The profit center piece of this should not be understated. Prisons extort significant amounts of money from prisoners' families for communications.
In Tennessee, a 15 minute inmate phone call costs $2.40 for in-state long distance and $3.15 for out-of-state long distance. "Maybe these just haven't been updated in a long time?" No, these are the updated rates from 2017. Before that it was almost/double/ this.
With that as prologue, why should we expect any less from video calls?
> The rest of us don't care how much it costs to put yet another communication satellite in orbit.
The rest of us must not have an imagination then. Space Tourism is/already/ a thing, and space colonies won't be far behind. Maybe you don't want to go; that's completely your prerogative. That said, I have no desire to live on this planet anymore. This guy is knocking zeroes off of the cost of getting to orbit, and that's a hugely exciting thing in moving towards that goal.
> there is nothing unfortunate about ZTE getting punished for supporting bad behavior of 2-bit despots in other countries.
Have you looked at the history of Iran and why their leaders hate the US? Our history books like to leave out some inconvenient parts of this story.
They have every reason to distrust us and every right to arm themselves. It's the only way to prevent my country from dropping so much freedom they end up in the stone age. If they ever doubt this path they can ask Syria and Iraq how disarmament worked out.
The microphone on mine is ok. Do you have it in a case? The first case I bought had a tiny hole in the rubber for the mic that shrouded it in 4-5 mm of rubber. Enlarging that pocket and thinning down the rubber around it helped tremendously.
I'm saddened to see them go; I love my ZTE Blade Spark. It's a _huge_ phone for under $100. The usable area of the display is bigger than the iPhone 6/7/8 plus and the battery lasts all day.;(
Fair point about tangle and low-altitude failures.
> Most quad/hex/octocopters (multirotor) craft propellers will not have the mass needed to auto-rotate, even with variable pitch.
How small are you thinking they can make these and still lift a usable (man-sized) payload?
In the sci-fi book Fuzzy Nation (Scalzi) the quad-like transporters had a fail-safe emergency descent system. It was an independent power system built into each motor/prop unit that powered the device just long enough to set it down (hard) from normal flight conditions. I wonder if the physics of that would work?
I'm excited to see R&D on flying cars, but I'm saddened that it's Uber doing it. I don't trust this company. They are far too willing to engage in unethical behavior to get the benefit of doubt.
> Helicopters are able to auto-rotate in the case of engines quitting because the rotors have lots of mass that can hold energy until needed close to the ground.
Long-blade variable pitch multirotors can do this too, fwiw, and should be considered for this application. For context, I've seen a 700 class helicopter lift 35 pounds/15 kilos, and that didn't/feel like/ the upper limit.
That said, autorotation might be an unnecessary complication. Ballistic Recovery Systems makes emergency descent parachutes for Light Aircraft that work beautifully. These are much more KISS than autorotation.
>> Until I was pissed enough that I felt like playing with the asshole.
This guy gets it. If you call me and offer to sell me health insurance its going to take you a half hour to get through the opening lines of your script. I can talk about my skin tags, bunions, moles, and all of the medical procedures everyone I've ever know has been through.... and bless your heart if you give me a callback number. I'll call for a follow-up chat every single day.
]XD
If the law can't break these scams then it's up to us to do it by making it as expensive as possible for them to exist.
> Same search for US says 12 weeks, e.g. 3 months. Worse.
[Citation needed] Details on stuff like this matters, because people/love/ to play around with statistics to make them say what they want. Case in point, dig in and find the parent study those pages are citing. Look closely and I'll wager that the majority of the participants are Medicare recipients in the US and not those on private insurance.
The surgical wait times for private plans are much shorter than the public plans.
I do not understand how one would convert limestone, CaCO3, into the primary ingredient of portland cement, CaO, without releasing a nontrivial amount of Carbon Dioxide.
>The real question is have they finally figured out how to do differential updates?
For the Monthly updates, yes. If you had last month's patches you'll get a delta update that is dramatically smaller than the full file cumulative update. The payload is the same, just the delivery is different.
Looking at kb4093119 in the Microsoft catalog, the x64 fullfile is 1.2gb, and the delta update is 361mb.
"And your material loss is maybe 10 percent, just for trimming the edges. Instead of a ratio of purchased to flown material-what they call the 'buy to fly' ratio-of maybe 10 to 20, you have a ratio of 1.1, 1.2 tops."
This is the backshell for the Orion spacecraft. It's machined from a/single piece/ of metal 17 feet square. >95% of it gets machined away.
A reasonably skeptical person would say "but that's just the backshell. It has to be {strong, lightweight, seamless, etc}. In this picture you can see many other structural panels manufactured the same way.
> You are assuming that Musk isn't just buying a dominant position in the market.
