Per Order No. 3915-2017 (pdf), Mueller has been authorized to prosecute federal crimes, and given a fairly broad scope of investigation - any links between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and any matters arising from these investigations (such as obstruction of justice).
Forget power to investigate, this guy has powers to prosecute. He's going out loaded for bear.
Address space layout randomization. To make it harder for buffer-related exploits to actually start executing arbitrary code, the memory pages get shuffled around at startup so all the memory addresses are different each time. This still works with a 32-bit address space but there's less total space to use, so with some brute force (eg. really long NOP slides) you can overcome ASLR. With a 64-bit address space, odds are a random jump won't even hit a valid memory address.
The used Surface market is pretty strong. Compulsive upgraders sell off their old models at a low price, which gives more cost-conscious consumers a choice between a new, expensive one, or a used cheap one. But Microsoft only makes money off the new sales, not the secondhand market. The net effect is that Surface revenue is depressed. The same happens with any new product line - you get a sales spike at launch, when the current model is the only game in town, and then it falls to sustainable levels as new models have to compete with the old one on the used market.
As for myself, I'm quite happy with my secondhand Surface Pro 2. Cost me about a third of what a new Surface Pro 4 would, and it does everything I've tried to use it for.
I was once asked by my boss to tinker with Tizen, see if it was usable, since a client was soliciting bids for an app they wanted to run on Samsung's smartwatch.
After a few day's experimentation, I reported that the Tizen SDK was basically unusable to write any app except the ones Samsung already wrote, and that the specific app the client was hoping for was literally impossible. The SDK itself was one of the worst programs I've used in many years - horrendously slow, crash-prone and cluttered in the way typical of early-00s Windows apps.
Needless to say, I am not surprised on multiple levels. First, that Tizen is insecure in addition to being slow and useless. Second, that nobody's taken a serious look at its security, since most people stop looking at it far before security starts to matter.
Tesla might not be able to reach Ford's current sales volume in the foreseeable future, but perhaps Ford's stock is sliding because investors expect its sales volume to shrink considerably? Ford doesn't have a BEV program, doesn't have a good AI program, and isn't even making cars that sell well internationally. They've bet fairly big on SUVs, crossovers and pickups, which are currently selling like hotcakes in the US, but not hugely well anywhere else. If the rest of the world passes heavy fuel-efficiency regulations, that would basically limit Ford to just domestic sales - and while it's unlikely Trump is going to tax CO2, the next administration certainly could, and California is trying to even now.
Tesla is also in position to win even if they lose. BEVs are looking like they'll be a pretty big market, and Tesla built a big-ass battery factory. Even if nobody buys a Model 3, whatever car they buy instead will probably have Tesla batteries inside it. Their ramp-up on batteries seems to be going smoother than their ramp-up of full cars.
The ISS is not in an orbit high enough to be long-term stable. There's microscopic amounts of drag from the extremely thin near-Earth atmosphere, but that still adds up. Every resupply mission to the ISS gives it a small altitude boost, to keep it in orbit.
If those boosts stop happening, even if the ISS is kept in it's low-drag configuration (align the solar panels edge-on), it *will* come down, in a matter of years. When it does, it is very likely parts of it will survive re-entry and be a hazard to people on the ground - Skylab had components survive re-entry. As a safety precaution, it is better to put it on a controlled de-orbit, so that any debris is over deep ocean and unlikely to be a danger. Mir took this path, coming down into the Pacific ocean on a steep angle.
As for putting it into a higher orbit, in order just to get it to a geosynchronous orbit, it would require roughly twice the mass of the ISS in propellants. We could maybe get it into a medium orbit, such that it would not come down for centuries, but that would still require billions of dollars in rockets. Maybe if ITS launches ahead of schedule...
The Zen architecture uses four-core "Complexes", which combine cache and some cache-coherency logic (not execution resources, the way Bulldozer did). The six-core parts are confirmed to be two-complex (eight-core) parts with two cores disabled. The four-core parts are almost assuredly single-complex parts, ie. a die specific for four-core (and under?) chips.
Remote-controlled turrets have recently become a trendy upgrade for military vehicles - the M1's TUSK system (Tank Urban Survival Kit) includes a remote-controlled 12.7mm machine gun, to allow it to be operated by the crew without exposing themselves.
