In fact, I expect that the spectacle of people dying during the attempt would do more damage to the Space Program than you can imagine.
Never been to a rodeo, have you. Or a dirt track motorcycle race. If by "Space Program" you mean the American space program, it's rather obvious that you completely underestimate the American enjoyment of deadly things happening to other people. For that matter, you underestimate the American enjoyment of deadly things for themselves: there were 37,449 members of the United States Parachute Association at the end of 2016. Or consider a monster truck rally, which is more dangerous to the spectators than it is to the drivers, with more than a dozen spectator deaths in the past 25 years.
After the Apollo 1 fire, did the US shutter the Apollo program? Nope. Many millions watched live as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon just two years later. If American astronauts die on Mars, soccer moms will concern troll on Twitter. And meanwhile, their daughters will be spreading their legs for the next astronauts to try. Americans like risk. As a nation of immigrants, they're bred for it.
Thanks for the link! The SpaceX webcasts are so much better when they're low-key like that. Half they time they feature a bunch of millennials trying to turn the launch into an iCarly episode. This one was how they should all be done.
SpaceX has been publishing two versions of its video launch coverage for a while now. The primary coverage has the talking heads, but there's also what they call the "technical" stream, which is just the launch net chatter.
You're arguing with a paid Tata consulting shill (and maybe a bot).
Tata pays poor Indians to shill, not a bot. It's cheaper. That's kind of the point.
Shit, if they tried to write a bot to do it, the project would take 48 months and of the resulting code, 30% of it would never execute, 30% of it would be buggy, 30% of it would be copied and pasted from StackOverflow, and 30% of it would be stolen from the firmware of one of those electronic coffee machines.
There are area of the low lying Gulf coast that could easily be flooded multiple time by hurricane storm surges.
[...]
The US is at best 2 pay periods away from complete anarchy and if an area as full of rednecks as the Gulf coast suddenly becomes a disaster caused everyman for himself war zone no one will not be able to stop the ensuing chaos.
1942 - Hurricane make landfall at Matagorda, TX 1945 - Hurricane makes landfall at Port Aransas, TX 1947 - Hurricane makes landfall at Chandeleur Island, LA 1949 - Hurricane makes landfall at Freeport, TX
1956 - Hurricane Flossy makes landfall at Burrwood, LA 1957 - Hurricane Audrey makes landfall at Port Arthur, TX
1961 - Hurricane Carla makes landfall at Port O'Connor, TX 1964 - Hurricane Hilda makes landfall at Morgan City, LA 1965 - Hurricane Betsy makes landfall at New Orleans, LA 1966 - Hurricane Alma makes landfall at Apalachee Bay, FL 1969 - Hurricane Camille makes landfall at Bay St. Louis, MS
1970 - Hurricane Celia makes landfall at Corpus Christi, TX 1972 - Hurricane Agnes makes landfall at Cape San Blas, FL 1979 - Hurricane Frederic makes landfall at Dauphin Island, AL
1980 - Hurricane Allen makes landfall at Brownsville, TX 1983 - Hurricane Alicia makes landfall at Galveston, TX 1985 - Hurricane Elena makes landfall at Biloxi, MS 1985 - Hurricane Juan makes landfall at Morgan City, LA
1992 - Hurricane Andrew makes landfall at Port Fourchon, LA 1994 - Tropical Storm Alberto makes landfall at Destin, FL 1995 - Hurricane Opal makes landfall at Pensacola Beach, FL 1996 - Tropical Storm Josephine makes landfall at Apalachee Bay, FL 1998 - Hurricane Earl makes landfall at Panama City, FL 1998 - Tropical Storm Francis makes landfall at Corpus Christi, TX 1998 - Hurricane Georges makes landfall at Biloxi, MS
2002 - Tropical Storm Isidore makes landfall at Port Eads, LA 2002 - Hurricane Lili makes landfall at Intracoastal City, LA 2003 - Hurricane Claudette makes landfall at Galveston, TX 2004 - Hurricane Charley makes landfall at Ft. Myers Beach, FL 2004 - Hurricane Francis makes landfall at Stuart, FL 2004 - Hurricane Ivan makes landfall at Gulf Shores, AL (causing the evacuation of 50+% of New Orleans' population) 2005 - Hurricane Dennis makes landfall at Santa Rosa Island, FL 2005 - Hurricane Katrina makes landfall at Buras, LA (famous for also causing the evacuation and flooding of New Orleans) 2005 - Hurricane Rita makes landfall at Johnson's Bayou, LA 2008 - Hurricane Dolly makes landfall at South Padre Island, TX 2008 - Hurricane Gustav makes landfall at Cocodrie, LA 2008 - Hurricane Ike makes landfall at Galveston, TX
2011 - Tropical Storm Lee makes landfall at Intracoastal City, LA
No hurricane has hit the Gulf coast since 2008 and only one has hit the US anywhere since 2008. (Hurricane Irene made landfall at Cape Lookout, NC in 2011.)
I've left out a dozen hurricanes that made landfall in eastern Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, which also affect rednecks, though you seem unaware of their presence.
A hurricane has washed out a bunch of rednecks on the Gulf Coast at least twice every decade since the 1940s, and the resulting local state of anarchy is indistinguishable from business as usual. If a century of hurricanes has caused neither anarchy nor abandonment of the Gulf coast, I don't think a decade long lack of hurricanes is going to do it either.
Your climate hysteria is duly noted. You may now collect your merit badge. Personally though, I don't think the rednecks of the Gulf coast give a shit about your wailing.
New York will attempt to build a wall around wall street, effectively anyhow. I predict it will fail horribly and we will see skyscrapers falling over due to the effects of seawater in 3..2..1.. (well, not yet. it's not quite time.)
The larger skyscrapers in New York have concrete-encased steel foundation pillars that reach right down to bedrock. Whether the soil around them is dry or wet, they won't subside. The smaller ones have pillars that reach only partway to bedrock, though still very very deep. Well below sea level, so if they were going to be affected by the water table, it would have already happened. Only the small buildings in New York are at risk, including all those nice, expensive brownstones.
Imagine data packets were physical packages, if we had "shipping neutrality" all shippers would have to treat all packages as equal, and not be able to offer improved services like next-day delivery at a premium - does that make sense? How, exactly is "net neutrality" any different, because it's data packets?
Because data packets aren't at all like physical packages. Reasoning by analogy fails hard when talking about communication services. The marginal cost of transmitting a data packet is zero. That's $0.00. Nothing. This is not true of any other service. But with a communications network, once the wires are pulled and the routers installed and configured, powering them costs the same regardless of how much or how little traffic is flowing through them. No other service behaves this way, so attempts to compare them are doomed to failure.
