NASA pays SpaceX primarily to put NASA satellites into orbit, or to send NASA cargo to NASA astronauts on a space station partially built by NASA. They provided some funding to help SpaceX develop that capability. They are continuing to fund SpaceX's development of Dragon v2 (because NASA also wants the ability to send NASA astronauts to the space station) and Falcon 9 Heavy (because NASA wants to improve what NASA satellites SpaceX can put into orbit). NASA is *not* directly funding BFR/BFS development, because they don't want that (the current BFR development was funded with the *profits* from the Falcon 9 flights, just as Falcon 9 reuse was). Note that NASA also pays United Launch Alliance, Orbital ATK, and Roscosmos for launch services, and has been funding development in Boeing, ULA, Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada, and Blue Origin, all of whom are building things NASA wants to be able to buy one day.
The US Air Force and the NRO also pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit, and the USAF was among the early funders in SpaceX because they like having redundant means of orbiting satellites. I believe they are funding development of Falcon 9 Heavy in order to have a redundant means of orbiting heavy satellites. They are not funding BFR/BFS development because their job has nothing to do with Mars, unless the Russians start putting guns and soldiers there.
I never said there *was* a media conspiracy, only that Trump was implying that there was. I have seen no evidence that it exists, save for the claims of Trump and other random nutjobs. Groundless claims by people with no reputation for accuracy are not evidence.
And if this election has taught me anything about the media, it's that the right-wing, not the left, has a ridiculous amount of control over press and public perceptions. They've managed to convince far too many people that Clinton's "scandals" are on par with Trump's - something that even a cursory look shows to be completely and objectively false.
I was wondering how he was going to try to recover from his recent string of bad news. Looks like his method is to pretend it's a conspiracy by the left-wing media to ruin him with an "onslaught" of bad press. Which implies that the stories are false or exaggerated, without actually making that claim. Clever, in case he ever needs to admit that the reports are true.
Truth has no sides. Reality has no bias. If these things are true, and I have seen no indications that they are not, then the news is making Donald Trump look bad because Donald Trump is actually bad. If he steals money from charity to bribe investigators to turn a blind eye to his fraudulent businesses, the blame for the bad press afterward lies purely at the hands of Trump, not on the media and press.
We cannot - therefore, your assumption must be incorrect, in a case of proof by contradiction.
Sports are physical events, where certain biological differences clearly affect performance. Race does involve biological factors besides just skin color, and some scientists have concluded that sub-saharan africans (not just "blacks", but a more specific subgroup) have a leg-length-to-body-size ratio that favors the kind of movement seen in basketball. You will find a similar bias towards taller basketball players - height being a quite clear advantage in the game. Discrimination is in fact allowed when you're discriminating on "ability to do the job" - you see which college-level players perform well, and hire them, and if reality happened to be biased towards a specific group, that's not really a problem.
However, no reproducible study has found a statistically significant difference in mental capacity between humans of different races. There are clearly some people who are smarter than others, but race is not a reliable predictor of intelligence. And since there are no physical differences that make one better or worse at data analysis, seeing any company that does data analysis with a substantially different racial makeup is suspicious. Maybe there's an explanation - it could be coincidence, or maybe another company has a hiring policy that's biased towards asians and hired them all up. Maybe there's a factor being discriminated on that correlates with race - preferring native citizens or permanent residents over those on work visas might give this result (or it might not). Or maybe Thiel's just racist. He hasn't been charged with anything yet, they're just checking to make sure there's not anything illegal going on.
So it makes sense for them to continue to generate and push the power into an overloaded grid that has no use for it, because they make money doing that.
And while wind companies are doing that, what are the coal/gas/oil plants doing? The rational move for them is to not generate once the price of electricity drops below the price of whichever fossil fuel they use, which means less CO2 is produced. It may not be an exact "every watt of wind power generated means one watt equivalent less CO2" but it's still reducing CO2 emissions.
Tesla's Autopilot functions at almost exactly the same level as an aircraft autopilot. Perhaps even better - an aircraft will not automatically detect and avoid other aircraft, only mapped obstacles. A Tesla will automatically brake for other vehicles moving into your lane.
I do agree that "Copilot" would be a better name, but only because people are idiots, not because it's a bad name.