Autonomous turrets are deployed along the Korean DMZ, and are equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher and a 5.56mm machine gun. They are claimed to be configured to require human authorization to fire, but are widely suspected to have fully-autonomous capabilities.
However, none of these are man-portable, for the simple reason that any system able to aim a decently powerful firearm is going to be fairly heavy. Even a light rifle will be 3kg+ with ammo, and recoil will be a problem without more mass (either for a recoil-damping system, or just to dissipate the force). Not to mention that it will be slower to aim (point-and-shoot is a lot easier than looking through a camera and pressing buttons, and that cover is rarely perfect - the soldier will be at risk anyways. Setting up some tripod-mounted remote-control gun sounds like an invitation to throw grenades at you.
Captain Falcon has the highest movement speed but he generally has slower attacks than any other competitive-level character. In particular, his neutral B is the slowest attack in the game.
If you were referring to "the simple strategy of crouching at the edge of the stage caused the network to behave very oddly", "network" refers to "neural network", meaning the AI. I didn't see any other references to networks in the article.
Is that apogee or perigee altitude? I can't imagine these tiny satellites had enough propellant for a circularization burn, but I couldn't find any more detailed orbital parameters. A relatively elliptical orbit would have their orbit decay much faster.
I'm working on a system now, and for the first time in my career, I'm taking the time to really do it right (mostly because, for the first time in my career, I'm being allowed to). Even though it's mostly used in-house, we do have outside customers with access so I do make sure it runs acceptably on slow connections or devices.
Images are small and scarce. That's not exactly a big deal these days, but honestly, it makes styling easier.
There is one CSS file. It caches just fine. I just ran a test simulating a 22kbps connection - the first page load is about ten seconds, but after that, nothing takes more than a second or so to load, save for one page I've already marked for revision.
Javascript is minimal, mostly used to make nested menus load with AJAX or to do form submission with nice validation. This saves bandwidth overall, so I'd call it a win. The site does not degrade gracefully without Javascript but it doesn't require that much CPU horsepower to do what we do with it.
There are no ads or tracking. Not even Google Analytics. The designer wants to add it but I'm not gonna let it happen. We have server logs we can analyze for all the info we need, why would we send that on to Google, not to mention the perf hit?
Tested in current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and Edge, and also IE10, under Windows and Linux (for browsers that run on Linux). IE misses some styling features, Firefox has some alignment glitches I haven't gotten around to yelling at the designer to fix it yet, but everything is fully usable. Safari and OS X testing will happen if we ever get a Mac to test with. Mobile browsers technically work but the site is very information-dense and nobody in their right minds would use it on a phone. (And I've tested it with Lynx, you can read it but it's not easy, and saving stuff is broken... if I ever run out of stuff to do, I might fix that, but it's not exactly a priority)
On a normal business-class internet connection (25Mbps shared across a dozen people), and a normal business-class browser (dual-core, 8GB RAM, Windows), most pages load in about 30ms. Only one takes longer than 100ms, and that's already queued for revision.
The fundamental problem is that too few programmers have a direct profit incentive to make a good website user experience. The big sites make money from ads, which are inherently anti-user. Contractors (which I used to be) care more about getting it out under the hours estimate than about quality. I work directly for the people who use this site eight hours a day, you can bet your ass I'll make this a good site for them to use.
It's a fuel pump. Unlike a reciprocating engine, where you can inject the fuel at low pressure and then compress it, a rocket engine has to inject the propellant at the same pressure it's burned at, and thermodynamics wants that pressure to be as high as possible in order to get maximum efficiency (imagine a car engine that injected fuel at the top of the cylinder stroke instead of the bottom). Combined with the sheer amount of propellant being used, that means you need an absolutely insane amount of power in your fuel and oxidizer pumps.
So they use a turbopump. A small amount of fuel and oxidizer are tapped off and burned. The resulting hot CO2 and H2O are used to run a turbine, which drives the pump. In the Merlin engines, and in many other engines, it ends up just exhausting, generating no additional thrust. Other designs, including Raptor, find ways to re-use that exhaust to generate a bit more power.
Good theory, but I think you're wrong. That's not what's hurting Microsoft - Sony did the same thing, with rumors of the "Neo" appearing shortly after the console itself launched. And yet the PS4 still sold quite well from day one.