This assumption is made confidently based on estimates by multiple competent independent analysts. SpaceX's materials buy to fly ratio was two orders of magnitude better than their competition/before/ they started recycling rockets. Recycling first stages drives that cost down even further.
They would be profitable today if they stopped sinking money into R&D, but they won't. I, personally, agree with this decision. I believe there is still room for one or two more order-of-magnitude improvements in this industry, and every zero you knock off the cost adds a zero to your list of potential customers.
> relied on a over priced shuttle, that they thought would never be shut down. This is wrong on a bunch of different levels.
1. NASA warned Congress repeatedly that scope creep and R&D spending cuts were dramatically increasing the initial shuttle cost and continuing operational costs. 2. NASA warned Congress about the need for a shuttle replacement in hearings and in public budget requests for more than a decade before the Shuttle EOL. 3. Despite 2, Shuttle replacement programs have been repeatedly killed by congress.
NASA warned Congress and three different administrations that shortsighted oversight would prevent them from fulfilling their mission. It's not fair or right to blame them when that prediction came true.
I respectfully disagree. Here in the US, the argument for right-to-repair is circulating among many state and federal legislators. Breaking those legislator's iPhones, or those legislator's kids hand-me-down iPhones, would massively tilt that argument/against/ Apple.
If a person in a leadership position actively made this decision then they are working against the company's stated objectives.
I'm going to assume your response is in good faith and not some darker motive.
The primary cause for the loss of Rhino populations is uncontrolled hunting and poaching. Rhino horn is, for reasons I cannot fathom, a valuable commodity. Picture them as Gold bars on the hoof. In a classic tragedy of the commons, people have harvested these gold bars and killed off 95% of the population. They are literally killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
If Rhino hunting was controlled by permitting then you can restrict the number of animals harvested to a sustainable level. When there are too many you allow harvesting of both sexes. When there aren't enough you reduce the bag limits and allow taking of only males. The money from permits can go to prevent poaching and create protected habitats.
Realistic wildlife conservation requires management, not benign neglect.
> where corruption is high or where governments are basically non-existant, it's going to fail.
Corruption can be a problem, but it can work too. Zimbabwe, a bastion of corruption free governance, has strict controls on hunting and is extremely tough on poachers. They have a financial incentive to do so; the revenue from hunting pays for their salaries and the land for wildlife preserves.
In my home state we have 1.2 million acres of public hunting lands under management by our Wildlife and Resources agency. It's paid for entirely through license fees and taxes on sporting equipment (primarily ammunition taxes). That's what paid for the Elk program. They also relocate bears away from human dense areas and are working to eliminate (invasive) wild hogs too. They also partnered with the Feds to bring back red wolves to one of our National Parks, but afaik those aren't a stable population (yet).
>> If the trend of hunting the larger animals for meat continues for 300+ years..
Here in the US the primary threat to large (wild) mammal population is habitat loss, not hunting. The hunting permit system is such that Hunters spend giant piles of money on conservation to combat this problem.
There is a fantastic example of this working in my home state, Tennessee. Elk were hunted out of the state more than a century ago, but hunters paid to reintroduce them in 2000. There are ~500 in the state now.... And yes, you can hunt them, if you are willing to drop the price of a decent used car to buy the permit.
I'd love to be able to dig into this author's source material. There are some fairly strong (possibly FUD) claims in the article, but it's missing the useful details.
E.g. It claims that end of life satellites out at GEO could be used for mayhem, but that doesn't seem right. EOL satellites at GEO are, by international convention, moved up to a graveyard orbit, the remaining propellant dumped, and the power subsystems turned off. This is done to reduce the amount of harm a software or hardware glitch (exploding batteries) can cause in the dying spacecraft
That said, there is some precedent for concern. There were successful and partially successful (possibly state-sponsored) cyberattacks against Terra EO and Landsat-7 in the 2000s.
I love how bits like this pretend that credit card processing is free. It isn't, and far from it. It's going to cost an average restaurant a couple of percent of the check plus a per-check fee plus a couple hundred bucks for a terminal plus a dedicated land line for the terminal (because we apparently live in the 1980's) plus chargebacks plus merchant account fees.
The Russia narrative needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt, comrade.
Both Clinton and Trump ran billion-dollar-plus campaigns. They spent over $100 million combined on social media. "The Russians" are accused of spending less than $200,000.
Slashdot Mirror
The profit center piece of this should not be understated. Prisons extort significant amounts of money from prisoners' families for communications.
In Tennessee, a 15 minute inmate phone call costs $2.40 for in-state long distance and $3.15 for out-of-state long distance. "Maybe these just haven't been updated in a long time?" No, these are the updated rates from 2017. Before that it was almost /double/ this.
With that as prologue, why should we expect any less from video calls?
> The rest of us don't care how much it costs to put yet another communication satellite in orbit.
