Keep in mind that the 215 mile range is under good conditions - new batteries, temperate climate, good roads with little traffic. A windy road during real winter will see nowhere near this range, nor will a car with some mileage on the batteries.
Partially true, partially not.
1) Battery age: This is correct. Battery range declines with time. Tesla warranties their packs for 75% of the initial range, for 8 years and unlimited km.
2) Temperate climate: This is mostly correct - but it can go either way. Tesla's range calculator shows, for example, that the P75D (EPA range 259mi) at 65mph does: 0F, heat on: 211mi 32F, heat on: 233mi 50F, heat on: 253mi 50F, heat off: 267mi 70F, AC off: 275mi 90F, AC off: 279mi 90F, AC on: 260mi 110F, AC on: 246mi
3) Traffic: It depends entirely on the type of traffic. While gasoline vehicles perform best at the lowest speed they can manage in their highest gear, EV optimum speeds are far lower, often in the ballpark of 20 mph, where their ranges can exceed their EPA ranges several times over. For example, the above P75D (EPA range 259mi) has the following speed-range depenency (70, no heat/AC)
Sub-45 mph: Not included in the calculator 45mph: 404mi 50mph: 367mi 55mph: 334mi 60mph: 303mi 65mph: 275mi 70mph: 250mi Over 70mph: Not included in the calculator
Steady-moving traffic that simply slows down travel speeds actually increases EV range, potentially significantly. However, braking in traffic that strongly fluctuates between speeds wastes energy - Li-ion EV regenerative braking is generally 50-75% efficient round-trip (hybrids, with their small NiMH packs, generally are much less efficient round-trip, around 30%). In general, low speeds advantages win out over braking disadvantages, which is why EVs generally do much better in city driving than highway driving - the opposite of gasoline vehicles.
A key detail most people miss over when talking about traffic: does anyone realize how long of a drive you're talking about when you describe using up an entire EV's range in stop-and-go traffic? Say you're talking about an average speed of 15mph for an EV that would have 200 miles range in that conditions. You're talking about spending over thirteen hours in traffic in those conditions. When was the last time you spent over thirteen hours continuously in traffic?
The Model 3 is to start around $35,000 and with a $7,500 federal electric car tax credit, could cost $27,500. Tesla says the five-seat car will be able to go 215 miles (346 kilometers) on a single charge and will be sporty, accelerating from zero to 60 miles per hour in under six seconds.
The question is whether Slashdot will leave misinformation up on their front page or not.
You want a genetically engineered crop of pest-resistant elephants? Indoors? Intriguing. Who is promoting paranoia, marketing and denialism about the concept? The Indoor-Trampleable-Underbrush lobby? Living Grass Carpet megacorporations?
Exactly my reaction. "Breaking news: insecticide shown to harm insects!"
The actual question is not whether an insecticide will harm bees, but how much they harm bees relative to how much they boost yields by controlling pests (the reason insecticides are used). And in that equation, I seriously doubt you'll find that, say, organophosphates come out as more bee-friendly.
"Hi, I'm Dave McClure. You may remember me from such investment proposals as "Shake your ass for this investment cash!" and "Why yes, your funds are in my hotel room - let's go up and fetch them...."
Fedora has long come standard with SELinux enabled. I hate it. It sounds like a great idea, but the vast majority of apps do nothing special with SELinux failures, and just report them as "permission denied", leading the user to suspect a different problem than what's actually going on. And that's the good case; since SELinux problems can cause failures in things many programs don't expect to fail, it can leave you having to dig through the program with strace to figure out what went wrong. And with services that mysteriously fail it can be even worse, as you don't necessarily know what program failed or how to manually start it. If you suspect SELinux you can check the audit log, but the way it plays out, the symptoms often don't make you suspect SELinux.
I don't think introducing "SELinux for Windows" is the right solution. I think the right solution is filesystems that support snapshots, with the ability to delete snapshots requiring superuser privileges (or in the case of external drives, a physical interaction with the drive). Of course you don't make the task of writing a ransomware program impossible, but you do make it a lot harder, requiring either good privilege escalation bugs or a way to trick the user into giving the program superuser privileges or deleting snapshots for it.
Yeah, what part of him de facto annexing parts of half a dozen neighboring countries and de jure annexing part of Ukraine would give one the impression that he wants to restore the empire? What part of Putin lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union would give one that impression?