To specifically address your tortured, twisted, broken analogy, I expect my ISP to continue working the way it always has, with next millisecond delivery of each and every packet. Internet service performance has always been and will always be expected to be hard up against the limits of switching speeds and the speed of light. The only thing that ISPs who are fighting net neutrality want to do is to degrade their service unless you pay extra. Exactly the opposite of offering next-day delivery at a premium. We already have next-millisecond delivery. There is nowhere to go but down.
BTW, when does a company stop being a "start-up"? Some of the companies list in the/. summary have been "startups" for several years.
When the FCC chairman is parroting their talking points, they're no longer a startup.
I think you'd find a lot of the liberals and progressives you like to blame for everything would be happy to revisit the idea of net neutrality and whether it's still necessary.
As someone who vociferously supports net neutrality and wants jackbooted thugs enforcing it, I would still want it to be the law of the land, and still want bloodthirsty enforcement, even if there were at least four choices of broadband providers. (Four is the minimum number of substitutable competitors required to actually produce competitive behavior.)
Why? Because history has shown that every time a natural monopoly is involved, the market naturally trends toward a monopoly provider. That's kind of the definition. So it may start with four (or forty) providers, but eventually there won't be even four anymore. If internet service wasn't obviously a natural monopoly through analysis of other factors, it should be blindingly obvious that it is a natural monopoly because of the historical and ongoing consolidation toward one sole provider in any region. Charter bought Time Warner Cable for $55 billion last year[1]. It is incontrovertible fact that the number of ISPs in the US is declining, not growing. Long term, this will always be true, so net neutrality is absolutely required, regardless of the number of providers available at any given moment.
--- [1] This after going through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 where they ditched $8 billion in debt. The ability to go from bankruptcy to an acquisition that massive in just seven years is additional evidence of monopoly status.
Could you remind me how many people SpaceX has killed?
One, so far. Details are scarce, but it did not involve a rocket or rocket test.
Virgin Galactic has killed three. Boeing and Lockheed between them have killed about a dozen. I can't be bothered to add them all up, but in reference to other posts on this story, one of Boeing's accidents involved the accidental ignition by static electricity of a solid rocket booster for the Delta third stage, which killed three and injured eight others. Those damned things are dangerous even on the ground.
According to the Justice Department, he forged email addresses, invoices, and corporate stamps in order to impersonate a large Asian-based manufacturer with whom the tech firms regularly did business.
Of all the companies in the world, I expected Google to have established some method of identification of their suppliers more secure than email addresses, invoice formats, and corporate stamps. PGP is now 26 years old, and the algorithms it implemented are older yet. It's really really time for businesses to start using those algorithms, if not PGP itself.
I'm envisioning a system where, during the meeting when a contract is signed, the principals exchange public keys, maybe going so far as printing them out as QR codes that are included beneath the signatures on the signature page. It takes a fairly dense QR code to represent 4096 bits with any redundancy, but there is a standard that can accommodate it.. These keys are specific to the contract; no reason to create a One True Corporate key, that if compromised, all is lost. Generating keys is cheap and easy, so make new ones at some convenient level of granularity. Per contract is best, per relationship is tolerable, per division is less good but might work, per organization should be avoided, but maybe if you're a small business it's ok. Store the private keys on one of those tamper-resistant secure storage thingies with a USB interface. (Google already uses those things internally. Why weren't they using them for invoices?)
When invoicing, sign the invoice with the correct private key. The system should preferably also encrypt with that private key, and encrypt with the recipient's public key already on file. This prevents interception of invoices in transit, and also makes it extremely clear to the recipient's Accounts Payable department whether or not an invoice is legitimate. If it won't decrypt, Accounts Payable won't try to be helpful and pay the invoice anyway, since all they'll see is guck. Maybe allow signing only, but it should be buried deep in the options, and default to off.
What needs to be done, which as far as I know is missing, is software integration to make this process as frictionless and foolproof as possible. PGP (and gpg) have email client integration, but last I looked, it worked only indifferently well, and wasn't available in all clients. What's missing, and what really needs to exist, is integration with accounting software. The relevant public keys should be on file inside the accounting software, and plugins should be written to know what to do with them, be it GnuCash, Peachtree Accounting, Quicken, or (heaven help you) SAP. The private keys (locked with a pass phrase) should be carried on the secure storage physical device by the authorized signer, and plugged in and unlocked only when that person is actually submitting invoices.
This is where I see a business opportunity. In order to be accepted, the system must be ubiquitous, reliable, and as unintrusive as possible. That means writing, testing, and seriously grinding the rough edges off of plugins, helpers, and apps to support every version of every OS, every version of every accounting package, and every device. This requires dozens of individual pieces of software, and integration work with existing code that is only barely friendly at best, and outright hostile at worst. A customer should be able to buy into the system and get whatever they need to work with the systems and software they already use, be it a small business running a seven year old version of Peachtree on Macs to a billion dollar behemoth with a tailored SAP Solution(TM)(R)(May God Have Mercy On Your Soul). When two small business owners meet in a bar to sign a ten thousand dollar contract, their smart phones should have apps that can offer up appropriate QR codes, and take pictures of them, to be funneled into the accounting software when they get home. (Etiquette suggests that the invoicer should present her QR code first, followed by
Rich folks like this guy have the funds to build nice post-apocalyptic shelters; Mr Brin appears to think having an aerial shelter would be best, and I think it's a clever way to get away from the zombie hordes, nuclear mutants, etc.
I'll only be worried if he also acquires a fluffy white cat.
Though the opening cinematic of Starcraft: Broodwar comes to mind...
Oregon prohibits drivers from pumping their own gas as only state licensed Gas Station Engineers have received the proper education and certification to properly perform such a complex task. You can only imagine the carnage that would result if lay people would refill their own vehicles.
Obviously only properly qualified and certified persons should be handling fluids with extremely flammable vapors that can cause massive explosions if mixed with sufficient air, fluids known to the state of California to cause cancer. The carnage were it otherwise is indeed unthinkable.
I have a hard time figuring out why companies insist on having their office in a place that requires them to pay salaries 4x the national average.
I have a hard time figuring out why companies insist on having their office in a place that would require 4x the national average for parity, but still pay only 2x the national average. The last time a company in the Bay Area approached me, I got on Zillow and told them I'd need $325,000/year to maintain my standard of living. They thanked me for my input.
This camera is targeted at normal people. To be more specific, it's targeted at your bed so bad guys can hack it and spy on you while you're fucking your wife/mistress/girlfriend/realdoll.
Normal people can't afford a Realdoll. Or a mistress.
The massive amount of used solar panels is a huge environmental disaster in the making and the materials that they are made from are very rare, making photovoltaic nonsustainable.