Okay, so you're on a 1600x900 screen. Or maybe 1200x900, if 4:3 laptops are still around, but horizontal space doesn't seem to be a problem for either of us.
Vertically, that's not all that much more than the 1920x1080 screens I regularly use, and I've not made any special effort to optimize vertical space on my setup.
My current screen has vertical space allocated like so: 46px: Firefox window border and tabs (a bit extra wasted space because I'm not in a maximized window, but rather a 960-wide half-screen window) 38px: Main address bar + search bar 25px: bookmarks bar 913px: Page content 18px: horizontal scrollbar and bottom window border 40px: Windows taskbar
Adjusting to a 900px screen height, that alone would give 733px for page content, or about 81%. This is a worst-case for my setup - simply maximizing the window would cause the horizontal scrollbar to disappear and the top window border to shrink, saving 17px and 16px, respectively. At this point, you should be up to 766px out of 900px, or 85%.
The next easy step is disabling the bookmarks bar, for 25px, and setting the Windows taskbar to auto-hide, saving 40px. That would give you 831px of page content, or 92%, which beats at least my installation of Chrome. That's pretty good, but I can do better:
Press F11.
100% of your screen is now devoted to page content. All bars and menus are automatically hidden.
I have a row of tabs, the address/search bar, and a bookmarks bar. On Firefox, that's about eight pixels less than on Chrome, because the back button is slightly bigger, but the overall height is only 90 pixels. I'm not running any special extensions to hide things - I have a few addons that add buttons to the main bar, and I've disabled more than a few things, but even those were through easily-discovered menus. If you disable the bookmarks bar, that cuts about 20 pixels - and even at 800x600, 70 pixels ought to be fully tolerable.
(Agree on the resources, though - I have to restart Firefox every few days because it starts getting laggy, and I've had to adblock a lot of useless Javascript that lags the browser.)
My first exposure to programming was MicroWorlds, in third grade. I was immediately hooked, and never turned back. I think it's fairly safe to say that if it wasn't for that, my life would be completely different, and probably for the worse. Rest in peace, Dr. Papert. You set out to teach children to program and love programming, and judging by these comments, you succeeded.
F9-001: Success F9-002: Success F9-003: Success F9-004: Primary mission success, secondary mission scrubbed due to ISS safety rules F9-005: Success F9-006: Success (first v1.1 flight) F9-007: Success F9-008: Success F9-009: Success (first flight with landing legs) F9-010: Success F9-011: Success F9-013: Success F9-012: Success F9-014: Success F9-015: Success F9-016: Success F9-017: Success F9-018: Success F9-020: Failure, RUD at T+150s F9-021: Success, first v1.1 FT, first successful landing at Canaveral F9-019: Success F9-022: Success F9-023: Success, first successful landing on droneship F9-024: Success F9-025: Success F9-026: Success F9-027: Success
One failure. Out of twenty-seven, for a success rate of 96%. Unless you want to count landings as necessary for success, in which case they have a 19% success rate - but by that metric, Soyuz, Proton, Atlas, Delta, Titan, Redstone, Saturn, Ariane, Athena, and Zenit all have 0% success rates, and only Energia-Buran and STS also have a non-zero success rate, with 50% and 98%, respectively.
Over that same period North Korea fired four missiles (claiming to have fired even more but not supported by evidence) and launched two orbital rockets. The missiles may or may not have failed - they fell vastly short of their design range but that may have been deliberate - and both rockets worked, although their payloads may have failed. At least, this is all the info I could find - there's no convenient list of every launch attempt they've made, and I suspect most failed launches are never revealed.
For computers? Quite some time. There was a one-off Atom netbook chip back in 2008, and before that was Core (the predecessor to the more popular, 64-bit capable Core 2) in 2006-2007 and some of the early Pentium 4s up to 2005. On the AMD side, you have to go back to K7, which stopped being made in 2005. So everything that you'd want to run a desktop distro on is at least eight years old.
Intel did make x86-32-only chips for smartphones until much more recently, but you wouldn't want to run a desktop distro on those, anyways. And it's not like the Linux kernel is dropping support for it, so whatever weird hack project you might theoretically want to make with a bunch of old smartphones is still just as doable.