Of course they can find a different email provider. But the version that's gone out and infected people - victims who presumably won't be infected twice - has used this email address, which is no longer valid.
What I find interesting about this article is that they're using a commercial email service with a known account. While Posteo doesn't collect or store IP addresses, I would think that they could be subpoenaed to return future IP information for future attempts to log into the account. Also, if the account was left open, subpoenas could also be issued upstream; even with encrypted traffic, they could probably match IPs by timing (aka, the attacker's click generates a request to send an email, which is presumedly sent with virtually no delay, so the two could be matched up - unless Posteo imposes some sort of significant delay.
They could of course be connecting to Posteo through Tor. But there are plenty of ways to attack targeted Tor users as well.
Interesting... ESET has a very different distribution analysis than Kaspersky, and they show almost exclusively Ukrainian targets, with Russia moved way down the list.
Because Ukraine is getting hit by far the hardest? Because they've been the subject of a long string of crippling cyberattacks since the Donbas conflict broke out, including highly sophisticated attacks that took down public utilities - so naturally people assume that this is more along those lines?
That doesn't mean that this is targeted at Ukraine; it could just be coincidence. But those numbers certainly are skewed. That said, if it was from Russia, they didn't do a good job at preventing it from hitting their own systems.
Something I was just thinking about the other day, when considering btrfs for a new install rather than ext4... wouldn't a filesystem that allows for periodic snapshotting offer some defense against ransomware, so long as the ransomware doesn't run with the privilege to delete snapshots? So it starts encrypting your files... then runs out of disk space due to all of the changes it's made since the last snapshot, becomes stuck, and all the user has to do is restore from the last snapshot.
Seems like some relatively low hanging fruit to help combat a relatively major problem. Or am I missing something?
Grocery stores have high ceilings not only for heat management, but also for:
1) Fire safety. It becomes harder for flame to reach the roof, and smoke accumulates at a much higher height. Sprinkler system design also becomes easier. 2) It creates a more "open" feel, which customers prefer. Some grocery stores even put mirrors on the upper walls to make the space feel even more open. The vertical height is also used for displays, signs, etc. 3) In some cases, excess inventory is stacked vertically. 4) Simpler, more even illumination
In general, if you're building retail and you have no particular reason to limit vertical height, you use high ceilings. Heat is one of the factors, but not the only one, and is managed by HVAC regardless. And gee, news flash, "Electronic device outputs heat, details at 11!"
High intensity glasshouses aren't exactly the same thing. Vertical microfarms generally pursue sterility and plant isolation, meaning that you don't have the same challenges with pest and disease management. They also do more to maintain precise controlled conditions and handle process steps automatically. This all comes at a cost of significantly higher capital costs per unit output, mind you.
Well... as a general rule with hydroponics, most aren't really closed systems. You mix up a batch of concentrate, and from that mix up your initial solution. You then monitor solution level, EC and pH daily. Water is added to maintain solution level, concentrate is added to maintain EC, and acidic or basic nutrients (such as nitric acid or potassium hydroxide) are added to control pH. After a month to a couple months, the balance of individual nutrients in the solution is considered to be too out of whack to use, you drain it, and start over.
Note that if you want a fully closed-loop system, it's not an answer to measure the concentration of each nutrient individually in the solution (a much more difficult task than EC measurement) and add them each individually. Because the goal isn't to maintain nutrient levels in the solution at a constant amount, it's to maintain uptake levels in the plants at a proper amount. If you want that, you need to take periodic plant tissue samples and measure the nutrient concentrations in the plants, and adjust the solution based on whether they're too high or low. As a general rule, this only applies to macronutrients; you usually don't have to be too cautious with micronutrients. You just deliver them in rough proportion to the macronutrients and you're good.
For an "in-store farm", I'd almost certainly expect it to be based around periodic solution flushes. It's much simpler. That said, even when dumping your nutrient solution at regular intervals, the wastage is far lower than with conventional farming.
BTW, one of the nice things about hydroponics is that it makes biofortification easier. For example, plants don't need iodine - it's actually somewhat harmful to them. But while in small quantities in the solution it makes no difference to their growth rate, they incorporate significant amounts of it into their biomass, transforming foods that are traditionally iodine-devoid into valuable dietary sources of iodine. Growing under lights also lets you have some interesting effects. While controlling frequencies in the visible spectrum affects plant growth factors (for example, triggering early blossoming or delaying it for more leaf growth), the really neat stuff comes from UV; UV exposure causes plants to produce various "sunscreen" compounds (akin to how we tan with increased melanin production). This affects their colour, flavour, and nutrient composition. Even non-plants can benefit from this; mushrooms do not require light, but when exposed to UV during growth, many mushrooms change from being almost devoid in vitamin D to crazy-rich in it.