Uhm, what? By weight, solar panels are mostly silicon (for the cells themselves and for the sheet of tempered glass on top of them) and aluminum (for the frame). The dopants in the cells that make them semiconductors are phosphorus and boron. There are negligible amounts of other elements in them for wiring and such. So in other words, the vast majority of a solar panel is made of the second and third most common elements in Earth's crust. Only oxygen is more common. The materials are not rare. They're common as dirt. Literally.
Solar city proposed three different systems for my house. None made financial sense.
The payback was always somewhere in the ballpark of 20 years!
Uh, the system actually has a payback period. As opposed to paying your electric bill, which you will otherwise do for the rest of your life, and have not one farthing in assets to show for it in the end.
From what I hear, yes, Solar City's prices are outrageous. Solar panels cost around $1/watt, retail. A 7 KW system should cost you around $7000 for the panels, $1000 for an inverter, and a few thousand in installation. Somehow, installation is always more than that. Getting your electrician's license is cheaper, including the coursework. That'll have to change before solar can become more widespread.
Gasoline is one of the most compact and highly useful energy sources available. Coal is also compact and highly useful.
Sun and wind are not. They are a pain to store...
My lawnmower uses a battery pack that stores half a kilowatt hour, enough to mow my entire lawn with power left over. I can carry it around with one hand, safely store it in my kitchen if I so desire[1], and it doesn't stink or dribble corrosive fluids. Sure, that's about an eighth of a pound of coal. But you can only extract that much energy from coal if you have a gigantic boiler being fed powdered coal on a conveyor belt at outrageous speeds, putting steam through a turbine the size of my house. If I wanted to burn an eight of a pound of coal myself to mow my lawn, well, I can't. It's physically impossible. If I want power from the battery, I just plug it in.
...huge losses during transport...
I charge that battery pack from the grid, which averages 5% loss. Your idea of "huge" is weird, and applies equally to coal or nuclear generated power.
...not evenly distributive. Forever the pipe dream of the ideological.
Now you're just spamming word salad. What?
Let me help you with that. In not too many more years, I will have photovoltaic panels on my roof connected to a battery bank in my basement about the size of a washing machine. That will eliminate nearly all of the 5% transmission losses and eliminate my need for grid distribution period. Pipe dream? No. Off the shelf hardware available today which will cost me less than the price of a new car.
--- [1] I don't. I store it in my basement, which is both dangerous and illegal to do with gasoline, and simply unthinkable with coal. What a mess.
Where do you get the power to run the (undoubtedly huge and multiple) pumps?
From wind and solar generators that are operating while the wind is blowing and the sun is shining? Did you not read the question, which was how to store large amounts of energy because "most renewable sources aren't 'uniform'"? Do try to keep up.
Yes, this requires construction of an overcapacity of wind and solar. Guess what. Coal is also built with overcapacity. So is nuclear. So is natural gas. The grid is always built with excess capacity, in any country where the grid is run by competent engineers. A grid with more wind and solar sources may require a little more overcapacity to be built, but it's not an outrageous amount. Much less than 100%, according to the engineers studying the problem. And yes, power company engineers are studying the problem. Who do you think owns all those new megawatt windmills?
The problem still remains that "over-abundance" will only apply to labor. It won't apply to capacity nor to raw resources.
When robots make robots, it applies to capacity. And we already have a super-abundance of resources. Just yesterday Slashdot ran the story about Apple requiring recyclers to literally shred iPhones. If that's not resource abundance, I don't know what is.
The only thing the Earth does not necessarily have is a super-abundance of real estate. There is definitely an upper limit there as to how much space a person can exclusively occupy. But if you've ever been in Montana, you'd know that we're a long long way from hitting that particular limit.
And remember that Marxism was always more than merely an economic theory, but was fundamentally a socio-political theory. It was innovative in that it viewed economics as the very core, but it proposed a good deal more than simply "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", and involved revolution, dictatorship and what really does amount to a sort of single party state (because, after all, who needs more than one political movement when Marxism is perfect).
Not really. It's an economic system. One proposed path to get there was revolution, dictatorship-by-committee, and a single party state. That path obviously failed. There is another path, and we in the West are already on it, despite the efforts of Thatcherites to dismantle it.
Still, this persistent urge to conflate economic systems with political systems really needs to stop. It is possible to have a communist representative democracy, a communist dictatorship, a communist theocracy, or a communist anarchy, just as it's possible to have a capitalist representative democracy, a capitalist dictatorship, a capitalist theocracy, or a capitalist anarchy. They're different words for a reason. The fact that the handful of (premature) attempts at communism were associated with violent revolution and dictatorship is an accident of history, not an absolute requirement.
In the face of actual super-abundance, there is no allocation committee. That position of power doesn't exist. When raw materials are acquired, transported, and refined by autonomous machines, when components are fabricated and transported by autonomous machines, when products are assembled and transported by autonomous machines, you can have whatever you want (and have room for), and there isn't anyone deciding whether or not you should be allowed to have it.
If we tried to just establish such a system today, of course it would fail. None of the prerequisites apply. The autonomous machines don't exist. Yet. They're getting closer every year. Mines in Australia already use autonomous dump trucks. And if it happens too quickly, yes, there will be examples of pathological behavior. But when it has happened, so gradually that people barely noticed, the vast majority of the world will only order one toaster from Freemazon.
One measure point is: how much money does the administration safe, buy not checking and observing regulations, but simply handing out the money.
Except as a sibling post of mine pointed out, that's not what Ontario is doing. They're means testing the hell out of it. The income is reduced $1 for every $2 earned.
The next interesting thing is to see what the receivers of the money are actually doing. Getting a part time job, trying education they can pay themselves instead of useless forced education by the administration etc. p.p. Moving house, not moving house, being more healthy or spending more on booze...
People behave radically differently when they think they have an indefinite source of income vs an income with a concrete end date. My example of graduate school precisely echoes what you said: "education that can pay themselves instead of useless forced education". There are other examples much less salubrious. Politicians come to mind. Having a definite end date to their public salaries drives all kinds of unsavory behavior.[1]
Those differences are so extreme that any UBI "pilot" with an end date isn't UBI at all. UBI has no end date, by definition. A system with an end date, especially one so close, is just a short term grant system. It is nothing like a UBI. And we already know what limited grants do, because there are a lot of them available.
--- [1] Something worth considering. Our political systems might improve with a UBI. The current choice is between poverty and being reelected, a lot of the time. If the choice is less extreme, politicians might behave a little better.
With that said, if they do this pilot correctly it will yield very interesting data.
Pilots like this are useless. They have no predictive power because an actual universal basic income is qualitatively different from an "income you and a few of your neighbors will get for less than a handful of years and then it goes away." We already know what people do in circumstances like that. It's called graduate school.