Agreed. I saw this news elsewhere, and it's pretty clear that the assets are, bare minimum, "traced" from other games. I'd need to see a more technical analysis to know if they were directly ripped from another game (and then modified just enough to not be copy/paste), but that seems more probable than not.
We had transoceanic ships half a millenium ago, and it improved quite a bit from those days, but today's tech would be basically recognizable to someone from the 1600s, even if unbelievably large in scale. Metal ships & propellers seem to be the biggest advances (disregarding nuclear fuel sources vs ICEs) and those aren't considered new by any means.
Our ships would be basically recognizable to someone from the 1600s. What about our jetliners? Or our spacecraft? In the 1600s, only experts in relatively narrow fields would have had anything at all to relate those things to. Most would have had no idea such technology could even exist.
Because Trump is the subject of the article, and Clinton is not. Clinton would definitely deserve many notes, although mostly on her "I supported this all along" lies.
I think it is a moral imperative (on all of us) to eliminate falsehoods. I would greatly prefer it if Facebook (and other companies with considerable control over the flow of information) would restrict the spread of objectively and provably false ideas. Perhaps not actually blocking them, but how hard would it be to add a "this has been proven false" message (with citations) to people sharing, say, anti-vax propaganda? And how much benefit would the public gain by it? Quite a bit, considering the anti-vaxxers have caused actual deaths. That's an extreme case for an extreme gain, but less-extreme cases will still have gains.
Most politicians are pretty well-practiced at avoiding statements that could be factually wrong, and would not be too badly affected. Even Trump is pretty good at this - his claim about how much the wall will cost is hard to disprove without actually building the damn thing (argue against, yes - disprove, no). But he provably lies pretty often - his stories about seeing Muslims celebrating in the streets as the WTC collapsed are demonstrably false. Or his claims to have never settled a case out of court, or never declared bankruptcy.
As long as it would be done fairly (ie. all candidates are subject to the same scrutiny) and to a set standard, I think this would be a good thing.
Decent starting point, but you stopped thinking far too quickly.
Centralizing power generation (moving from millions of small gasoline engines to hundreds of big oil/coal turbine generators) allows for greater efficiency. Most things work better at scale - you get more power extracted per unit fuel. And it allows you to cost-effectively install better pollution-reducing devices - big scrubbers on the exhaust, to keep particulates and such down. So even if the power grid were 100% fossil fuels, it would still be a gain.
But the grid isn't 100% fossil fuels. In some places those are a minority already - where hydro or geothermal or nuclear dominate. And it decouples the generators from the infrastructure - if all cars ran off batteries, we could switch over to whatever new power method works best, as we invent it. If we had cheap, efficient, clean nuclear fusion, switching to it would be easy if we were on electric cars. Switching from gasoline/diesel engines to fusion engines would require a lot more change to the infrastructure - new fueling stations built, new pipelines for deuterium run, new mechanics trained on new engine types.
I'm American, and I habitually avoid "tonnes" because, when spoken, there's no way to know if it's the "1000 kilograms" metric tonne, the "2000 pounds" American ton (aka short ton, or customary ton), or the "2240 pounds" British ton (aka long ton, imperial ton, or, most confusingly, also called the metric ton). "Megagram" is far harder to confuse with anything else, and even if it's not natural for most people to use, it's obvious what it means - 1000 kilograms, or 1000000 grams. Even Americans can figure out what it means.
So it's used primarily by Americans who wish their country could hurry the fuck up and switch to metric already.
SpaceX does not "already" have one. They definitely didn't when SLS started.
SLS is big. Really big. 70Mg to orbit with just the base model, potentially up to 150Mg with upgrades. It will be classified as a "Super-Heavy-Lift Launch Vehicle", the same class as Saturn V.
Falcon 9, as currently flown, can orbit 13Mg ("Medium Lift"). The biggest rocket currently flying, Delta IV Heavy, can orbit nearly 29Mg, making it one of two flying Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles. The analogous Falcon Heavy vehicle is specified to orbit 53Mg, putting it on the edge between HLLV and SHLLV.