What hurt the Xb1 is that it's demonstrably weaker than the PS4, but cost significantly more at launch ($500 compared to $400). Most games are available on both, so the natural inclination is to go with the cheaper and more powerful console. With a wide library of shared games, there's lots of direct comparisons to make, and even before they launched, it was easy to tell the PS4 would be more powerful. That gave the PS4 a very strong advantage during the first year or two.
Even now, they only have price-parity, with both having an entry price around $250-$300. But more people already have a PS4, making that the more attractive option both for multiplayer gaming (if all your friends are on PS4, you'd want one too) and for the larger percentage of third-party exclusive titles (it's nowhere near as big a deal as it once was, since porting is so easy, but there's still some studios that are deciding to skip the Xb1 because the audience is smaller). And it seems to me (as a non-Xb1, non-PS4 gamer) that Sony's shoveling the money from their console sales into more first-party games, giving it a still stronger library, which is ultimately what every gamer cares about.
Microsoft doesn't have a lot of options for coming back from this, just as the PS3 struggled to come back from the Xb360's early lead and the XbC never came close to the PS2. They could make the Scorpio be *substantially* more powerful than the PS4 Pro, making it more future-proof and maybe able to handle 4K/VR better. They could slash the price, and hope to catch up that way, but that's a risky move. They could pin it on VR or AR, but that's riskier still. They could double-down on their cross-play with PC bets - make every single Xb1 game PC-compatible and bundle a PC version, which would widen their library (although it would cannibalize Scorpio somewhat). Or they could go on a spending spree and buy up every developer they can, and kill off the PS4's third-party support - Sony is no Nintendo, they can't survive on first-party games alone (even Nintendo might not do so much longer).
An order of magnitude less than $8,000,000,000 is still $800,000,000 - which is still an order of magnitude greater than the price difference between ULA and SpaceX. I won't begrudge NASA if they play it safe and go with a more reliable launch system for JWST.
You can have $70M of your taxpayer dollars used on his rockets, or you can have $160M of your taxpayer dollars go to Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Your choice.
So: * Cheaper by 55% * Built entirely in America * Doesn't give money to a country we're sanctioning * No design elements from the 1970s * Company is doing innovative things to drive down costs even more in the future * Slightly more likely to explode
Solid rocket motors have tradeoffs. In some circumstances, they make sense.
They are long-term storage-stable. Build it, stick it in a silo somewhere, and leave it be for a few years, it will still launch just fine. Hypergolic liquid-fueled rockets can't be kept ready-to-launch for more than a few days*, and cryogenic liquid-fueled rockets can't be kept ready-to-launch for more than a few hours. This makes them particularly preferable for military uses, everything from little anti-tank rockets to ICBMs. This also reduces the number of ground crew needed - you don't need to worry about fueling, just electricals and signals.
They have extremely high levels of thrust, due to the extremely high energy density. The Shuttle's SRBs were each twice as powerful as the largest liquid-fueled rockets. This makes them very popular as boosters.
They have a lot of impulse per unit volume. What most rockets care about is impulse per unit mass (aka specific impulse), but some cases care about volume. If you're launching from an aircraft, like Stratolaunch or Pegasus, this matters. If you have constrained volume because you're in a fixed-size fairing, this matters. If you're launching from a submarine, this matters.
It's also often a matter of economies of scale. Countries with military missile programs (which have many reasons to go solid-fueled) often use them for other things as well, either to subsidize their military-industrial complex or to take advantage of existing scale to make civilian rocketry cheaper, depending on how cynical you are. The US, masters of solid-fueled ICBMs, used a pair of massive SRBs on the Space Shuttle, and will use them again on SLS, if that ever flies. The ESA's Ariane 5 uses SRBs based on a French SLBM. Japan may not field ICBMs, but they too have a reason - the first stage of this rocket is almost identical to the booster of their H-II rocket.
The higher stages are solid-fueled presumably to maintain that low-ground-crew capability, and the minor reduction in drag can't hurt either.
The difference, as I see it, is that "incorrect news" or "wrong news" lacks malice - it may have been wrong, but it was intended to be true, and either accident or negligence caused it to not be. "Fake news" was known by its peddler to be false, and yet was pushed anyways because The Cause mattered more than The Truth.
Chinese citizens are among the most visibly affected by pollution in general, through smog, and they have sufficient communications and disposable income to organize a movement against it. That movement has coalesced and is pushing for reduced air pollution in general, with carbon dioxide as merely one of the problems. But because the movement formed while climate change was an article of discussion internationally, the Chinese movement has ingrained a fight against climate change into their philosophy.
