Does Musk share his discoveries with other space programs?
No. As has been pointed out on multiple occasions, SpaceX is doing little or no new science. They are doing groundbreaking, revolutionary engineering, but they're not discovering new things about the universe in order to do it, so there isn't anything to share of the nature you're referring to.
Beyond the engineering, they are also doing highly effective management. Management so effective that ULA partisans have claimed repeatedly that it's impossible. They're producing quality rockets, with continuously improving quality, with team sizes far smaller and far more effective than ULA can currently field. It may be that someone has written and published something about how they do that, but as with all things managerial, it's effectively impossible for an organization that isn't run that way to remake itself into an organization that is run that way.
SpaceX is successful not for what they are discovering, but for what they are not doing. They're not operating with a cost-plus contract with the US government, which has the same effect on an engineering project that an unlimited budget has on a movie (see Michael Bay), and they're not operating with a bloated, dysfunctional management structure. Those two simple things allow them to pull off what are being called engineering miracles, but they're not miraculous. It's just that our standards have become so absymally low thanks to decades of bumbling by Lockheed, Boeing, and yes, NASA, that when we encounter competence, it appears amazing.
When you get right down to it, Elon Musk doesn't have anything to share that would do any good. The Atlas and Delta rocket families already work, after all. Elon Musk could talk about the design decisions he made that made the Falcon 9 far cheaper, but Lockheed and Boeing have reams and reams of PowerPoint presentations about why those were the wrong decisions. They simply can't back down from that now.
Yes, manufacturers want to cut costs to increase profit margins, but they would also be compelled to pass a portion of those cost reductions on to their customers or risk losing market share.
Consider the worldwide oil market. Once an oil well is sunk and all the parts installed, it is a robot. There is zero human labor involved even in maintenance, for years at a time. The only expenses are electricity, possible royalties to a property owner, and taxes. Electricity is dirt cheap, royalties are routinely cheated, and taxes are obviously avoided almost completely. So running an existing oil well is extremely cheap to do. So cheap that almost any price per barrel is profitable.
But when Saudi Arabia realized this and cranked up their production, driving oil prices down from $100/barrel to $40/barrel, what did other producers do? Even though they were still profitable, they still shut down their robots and stopped pumping oil. Were they unprofitable? No. Income minus operating expenses was still a positive number. It was just a much smaller number. So no, they do not pass on cost reductions to their customers. They prefer to lose market share if they don't get the amount of profit they believe they deserve.
The model of humans that economists use is completely and totally divorced from reality. Humans don't think the way economists say they do. Not even close.
That's why pretty much all the U.S. launch vehicles are actually modified ballistic missiles. They were designed (by the private sector under contract) with the goal of dropping bombs on places halfway around the world. And NASA got to re-use that tech at a price heavily subsidized by military R&D.
Historically this was true. The situation has now, bizarrely, reversed. NASA is being used to artificially keep Thiokol alive because they manufacture the solid fuel rockets that are ICBMs, but the Air Force hasn't been allowed to buy more ICBMs since the Clinton era. This is why the Senate Launch System is "architected" the way it is.
Trump has been making noises about the poor condition of our nuclear deterrent. If he gets his way, the Air Force will be able to replace a bunch of missiles directly, and NASA can stop pretending they ever wanted solid fuel boosters for anything.
Are you ok blaming Trump for the same things you defend Obama on?
If you agree Trump is no more to blame than Obama, then ok. If not then time to self reflect.
Trump is no more to blame than Obama today. It's only March, after all. There still isn't a Trump administration to blame yet, since their takeover is in such a shambles.
But by the time of the mid-term elections in 2018? Yep, his fault by then. Why? Because he's the leader of the party that controls both houses of Congress.
I managed to type that with a straight face. Ok, we can't ever blame Trump for the F-35 or the SLS. We both know he is only the titular leader of the Republican party, not the actual leader. We both know they don't like him and don't want him and have no intention of ever listening to him. Trump had no idea what he was letting himself in for. He's going to be blamed for everything, while having control of almost nothing. Congress doesn't like him, doesn't respect him, and doesn't believe in anything he believes in, lip service to the contrary. He's going to get even less traction than Hillary Clinton would have, since she knew where the bodies were buried and he doesn't. If he wasn't such a childish, self-aggrandizing prick, I'd feel sorry for him.
Paying for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn't get put into the general defense budget either, so add a few more trillion.
They weren't, under Bush. They are now. The Obama administration brought the war spending into the budget. And took the blame for the increased deficit, even though it wasn't their expense. The next time you hear some idiot hyperventilating over Obama's increase of the deficit, remember that.
... he's the reason the storm-troopers in riot gear tore your house down, zip-tied your family and shot your goldfish, only to find your 10-year-old pulling pranks on his iPad.
I'd like to see some Saberhagen Berserker stories on the big screen.
So would I. Australian director Alex Proyas, who directed Will Smith in I, Robot, says he's very slowly working on it. An attempt was made to license the rights to New Line Cinema, but that fell apart. Apparently no studio currently has the movie rights, which I find a bit odd. I guess most studio executives don't want to risk going up against the Terminator franchise.