For the timid politicians among us, I have bad news. UBI is untestable. You can't pretend to have it for a while and then discontinue it. But it doesn't matter. No country is ever going to just decide to have an actual UBI. When it happens, it will have happened organically, by easy stages over the course of decades. Social Security and the equivalents around the world are the beginning of that. The amazing ease with which a person qualifies for disability nowadays is another part of that. That's probably how the US will deal with all the unemployed truckers in 20 years' time. You were a trucker? Ok, now that robots do that job, you're "disabled." Because of the kidney damage you suffered due to all the vibration. Wink wink, nudge nudge, sign here.
What will happen is gradual, targeted expansions of social security/welfare that slowly absorbs sections of the population that are unemployable (just as they already do), and then gradually the means testing of those groups will go away, and in 60 years, if there is still such a thing as the developed world, it will have UBI. The rabid libertarians among us see this coming and are having screaming meamies about it because they think people who used to work in factories who then went to work in construction who then went to work driving trucks who now have nowhere to go should definitely die in the street because they can't become software developers. Not a straw man. I've had a person literally say that to my face within the past year, using the actual phrase "die in the street." A person who self-identifies as Christian, by the way, and who attends church every single Sunday. Yes, these are real people who do exist and do think that way.
I believe Marxism is inevitable, but Karl Marx was way ahead of his time, just as this silly "pilot" is. Capitalism is a reasonable system for dealing with scarcity. It does not deal at all well with super-abundance. Marxism deals well with super-abundance, but except for the idle rich, we do not have super-abundance. I believe it's possible that we will sometime before the end of the century, but I strongly expect it will be much nearer the end of the century than the beginning. And "pilots" like this are a waste of time.
Everyone (Many people) are suffering from some kind of version fatigue. It's as simple as that. Owning any software run device these days is like having someone come and and re-arrange all the furniture in your house every week. The novelty might seem nice at first, but after a while, any change that you don't specifically want becomes irritating.
More than irritating when in the process of rearranging the furniture they stack your recliner on top of your dining room table, put the TV behind the sofa, and hide all your spoons.
Resistance to modifications starts to really congeal when so much of the software we use everyday is subjected to capricious, useless changes, chasing fashion or some nebulous architectural Cause, with a capital 'C'. (Firefox, we're looking at you.) When the fundamentals, right down to the OS, won't hold still, people start to get very very cranky about changes to their niche tool that they're actually using to get something done.
You don't understand the downforce of the air required to lift a few thousand pounds into the air...
You will never, ever, EVER be be able to do vertical take off from normal residential homes using anything that blows air, ever...
Well sure, but you can never, ever, EVER operate a horse-drawn carriage from a normal residential home today either. The garage is nearly always attached to the house, and horses and their accoutrements are persistently stinky. Houses evolved considerably as the world transitioned from horse transportation to the infernal combustion carriage. Obviously houses would evolve again if powered lift flight ever became a common household thing.
I'd expect something like a rooftop landing pad on your garage, and instead of a rollup door on the front, it would just lower the pad into the structure and close the roof. With the right set of baffles and spoilers, the downdraft felt at ground level wouldn't be particularly hazardous. The opening roof isn't any more silly than the opening door on current garages, when you compare current garages to their predecessors. A door that wide that rolls up vertically? Ridiculous! Why would you need that, when the door that rolls sideways on wheels in your carriage house has been perfectly adequate for centuries?
Basically, if you can afford a personal VTOL aircraft, you can also afford to modify your dwelling to accommodate it conveniently. Who knows, detached garages might become a thing again, just in case you're trying to land in a rain storm and experience an unexpected wind buffet and downdraft simultaneously. (The real reason why personal aircraft are unlikely to ever replace ground transportation.)
This thing is incapable of controlled flight using the wings alone. It needs to add vectored lift from the forward blowers, which will add a variety of failure modes which will make this design impossible to certify. And without proper certification it can neither be operated as proposed nor used for commercial purposes.
If you're referring to FAA certification, you're being a little myopic. You are correct that there's no way this thing can be certified as an airplane for fixed wing flight. And it's obviously not a rotary wing, so it won't be certified that way either. What you're apparently unaware of is the FAA has a certification for "powered lift" flight and a corresponding powered lift pilot's license. They've had them for more than 20 years. Funnily enough, they established these rules at the behest of Moller, of Moller Skycar fame (notoriety?). Moller may not be much good at engineering (or possibly he was just before his time), but he's reasonably good at politics. So at least under the US regulatory regime, there is a way to certify this thing. I am unfamiliar with German law, so I couldn't say what they'll have to do at home.
Again, this only works when the engines are running. Engine failure is far too frequent to rely on them for regular flight.
Again, a little bit myopic. You are speaking from a position of experience with combustion engines, be they prop or jet, and from that perspective you would be correct. What you are forgetting is there is no combustion anywhere in this vehicle. Instead, there's a many-cell battery pack, a bunch of power electronics, and a bunch of electric motors.
Electric motors are fantastically reliable. Think of your home appliances. Your refrigerator, your vacuum cleaner, your washing machine, your dryer, your furnace blower. Every single one of these things works for 15, 20, even 30 years without fail, with a duty cycle as high as 60%, and when they do fail, it's invariably something other than the motor that has gone out. Your furnace develops cracks in its heat exchanger, or your refrigerator compressor loses it seals, or your dryer belt breaks. But the motor just keeps working. Even the cheapest of cheap crappy Chinese-made motors are remarkably reliable. Hell, you can hand-build an electric motor and it will work for 15 years. People do. The design of this vehicle, with many small motors, reduces the already low odds of motive failure from miniscule to absurdly microscopic.
As for the batteries, they describe it as "Tesla-style", which means a large pack made of many many small cells, with power balancing and safety circuitry throughout. Battery cells do fail, of course, but by far the most common failure mode is capacity loss, which is slow, gradual, and easily tracked electronically. Samsung reminded us that cells can also fail catastrophically, and the cell phone operating regime is germane to this discussion, with its emphasis on small form factors and light weights, but Samsung's reminder, however cogent, is obviously exceptional. Tesla's experience has shown that a large pack of cylindrical cells basically never fails catastrophically unless its physical integrity has been breached by road debris, a hazard not present in flight. If your battery pack in your aircraft has been breached, you've either suffered a missile strike or you've already crashed. Either way, you have much more pressing concerns than what your batteries are doing. For the common case of capacity loss, the electronics can simply refuse to allow take off if a capacity test falls below a reasonable threshold.
Which brings us to the electronics. The electronics are likely to be the weak point in any electric vehicle, airborne or otherwise. Capacitors fail with dismal regularity even today (my air conditioner compressor lost both of its motor-start capacitors within 3 years of it being installed), ROHS practices result in tin whiskers which cause shorts, and even devices as s
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, I expect that the spectacle of people dying during the attempt would do more damage to the Space Program than you can imagine.