The rest of us must not have an imagination then. Space Tourism is /already/ a thing, and space colonies won't be far behind. Maybe you don't want to go; that's completely your prerogative. That said, I have no desire to live on this planet anymore. This guy is knocking zeroes off of the cost of getting to orbit, and that's a hugely exciting thing in moving towards that goal.
> there is nothing unfortunate about ZTE getting punished for supporting bad behavior of 2-bit despots in other countries.
Have you looked at the history of Iran and why their leaders hate the US? Our history books like to leave out some inconvenient parts of this story.
They have every reason to distrust us and every right to arm themselves. It's the only way to prevent my country from dropping so much freedom they end up in the stone age. If they ever doubt this path they can ask Syria and Iraq how disarmament worked out.
The microphone on mine is ok. Do you have it in a case? The first case I bought had a tiny hole in the rubber for the mic that shrouded it in 4-5 mm of rubber. Enlarging that pocket and thinning down the rubber around it helped tremendously.
I'm saddened to see them go; I love my ZTE Blade Spark. It's a _huge_ phone for under $100. The usable area of the display is bigger than the iPhone 6/7/8 plus and the battery lasts all day. ;(
Fair point about tangle and low-altitude failures.
> Most quad/hex/octocopters (multirotor) craft propellers will not have the mass needed to auto-rotate, even with variable pitch.
How small are you thinking they can make these and still lift a usable (man-sized) payload?
In the sci-fi book Fuzzy Nation (Scalzi) the quad-like transporters had a fail-safe emergency descent system. It was an independent power system built into each motor/prop unit that powered the device just long enough to set it down (hard) from normal flight conditions. I wonder if the physics of that would work?
>> I'd love to dock my phone and use it like a desktop.
Have you tried this on your existing kit? A Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse works on my Android phone, as does a USB-C to HDMI adapter.
The trick is finding a bluetooth keyboard that doesn't suck.
> If only a technology existed that allowed cars to travel at night in areas with no lights.
Parent has a very good point. They put an IR camera inside the car to observe the driver, but didn't put one facing the road?
I'm excited to see R&D on flying cars, but I'm saddened that it's Uber doing it. I don't trust this company. They are far too willing to engage in unethical behavior to get the benefit of doubt.
> Helicopters are able to auto-rotate in the case of engines quitting because the rotors have lots of mass that can hold energy until needed close to the ground.
Long-blade variable pitch multirotors can do this too, fwiw, and should be considered for this application. For context, I've seen a 700 class helicopter lift 35 pounds/15 kilos, and that didn't /feel like/ the upper limit.
That said, autorotation might be an unnecessary complication. Ballistic Recovery Systems makes emergency descent parachutes for Light Aircraft that work beautifully. These are much more KISS than autorotation.
>> Until I was pissed enough that I felt like playing with the asshole.
This guy gets it. If you call me and offer to sell me health insurance its going to take you a half hour to get through the opening lines of your script. I can talk about my skin tags, bunions, moles, and all of the medical procedures everyone I've ever know has been through. ... and bless your heart if you give me a callback number. I'll call for a follow-up chat every single day.
]XD
If the law can't break these scams then it's up to us to do it by making it as expensive as possible for them to exist.
> Same search for US says 12 weeks, e.g. 3 months. Worse.
[Citation needed] Details on stuff like this matters, because people /love/ to play around with statistics to make them say what they want. Case in point, dig in and find the parent study those pages are citing. Look closely and I'll wager that the majority of the participants are Medicare recipients in the US and not those on private insurance.
The surgical wait times for private plans are much shorter than the public plans.
I do not understand how one would convert limestone, CaCO3, into the primary ingredient of portland cement, CaO, without releasing a nontrivial amount of Carbon Dioxide.
Could you explain what I'm missing?
THanks.
>The real question is have they finally figured out how to do differential updates?
For the Monthly updates, yes. If you had last month's patches you'll get a delta update that is dramatically smaller than the full file cumulative update. The payload is the same, just the delivery is different.
Looking at kb4093119 in the Microsoft catalog, the x64 fullfile is 1.2gb, and the delta update is 361mb.
For the feature updates I don't know.
Buy-to-fly ratio:
https://www.wired.com/2012/10/...
"And your material loss is maybe 10 percent, just for trimming the edges. Instead of a ratio of purchased to flown material-what they call the 'buy to fly' ratio-of maybe 10 to 20, you have a ratio of 1.1, 1.2 tops."
A practical example is in this video.
https://archive.org/details/NA...
This is the backshell for the Orion spacecraft. It's machined from a /single piece/ of metal 17 feet square. >95% of it gets machined away.
A reasonably skeptical person would say "but that's just the backshell. It has to be {strong, lightweight, seamless, etc}. In this picture you can see many other structural panels manufactured the same way.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/orion/w...
If, and it is a non-trivial if, they manage to pull 10 flights out of a Block 5 booster without refurbishment that's another order of magnitude.