In some respects I don't blame them. Quite a few of the Berserker novels would be difficult to adapt into movies without totally mangling them, and even after a mangling, they might not be good movies. Berserker Man comes to mind. Others are almost too easy to adapt, like Brother Assassin, but the problem with Berserker novels is they are frequently tragedies. Even though humanity wins, the hero dies. Chinese and Japanese audiences love that, but American audiences hate it.
Maybe someday a Berserker movie will get made, but I don't have a lot of hope for that, or a lot of hope for the result if it happens. Hollywood treats adapted material so badly so frequently that it's just not worth it. They insist on inserting jackass movie tropes into otherwise good material.
Cities are best for people who pay for their entertainment. Rural is best for people who make their own entertainment.
And suburbs, where people are busily moving, are a happy medium, with enough room to make some of your own entertainment and still be able to go into the city in an hour or so, rather than 3 hours.
Yes, everyone does need that second car. It's very rarely optional in a two income household, especially considering the state of mass transit in the US. Worse, both the first and second cars are notably more expensive than they were in the 1950s, even inflation-adjusted. Safety equipment costs money, and auto manufacturers really really want to upsell you to the model with the entertainment system in it.
They need to eat fast food rather than cook.
Fast food is as cheap as cooking yourself now. Maybe the results aren't as high quality for the same price, but it will keep you alive, and you aren't paying a premium for it.
They need to pay for that cable and internet.
Well yeah. Paying for Internet is as essential today as paying for a telephone line was in the 1950s. I suspect the two are comparably expensive, too, inflation-adjusted. Ma Bell ruled the world in the 50s, and extracted her pound of flesh. Today's ISPs behave quite similarly.
They need central heating and air.
Central air I'll give you, but central heating has been a thing since the 1800s in cities, when it was a coal furnace in the basement, and your house had a street-accessible coal chute for deliveries. It was certainly a thing everywhere in the 1950s, including rural areas, where it was propane or fuel oil. (I lived in a house with a fuel oil furnace for several years, as a child. Filthy.)
I'm surprised you left out the largest difference in expenditure. House sizes are considerably larger today than they were in the 1950s. That's usually the go-to complaint from the "slaves should never have it better than their parents" crowd that you represent.
How about this. All of those things are things we should have now. What the hell is civilization for? What the hell are all these engineers for, if not making things better for as many people as possible? And yes, why aren't all us Morlocks getting a bigger slice of the financial reward for doing all that work?
It is a relatively low-end Pentium processor, but still over 5 minutes to compress a 1MB image is too high.
Is it? It only has to be compressed once and put on a website, where it will be served to a million browsers and decompressed a million times. Does decompression take any longer?
When Google seems to care about the 20,000,000 Russian lives lost in WWII, it might begin to appear that Google is using its power with some sort of sense of fairness.
No one is trying to deny that 20 million people were killed in Soviet gulags. More to the point, no one is trying to deny that 20 million people died in the Soviet gulags and use that non-fact as justification for arson and murder today.
I think artificial meat inevitable but I doubt it would be healthful.
Why wouldn't it be? By the time your gastric juices are done with the food you eat, it's been reduced to a slurry that is absorbed at the molecular level. If artificial meat contains the same molecules as animal meat, i.e. vitamins, fats, and amino acids, your intestines won't notice the difference. I suspect the results of these experiments are already fairly healthful. Perfecting the cosmetic attributes such as taste and texture will be the hard part.
As a small business manufacturing a fairly niche product, in the past few months I've noticed that vendors are less willing to to small production runs of custom parts. Last week I had a CNC milling vendor tell me, and I quote, "Well, you haven't done any business with us in a while so we're unable to work with you."
Sounds like you're going to have to buy a CNC milling machine. A.K.A. a robot. If you don't, you'll miss out on the next industrial revolution...
That might not be as outrageous as you think, either. I hear a decent CNC milling machine can be had from China for 1/10th what they used to go for, and its own build quality and its accuracy aren't any worse than the far more expensive models. Small business can survive this, but it will be just a little bit bigger than it was, and more vertically integrated. You're going to have to produce more of the stuff you use in house, and you're going to have to produce it in an automated fashion.
Yeah, getting small runs of large custom castings done is going to be tough, but maybe they'll do it if you agree to do your own milling. I know that's how it works for steel castings. Large scale live steam model rail cars are built on cast iron wheels that are shipped from the foundry raw. The hobbyist has to do the finish milling himself.
The real issue is if Tesla has a viable business model and if its current valuation can be justified. Many Tesla naysayers, and I am one, believe the answer is "No."
Normalize interest rates and Tesla will start have to start earning serious operating capital or be in the dot-com model of "we'll make it up on volume."
As with most naysayers, you're obviously completely clueless about anything and everything to do with finances. If you did, you'd have read Tesla's financial statements and know they make a profit on every single vehicle sold. As in "sale price - (cost of materials + cost of labor) = a positive number." They most definitely can "make it up on volume" eventually. That's the whole point of this funding round—ramping up their production capacity so they can produce higher volumes. Higher volumes of a profitable product x the amount of product sold = higher profit. Tesla doesn't post a profit because they're busy sinking those earnings into building out not one but two factories. But a super genius like you already knew that.