Have to side with you, despite your username (although your notion of 2-10x "speedups" from hydroponics is... let's just say "optimistic" to be nice - and yes, I have plenty of experience with both hydroponics and growing crops under lights, and no, not that kind of crop;) ). Lettuce and herbs don't take three months to grow; it's crops like grains and tomatoes that take that long. And for most of their life they're far smaller than their final size. Even if that wasn't the case, the GP's logic makes no sense. Are they seriously proposing to house a family in the amount of space that is taken up by a box of hydroponic lettuce?
For realistic numbers for herbs or greens - say, a 2,5m high unit taking up 2m of floor space with 8x 30cm-high rows, 1 month from planting to harvest, minimum growth media space of 8cm, maximum mature plant space of 50cm, average of say 20cm - and a wasted space fraction of say 20% - you get 80 plants (representing a couple cubic meters of total volume) per month, 2-3 mature plants per day. Filling up an entire tiny apartment's worth of space (say, 30 square meters) would yield 15 times that much.
If you want to talk crops that can actually take a few months from seed to harvest, tomatoes might be an example (and IMHO probably aren't a good idea, as they're more of an energy-intensive crop than herbs and greens - although not as bad as caloric crops like grains, tubers, etc). But in that case, while it may be 90 days to harvest, that's only 90 days to the start of harvesting. A tomato plant, kept properly, can stay productive for years - continuously. Of course, when you're talking long-lifespan continuous producers, having some sort of automated "farm" becomes less meaningful, all you really need is a proper grow tent setup.
I live in a place where hydroponics is a big thing (Iceland). And in the winter, it's almost entirely done under lights. But they don't do it in grocery stores in vertical farms, it's done under glass. The lettuce and herbs, for example, are planted in an automated system in little cheap plastic mini-pots filled with some sort of growth medium (peat?), and for "harvest" they just take the whole pot and put it in an open-ended plastic bag and ship it to stores. While I can't imagine a cheapo chain like Bónus changing that system, I could imagine a high-end one like Hagkaup having their own "in-store" growth system as a loss-leader. Or, for a US equivalent, something like Whole Foods.
The basic concept is that you don't "operate" it, you plug it in, connect the fresh and wastewater supply, and beyond that it's just scheduled nutrient refills. Monitoring and any troubleshooting is done remotely, not by the local staff. They don't discuss what sort of growth medium they're using or whether the customer is expected to take the whole plant (roots, medium and all), but one presumes that keeping that simple is also part of their design goals.
Like they said, it's not a new concept. And it's never going to make sense for "calorie-intensive" crops. But for herbs, lettuce, etc, it's at least plausible. At the very least it'd make for a nice loss leader for upscale grocery chains.
The maneuvers required for the satellites to achieve their individual orbital parameters require only a minimal amount of dV. The constellation is 7 different planes of 10 satellites each, so they just need to vary TA with respect to each other. As a Kerbin University graduate, you're aware that you do this by making a small burn to increase or decrease orbital velocity, and thus orbital period, then recircularizing as you cross back over the orbital plane at the desired TA.
The second stage does a deorbit burn (this is done upon completion of every LEO mission) to dispose of it in the ocean (after issuing a NOTAM for the expected debris ellipse).
Indeed. Personally, I'm impressed by the constant stream of new innovation work - it seems every other launch is trying something new, even if minor - some new part, some new extreme in the flight or landing envelope, some new attempt to work towards additional parts recovery or reusability, etc. I love how they're experimenting with fairing recovery. If they keep improving the durability of their F9 stages like they've been doing incrementally (e.x. in this launch, the titanium grid fins), we may well get to the point of seeing second stage recovery. SpaceX used to dismiss it as unlikely but now talks about it as a long-term goal.