> You are assuming that Musk isn't just buying a dominant position in the market.
This assumption is made confidently based on estimates by multiple competent independent analysts. SpaceX's materials buy to fly ratio was two orders of magnitude better than their competition /before/ they started recycling rockets. Recycling first stages drives that cost down even further.
They would be profitable today if they stopped sinking money into R&D, but they won't. I, personally, agree with this decision. I believe there is still room for one or two more order-of-magnitude improvements in this industry, and every zero you knock off the cost adds a zero to your list of potential customers.
> relied on a over priced shuttle, that they thought would never be shut down.
This is wrong on a bunch of different levels.
1. NASA warned Congress repeatedly that scope creep and R&D spending cuts were dramatically increasing the initial shuttle cost and continuing operational costs.
2. NASA warned Congress about the need for a shuttle replacement in hearings and in public budget requests for more than a decade before the Shuttle EOL.
3. Despite 2, Shuttle replacement programs have been repeatedly killed by congress.
NASA warned Congress and three different administrations that shortsighted oversight would prevent them from fulfilling their mission. It's not fair or right to blame them when that prediction came true.
I respectfully disagree. Here in the US, the argument for right-to-repair is circulating among many state and federal legislators. Breaking those legislator's iPhones, or those legislator's kids hand-me-down iPhones, would massively tilt that argument /against/ Apple.
If a person in a leadership position actively made this decision then they are working against the company's stated objectives.
I'm going to assume your response is in good faith and not some darker motive.
The primary cause for the loss of Rhino populations is uncontrolled hunting and poaching. Rhino horn is, for reasons I cannot fathom, a valuable commodity. Picture them as Gold bars on the hoof. In a classic tragedy of the commons, people have harvested these gold bars and killed off 95% of the population. They are literally killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
If Rhino hunting was controlled by permitting then you can restrict the number of animals harvested to a sustainable level. When there are too many you allow harvesting of both sexes. When there aren't enough you reduce the bag limits and allow taking of only males. The money from permits can go to prevent poaching and create protected habitats.
Realistic wildlife conservation requires management, not benign neglect.
> where corruption is high or where governments are basically non-existant, it's going to fail.
Corruption can be a problem, but it can work too. Zimbabwe, a bastion of corruption free governance, has strict controls on hunting and is extremely tough on poachers. They have a financial incentive to do so; the revenue from hunting pays for their salaries and the land for wildlife preserves.
In my home state we have 1.2 million acres of public hunting lands under management by our Wildlife and Resources agency. It's paid for entirely through license fees and taxes on sporting equipment (primarily ammunition taxes). That's what paid for the Elk program. They also relocate bears away from human dense areas and are working to eliminate (invasive) wild hogs too. They also partnered with the Feds to bring back red wolves to one of our National Parks, but afaik those aren't a stable population (yet).
>> If the trend of hunting the larger animals for meat continues for 300+ years..
Here in the US the primary threat to large (wild) mammal population is habitat loss, not hunting. The hunting permit system is such that Hunters spend giant piles of money on conservation to combat this problem.
There is a fantastic example of this working in my home state, Tennessee. Elk were hunted out of the state more than a century ago, but hunters paid to reintroduce them in 2000. There are ~500 in the state now. ... And yes, you can hunt them, if you are willing to drop the price of a decent used car to buy the permit.
Want more Moose? Take up hunting.
I'd love to be able to dig into this author's source material. There are some fairly strong (possibly FUD) claims in the article, but it's missing the useful details.
E.g. It claims that end of life satellites out at GEO could be used for mayhem, but that doesn't seem right. EOL satellites at GEO are, by international convention, moved up to a graveyard orbit, the remaining propellant dumped, and the power subsystems turned off. This is done to reduce the amount of harm a software or hardware glitch (exploding batteries) can cause in the dying spacecraft
That said, there is some precedent for concern. There were successful and partially successful (possibly state-sponsored) cyberattacks against Terra EO and Landsat-7 in the 2000s.
> Cash actually costs money ...
I love how bits like this pretend that credit card processing is free. It isn't, and far from it. It's going to cost an average restaurant a couple of percent of the check plus a per-check fee plus a couple hundred bucks for a terminal plus a dedicated land line for the terminal (because we apparently live in the 1980's) plus chargebacks plus merchant account fees.
Neither Paper nor Plastic is free.
The Russia narrative needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt, comrade.
Both Clinton and Trump ran billion-dollar-plus campaigns. They spent over $100 million combined on social media. "The Russians" are accused of spending less than $200,000.
I find it telling that Dick Cheney's pacemaker was replaced with a unit that had all of the RF functions disabled during his tenure as VP.
That tells me two things.
1. He still has some biological components left.
2. I do not want wireless interfaces on my medical devices.