You obviously have no clue what a convertible note is, either. The interest rate on convertible notes is often not tied to the prime rate or to any other published rate. Tesla's coupon rate on their convertible notes is habitually a fixed 1.5%. Normalize the interest rates or further denormalize them, it doesn't matter. Tesla knows how much they will be paying on their debt, and it's totally unaffected by the prime rate. Further, when those convertible notes come due, they will pay in equity, not cash. That's what a convertible note is. But a super genius like you knew that too.
Oh wait. You obviously didn't know those things. Maybe when you learn the most basic things about corporate finance and about Tesla's specific financing, you'll be a super genius. Until then, you're just an idiot.
Not to mention if we choose as a society to pay together, it can be a lit cheaper for everyone. Currently we collectively pay 4 times as much per person as any other country and we have a lot less to show for it.
Those of us who do have health insurance might actually pay less under a universal healthcare system than we do now even while covering other people.
That only happens in other countries because other countries have come to grips with the fact that running a healthcare system for profit is not merely inefficient, but immoral. The US doesn't understand that.
Which is kind of peculiar, because the US healthcare system was largely non-profit for most people for most of the history of the country. Why do you think all these hospitals all over the country have the names of saints in them? Well, today it's because of marketing. Calling them Uncle Bob's Chop Shop and Surgery Emporium just doesn't have quite the same ring. But originally it was because they were charity hospitals. Not just non-profit, but literally free to the majority of the recipients. They were founded and run by church organizations, especially the monetary behemoth that is the Catholic Church.
Other countries pay much much less because other countries have determined how much each and every drug costs to make, how much each and every procedure costs to perform, and how much each and every machine costs to make, and dictated the amount that will be paid for each of those things. And drug manufacturers, hospitals, and equipment manufacturers manage to get along just fine. They just don't get to rake in record profits every year. Oh, and they can almost completely avoid the monstrous parasitic growth that the US suffers from known as the health insurance industry: that most ridiculous organization whose sole purpose is to prevent healthcare.
Healthcare in the US started as a charity and somehow evolved into a mammoth profit-taking entity and there is no way back for us, ever, because of the first italicized word in my preceding paragraph. Because the only way out is to use government for its intended purpose, "to promote the general welfare" as it says in the Constitution, but we can't do that because "muh freedums!" And because of the root of this entire thread, still reflected in the comment subject: "Re: Tough shit -- welcome to the real world", which translates with ease as "Fuck you -- I got mine".
So Christian, these Americans... Like Jesus said in the Bible, "Fuck you, I got mine."
I can lose a contract just because some client can't open a proposal in their copy of word. Not worth the chance to me.
You really really should be sending your proposals as cryptographically signed PDFs. Both because of the aforementioned problem and because you want to have the ability to prove the customer still has what you sent, days or weeks later. PDFs display the same everywhere, including Android and iOS, and any decent PDF viewer makes them easy to annotate as well.
And... guess which office suite it's trivially easy to export a PDF from, for free? Yeah, LibreOffice.
As for compatibility issues when editing the same document together with another person, the only way to do it reliably with MS Office is if you both have absolutely identical versions of MS Office, down to the patch level. DOC format is such a fucking disaster that Microsoft's own tool will break it if passed between versions that aren't even all that far apart. LibreOffice has broken documents in its own format before too, but it's considerably less common, and of course it's free for everyone to use the same version.
Personally, I found it easier to transition between Word and LibreWriter than it was to transition between Word and the new version of Word with the ribbon abomination. I used a ribbon version of Office for 4 years, and now that I'm perfectly familiar with it, I still despise it. Why the LibreOffice people felt obliged to waste hundreds of hours of developer time on imitating the pathetic disaster that is the ribbon, I'm sure I don't know.
Why does that page read like the TimeCube guy? It sounds significantly dubious, as if the chip doesn't actually exist. It sorta sounds like it could exist, but the company is mostly just tossing out a proposed spec, in hopes that someone will fund development of it. Too many superlatives, too many uses of the word "hundreds" in contexts that are exceedingly unlikely. Sounds bogus.
Why is it that wiretaps still exist? Why doesn't every phone negotiate the highest possible encryption level with the other phone it is connected to? Then whoever you call you get the highest encryption supported by their phone, and wiretap is impossible.
Because with mobile phones, voice is still different from data. Data is a second class citizen in the protocol, because phone guys have thought in terms of voice for a century, and have a hard time considering voice as data. It's not a completely ridiculous stance, either.
I have a VOIP phone at home, and its latency is seriously bad. Bad enough that having a conversation with me is noticeably difficult, because the normal human rhythm of voice communications is fouled up by the latency. The mobile phone protocols are at pains to avoid that problem, so voice is its own thing, and the protocols have no room for encryption. No doubt at the behest of Three Letter Agencies in recent years, but also due to both inertia and legitimate technical problems. Even hardware accelerated encryption takes time. On a mobile device, it takes both time and battery power. Neither is in abundant supply to begin with, so the further burden of encryption is being avoided in order to prevent a serious bump in latency (which people notice and hate) and a less serious bump in battery drain (which people mostly don't notice as long as the phone lasts a day on a charge).
Now, is it possible? Maybe. Low latency protocols like Codec2 combined with hardware accelerated encryption could yield acceptable performance. I suspect it's been possible only in quite recent times, long after the last round of meetings of the standards committee for cellular phones currently in use.