Never been to a rodeo, have you. Or a dirt track motorcycle race. If by "Space Program" you mean the American space program, it's rather obvious that you completely underestimate the American enjoyment of deadly things happening to other people. For that matter, you underestimate the American enjoyment of deadly things for themselves: there were 37,449 members of the United States Parachute Association at the end of 2016. Or consider a monster truck rally, which is more dangerous to the spectators than it is to the drivers, with more than a dozen spectator deaths in the past 25 years.
After the Apollo 1 fire, did the US shutter the Apollo program? Nope. Many millions watched live as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon just two years later. If American astronauts die on Mars, soccer moms will concern troll on Twitter. And meanwhile, their daughters will be spreading their legs for the next astronauts to try. Americans like risk. As a nation of immigrants, they're bred for it.
Thanks for the link! The SpaceX webcasts are so much better when they're low-key like that. Half they time they feature a bunch of millennials trying to turn the launch into an iCarly episode. This one was how they should all be done.
SpaceX has been publishing two versions of its video launch coverage for a while now. The primary coverage has the talking heads, but there's also what they call the "technical" stream, which is just the launch net chatter.
You're arguing with a paid Tata consulting shill (and maybe a bot).
Tata pays poor Indians to shill, not a bot. It's cheaper. That's kind of the point.
Shit, if they tried to write a bot to do it, the project would take 48 months and of the resulting code, 30% of it would never execute, 30% of it would be buggy, 30% of it would be copied and pasted from StackOverflow, and 30% of it would be stolen from the firmware of one of those electronic coffee machines.
And then they'll have to retract half of it...
There are area of the low lying Gulf coast that could easily be flooded multiple time by hurricane storm surges.
[...]
The US is at best 2 pay periods away from complete anarchy and if an area as full of rednecks as the Gulf coast suddenly becomes a disaster caused everyman for himself war zone no one will not be able to stop the ensuing chaos.
1942 - Hurricane make landfall at Matagorda, TX
1945 - Hurricane makes landfall at Port Aransas, TX
1947 - Hurricane makes landfall at Chandeleur Island, LA
1949 - Hurricane makes landfall at Freeport, TX
1956 - Hurricane Flossy makes landfall at Burrwood, LA
1957 - Hurricane Audrey makes landfall at Port Arthur, TX
1961 - Hurricane Carla makes landfall at Port O'Connor, TX
1964 - Hurricane Hilda makes landfall at Morgan City, LA
1965 - Hurricane Betsy makes landfall at New Orleans, LA
1966 - Hurricane Alma makes landfall at Apalachee Bay, FL
1969 - Hurricane Camille makes landfall at Bay St. Louis, MS
1970 - Hurricane Celia makes landfall at Corpus Christi, TX
1972 - Hurricane Agnes makes landfall at Cape San Blas, FL
1979 - Hurricane Frederic makes landfall at Dauphin Island, AL
1980 - Hurricane Allen makes landfall at Brownsville, TX
1983 - Hurricane Alicia makes landfall at Galveston, TX
1985 - Hurricane Elena makes landfall at Biloxi, MS
1985 - Hurricane Juan makes landfall at Morgan City, LA
1992 - Hurricane Andrew makes landfall at Port Fourchon, LA
1994 - Tropical Storm Alberto makes landfall at Destin, FL
1995 - Hurricane Opal makes landfall at Pensacola Beach, FL
1996 - Tropical Storm Josephine makes landfall at Apalachee Bay, FL
1998 - Hurricane Earl makes landfall at Panama City, FL
1998 - Tropical Storm Francis makes landfall at Corpus Christi, TX
1998 - Hurricane Georges makes landfall at Biloxi, MS
2002 - Tropical Storm Isidore makes landfall at Port Eads, LA
2002 - Hurricane Lili makes landfall at Intracoastal City, LA
2003 - Hurricane Claudette makes landfall at Galveston, TX
2004 - Hurricane Charley makes landfall at Ft. Myers Beach, FL
2004 - Hurricane Francis makes landfall at Stuart, FL
2004 - Hurricane Ivan makes landfall at Gulf Shores, AL (causing the evacuation of 50+% of New Orleans' population)
2005 - Hurricane Dennis makes landfall at Santa Rosa Island, FL
2005 - Hurricane Katrina makes landfall at Buras, LA (famous for also causing the evacuation and flooding of New Orleans)
2005 - Hurricane Rita makes landfall at Johnson's Bayou, LA
2008 - Hurricane Dolly makes landfall at South Padre Island, TX
2008 - Hurricane Gustav makes landfall at Cocodrie, LA
2008 - Hurricane Ike makes landfall at Galveston, TX
2011 - Tropical Storm Lee makes landfall at Intracoastal City, LA
No hurricane has hit the Gulf coast since 2008 and only one has hit the US anywhere since 2008. (Hurricane Irene made landfall at Cape Lookout, NC in 2011.)
I've left out a dozen hurricanes that made landfall in eastern Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, which also affect rednecks, though you seem unaware of their presence.
A hurricane has washed out a bunch of rednecks on the Gulf Coast at least twice every decade since the 1940s, and the resulting local state of anarchy is indistinguishable from business as usual. If a century of hurricanes has caused neither anarchy nor abandonment of the Gulf coast, I don't think a decade long lack of hurricanes is going to do it either.
Your climate hysteria is duly noted. You may now collect your merit badge. Personally though, I don't think the rednecks of the Gulf coast give a shit about your wailing.
New York will attempt to build a wall around wall street, effectively anyhow. I predict it will fail horribly and we will see skyscrapers falling over due to the effects of seawater in 3..2..1.. (well, not yet. it's not quite time.)
The larger skyscrapers in New York have concrete-encased steel foundation pillars that reach right down to bedrock. Whether the soil around them is dry or wet, they won't subside. The smaller ones have pillars that reach only partway to bedrock, though still very very deep. Well below sea level, so if they were going to be affected by the water table, it would have already happened. Only the small buildings in New York are at risk, including all those nice, expensive brownstones.
Imagine data packets were physical packages, if we had "shipping neutrality" all shippers would have to treat all packages as equal, and not be able to offer improved services like next-day delivery at a premium - does that make sense? How, exactly is "net neutrality" any different, because it's data packets?
Because data packets aren't at all like physical packages. Reasoning by analogy fails hard when talking about communication services. The marginal cost of transmitting a data packet is zero. That's $0.00. Nothing. This is not true of any other service. But with a communications network, once the wires are pulled and the routers installed and configured, powering them costs the same regardless of how much or how little traffic is flowing through them. No other service behaves this way, so attempts to compare them are doomed to failure.