I imagine it will be a while, but I look forward to seeing how their reuse cost savings works out. We should be able to get a rough sense by tracking how quickly they're turning around stages, as that corresponds with man-hours. There's all sorts of tangential things they're ultimately going to need to reduce in price as well related to ground and communication services, things that used to be an insignificant fraction of the total cost but become more relevant the cheaper the rocket cost-per-flight gets. I'm an optimist on this; I think they're going to ultimately get turnaround very cheap indeed. I see no fundamental reason why turnaround must cost seven figures, or even six, per flight. Orbital rocketry is a tougher flight envelope than aircraft, but ultimately, you adjust your hardware to make maintenance turnaround as cheap as possible, just like aircraft designers do, based on your experience flying the craft. That which you can make last, you make last; that which you can't, you make it as cheap to swap as possible. You determine how much you can fly each part before it needs service, and build a maintenance schedule around that which minimizes labour and downtime. Etc.
People often point to Shuttle reuse as a counterpoint to reusability economics, but the Shuttle program couldn't do the above. The orbiters were made once and then production stopped, versus the Falcons which are designed to be affordable even in a disposable, series-production flight mode. The Shuttle tanks were never reusable, and the SRBs (by nature of being solids) fundamentally required a full disassembly/recasting/rebuild each time. This is all ignoring how the program was economically compromised from the beginning due to budget cuts, difficult imposed design requirements, and a few bad decisions. The short of it, the Shuttle never had the option to make its engines or TPS maintenance-simpler, it never had the option to get rid of the side-mount that caused so many headaches (weight, vibration, debris strike, etc), couldn't change that the SRBs got seawater soaked after a highway-speed crash into the ocean, and on and on. SpaceX can continually change anything that hinders their reuse economics. It's a massive advantage, and I think ultimately it'll pay off massively.
but even this rocket's unlaunched big brother isn't nearly as big as the Saturn Vs they launched in the 60s.
By far the largest existing today. And not costing over a billion dollars per launch, or cost a meaningful fraction of the US's economy to develop.
Nor has SpaceX to my knowledge delivered a single payload outside earth's orbit
First off, that's a weird remark. The launch vehicle has nothing to do with what the payload does after it's launched; interplanetary transfer stages aren't part of a launch vehicle, they're just mass that it has to deliver. Secondly, DISCOVR does not orbit Earth; it orbits the Sun-Earth L1 point, and if it did not experience stationkeeping it would slowly drift away.
Slashdot Mirror
Partially true, partially not.
1) Battery age: This is correct. Battery range declines with time. Tesla warranties their packs for 75% of the initial range, for 8 years and unlimited km.
2) Temperate climate: This is mostly correct - but it can go either way. Tesla's range calculator shows, for example, that the P75D (EPA range 259mi) at 65mph does:
0F, heat on: 211mi
32F, heat on: 233mi
50F, heat on: 253mi
50F, heat off: 267mi
70F, AC off: 275mi
90F, AC off: 279mi
90F, AC on: 260mi
110F, AC on: 246mi
3) Traffic: It depends entirely on the type of traffic. While gasoline vehicles perform best at the lowest speed they can manage in their highest gear, EV optimum speeds are far lower, often in the ballpark of 20 mph, where their ranges can exceed their EPA ranges several times over. For example, the above P75D (EPA range 259mi) has the following speed-range depenency (70, no heat/AC)
Sub-45 mph: Not included in the calculator
45mph: 404mi
50mph: 367mi
55mph: 334mi
60mph: 303mi
65mph: 275mi
70mph: 250mi
Over 70mph: Not included in the calculator
Steady-moving traffic that simply slows down travel speeds actually increases EV range, potentially significantly. However, braking in traffic that strongly fluctuates between speeds wastes energy - Li-ion EV regenerative braking is generally 50-75% efficient round-trip (hybrids, with their small NiMH packs, generally are much less efficient round-trip, around 30%). In general, low speeds advantages win out over braking disadvantages, which is why EVs generally do much better in city driving than highway driving - the opposite of gasoline vehicles.
A key detail most people miss over when talking about traffic: does anyone realize how long of a drive you're talking about when you describe using up an entire EV's range in stop-and-go traffic? Say you're talking about an average speed of 15mph for an EV that would have 200 miles range in that conditions. You're talking about spending over thirteen hours in traffic in those conditions. When was the last time you spent over thirteen hours continuously in traffic?
TFA has apparently been fixed:
The question is whether Slashdot will leave misinformation up on their front page or not.
You want a genetically engineered crop of pest-resistant elephants? Indoors? Intriguing. Who is promoting paranoia, marketing and denialism about the concept? The Indoor-Trampleable-Underbrush lobby? Living Grass Carpet megacorporations?