As president, those who suffer from that have no recourse until he leaves office. He can't be sued as president.
Not true. A sitting President can be sued for any illegal action outside the bounds of his duties, per the unanimous US Supreme Court ruling in 1997. The Court was asked whether or not Bill Clinton could be sued for alleged sexual harassment. The answer was an unequivocal yes. Now Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a second, concurring opinion saying that it might be difficult to hold court proceedings without interfering with the duties of the President, so there's plenty of legal cover for lawyers to delay proceedings for ages, possibly until a President is out of office, but a suit can certainly be filed while a President is still in office.
So while the federal government enjoys sovereign immunity (with some explicit exceptions in law), and that includes the Office of the President, it only applies to the person of the President when he is acting as president. So a President can not be sued for signing a bill into law, or for ordering troops around, or for signing a treaty with a foreign power, or for any of the thousands of things authorized by law, but a President can be sued for libel or slander or sexual harassment.
The decision was hailed at the time by the New York Times as "resisting the notion of an imperial White House," so even a left-leaning paper saw it as a good thing, even when applied to a Democratic president.
Replying to myself because still no edit button...
I should clarify that it was perfectly legal for Bill Clinton to reveal classified information in a press conference. As many other people have pointed out, the Office of the President is the ultimate classification authority and can talk about anything he wants. Simply talking doesn't declassify the information though.
Since he's the ultimate classification authority, information just BECOMES unclassified BY being tweeted.
Well no, it doesn't. There is a formal process for declassifying information. Simply revealing the information publicly does not follow the process, and so the information remains classified.
This leaves people with clearances in a totally bizarre situation, and it has happened before. When Bill Clinton revealed classified information in a public press conference, the information was still classified afterwards. That meant that anyone who held a clearance could not have certain issues of certain newspapers in their homes. Doing so would violate the laws concerning the handling of classified information. People who hold or have ever held clearances can not discuss the contents of that press conference with anyone who didn't have a clearance, and can't hold such a discussion outside a secure area.
I left the military industrial complex two years later, and my clearance has since expired, but so far as I know, that whacky situation was never cleared up. The data remains classified to this day, even though it is literally common knowledge.
That child is going to grow up with his communications logged, messages recorded, phone conversations intercepted, and what's more all his porn interests, mistakes in teenage years, drug taking, cheating, law breaking, foolish racist or bigoted or cruel utterances, web searches, fucking everything.
Then when they're making something of themselves they get a knock at the door and someone comes in with a big file.
And this is why, in 1939 when Robert Heinlein wrote Revolt in 2100, he predicted that when the US government falls, it will fall into a religious dictatorship, the most oppressive theocracy the world has ever seen. There was no such thing as an integrated circuit at the time, no such thing as a world wide web, but the Puritanism latent in American society has been a dangerous undercurrent since before the founding of the nation.
There are people who have never looked at porn, never groped a girl in high school, never drink alcohol, let alone try other drugs, never cheated on a test or a boyfriend or a spouse, never so much as speed in their car or download a song without paying for it. With very few exceptions, they're the most self-righteous little prigs you could ever hope never to meet. But in a culture like the US, with that streak of lip service to Puritanism, they're unassailable. If we ever accumulate a critical mass of them, the US as we knew it would be doomed, lost even to memory because it would all get dumped down the memory hole, since freedom is obviously too dangerous to even remember, let alone possess.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel though. Americans are voting Republicans in everywhere, while simultaneously voting down nearly every Republican social initiative. Everything from anti-abortion measures being voted down, even in deeply red states, to minimum wage hikes being approved, again in deeply red states, to drug legalization and gay rights. Somehow or other, voters relate better to Republican candidates, while disliking everything they allegedly stand for. The massive gap in approval ratings for Obamacare vs the A.C.A. is further evidence of this bizarre disconnect. So maybe we'll avoid the theocracy. Maybe.
Do ARM chips have the pci-e for storage / 10-gig-e?
Yes.
Marvell:Armada XP supports four PCI-e 2.0 ports (two x4 ports can be configured to Quad x1 – up to 16 lanes) Calxeda: Energycore SoC supports PCI Express Four (4) integrated Gen2 PCIe controllers
nVidia Tegra 2 also supports PCI-e. The ARM and PCI-e licenses are compatible. Electrically of course, the choice of supported buses is entirely up to the chip designer.
...nothing on our plates is nearly as challenging to chew as an uncooked squirrel.
You should suggest to your wife that she take a look at your cat's teeth. They don't have molars, so they're not chewing anything, be it human food, uncooked squirrel, or kibble. It all goes down the same way, basically in bite-sized hunks. (Though I did have one cat years ago who would crunch up the kibble a bit before swallowing it. Greedy sod always took too big a mouthful.)
...an ad for "male enhancement products" that features someone holding a geoduck clam in a disturbingly suggestive manner...
Wait, what? Wtf is a geoduck clam? I see that running an AdBlock plugin since they were invented has deprived me of some of the wondrous variety of the Internet.
I think.. I might... nope, false alarm. I don't care. And I will leave unasked the question of what molluscs have to do with male enhancement.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Musk share his discoveries with other space programs?