China is far from an ideal democracy, but no government is immune to the ill will of its citizens. The Chinese government does not have any particular conflict of interests here - they need to keep manufacturing up, in order to keep their population employed, but oil and coal are mostly imported so reducing their use would actually be a minor improvement. The pressure from the Chinese citizenry isn't particularly hard, but with no reason to fight back the Chinese government is willing to go along to avoid possible unrest. And the Chinese government has historically taken a very long view compared to most Western governments, so the whole "leave a livable Earth for future generations" thing might actually matter to them.
Carbon taxes will make most carbon-producing activities unprofitable. Right now, coal actually requires government subsidies in order to survive. Flip that to a tax, and electrical power generation from fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) ends about as quickly as new carbon-neutral plants can be built (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, hydro, nuclear - all are carbon-neutral and cost-competitive). For the electric grid, it's not a matter of technology, merely a matter of using technologies we already have. We could have gone carbon-neutral in the 70s if we had gone all-in on nuclear power and hydroelectric. Now we have even more options.
That leaves transportation and direct industrial use. We're already starting to see a shift towards battery-electric vehicles (it's not just Tesla - out of the top ten auto manufacturers, the only ones without an actively-made electric car are Suzuki and Citroen), and gas is under $2/gal. If the carbon tax merely pushed the cost of gasoline up to European prices, around $5-6/gal, that would accelerate the movement. BEVs are only as carbon-free as the electric grid, but a) we already get a lot of carbon-free power, so it's already greener, and b) as the grid becomes greener, BEVs become greener. The technology seems to be at a level that's competitive already - it's an obvious corollary to the efficient market hypothesis that if everyone in a given field is selling something, it's profitable to do so.
There would still be some transportation burning fossil fuels (aircraft, ships, rail), some of which aren't easily electrified. Rail can probably be electrified relatively easily, but aircraft will be very hard to do). But those will merely have to shoulder the cost - and they already have huge natural economic incentives to minimize fuel consumption, which in turn minimizes carbon dioxide release.
(Second-order effects might actually make manufacturers shift back to the West if there's a global carbon tax. Intercontinental shipping will become more expensive, so there would be an economic advantage to manufacturing close to the sale destination, possibly enough to outweigh the lower labor costs overseas. That's not directly relevant to the problem of climate change but it would certainly be a nice side benefit.)
Direct industrial use is a bit harder. Lots of industrial processes require heat, notably metal smelting and cement production, and a lot of them get it by burning fossil fuels of one sort or another. We might be able to improve on that by using solar reflector heating or electric heating, but it's probably just going to be a cost that gets passed on to the consumer and thus reduces consumption. Which still ultimately lowers CO2 production, so I'll count that as a weak win. Remember, we don't have to get to literally zero carbon emissions, we just have to get down to a level the natural carbon cycle can swallow.
And a tax on carbon dioxide would allow reduction of other taxes (in countries who have balanced budgets) or prevent the need for other taxes to be raised (in countries with imbalanced budgets). Since a lot of those taxes have no benefit beyond revenue, and have negative effects elsewhere (sales tax, income tax), we would improve our economy by reducing them.
Damage to Comcast's lines is already covered by applicable law. This is not made explicit in this new ordinance, but because the ordinance requires the attacher to both post a bond, and to indemnify (protect from legal repercussions for damages) the pole owner, it's clearly something obvious to the lawyers who wrote it.
This law also requires notification be sent to anyone whose lines are moved, and places liability for certain costs on the one doing the moving - cost for the existing user to perform inspections, and cover the costs for any mistakes made that bring it out of spec with the pole owner. And the pole owners may require approval of the contractors who actually perform the work.
Also, the law does require that the new line owner gets permission from the pole owner, and that any work that could reasonably cause a service outage must notify the existing line owners, and must coordinate with them if they choose to do so (within a certain timeframe - if Comcast sits around for a month after being told of outage-causing work, the work may proceed without them).
The price for a Wacom screen of that size is about $2800, and that one's only 2560x1440. $1400 for a decent-specced computer in that form factor is about what you'd pay with anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Per Order No. 3915-2017 (pdf), Mueller has been authorized to prosecute federal crimes, and given a fairly broad scope of investigation - any links between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and any matters arising from these investigations (such as obstruction of justice).