Exactly my reaction. "Breaking news: insecticide shown to harm insects!"
The actual question is not whether an insecticide will harm bees, but how much they harm bees relative to how much they boost yields by controlling pests (the reason insecticides are used). And in that equation, I seriously doubt you'll find that, say, organophosphates come out as more bee-friendly.
Which is precisely what this "study" does. Their graph simply compares cubic meters to cubic meters.
I put "study" in quotes because as far as I can tell there actually isn't a peer-reviewed study. Please correct me (with a link) if I'm mistaken.
"Hi, I'm Dave McClure. You may remember me from such investment proposals as "Shake your ass for this investment cash!" and "Why yes, your funds are in my hotel room - let's go up and fetch them...."
Fedora has long come standard with SELinux enabled. I hate it. It sounds like a great idea, but the vast majority of apps do nothing special with SELinux failures, and just report them as "permission denied", leading the user to suspect a different problem than what's actually going on. And that's the good case; since SELinux problems can cause failures in things many programs don't expect to fail, it can leave you having to dig through the program with strace to figure out what went wrong. And with services that mysteriously fail it can be even worse, as you don't necessarily know what program failed or how to manually start it. If you suspect SELinux you can check the audit log, but the way it plays out, the symptoms often don't make you suspect SELinux.
I don't think introducing "SELinux for Windows" is the right solution. I think the right solution is filesystems that support snapshots, with the ability to delete snapshots requiring superuser privileges (or in the case of external drives, a physical interaction with the drive). Of course you don't make the task of writing a ransomware program impossible, but you do make it a lot harder, requiring either good privilege escalation bugs or a way to trick the user into giving the program superuser privileges or deleting snapshots for it.
It's also worth noting that according to other sources Kaspersky is lowballing the percentage of victims that are in Ukraine.
Yeah, what part of him de facto annexing parts of half a dozen neighboring countries and de jure annexing part of Ukraine would give one the impression that he wants to restore the empire? What part of Putin lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union would give one that impression?
Of course they can find a different email provider. But the version that's gone out and infected people - victims who presumably won't be infected twice - has used this email address, which is no longer valid.
What I find interesting about this article is that they're using a commercial email service with a known account. While Posteo doesn't collect or store IP addresses, I would think that they could be subpoenaed to return future IP information for future attempts to log into the account. Also, if the account was left open, subpoenas could also be issued upstream; even with encrypted traffic, they could probably match IPs by timing (aka, the attacker's click generates a request to send an email, which is presumedly sent with virtually no delay, so the two could be matched up - unless Posteo imposes some sort of significant delay.
They could of course be connecting to Posteo through Tor. But there are plenty of ways to attack targeted Tor users as well.
Interesting... ESET has a very different distribution analysis than Kaspersky, and they show almost exclusively Ukrainian targets, with Russia moved way down the list.
That's actually what Kaspersky is now saying. They're saying it's something new and have actually taken to calling it "NotPetya".
Because Ukraine is getting hit by far the hardest? Because they've been the subject of a long string of crippling cyberattacks since the Donbas conflict broke out, including highly sophisticated attacks that took down public utilities - so naturally people assume that this is more along those lines?
That doesn't mean that this is targeted at Ukraine; it could just be coincidence. But those numbers certainly are skewed. That said, if it was from Russia, they didn't do a good job at preventing it from hitting their own systems.
Something I was just thinking about the other day, when considering btrfs for a new install rather than ext4... wouldn't a filesystem that allows for periodic snapshotting offer some defense against ransomware, so long as the ransomware doesn't run with the privilege to delete snapshots? So it starts encrypting your files... then runs out of disk space due to all of the changes it's made since the last snapshot, becomes stuck, and all the user has to do is restore from the last snapshot.
Seems like some relatively low hanging fruit to help combat a relatively major problem. Or am I missing something?
Grocery stores have high ceilings not only for heat management, but also for:
1) Fire safety. It becomes harder for flame to reach the roof, and smoke accumulates at a much higher height. Sprinkler system design also becomes easier.
2) It creates a more "open" feel, which customers prefer. Some grocery stores even put mirrors on the upper walls to make the space feel even more open. The vertical height is also used for displays, signs, etc.
3) In some cases, excess inventory is stacked vertically.
4) Simpler, more even illumination
In general, if you're building retail and you have no particular reason to limit vertical height, you use high ceilings. Heat is one of the factors, but not the only one, and is managed by HVAC regardless. And gee, news flash, "Electronic device outputs heat, details at 11!"