No. As has been pointed out on multiple occasions, SpaceX is doing little or no new science. They are doing groundbreaking, revolutionary engineering, but they're not discovering new things about the universe in order to do it, so there isn't anything to share of the nature you're referring to.
Beyond the engineering, they are also doing highly effective management. Management so effective that ULA partisans have claimed repeatedly that it's impossible. They're producing quality rockets, with continuously improving quality, with team sizes far smaller and far more effective than ULA can currently field. It may be that someone has written and published something about how they do that, but as with all things managerial, it's effectively impossible for an organization that isn't run that way to remake itself into an organization that is run that way.
SpaceX is successful not for what they are discovering, but for what they are not doing. They're not operating with a cost-plus contract with the US government, which has the same effect on an engineering project that an unlimited budget has on a movie (see Michael Bay), and they're not operating with a bloated, dysfunctional management structure. Those two simple things allow them to pull off what are being called engineering miracles, but they're not miraculous. It's just that our standards have become so absymally low thanks to decades of bumbling by Lockheed, Boeing, and yes, NASA, that when we encounter competence, it appears amazing.
When you get right down to it, Elon Musk doesn't have anything to share that would do any good. The Atlas and Delta rocket families already work, after all. Elon Musk could talk about the design decisions he made that made the Falcon 9 far cheaper, but Lockheed and Boeing have reams and reams of PowerPoint presentations about why those were the wrong decisions. They simply can't back down from that now.
Yes, manufacturers want to cut costs to increase profit margins, but they would also be compelled to pass a portion of those cost reductions on to their customers or risk losing market share.
Consider the worldwide oil market. Once an oil well is sunk and all the parts installed, it is a robot. There is zero human labor involved even in maintenance, for years at a time. The only expenses are electricity, possible royalties to a property owner, and taxes. Electricity is dirt cheap, royalties are routinely cheated, and taxes are obviously avoided almost completely. So running an existing oil well is extremely cheap to do. So cheap that almost any price per barrel is profitable.
But when Saudi Arabia realized this and cranked up their production, driving oil prices down from $100/barrel to $40/barrel, what did other producers do? Even though they were still profitable, they still shut down their robots and stopped pumping oil. Were they unprofitable? No. Income minus operating expenses was still a positive number. It was just a much smaller number. So no, they do not pass on cost reductions to their customers. They prefer to lose market share if they don't get the amount of profit they believe they deserve.
The model of humans that economists use is completely and totally divorced from reality. Humans don't think the way economists say they do. Not even close.
That's why pretty much all the U.S. launch vehicles are actually modified ballistic missiles. They were designed (by the private sector under contract) with the goal of dropping bombs on places halfway around the world. And NASA got to re-use that tech at a price heavily subsidized by military R&D.
Historically this was true. The situation has now, bizarrely, reversed. NASA is being used to artificially keep Thiokol alive because they manufacture the solid fuel rockets that are ICBMs, but the Air Force hasn't been allowed to buy more ICBMs since the Clinton era. This is why the Senate Launch System is "architected" the way it is.
Trump has been making noises about the poor condition of our nuclear deterrent. If he gets his way, the Air Force will be able to replace a bunch of missiles directly, and NASA can stop pretending they ever wanted solid fuel boosters for anything.
Are you ok blaming Trump for the same things you defend Obama on?
If you agree Trump is no more to blame than Obama, then ok. If not then time to self reflect.
Trump is no more to blame than Obama today. It's only March, after all. There still isn't a Trump administration to blame yet, since their takeover is in such a shambles.
But by the time of the mid-term elections in 2018? Yep, his fault by then. Why? Because he's the leader of the party that controls both houses of Congress.
I managed to type that with a straight face. Ok, we can't ever blame Trump for the F-35 or the SLS. We both know he is only the titular leader of the Republican party, not the actual leader. We both know they don't like him and don't want him and have no intention of ever listening to him. Trump had no idea what he was letting himself in for. He's going to be blamed for everything, while having control of almost nothing. Congress doesn't like him, doesn't respect him, and doesn't believe in anything he believes in, lip service to the contrary. He's going to get even less traction than Hillary Clinton would have, since she knew where the bodies were buried and he doesn't. If he wasn't such a childish, self-aggrandizing prick, I'd feel sorry for him.
Paying for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn't get put into the general defense budget either, so add a few more trillion.
They weren't, under Bush. They are now. The Obama administration brought the war spending into the budget. And took the blame for the increased deficit, even though it wasn't their expense. The next time you hear some idiot hyperventilating over Obama's increase of the deficit, remember that.
... he's the reason the storm-troopers in riot gear tore your house down, zip-tied your family and shot your goldfish, only to find your 10-year-old pulling pranks on his iPad.
Won't someone think of the goldfish?
I'd like to see some Saberhagen Berserker stories on the big screen.
So would I. Australian director Alex Proyas, who directed Will Smith in I, Robot, says he's very slowly working on it. An attempt was made to license the rights to New Line Cinema, but that fell apart. Apparently no studio currently has the movie rights, which I find a bit odd. I guess most studio executives don't want to risk going up against the Terminator franchise.