Forget power to investigate, this guy has powers to prosecute. He's going out loaded for bear.
Address space layout randomization. To make it harder for buffer-related exploits to actually start executing arbitrary code, the memory pages get shuffled around at startup so all the memory addresses are different each time. This still works with a 32-bit address space but there's less total space to use, so with some brute force (eg. really long NOP slides) you can overcome ASLR. With a 64-bit address space, odds are a random jump won't even hit a valid memory address.
The used Surface market is pretty strong. Compulsive upgraders sell off their old models at a low price, which gives more cost-conscious consumers a choice between a new, expensive one, or a used cheap one. But Microsoft only makes money off the new sales, not the secondhand market. The net effect is that Surface revenue is depressed. The same happens with any new product line - you get a sales spike at launch, when the current model is the only game in town, and then it falls to sustainable levels as new models have to compete with the old one on the used market.
As for myself, I'm quite happy with my secondhand Surface Pro 2. Cost me about a third of what a new Surface Pro 4 would, and it does everything I've tried to use it for.
I was once asked by my boss to tinker with Tizen, see if it was usable, since a client was soliciting bids for an app they wanted to run on Samsung's smartwatch.
After a few day's experimentation, I reported that the Tizen SDK was basically unusable to write any app except the ones Samsung already wrote, and that the specific app the client was hoping for was literally impossible. The SDK itself was one of the worst programs I've used in many years - horrendously slow, crash-prone and cluttered in the way typical of early-00s Windows apps.
Needless to say, I am not surprised on multiple levels. First, that Tizen is insecure in addition to being slow and useless. Second, that nobody's taken a serious look at its security, since most people stop looking at it far before security starts to matter.
I'll grant you the parts, but it's mostly dealers who make money off the extended warranties.
Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Unless they're still on lease, the cars Ford sold last quarter aren't bringing in any money.
Tesla might not be able to reach Ford's current sales volume in the foreseeable future, but perhaps Ford's stock is sliding because investors expect its sales volume to shrink considerably? Ford doesn't have a BEV program, doesn't have a good AI program, and isn't even making cars that sell well internationally. They've bet fairly big on SUVs, crossovers and pickups, which are currently selling like hotcakes in the US, but not hugely well anywhere else. If the rest of the world passes heavy fuel-efficiency regulations, that would basically limit Ford to just domestic sales - and while it's unlikely Trump is going to tax CO2, the next administration certainly could, and California is trying to even now.
Tesla is also in position to win even if they lose. BEVs are looking like they'll be a pretty big market, and Tesla built a big-ass battery factory. Even if nobody buys a Model 3, whatever car they buy instead will probably have Tesla batteries inside it. Their ramp-up on batteries seems to be going smoother than their ramp-up of full cars.
The ISS is not in an orbit high enough to be long-term stable. There's microscopic amounts of drag from the extremely thin near-Earth atmosphere, but that still adds up. Every resupply mission to the ISS gives it a small altitude boost, to keep it in orbit.
If those boosts stop happening, even if the ISS is kept in it's low-drag configuration (align the solar panels edge-on), it *will* come down, in a matter of years. When it does, it is very likely parts of it will survive re-entry and be a hazard to people on the ground - Skylab had components survive re-entry. As a safety precaution, it is better to put it on a controlled de-orbit, so that any debris is over deep ocean and unlikely to be a danger. Mir took this path, coming down into the Pacific ocean on a steep angle.
As for putting it into a higher orbit, in order just to get it to a geosynchronous orbit, it would require roughly twice the mass of the ISS in propellants. We could maybe get it into a medium orbit, such that it would not come down for centuries, but that would still require billions of dollars in rockets. Maybe if ITS launches ahead of schedule...
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
The Zen architecture uses four-core "Complexes", which combine cache and some cache-coherency logic (not execution resources, the way Bulldozer did). The six-core parts are confirmed to be two-complex (eight-core) parts with two cores disabled. The four-core parts are almost assuredly single-complex parts, ie. a die specific for four-core (and under?) chips.
Remote-controlled turrets have recently become a trendy upgrade for military vehicles - the M1's TUSK system (Tank Urban Survival Kit) includes a remote-controlled 12.7mm machine gun, to allow it to be operated by the crew without exposing themselves.