High intensity glasshouses aren't exactly the same thing. Vertical microfarms generally pursue sterility and plant isolation, meaning that you don't have the same challenges with pest and disease management. They also do more to maintain precise controlled conditions and handle process steps automatically. This all comes at a cost of significantly higher capital costs per unit output, mind you.
Well... as a general rule with hydroponics, most aren't really closed systems. You mix up a batch of concentrate, and from that mix up your initial solution. You then monitor solution level, EC and pH daily. Water is added to maintain solution level, concentrate is added to maintain EC, and acidic or basic nutrients (such as nitric acid or potassium hydroxide) are added to control pH. After a month to a couple months, the balance of individual nutrients in the solution is considered to be too out of whack to use, you drain it, and start over.
Note that if you want a fully closed-loop system, it's not an answer to measure the concentration of each nutrient individually in the solution (a much more difficult task than EC measurement) and add them each individually. Because the goal isn't to maintain nutrient levels in the solution at a constant amount, it's to maintain uptake levels in the plants at a proper amount. If you want that, you need to take periodic plant tissue samples and measure the nutrient concentrations in the plants, and adjust the solution based on whether they're too high or low. As a general rule, this only applies to macronutrients; you usually don't have to be too cautious with micronutrients. You just deliver them in rough proportion to the macronutrients and you're good.
For an "in-store farm", I'd almost certainly expect it to be based around periodic solution flushes. It's much simpler. That said, even when dumping your nutrient solution at regular intervals, the wastage is far lower than with conventional farming.
BTW, one of the nice things about hydroponics is that it makes biofortification easier. For example, plants don't need iodine - it's actually somewhat harmful to them. But while in small quantities in the solution it makes no difference to their growth rate, they incorporate significant amounts of it into their biomass, transforming foods that are traditionally iodine-devoid into valuable dietary sources of iodine. Growing under lights also lets you have some interesting effects. While controlling frequencies in the visible spectrum affects plant growth factors (for example, triggering early blossoming or delaying it for more leaf growth), the really neat stuff comes from UV; UV exposure causes plants to produce various "sunscreen" compounds (akin to how we tan with increased melanin production). This affects their colour, flavour, and nutrient composition. Even non-plants can benefit from this; mushrooms do not require light, but when exposed to UV during growth, many mushrooms change from being almost devoid in vitamin D to crazy-rich in it.
Have to side with you, despite your username (although your notion of 2-10x "speedups" from hydroponics is... let's just say "optimistic" to be nice - and yes, I have plenty of experience with both hydroponics and growing crops under lights, and no, not that kind of crop ;) ). Lettuce and herbs don't take three months to grow; it's crops like grains and tomatoes that take that long. And for most of their life they're far smaller than their final size. Even if that wasn't the case, the GP's logic makes no sense. Are they seriously proposing to house a family in the amount of space that is taken up by a box of hydroponic lettuce?
For realistic numbers for herbs or greens - say, a 2,5m high unit taking up 2m of floor space with 8x 30cm-high rows, 1 month from planting to harvest, minimum growth media space of 8cm, maximum mature plant space of 50cm, average of say 20cm - and a wasted space fraction of say 20% - you get 80 plants (representing a couple cubic meters of total volume) per month, 2-3 mature plants per day. Filling up an entire tiny apartment's worth of space (say, 30 square meters) would yield 15 times that much.
If you want to talk crops that can actually take a few months from seed to harvest, tomatoes might be an example (and IMHO probably aren't a good idea, as they're more of an energy-intensive crop than herbs and greens - although not as bad as caloric crops like grains, tubers, etc). But in that case, while it may be 90 days to harvest, that's only 90 days to the start of harvesting. A tomato plant, kept properly, can stay productive for years - continuously. Of course, when you're talking long-lifespan continuous producers, having some sort of automated "farm" becomes less meaningful, all you really need is a proper grow tent setup.
I live in a place where hydroponics is a big thing (Iceland). And in the winter, it's almost entirely done under lights. But they don't do it in grocery stores in vertical farms, it's done under glass. The lettuce and herbs, for example, are planted in an automated system in little cheap plastic mini-pots filled with some sort of growth medium (peat?), and for "harvest" they just take the whole pot and put it in an open-ended plastic bag and ship it to stores. While I can't imagine a cheapo chain like Bónus changing that system, I could imagine a high-end one like Hagkaup having their own "in-store" growth system as a loss-leader. Or, for a US equivalent, something like Whole Foods.