That said, SLS is an absolute disaster of a project. It reuses almost every part of the Shuttle's powertrain - same engines, same fuel tanks, boosters that are identical except for being 25% longer. It uses an upper-stage engine that's flown since before Saturn. Years of study were spent on related designs, like Ares. And yet it will cost $18,000,000,000 and eight years to design, build and launch one of them? In eight years, SpaceX went from not existing, to building their own rocket using their own engine to launch their own spacecraft. And it's looking likely that, eight years from now, they'll have not one but two of their own super-heavy-lift rockets, Falcon Heavy and the Mars Colonial Transporter launcher.
After the Space Shuttle retired, and with all replacement programs canned by Congress, NASA had no way to get astronauts into space, except by hitching a ride with the Russians, and NASA had no native way to resupply the ISS.
The COTS program has already fixed one of those. NASA now has access to two locally-made spacecraft that can fly on either the entirely-American Falcon 9, or the partially-foreign Antares or Atlas V. This gives pretty robust resiliency - a single accident cannot halt the entire system. (Two back-to-back RUDs can do that, though, as we saw).
The CCD program is getting NASA access to two spacecraft capable of shuttling astronauts to low orbit - one built to fly atop basically any lift rocket that can handle the load. Three other spacecraft are in the program, theoretically able to replace either of the two main CCD craft should they fall too far behind schedule or too far over budget - helping to ensure robust access to space.
Where would NASA be right now without them? Well, they could still loft satellites or probes on the high-price ULA vehicles, but they'd probably have to abandon the ISS. Between only having Russia for crew transfers, and only having Russia, Japan and the ESA for resupply missions, they would not have been able to effectively operate the ISS.
The entire cost of COTS, CRS and CCD combined is $12.3B. For comparison, the Constellation program cost $9B, and produced no flyable launch vehicles or spacecraft before it was canceled. SLS will have cost us $18B by the time it makes its first test flight. Considering the commercial programs* have given us multiple, redundant systems, and included the cost of dozens of missions, while SLS is a single spacecraft for a single rocket that will perform a single flight on its $18B budget, I think we're getting a pretty good deal.
* SLS is technically "commercial" as it is being made by several independent corporations. However, the key difference is that it is not competitive. If Aerojet Rocketdyne cannot produce engines at sufficient quality and quantity, or at a low enough price, NASA has no alternative. Same for the boosters and Orbital ATK, or the upper stage and Boeing, etc.. (The other difference is that the COTS/CRS/CCD program rockets are assembled by the contractor, while SLS will be assembled by NASA, but this is not a particularly meaningful distinction)
Hey dumbass, this was a private industry launch. NASA has been contracting with independent companies for cargo to the ISS since the Space Shuttle stopped flying - both to Russian space firms, and to several American ones.
For this flight, the contract was to Orbital ATK, but due to the grounding of the Antares 100 lift vehicle (after one exploded in late 2014), Orbital ATK subcontracted the launch vehicle (at their own cost) to United Launch Alliance. The Cygnus spacecraft is also made by Orbital ATK, and is part of the cost.
Total cargo was 3513kg. It was part of an ongoing NASA contract, with precise details not known, but the original contract was $1.9B for eight flights, or $237M per launch. This contract was later extended with three more flights, presumably at similar costs.
This was the heaviest Cygnus launch to date, so dividing the payload mass by the cost gives us a lower bound on cost-per-mass of $67K per kilogram, or $31K per pound. So you're off by at least two orders of magnitude, probably closer to three.
Incidentally, the price-per-kilogram of a Saturn IB launch was $25K/kg (or thereabouts - it never flew to the ISS's orbit, so I had to make some estimates), and the price-per-kilogram of a Space Shuttle launch was $98K/kg (full program cost divided by successful launches) to $28K/kg (individual launch cost). All three of those numbers are adjusted for inflation, BTW, I'm not trying to bullshit on this. Also incidentally, the Falcon 9/Dragon flights to the ISS under the same program have a cost-per-mass of $40K/kg (they're more public with their pricing), although this includes a substantial deorbiting payload, which only SpaceX currently offers in any substantial amount.
And for one last dose of perspective, shipping from L.A. to NYC is $23/kg ($9/lb), for an overnight Fedex shipment of 400kg (the mass of the earliest test CRS flights). You literally think that shipping to outer space should cost no more than twice what it costs to ship around the country. Maybe you should get some perspective before you start bitching?