In some respects I don't blame them. Quite a few of the Berserker novels would be difficult to adapt into movies without totally mangling them, and even after a mangling, they might not be good movies. Berserker Man comes to mind. Others are almost too easy to adapt, like Brother Assassin, but the problem with Berserker novels is they are frequently tragedies. Even though humanity wins, the hero dies. Chinese and Japanese audiences love that, but American audiences hate it.
Maybe someday a Berserker movie will get made, but I don't have a lot of hope for that, or a lot of hope for the result if it happens. Hollywood treats adapted material so badly so frequently that it's just not worth it. They insist on inserting jackass movie tropes into otherwise good material.
Cities are best for people who pay for their entertainment. Rural is best for people who make their own entertainment.
And suburbs, where people are busily moving, are a happy medium, with enough room to make some of your own entertainment and still be able to go into the city in an hour or so, rather than 3 hours.
But everybody needs that second car.
Yes, everyone does need that second car. It's very rarely optional in a two income household, especially considering the state of mass transit in the US. Worse, both the first and second cars are notably more expensive than they were in the 1950s, even inflation-adjusted. Safety equipment costs money, and auto manufacturers really really want to upsell you to the model with the entertainment system in it.
They need to eat fast food rather than cook.
Fast food is as cheap as cooking yourself now. Maybe the results aren't as high quality for the same price, but it will keep you alive, and you aren't paying a premium for it.
They need to pay for that cable and internet.
Well yeah. Paying for Internet is as essential today as paying for a telephone line was in the 1950s. I suspect the two are comparably expensive, too, inflation-adjusted. Ma Bell ruled the world in the 50s, and extracted her pound of flesh. Today's ISPs behave quite similarly.
They need central heating and air.
Central air I'll give you, but central heating has been a thing since the 1800s in cities, when it was a coal furnace in the basement, and your house had a street-accessible coal chute for deliveries. It was certainly a thing everywhere in the 1950s, including rural areas, where it was propane or fuel oil. (I lived in a house with a fuel oil furnace for several years, as a child. Filthy.)
I'm surprised you left out the largest difference in expenditure. House sizes are considerably larger today than they were in the 1950s. That's usually the go-to complaint from the "slaves should never have it better than their parents" crowd that you represent.
How about this. All of those things are things we should have now. What the hell is civilization for? What the hell are all these engineers for, if not making things better for as many people as possible? And yes, why aren't all us Morlocks getting a bigger slice of the financial reward for doing all that work?
It is a relatively low-end Pentium processor, but still over 5 minutes to compress a 1MB image is too high.
Is it? It only has to be compressed once and put on a website, where it will be served to a million browsers and decompressed a million times. Does decompression take any longer?
When Google seems to care about the 20,000,000 Russian lives lost in WWII, it might begin
to appear that Google is using its power with some sort of sense of fairness.
No one is trying to deny that 20 million people were killed in Soviet gulags. More to the point, no one is trying to deny that 20 million people died in the Soviet gulags and use that non-fact as justification for arson and murder today.
I think artificial meat inevitable but I doubt it would be healthful.
Why wouldn't it be? By the time your gastric juices are done with the food you eat, it's been reduced to a slurry that is absorbed at the molecular level. If artificial meat contains the same molecules as animal meat, i.e. vitamins, fats, and amino acids, your intestines won't notice the difference. I suspect the results of these experiments are already fairly healthful. Perfecting the cosmetic attributes such as taste and texture will be the hard part.
As a small business manufacturing a fairly niche product, in the past few months I've noticed that vendors are less willing to to small production runs of custom parts. Last week I had a CNC milling vendor tell me, and I quote, "Well, you haven't done any business with us in a while so we're unable to work with you."
Sounds like you're going to have to buy a CNC milling machine. A.K.A. a robot. If you don't, you'll miss out on the next industrial revolution...
That might not be as outrageous as you think, either. I hear a decent CNC milling machine can be had from China for 1/10th what they used to go for, and its own build quality and its accuracy aren't any worse than the far more expensive models. Small business can survive this, but it will be just a little bit bigger than it was, and more vertically integrated. You're going to have to produce more of the stuff you use in house, and you're going to have to produce it in an automated fashion.
Yeah, getting small runs of large custom castings done is going to be tough, but maybe they'll do it if you agree to do your own milling. I know that's how it works for steel castings. Large scale live steam model rail cars are built on cast iron wheels that are shipped from the foundry raw. The hobbyist has to do the finish milling himself.
The real issue is if Tesla has a viable business model and if its current valuation can be justified. Many Tesla naysayers, and I am one, believe the answer is "No."
Normalize interest rates and Tesla will start have to start earning serious operating capital or be in the dot-com model of "we'll make it up on volume."
As with most naysayers, you're obviously completely clueless about anything and everything to do with finances. If you did, you'd have read Tesla's financial statements and know they make a profit on every single vehicle sold. As in "sale price - (cost of materials + cost of labor) = a positive number." They most definitely can "make it up on volume" eventually. That's the whole point of this funding round—ramping up their production capacity so they can produce higher volumes. Higher volumes of a profitable product x the amount of product sold = higher profit. Tesla doesn't post a profit because they're busy sinking those earnings into building out not one but two factories. But a super genius like you already knew that.