Autonomous turrets are deployed along the Korean DMZ, and are equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher and a 5.56mm machine gun. They are claimed to be configured to require human authorization to fire, but are widely suspected to have fully-autonomous capabilities.
However, none of these are man-portable, for the simple reason that any system able to aim a decently powerful firearm is going to be fairly heavy. Even a light rifle will be 3kg+ with ammo, and recoil will be a problem without more mass (either for a recoil-damping system, or just to dissipate the force). Not to mention that it will be slower to aim (point-and-shoot is a lot easier than looking through a camera and pressing buttons, and that cover is rarely perfect - the soldier will be at risk anyways. Setting up some tripod-mounted remote-control gun sounds like an invitation to throw grenades at you.
Captain Falcon has the highest movement speed but he generally has slower attacks than any other competitive-level character. In particular, his neutral B is the slowest attack in the game.
If you were referring to "the simple strategy of crouching at the edge of the stage caused the network to behave very oddly", "network" refers to "neural network", meaning the AI. I didn't see any other references to networks in the article.
Is that apogee or perigee altitude? I can't imagine these tiny satellites had enough propellant for a circularization burn, but I couldn't find any more detailed orbital parameters. A relatively elliptical orbit would have their orbit decay much faster.
I'm working on a system now, and for the first time in my career, I'm taking the time to really do it right (mostly because, for the first time in my career, I'm being allowed to). Even though it's mostly used in-house, we do have outside customers with access so I do make sure it runs acceptably on slow connections or devices.
Images are small and scarce. That's not exactly a big deal these days, but honestly, it makes styling easier.
There is one CSS file. It caches just fine. I just ran a test simulating a 22kbps connection - the first page load is about ten seconds, but after that, nothing takes more than a second or so to load, save for one page I've already marked for revision.
Javascript is minimal, mostly used to make nested menus load with AJAX or to do form submission with nice validation. This saves bandwidth overall, so I'd call it a win. The site does not degrade gracefully without Javascript but it doesn't require that much CPU horsepower to do what we do with it.
There are no ads or tracking. Not even Google Analytics. The designer wants to add it but I'm not gonna let it happen. We have server logs we can analyze for all the info we need, why would we send that on to Google, not to mention the perf hit?
Tested in current versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and Edge, and also IE10, under Windows and Linux (for browsers that run on Linux). IE misses some styling features, Firefox has some alignment glitches I haven't gotten around to yelling at the designer to fix it yet, but everything is fully usable. Safari and OS X testing will happen if we ever get a Mac to test with. Mobile browsers technically work but the site is very information-dense and nobody in their right minds would use it on a phone. (And I've tested it with Lynx, you can read it but it's not easy, and saving stuff is broken... if I ever run out of stuff to do, I might fix that, but it's not exactly a priority)
On a normal business-class internet connection (25Mbps shared across a dozen people), and a normal business-class browser (dual-core, 8GB RAM, Windows), most pages load in about 30ms. Only one takes longer than 100ms, and that's already queued for revision.
The fundamental problem is that too few programmers have a direct profit incentive to make a good website user experience. The big sites make money from ads, which are inherently anti-user. Contractors (which I used to be) care more about getting it out under the hours estimate than about quality. I work directly for the people who use this site eight hours a day, you can bet your ass I'll make this a good site for them to use.
It's a fuel pump. Unlike a reciprocating engine, where you can inject the fuel at low pressure and then compress it, a rocket engine has to inject the propellant at the same pressure it's burned at, and thermodynamics wants that pressure to be as high as possible in order to get maximum efficiency (imagine a car engine that injected fuel at the top of the cylinder stroke instead of the bottom). Combined with the sheer amount of propellant being used, that means you need an absolutely insane amount of power in your fuel and oxidizer pumps.
So they use a turbopump. A small amount of fuel and oxidizer are tapped off and burned. The resulting hot CO2 and H2O are used to run a turbine, which drives the pump. In the Merlin engines, and in many other engines, it ends up just exhausting, generating no additional thrust. Other designs, including Raptor, find ways to re-use that exhaust to generate a bit more power.
The jury's still out on bears, though.
Good theory, but I think you're wrong. That's not what's hurting Microsoft - Sony did the same thing, with rumors of the "Neo" appearing shortly after the console itself launched. And yet the PS4 still sold quite well from day one.
