or you could live in a society where the government actually looks after its people. Yeah, you'll earn a bit less money because the government takes some to pay for all those lazy freeloaders getting expensive medical treatments, but you won't go broke trying to survive when you (or your kid, or your parent...) find yourself in the hospital. Instead, society will support you too, and when you're back on your feet you'll still be financially stable and able to resume contributing to society. Your *personal* contributions to this pool may never amount to what your treatment cost (in which case you, personally, came out ahead) or they might (if, say, you go on to develop something really significant), but society will still be better off in the long run than if they let you lie there in that ditch.
It costs less to provide housing to the chronically homeless than it costs the city to deal with the expenses of them living on the street, did you know that?
Right, because offering to turn your money into somebody else's (political) power totally isn't bribery...
If you and your fellow plutocrats / apologists for the same want to put your money into actually *implementing* political ideas, go ahead. I do it myself, slightly indirectly; I vote for higher taxes on people in (and above) my tax bracket, because I can afford it and it is a historical sociological fact that societies do better when those at the bottom are taken care of (there are limits to the truth of that, but we aren't even vaguely close to them). Note that I didn't say "I vote for people who say they're going to impose higher taxes"; I said I voted for the taxes directly. That's usually not viable above state level, but it's a thing I do nonetheless, and nobody gains power from it. The closest I come to giving money to politicians is donating to the ACLU and the EFF, who use that money to pay legal expenses for things I generally strongly agree with. What ideas are you putting your money into implementing?
If you instead want to put your money into buying votes in favor of politicians, you're just buying power (for somebody else, but they owe you, so you're buying it for yourself too). The primary beneficiaries in such a situation are the politician whose power you bought (corruption) and you, who turned your wealth into power (plutocracy). Society doesn't benefit at all, except to the extent that somebody who owes their power to a rich minority is going to use that power for the benefit of everybody (heh, I *almost* managed to type that with a straight face). Therefore, it is not in society's best interest to allow buying votes... and don't kid yourself, that's exactly what campaign contributions amount to.
True democracy is a terrible system at the large scale. A republic is better, but still has a lot of issues.
Sadly, they're both better than what we have now, which is effectively a plutocracy. I'm not sure how to solve all the problems our system has, but I can come up with a good number of them. Getting money (from wealthy donors) out of elections is a big one.
I love in WA, and I did the same thing in the 2012 presidential election. That is, I voted for a third-party candidate who I actually largely agreed with (and whose platform I'd like to see the main parties address) because, even though I really didn't want Romney to win, voting for Obama in a winner-takes-all state that was called blue when barely 1% of the vote was in really *is* throwing away my vote, far more than contributing to the ~1.1% that my preferred party got in WA (though it was lower internationally).
The neat thing about such third-party votes is that if they ever get even close to upsetting the status quo (doesn't mean they have to *win*, just put "WA is a safely blue state" at risk, for example) the major parties will try to win those voters by adopting elements of the relevant third-party platform. This isn't as good as actually having more than two meaningful platforms, but it's a lot better than the "a vote for a third party is a wasted vote" drivel that so many people seem to actually believe.
True, but at least Luke (and even R2, once he got to a technician) survived *despite* having somebody get a lock on them. The rebels had smaller numbers of pilots; they needed each individual fighter to be as effective and survivable as possible. It also took a second or so of continuous fire for a TIE fighter to kill an X-wing; that doesn't sound like much, but it's that much more time to break lock, have your wingman kill him, etc,
TIEs were cheap in other ways too: no hyperdrive, no heavy weaponry (except the bombers, which were rather un-agile). They were strictly anti-fighter craft. With that said, if you were willing to absorb the losses of putting ships like that up against X-wings and A-wings, they *were* effective.
TIE fighters had no deflectors; a single shot usually killed them. The quad rapid-fire weapons of an X-wing were serious overkill for them. A volley of shots like the one that leaked a hit through to damage R2-D2 would have destroyed most imperial fighters outright.
X-Wings (all rebel fighters, actually) had deflectors. There are any number of scenes that mention them. They weren't generally intended to stand up to capital ship batteries, but rather as protection against enemy fighters.
TIE-Fighters (and bombers) did not have deflectors. They were mass-produced, cheap, crappy ships that didn't even possess hyperdrives (unlike the rebel fighters). However, your typical Star Destroyer could carry and man a *lot* of TIE fighters.
In a way, it's actually kind of funny how X-wings were so weapon-heavy when their primary opposition could probably be one-shot-killed by a single reasonably large infantry weapon. On the other hand, TIE fighters were primarily anti-starfighter, wherein "quantity has a quality all its own" makes a fair bit of sense because they could win a war of attrition with cheap fighters. The job of taking out rebel capital ships was usually left up to the (typically much larger) imperial capitals.
X-wings, Y-wings, and B-wings were designed to be effective against heavy targets (A-wings, which traded some firepower for greater agility, were the preferred rebel anti-fighter fighter), and while each one was individually superior to a TIE-fighter, the empire had a lot more TIEs than the rebellion had fighters of any kind. However, rebel fighters could effectively destroy Star Destroyers, and were also far more survivable in combat.
SpaceX Falcon boosters are already quite capable of in-air restart; it's a critical part of their reusable first-stage design (the first stage re-lights at low elevation for a powered touchdown). As for accuracy of payloads, that's one of the critical requirements for ISS transfer, which they have demonstrated repeatedly now. Reliability remains to be seen; they've had no catastrophic failures yet (and they've had at least one sub-last-second automatic launch scrub when the computers detected a problem) but as rocket companies go, they're young yet.
Falcon Heavy would indeed fill a currently serious hole in our launch capability. In theory, it's a simple design - three Falcon 9 first-stages glued together - but SpaceX has been putting a lot of effort into perfecting the Falcon 9 and they'll need some time to adapt that work to a reliable, full-performance Falcon Heavy. On the other hand, at least it's in development! With well over twice the payload capacity of the Delta IV Heavy and nearly 3x that of the Atlas V, it will be a game-changer if it can be flown at anything like the prices SpaceX is predicting.
Right, because there's never critical vulnerabilities in widely-used open source software. I mean, anything as sensitive as, say, an SSL library would obviously be thoroughly tested and code reviewed to prevent any kind of trivially exploitable error that looks like something a CS freshman student might make. Thank goodness neither OpenSSL nor GnuTLS are required by any common free software, for example...