To specifically address your tortured, twisted, broken analogy, I expect my ISP to continue working the way it always has, with next millisecond delivery of each and every packet. Internet service performance has always been and will always be expected to be hard up against the limits of switching speeds and the speed of light. The only thing that ISPs who are fighting net neutrality want to do is to degrade their service unless you pay extra. Exactly the opposite of offering next-day delivery at a premium. We already have next-millisecond delivery. There is nowhere to go but down.
BTW, when does a company stop being a "start-up"? Some of the companies list in the /. summary have been "startups" for several years.
When the FCC chairman is parroting their talking points, they're no longer a startup.
I think you'd find a lot of the liberals and progressives you like to blame for everything would be happy to revisit the idea of net neutrality and whether it's still necessary.
As someone who vociferously supports net neutrality and wants jackbooted thugs enforcing it, I would still want it to be the law of the land, and still want bloodthirsty enforcement, even if there were at least four choices of broadband providers. (Four is the minimum number of substitutable competitors required to actually produce competitive behavior.)
Why? Because history has shown that every time a natural monopoly is involved, the market naturally trends toward a monopoly provider. That's kind of the definition. So it may start with four (or forty) providers, but eventually there won't be even four anymore. If internet service wasn't obviously a natural monopoly through analysis of other factors, it should be blindingly obvious that it is a natural monopoly because of the historical and ongoing consolidation toward one sole provider in any region. Charter bought Time Warner Cable for $55 billion last year[1]. It is incontrovertible fact that the number of ISPs in the US is declining, not growing. Long term, this will always be true, so net neutrality is absolutely required, regardless of the number of providers available at any given moment.
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[1] This after going through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 where they ditched $8 billion in debt. The ability to go from bankruptcy to an acquisition that massive in just seven years is additional evidence of monopoly status.
Could you remind me how many people SpaceX has killed?
One, so far. Details are scarce, but it did not involve a rocket or rocket test.
Virgin Galactic has killed three. Boeing and Lockheed between them have killed about a dozen. I can't be bothered to add them all up, but in reference to other posts on this story, one of Boeing's accidents involved the accidental ignition by static electricity of a solid rocket booster for the Delta third stage, which killed three and injured eight others. Those damned things are dangerous even on the ground.
According to the Justice Department, he forged email addresses, invoices, and corporate stamps in order to impersonate a large Asian-based manufacturer with whom the tech firms regularly did business.
Of all the companies in the world, I expected Google to have established some method of identification of their suppliers more secure than email addresses, invoice formats, and corporate stamps. PGP is now 26 years old, and the algorithms it implemented are older yet. It's really really time for businesses to start using those algorithms, if not PGP itself.
I'm envisioning a system where, during the meeting when a contract is signed, the principals exchange public keys, maybe going so far as printing them out as QR codes that are included beneath the signatures on the signature page. It takes a fairly dense QR code to represent 4096 bits with any redundancy, but there is a standard that can accommodate it.. These keys are specific to the contract; no reason to create a One True Corporate key, that if compromised, all is lost. Generating keys is cheap and easy, so make new ones at some convenient level of granularity. Per contract is best, per relationship is tolerable, per division is less good but might work, per organization should be avoided, but maybe if you're a small business it's ok. Store the private keys on one of those tamper-resistant secure storage thingies with a USB interface. (Google already uses those things internally. Why weren't they using them for invoices?)
When invoicing, sign the invoice with the correct private key. The system should preferably also encrypt with that private key, and encrypt with the recipient's public key already on file. This prevents interception of invoices in transit, and also makes it extremely clear to the recipient's Accounts Payable department whether or not an invoice is legitimate. If it won't decrypt, Accounts Payable won't try to be helpful and pay the invoice anyway, since all they'll see is guck. Maybe allow signing only, but it should be buried deep in the options, and default to off.
What needs to be done, which as far as I know is missing, is software integration to make this process as frictionless and foolproof as possible. PGP (and gpg) have email client integration, but last I looked, it worked only indifferently well, and wasn't available in all clients. What's missing, and what really needs to exist, is integration with accounting software. The relevant public keys should be on file inside the accounting software, and plugins should be written to know what to do with them, be it GnuCash, Peachtree Accounting, Quicken, or (heaven help you) SAP. The private keys (locked with a pass phrase) should be carried on the secure storage physical device by the authorized signer, and plugged in and unlocked only when that person is actually submitting invoices.
This is where I see a business opportunity. In order to be accepted, the system must be ubiquitous, reliable, and as unintrusive as possible. That means writing, testing, and seriously grinding the rough edges off of plugins, helpers, and apps to support every version of every OS, every version of every accounting package, and every device. This requires dozens of individual pieces of software, and integration work with existing code that is only barely friendly at best, and outright hostile at worst. A customer should be able to buy into the system and get whatever they need to work with the systems and software they already use, be it a small business running a seven year old version of Peachtree on Macs to a billion dollar behemoth with a tailored SAP Solution(TM)(R)(May God Have Mercy On Your Soul). When two small business owners meet in a bar to sign a ten thousand dollar contract, their smart phones should have apps that can offer up appropriate QR codes, and take pictures of them, to be funneled into the accounting software when they get home. (Etiquette suggests that the invoicer should present her QR code first, followed by
Rich folks like this guy have the funds to build nice post-apocalyptic shelters; Mr Brin appears to think having an aerial shelter would be best, and I think it's a clever way to get away from the zombie hordes, nuclear mutants, etc.
I'll only be worried if he also acquires a fluffy white cat.
Though the opening cinematic of Starcraft: Broodwar comes to mind...
Oregon prohibits drivers from pumping their own gas as only state licensed Gas Station Engineers have received the proper education and certification to properly perform such a complex task. You can only imagine the carnage that would result if lay people would refill their own vehicles.
Obviously only properly qualified and certified persons should be handling fluids with extremely flammable vapors that can cause massive explosions if mixed with sufficient air, fluids known to the state of California to cause cancer. The carnage were it otherwise is indeed unthinkable.
I have a hard time figuring out why companies insist on having their office in a place that requires them to pay salaries 4x the national average.
I have a hard time figuring out why companies insist on having their office in a place that would require 4x the national average for parity, but still pay only 2x the national average. The last time a company in the Bay Area approached me, I got on Zillow and told them I'd need $325,000/year to maintain my standard of living. They thanked me for my input.
The tax dollars they pay go to supporting the people of Tennessee and other states.
Not when Trump is through with the federal budget.
This camera is targeted at normal people. To be more specific, it's targeted at your bed so bad guys can hack it and spy on you while you're fucking your wife/mistress/girlfriend/realdoll.
Normal people can't afford a Realdoll. Or a mistress.
The massive amount of used solar panels is a huge environmental disaster in the making and the materials that they are made from are very rare, making photovoltaic nonsustainable.