What hurt the Xb1 is that it's demonstrably weaker than the PS4, but cost significantly more at launch ($500 compared to $400). Most games are available on both, so the natural inclination is to go with the cheaper and more powerful console. With a wide library of shared games, there's lots of direct comparisons to make, and even before they launched, it was easy to tell the PS4 would be more powerful. That gave the PS4 a very strong advantage during the first year or two.
Even now, they only have price-parity, with both having an entry price around $250-$300. But more people already have a PS4, making that the more attractive option both for multiplayer gaming (if all your friends are on PS4, you'd want one too) and for the larger percentage of third-party exclusive titles (it's nowhere near as big a deal as it once was, since porting is so easy, but there's still some studios that are deciding to skip the Xb1 because the audience is smaller). And it seems to me (as a non-Xb1, non-PS4 gamer) that Sony's shoveling the money from their console sales into more first-party games, giving it a still stronger library, which is ultimately what every gamer cares about.
Microsoft doesn't have a lot of options for coming back from this, just as the PS3 struggled to come back from the Xb360's early lead and the XbC never came close to the PS2. They could make the Scorpio be *substantially* more powerful than the PS4 Pro, making it more future-proof and maybe able to handle 4K/VR better. They could slash the price, and hope to catch up that way, but that's a risky move. They could pin it on VR or AR, but that's riskier still. They could double-down on their cross-play with PC bets - make every single Xb1 game PC-compatible and bundle a PC version, which would widen their library (although it would cannibalize Scorpio somewhat). Or they could go on a spending spree and buy up every developer they can, and kill off the PS4's third-party support - Sony is no Nintendo, they can't survive on first-party games alone (even Nintendo might not do so much longer).
An order of magnitude less than $8,000,000,000 is still $800,000,000 - which is still an order of magnitude greater than the price difference between ULA and SpaceX. I won't begrudge NASA if they play it safe and go with a more reliable launch system for JWST.
You can have $70M of your taxpayer dollars used on his rockets, or you can have $160M of your taxpayer dollars go to Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Your choice.
So:
* Cheaper by 55%
* Built entirely in America
* Doesn't give money to a country we're sanctioning
* No design elements from the 1970s
* Company is doing innovative things to drive down costs even more in the future
* Slightly more likely to explode
Seems like a good thing to me.
Solid rocket motors have tradeoffs. In some circumstances, they make sense.
They are long-term storage-stable. Build it, stick it in a silo somewhere, and leave it be for a few years, it will still launch just fine. Hypergolic liquid-fueled rockets can't be kept ready-to-launch for more than a few days*, and cryogenic liquid-fueled rockets can't be kept ready-to-launch for more than a few hours. This makes them particularly preferable for military uses, everything from little anti-tank rockets to ICBMs. This also reduces the number of ground crew needed - you don't need to worry about fueling, just electricals and signals.
They have extremely high levels of thrust, due to the extremely high energy density. The Shuttle's SRBs were each twice as powerful as the largest liquid-fueled rockets. This makes them very popular as boosters.
They have a lot of impulse per unit volume. What most rockets care about is impulse per unit mass (aka specific impulse), but some cases care about volume. If you're launching from an aircraft, like Stratolaunch or Pegasus, this matters. If you have constrained volume because you're in a fixed-size fairing, this matters. If you're launching from a submarine, this matters.
It's also often a matter of economies of scale. Countries with military missile programs (which have many reasons to go solid-fueled) often use them for other things as well, either to subsidize their military-industrial complex or to take advantage of existing scale to make civilian rocketry cheaper, depending on how cynical you are. The US, masters of solid-fueled ICBMs, used a pair of massive SRBs on the Space Shuttle, and will use them again on SLS, if that ever flies. The ESA's Ariane 5 uses SRBs based on a French SLBM. Japan may not field ICBMs, but they too have a reason - the first stage of this rocket is almost identical to the booster of their H-II rocket.
The higher stages are solid-fueled presumably to maintain that low-ground-crew capability, and the minor reduction in drag can't hurt either.
The difference, as I see it, is that "incorrect news" or "wrong news" lacks malice - it may have been wrong, but it was intended to be true, and either accident or negligence caused it to not be. "Fake news" was known by its peddler to be false, and yet was pushed anyways because The Cause mattered more than The Truth.