The basic concept is that you don't "operate" it, you plug it in, connect the fresh and wastewater supply, and beyond that it's just scheduled nutrient refills. Monitoring and any troubleshooting is done remotely, not by the local staff. They don't discuss what sort of growth medium they're using or whether the customer is expected to take the whole plant (roots, medium and all), but one presumes that keeping that simple is also part of their design goals.
Like they said, it's not a new concept. And it's never going to make sense for "calorie-intensive" crops. But for herbs, lettuce, etc, it's at least plausible. At the very least it'd make for a nice loss leader for upscale grocery chains.
They're in a stable orbit.
The maneuvers required for the satellites to achieve their individual orbital parameters require only a minimal amount of dV. The constellation is 7 different planes of 10 satellites each, so they just need to vary TA with respect to each other. As a Kerbin University graduate, you're aware that you do this by making a small burn to increase or decrease orbital velocity, and thus orbital period, then recircularizing as you cross back over the orbital plane at the desired TA.
The second stage does a deorbit burn (this is done upon completion of every LEO mission) to dispose of it in the ocean (after issuing a NOTAM for the expected debris ellipse).
Indeed. Personally, I'm impressed by the constant stream of new innovation work - it seems every other launch is trying something new, even if minor - some new part, some new extreme in the flight or landing envelope, some new attempt to work towards additional parts recovery or reusability, etc. I love how they're experimenting with fairing recovery. If they keep improving the durability of their F9 stages like they've been doing incrementally (e.x. in this launch, the titanium grid fins), we may well get to the point of seeing second stage recovery. SpaceX used to dismiss it as unlikely but now talks about it as a long-term goal.
I imagine it will be a while, but I look forward to seeing how their reuse cost savings works out. We should be able to get a rough sense by tracking how quickly they're turning around stages, as that corresponds with man-hours. There's all sorts of tangential things they're ultimately going to need to reduce in price as well related to ground and communication services, things that used to be an insignificant fraction of the total cost but become more relevant the cheaper the rocket cost-per-flight gets. I'm an optimist on this; I think they're going to ultimately get turnaround very cheap indeed. I see no fundamental reason why turnaround must cost seven figures, or even six, per flight. Orbital rocketry is a tougher flight envelope than aircraft, but ultimately, you adjust your hardware to make maintenance turnaround as cheap as possible, just like aircraft designers do, based on your experience flying the craft. That which you can make last, you make last; that which you can't, you make it as cheap to swap as possible. You determine how much you can fly each part before it needs service, and build a maintenance schedule around that which minimizes labour and downtime. Etc.
People often point to Shuttle reuse as a counterpoint to reusability economics, but the Shuttle program couldn't do the above. The orbiters were made once and then production stopped, versus the Falcons which are designed to be affordable even in a disposable, series-production flight mode. The Shuttle tanks were never reusable, and the SRBs (by nature of being solids) fundamentally required a full disassembly/recasting/rebuild each time. This is all ignoring how the program was economically compromised from the beginning due to budget cuts, difficult imposed design requirements, and a few bad decisions. The short of it, the Shuttle never had the option to make its engines or TPS maintenance-simpler, it never had the option to get rid of the side-mount that caused so many headaches (weight, vibration, debris strike, etc), couldn't change that the SRBs got seawater soaked after a highway-speed crash into the ocean, and on and on. SpaceX can continually change anything that hinders their reuse economics. It's a massive advantage, and I think ultimately it'll pay off massively.
20 seconds, 3 engines at nearly-empty is some pretty significant delta-V.
Also, the paint on the first stage still looks scorched as usual after landing.
By far the largest existing today. And not costing over a billion dollars per launch, or cost a meaningful fraction of the US's economy to develop.
First off, that's a weird remark. The launch vehicle has nothing to do with what the payload does after it's launched; interplanetary transfer stages aren't part of a launch vehicle, they're just mass that it has to deliver. Secondly, DISCOVR does not orbit Earth; it orbits the Sun-Earth L1 point, and if it did not experience stationkeeping it would slowly drift away.
And there is goes, all 10 satellites successfully deployed. Another nice mission.
Can't wait until the first Falcon Heavy launch... now that's going to be something that Slashdot ought to have an article on ;)