Uhm, what? By weight, solar panels are mostly silicon (for the cells themselves and for the sheet of tempered glass on top of them) and aluminum (for the frame). The dopants in the cells that make them semiconductors are phosphorus and boron. There are negligible amounts of other elements in them for wiring and such. So in other words, the vast majority of a solar panel is made of the second and third most common elements in Earth's crust. Only oxygen is more common. The materials are not rare. They're common as dirt. Literally.
Solar city proposed three different systems for my house. None made financial sense.
The payback was always somewhere in the ballpark of 20 years!
Uh, the system actually has a payback period. As opposed to paying your electric bill, which you will otherwise do for the rest of your life, and have not one farthing in assets to show for it in the end.
From what I hear, yes, Solar City's prices are outrageous. Solar panels cost around $1/watt, retail. A 7 KW system should cost you around $7000 for the panels, $1000 for an inverter, and a few thousand in installation. Somehow, installation is always more than that. Getting your electrician's license is cheaper, including the coursework. That'll have to change before solar can become more widespread.
Gasoline is one of the most compact and highly useful energy sources available. Coal is also compact and highly useful.
Sun and wind are not. They are a pain to store...
My lawnmower uses a battery pack that stores half a kilowatt hour, enough to mow my entire lawn with power left over. I can carry it around with one hand, safely store it in my kitchen if I so desire[1], and it doesn't stink or dribble corrosive fluids. Sure, that's about an eighth of a pound of coal. But you can only extract that much energy from coal if you have a gigantic boiler being fed powdered coal on a conveyor belt at outrageous speeds, putting steam through a turbine the size of my house. If I wanted to burn an eight of a pound of coal myself to mow my lawn, well, I can't. It's physically impossible. If I want power from the battery, I just plug it in.
...huge losses during transport...
I charge that battery pack from the grid, which averages 5% loss. Your idea of "huge" is weird, and applies equally to coal or nuclear generated power.
...not evenly distributive. Forever the pipe dream of the ideological.
Now you're just spamming word salad. What?
Let me help you with that. In not too many more years, I will have photovoltaic panels on my roof connected to a battery bank in my basement about the size of a washing machine. That will eliminate nearly all of the 5% transmission losses and eliminate my need for grid distribution period. Pipe dream? No. Off the shelf hardware available today which will cost me less than the price of a new car.
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[1] I don't. I store it in my basement, which is both dangerous and illegal to do with gasoline, and simply unthinkable with coal. What a mess.
Where do you get the power to run the (undoubtedly huge and multiple) pumps?
From wind and solar generators that are operating while the wind is blowing and the sun is shining? Did you not read the question, which was how to store large amounts of energy because "most renewable sources aren't 'uniform'"? Do try to keep up.
Yes, this requires construction of an overcapacity of wind and solar. Guess what. Coal is also built with overcapacity. So is nuclear. So is natural gas. The grid is always built with excess capacity, in any country where the grid is run by competent engineers. A grid with more wind and solar sources may require a little more overcapacity to be built, but it's not an outrageous amount. Much less than 100%, according to the engineers studying the problem. And yes, power company engineers are studying the problem. Who do you think owns all those new megawatt windmills?
The problem still remains that "over-abundance" will only apply to labor. It won't apply to capacity nor to raw resources.
When robots make robots, it applies to capacity. And we already have a super-abundance of resources. Just yesterday Slashdot ran the story about Apple requiring recyclers to literally shred iPhones. If that's not resource abundance, I don't know what is.
The only thing the Earth does not necessarily have is a super-abundance of real estate. There is definitely an upper limit there as to how much space a person can exclusively occupy. But if you've ever been in Montana, you'd know that we're a long long way from hitting that particular limit.
And remember that Marxism was always more than merely an economic theory, but was fundamentally a socio-political theory. It was innovative in that it viewed economics as the very core, but it proposed a good deal more than simply "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", and involved revolution, dictatorship and what really does amount to a sort of single party state (because, after all, who needs more than one political movement when Marxism is perfect).
Not really. It's an economic system. One proposed path to get there was revolution, dictatorship-by-committee, and a single party state. That path obviously failed. There is another path, and we in the West are already on it, despite the efforts of Thatcherites to dismantle it.
Still, this persistent urge to conflate economic systems with political systems really needs to stop. It is possible to have a communist representative democracy, a communist dictatorship, a communist theocracy, or a communist anarchy, just as it's possible to have a capitalist representative democracy, a capitalist dictatorship, a capitalist theocracy, or a capitalist anarchy. They're different words for a reason. The fact that the handful of (premature) attempts at communism were associated with violent revolution and dictatorship is an accident of history, not an absolute requirement.
In the face of actual super-abundance, there is no allocation committee. That position of power doesn't exist. When raw materials are acquired, transported, and refined by autonomous machines, when components are fabricated and transported by autonomous machines, when products are assembled and transported by autonomous machines, you can have whatever you want (and have room for), and there isn't anyone deciding whether or not you should be allowed to have it.
If we tried to just establish such a system today, of course it would fail. None of the prerequisites apply. The autonomous machines don't exist. Yet. They're getting closer every year. Mines in Australia already use autonomous dump trucks. And if it happens too quickly, yes, there will be examples of pathological behavior. But when it has happened, so gradually that people barely noticed, the vast majority of the world will only order one toaster from Freemazon.
One measure point is: how much money does the administration safe, buy not checking and observing regulations, but simply handing out the money.
Except as a sibling post of mine pointed out, that's not what Ontario is doing. They're means testing the hell out of it. The income is reduced $1 for every $2 earned.
The next interesting thing is to see what the receivers of the money are actually doing. Getting a part time job, trying education they can pay themselves instead of useless forced education by the administration etc. p.p. Moving house, not moving house, being more healthy or spending more on booze ...
People behave radically differently when they think they have an indefinite source of income vs an income with a concrete end date. My example of graduate school precisely echoes what you said: "education that can pay themselves instead of useless forced education". There are other examples much less salubrious. Politicians come to mind. Having a definite end date to their public salaries drives all kinds of unsavory behavior.[1]
Those differences are so extreme that any UBI "pilot" with an end date isn't UBI at all. UBI has no end date, by definition. A system with an end date, especially one so close, is just a short term grant system. It is nothing like a UBI. And we already know what limited grants do, because there are a lot of them available.
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[1] Something worth considering. Our political systems might improve with a UBI. The current choice is between poverty and being reelected, a lot of the time. If the choice is less extreme, politicians might behave a little better.
With that said, if they do this pilot correctly it will yield very interesting data.
Pilots like this are useless. They have no predictive power because an actual universal basic income is qualitatively different from an "income you and a few of your neighbors will get for less than a handful of years and then it goes away." We already know what people do in circumstances like that. It's called graduate school.