Chinese citizens are among the most visibly affected by pollution in general, through smog, and they have sufficient communications and disposable income to organize a movement against it. That movement has coalesced and is pushing for reduced air pollution in general, with carbon dioxide as merely one of the problems. But because the movement formed while climate change was an article of discussion internationally, the Chinese movement has ingrained a fight against climate change into their philosophy.
China is far from an ideal democracy, but no government is immune to the ill will of its citizens. The Chinese government does not have any particular conflict of interests here - they need to keep manufacturing up, in order to keep their population employed, but oil and coal are mostly imported so reducing their use would actually be a minor improvement. The pressure from the Chinese citizenry isn't particularly hard, but with no reason to fight back the Chinese government is willing to go along to avoid possible unrest. And the Chinese government has historically taken a very long view compared to most Western governments, so the whole "leave a livable Earth for future generations" thing might actually matter to them.
Two words: Carbon tax.
Carbon taxes will make most carbon-producing activities unprofitable. Right now, coal actually requires government subsidies in order to survive. Flip that to a tax, and electrical power generation from fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) ends about as quickly as new carbon-neutral plants can be built (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, hydro, nuclear - all are carbon-neutral and cost-competitive). For the electric grid, it's not a matter of technology, merely a matter of using technologies we already have. We could have gone carbon-neutral in the 70s if we had gone all-in on nuclear power and hydroelectric. Now we have even more options.
That leaves transportation and direct industrial use. We're already starting to see a shift towards battery-electric vehicles (it's not just Tesla - out of the top ten auto manufacturers, the only ones without an actively-made electric car are Suzuki and Citroen), and gas is under $2/gal. If the carbon tax merely pushed the cost of gasoline up to European prices, around $5-6/gal, that would accelerate the movement. BEVs are only as carbon-free as the electric grid, but a) we already get a lot of carbon-free power, so it's already greener, and b) as the grid becomes greener, BEVs become greener. The technology seems to be at a level that's competitive already - it's an obvious corollary to the efficient market hypothesis that if everyone in a given field is selling something, it's profitable to do so.
There would still be some transportation burning fossil fuels (aircraft, ships, rail), some of which aren't easily electrified. Rail can probably be electrified relatively easily, but aircraft will be very hard to do). But those will merely have to shoulder the cost - and they already have huge natural economic incentives to minimize fuel consumption, which in turn minimizes carbon dioxide release.
(Second-order effects might actually make manufacturers shift back to the West if there's a global carbon tax. Intercontinental shipping will become more expensive, so there would be an economic advantage to manufacturing close to the sale destination, possibly enough to outweigh the lower labor costs overseas. That's not directly relevant to the problem of climate change but it would certainly be a nice side benefit.)
Direct industrial use is a bit harder. Lots of industrial processes require heat, notably metal smelting and cement production, and a lot of them get it by burning fossil fuels of one sort or another. We might be able to improve on that by using solar reflector heating or electric heating, but it's probably just going to be a cost that gets passed on to the consumer and thus reduces consumption. Which still ultimately lowers CO2 production, so I'll count that as a weak win. Remember, we don't have to get to literally zero carbon emissions, we just have to get down to a level the natural carbon cycle can swallow.
And a tax on carbon dioxide would allow reduction of other taxes (in countries who have balanced budgets) or prevent the need for other taxes to be raised (in countries with imbalanced budgets). Since a lot of those taxes have no benefit beyond revenue, and have negative effects elsewhere (sales tax, income tax), we would improve our economy by reducing them.
Damage to Comcast's lines is already covered by applicable law. This is not made explicit in this new ordinance, but because the ordinance requires the attacher to both post a bond, and to indemnify (protect from legal repercussions for damages) the pole owner, it's clearly something obvious to the lawyers who wrote it.
This law also requires notification be sent to anyone whose lines are moved, and places liability for certain costs on the one doing the moving - cost for the existing user to perform inspections, and cover the costs for any mistakes made that bring it out of spec with the pole owner. And the pole owners may require approval of the contractors who actually perform the work.
Also, the law does require that the new line owner gets permission from the pole owner, and that any work that could reasonably cause a service outage must notify the existing line owners, and must coordinate with them if they choose to do so (within a certain timeframe - if Comcast sits around for a month after being told of outage-causing work, the work may proceed without them).
The price for a Wacom screen of that size is about $2800, and that one's only 2560x1440. $1400 for a decent-specced computer in that form factor is about what you'd pay with anyone else.