You obviously have no clue what a convertible note is, either. The interest rate on convertible notes is often not tied to the prime rate or to any other published rate. Tesla's coupon rate on their convertible notes is habitually a fixed 1.5%. Normalize the interest rates or further denormalize them, it doesn't matter. Tesla knows how much they will be paying on their debt, and it's totally unaffected by the prime rate. Further, when those convertible notes come due, they will pay in equity, not cash. That's what a convertible note is. But a super genius like you knew that too.
Oh wait. You obviously didn't know those things. Maybe when you learn the most basic things about corporate finance and about Tesla's specific financing, you'll be a super genius. Until then, you're just an idiot.
Not to mention if we choose as a society to pay together, it can be a lit cheaper for everyone. Currently we collectively pay 4 times as much per person as any other country and we have a lot less to show for it.
Those of us who do have health insurance might actually pay less under a universal healthcare system than we do now even while covering other people.
That only happens in other countries because other countries have come to grips with the fact that running a healthcare system for profit is not merely inefficient, but immoral. The US doesn't understand that.
Which is kind of peculiar, because the US healthcare system was largely non-profit for most people for most of the history of the country. Why do you think all these hospitals all over the country have the names of saints in them? Well, today it's because of marketing. Calling them Uncle Bob's Chop Shop and Surgery Emporium just doesn't have quite the same ring. But originally it was because they were charity hospitals. Not just non-profit, but literally free to the majority of the recipients. They were founded and run by church organizations, especially the monetary behemoth that is the Catholic Church.
Other countries pay much much less because other countries have determined how much each and every drug costs to make, how much each and every procedure costs to perform, and how much each and every machine costs to make, and dictated the amount that will be paid for each of those things. And drug manufacturers, hospitals, and equipment manufacturers manage to get along just fine. They just don't get to rake in record profits every year. Oh, and they can almost completely avoid the monstrous parasitic growth that the US suffers from known as the health insurance industry: that most ridiculous organization whose sole purpose is to prevent healthcare.
Healthcare in the US started as a charity and somehow evolved into a mammoth profit-taking entity and there is no way back for us, ever, because of the first italicized word in my preceding paragraph. Because the only way out is to use government for its intended purpose, "to promote the general welfare" as it says in the Constitution, but we can't do that because "muh freedums!" And because of the root of this entire thread, still reflected in the comment subject: "Re: Tough shit -- welcome to the real world", which translates with ease as "Fuck you -- I got mine".
So Christian, these Americans... Like Jesus said in the Bible, "Fuck you, I got mine."
I can lose a contract just because some client can't open a proposal in their copy of word. Not worth the chance to me.
You really really should be sending your proposals as cryptographically signed PDFs. Both because of the aforementioned problem and because you want to have the ability to prove the customer still has what you sent, days or weeks later. PDFs display the same everywhere, including Android and iOS, and any decent PDF viewer makes them easy to annotate as well.
And... guess which office suite it's trivially easy to export a PDF from, for free? Yeah, LibreOffice.
As for compatibility issues when editing the same document together with another person, the only way to do it reliably with MS Office is if you both have absolutely identical versions of MS Office, down to the patch level. DOC format is such a fucking disaster that Microsoft's own tool will break it if passed between versions that aren't even all that far apart. LibreOffice has broken documents in its own format before too, but it's considerably less common, and of course it's free for everyone to use the same version.
Personally, I found it easier to transition between Word and LibreWriter than it was to transition between Word and the new version of Word with the ribbon abomination. I used a ribbon version of Office for 4 years, and now that I'm perfectly familiar with it, I still despise it. Why the LibreOffice people felt obliged to waste hundreds of hours of developer time on imitating the pathetic disaster that is the ribbon, I'm sure I don't know.
The Cavium chips handle multiple PCI-e 3.0 ports.
Why does that page read like the TimeCube guy? It sounds significantly dubious, as if the chip doesn't actually exist. It sorta sounds like it could exist, but the company is mostly just tossing out a proposed spec, in hopes that someone will fund development of it. Too many superlatives, too many uses of the word "hundreds" in contexts that are exceedingly unlikely. Sounds bogus.
Why is it that wiretaps still exist? Why doesn't every phone negotiate the highest possible encryption level with the other phone it is connected to? Then whoever you call you get the highest encryption supported by their phone, and wiretap is impossible.
Because with mobile phones, voice is still different from data. Data is a second class citizen in the protocol, because phone guys have thought in terms of voice for a century, and have a hard time considering voice as data. It's not a completely ridiculous stance, either.
I have a VOIP phone at home, and its latency is seriously bad. Bad enough that having a conversation with me is noticeably difficult, because the normal human rhythm of voice communications is fouled up by the latency. The mobile phone protocols are at pains to avoid that problem, so voice is its own thing, and the protocols have no room for encryption. No doubt at the behest of Three Letter Agencies in recent years, but also due to both inertia and legitimate technical problems. Even hardware accelerated encryption takes time. On a mobile device, it takes both time and battery power. Neither is in abundant supply to begin with, so the further burden of encryption is being avoided in order to prevent a serious bump in latency (which people notice and hate) and a less serious bump in battery drain (which people mostly don't notice as long as the phone lasts a day on a charge).