For the timid politicians among us, I have bad news. UBI is untestable. You can't pretend to have it for a while and then discontinue it. But it doesn't matter. No country is ever going to just decide to have an actual UBI. When it happens, it will have happened organically, by easy stages over the course of decades. Social Security and the equivalents around the world are the beginning of that. The amazing ease with which a person qualifies for disability nowadays is another part of that. That's probably how the US will deal with all the unemployed truckers in 20 years' time. You were a trucker? Ok, now that robots do that job, you're "disabled." Because of the kidney damage you suffered due to all the vibration. Wink wink, nudge nudge, sign here.
What will happen is gradual, targeted expansions of social security/welfare that slowly absorbs sections of the population that are unemployable (just as they already do), and then gradually the means testing of those groups will go away, and in 60 years, if there is still such a thing as the developed world, it will have UBI. The rabid libertarians among us see this coming and are having screaming meamies about it because they think people who used to work in factories who then went to work in construction who then went to work driving trucks who now have nowhere to go should definitely die in the street because they can't become software developers. Not a straw man. I've had a person literally say that to my face within the past year, using the actual phrase "die in the street." A person who self-identifies as Christian, by the way, and who attends church every single Sunday. Yes, these are real people who do exist and do think that way.
I believe Marxism is inevitable, but Karl Marx was way ahead of his time, just as this silly "pilot" is. Capitalism is a reasonable system for dealing with scarcity. It does not deal at all well with super-abundance. Marxism deals well with super-abundance, but except for the idle rich, we do not have super-abundance. I believe it's possible that we will sometime before the end of the century, but I strongly expect it will be much nearer the end of the century than the beginning. And "pilots" like this are a waste of time.
Everyone (Many people) are suffering from some kind of version fatigue. It's as simple as that. Owning any software run device these days is like having someone come and and re-arrange all the furniture in your house every week. The novelty might seem nice at first, but after a while, any change that you don't specifically want becomes irritating.
More than irritating when in the process of rearranging the furniture they stack your recliner on top of your dining room table, put the TV behind the sofa, and hide all your spoons.
Resistance to modifications starts to really congeal when so much of the software we use everyday is subjected to capricious, useless changes, chasing fashion or some nebulous architectural Cause, with a capital 'C'. (Firefox, we're looking at you.) When the fundamentals, right down to the OS, won't hold still, people start to get very very cranky about changes to their niche tool that they're actually using to get something done.
You don't understand the downforce of the air required to lift a few thousand pounds into the air...
You will never, ever, EVER be be able to do vertical take off from normal residential homes using anything that blows air, ever...
Well sure, but you can never, ever, EVER operate a horse-drawn carriage from a normal residential home today either. The garage is nearly always attached to the house, and horses and their accoutrements are persistently stinky. Houses evolved considerably as the world transitioned from horse transportation to the infernal combustion carriage. Obviously houses would evolve again if powered lift flight ever became a common household thing.
I'd expect something like a rooftop landing pad on your garage, and instead of a rollup door on the front, it would just lower the pad into the structure and close the roof. With the right set of baffles and spoilers, the downdraft felt at ground level wouldn't be particularly hazardous. The opening roof isn't any more silly than the opening door on current garages, when you compare current garages to their predecessors. A door that wide that rolls up vertically? Ridiculous! Why would you need that, when the door that rolls sideways on wheels in your carriage house has been perfectly adequate for centuries?
Basically, if you can afford a personal VTOL aircraft, you can also afford to modify your dwelling to accommodate it conveniently. Who knows, detached garages might become a thing again, just in case you're trying to land in a rain storm and experience an unexpected wind buffet and downdraft simultaneously. (The real reason why personal aircraft are unlikely to ever replace ground transportation.)
This thing is incapable of controlled flight using the wings alone. It needs to add vectored lift from the forward blowers, which will add a variety of failure modes which will make this design impossible to certify. And without proper certification it can neither be operated as proposed nor used for commercial purposes.
If you're referring to FAA certification, you're being a little myopic. You are correct that there's no way this thing can be certified as an airplane for fixed wing flight. And it's obviously not a rotary wing, so it won't be certified that way either. What you're apparently unaware of is the FAA has a certification for "powered lift" flight and a corresponding powered lift pilot's license. They've had them for more than 20 years. Funnily enough, they established these rules at the behest of Moller, of Moller Skycar fame (notoriety?). Moller may not be much good at engineering (or possibly he was just before his time), but he's reasonably good at politics. So at least under the US regulatory regime, there is a way to certify this thing. I am unfamiliar with German law, so I couldn't say what they'll have to do at home.
Again, this only works when the engines are running. Engine failure is far too frequent to rely on them for regular flight.
Again, a little bit myopic. You are speaking from a position of experience with combustion engines, be they prop or jet, and from that perspective you would be correct. What you are forgetting is there is no combustion anywhere in this vehicle. Instead, there's a many-cell battery pack, a bunch of power electronics, and a bunch of electric motors.
Electric motors are fantastically reliable. Think of your home appliances. Your refrigerator, your vacuum cleaner, your washing machine, your dryer, your furnace blower. Every single one of these things works for 15, 20, even 30 years without fail, with a duty cycle as high as 60%, and when they do fail, it's invariably something other than the motor that has gone out. Your furnace develops cracks in its heat exchanger, or your refrigerator compressor loses it seals, or your dryer belt breaks. But the motor just keeps working. Even the cheapest of cheap crappy Chinese-made motors are remarkably reliable. Hell, you can hand-build an electric motor and it will work for 15 years. People do. The design of this vehicle, with many small motors, reduces the already low odds of motive failure from miniscule to absurdly microscopic.
As for the batteries, they describe it as "Tesla-style", which means a large pack made of many many small cells, with power balancing and safety circuitry throughout. Battery cells do fail, of course, but by far the most common failure mode is capacity loss, which is slow, gradual, and easily tracked electronically. Samsung reminded us that cells can also fail catastrophically, and the cell phone operating regime is germane to this discussion, with its emphasis on small form factors and light weights, but Samsung's reminder, however cogent, is obviously exceptional. Tesla's experience has shown that a large pack of cylindrical cells basically never fails catastrophically unless its physical integrity has been breached by road debris, a hazard not present in flight. If your battery pack in your aircraft has been breached, you've either suffered a missile strike or you've already crashed. Either way, you have much more pressing concerns than what your batteries are doing. For the common case of capacity loss, the electronics can simply refuse to allow take off if a capacity test falls below a reasonable threshold.
Which brings us to the electronics. The electronics are likely to be the weak point in any electric vehicle, airborne or otherwise. Capacitors fail with dismal regularity even today (my air conditioner compressor lost both of its motor-start capacitors within 3 years of it being installed), ROHS practices result in tin whiskers which cause shorts, and even devices as s