Now, is it possible? Maybe. Low latency protocols like Codec2 combined with hardware accelerated encryption could yield acceptable performance. I suspect it's been possible only in quite recent times, long after the last round of meetings of the standards committee for cellular phones currently in use.
As president, those who suffer from that have no recourse until he leaves office. He can't be sued as president.
Not true. A sitting President can be sued for any illegal action outside the bounds of his duties, per the unanimous US Supreme Court ruling in 1997. The Court was asked whether or not Bill Clinton could be sued for alleged sexual harassment. The answer was an unequivocal yes. Now Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a second, concurring opinion saying that it might be difficult to hold court proceedings without interfering with the duties of the President, so there's plenty of legal cover for lawyers to delay proceedings for ages, possibly until a President is out of office, but a suit can certainly be filed while a President is still in office.
So while the federal government enjoys sovereign immunity (with some explicit exceptions in law), and that includes the Office of the President, it only applies to the person of the President when he is acting as president. So a President can not be sued for signing a bill into law, or for ordering troops around, or for signing a treaty with a foreign power, or for any of the thousands of things authorized by law, but a President can be sued for libel or slander or sexual harassment.
The decision was hailed at the time by the New York Times as "resisting the notion of an imperial White House," so even a left-leaning paper saw it as a good thing, even when applied to a Democratic president.
Replying to myself because still no edit button...
I should clarify that it was perfectly legal for Bill Clinton to reveal classified information in a press conference. As many other people have pointed out, the Office of the President is the ultimate classification authority and can talk about anything he wants. Simply talking doesn't declassify the information though.
Since he's the ultimate classification authority, information just BECOMES unclassified BY being tweeted.
Well no, it doesn't. There is a formal process for declassifying information. Simply revealing the information publicly does not follow the process, and so the information remains classified.
This leaves people with clearances in a totally bizarre situation, and it has happened before. When Bill Clinton revealed classified information in a public press conference, the information was still classified afterwards. That meant that anyone who held a clearance could not have certain issues of certain newspapers in their homes. Doing so would violate the laws concerning the handling of classified information. People who hold or have ever held clearances can not discuss the contents of that press conference with anyone who didn't have a clearance, and can't hold such a discussion outside a secure area.
I left the military industrial complex two years later, and my clearance has since expired, but so far as I know, that whacky situation was never cleared up. The data remains classified to this day, even though it is literally common knowledge.
That child is going to grow up with his communications logged, messages recorded, phone conversations intercepted, and what's more all his porn interests, mistakes in teenage years, drug taking, cheating, law breaking, foolish racist or bigoted or cruel utterances, web searches, fucking everything.
Then when they're making something of themselves they get a knock at the door and someone comes in with a big file.
And this is why, in 1939 when Robert Heinlein wrote Revolt in 2100, he predicted that when the US government falls, it will fall into a religious dictatorship, the most oppressive theocracy the world has ever seen. There was no such thing as an integrated circuit at the time, no such thing as a world wide web, but the Puritanism latent in American society has been a dangerous undercurrent since before the founding of the nation.
There are people who have never looked at porn, never groped a girl in high school, never drink alcohol, let alone try other drugs, never cheated on a test or a boyfriend or a spouse, never so much as speed in their car or download a song without paying for it. With very few exceptions, they're the most self-righteous little prigs you could ever hope never to meet. But in a culture like the US, with that streak of lip service to Puritanism, they're unassailable. If we ever accumulate a critical mass of them, the US as we knew it would be doomed, lost even to memory because it would all get dumped down the memory hole, since freedom is obviously too dangerous to even remember, let alone possess.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel though. Americans are voting Republicans in everywhere, while simultaneously voting down nearly every Republican social initiative. Everything from anti-abortion measures being voted down, even in deeply red states, to minimum wage hikes being approved, again in deeply red states, to drug legalization and gay rights. Somehow or other, voters relate better to Republican candidates, while disliking everything they allegedly stand for. The massive gap in approval ratings for Obamacare vs the A.C.A. is further evidence of this bizarre disconnect. So maybe we'll avoid the theocracy. Maybe.
Do ARM chips have the pci-e for storage / 10-gig-e?
Yes.
Marvell:Armada XP supports four PCI-e 2.0 ports (two x4 ports can be configured to Quad x1 – up to 16 lanes)
Calxeda: Energycore SoC supports PCI Express Four (4) integrated Gen2 PCIe controllers
nVidia Tegra 2 also supports PCI-e. The ARM and PCI-e licenses are compatible. Electrically of course, the choice of supported buses is entirely up to the chip designer.
...nothing on our plates is nearly as challenging to chew as an uncooked squirrel.
You should suggest to your wife that she take a look at your cat's teeth. They don't have molars, so they're not chewing anything, be it human food, uncooked squirrel, or kibble. It all goes down the same way, basically in bite-sized hunks. (Though I did have one cat years ago who would crunch up the kibble a bit before swallowing it. Greedy sod always took too big a mouthful.)
...an ad for "male enhancement products" that features someone holding a geoduck clam in a disturbingly suggestive manner...
Wait, what? Wtf is a geoduck clam? I see that running an AdBlock plugin since they were invented has deprived me of some of the wondrous variety of the Internet.
I think.. I might... nope, false alarm. I don't care. And I will leave unasked the question of what molluscs have to do with male enhancement.