There's some app-tier logic that tends to fuck this up. I myself had to deal with it.
In my case, I had written a set of webservices that took in parameters as POST form variables, and updated records accordingly. Parameters that were not sent were not modified. POST form variables are string-only, so I had originally planned for the empty string ("") to be the value indicating "set this field to null", but that caused problems for the web-tier developer, so (under mild protest) I made it so the string "null" would set a field to null.
I had written it generically, and in such a way that it transformed the set-to-null string into an actual null prior to processing, so even fields which could not be set to null, like name fields, would be modified that way.
And then there was a user named "Au Null".
And then I forced the web-tier developer to figure out how to send an actual empty string.
And then I used JSON forms for all future webservices, when I was given an option, so an actual null data type could be used.
Nuclear, alongside geothermal and hydroelectric, is well-suited to handling base load. It "throttles" very slowly - you generally want to keep it at a consistent power output. It pairs quite well with hydro (you can use the reservoir for "free" energy storage, letting it fill when load is below what the nuke plant provides, then let it drain when you need peak power), but it's also something that can be used for sole base load pretty much anywhere, whereas geothermal/hydroelectric don't work everywhere. The pollution of nuclear fission can be managed, and even "green" power has an environmental impact.
Solar and wind serve a purpose as well, handling the peak load (which is often quite substantial - for rough estimates, peak power consumption can be treated as 2x base load). You can work with just solar/wind, but that requires either a lot of long-distance power transmission, or a lot of power storage, both of which have both infrastructure costs, and power losses. It's also inherently risky to be too heavily focused on any one generation system - diverse ecosystems can withstand stress better.
Oil/gas/coal also have their niche. They're good for on-site emergency power, because they scale down well, and require little space. They're also good for off-grid power, where demand exceeds what portable solar can provide (eg. welding). And they might be good for "emergency" power for the grid as well - if conditions are temporarily bad for other forms of power (a drought in a hydro-heavy region), or even just a long-term high demand, a mothballed coal plant could be brought online relatively quickly, and will function for as long as fuel can be supplied.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA pays SpaceX primarily to put NASA satellites into orbit, or to send NASA cargo to NASA astronauts on a space station partially built by NASA. They provided some funding to help SpaceX develop that capability. They are continuing to fund SpaceX's development of Dragon v2 (because NASA also wants the ability to send NASA astronauts to the space station) and Falcon 9 Heavy (because NASA wants to improve what NASA satellites SpaceX can put into orbit). NASA is *not* directly funding BFR/BFS development, because they don't want that (the current BFR development was funded with the *profits* from the Falcon 9 flights, just as Falcon 9 reuse was). Note that NASA also pays United Launch Alliance, Orbital ATK, and Roscosmos for launch services, and has been funding development in Boeing, ULA, Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada, and Blue Origin, all of whom are building things NASA wants to be able to buy one day.
The US Air Force and the NRO also pay SpaceX to put their satellites into orbit, and the USAF was among the early funders in SpaceX because they like having redundant means of orbiting satellites. I believe they are funding development of Falcon 9 Heavy in order to have a redundant means of orbiting heavy satellites. They are not funding BFR/BFS development because their job has nothing to do with Mars, unless the Russians start putting guns and soldiers there.
I never said there *was* a media conspiracy, only that Trump was implying that there was. I have seen no evidence that it exists, save for the claims of Trump and other random nutjobs. Groundless claims by people with no reputation for accuracy are not evidence.
And if this election has taught me anything about the media, it's that the right-wing, not the left, has a ridiculous amount of control over press and public perceptions. They've managed to convince far too many people that Clinton's "scandals" are on par with Trump's - something that even a cursory look shows to be completely and objectively false.
I was wondering how he was going to try to recover from his recent string of bad news. Looks like his method is to pretend it's a conspiracy by the left-wing media to ruin him with an "onslaught" of bad press. Which implies that the stories are false or exaggerated, without actually making that claim. Clever, in case he ever needs to admit that the reports are true.
Truth has no sides. Reality has no bias. If these things are true, and I have seen no indications that they are not, then the news is making Donald Trump look bad because Donald Trump is actually bad. If he steals money from charity to bribe investigators to turn a blind eye to his fraudulent businesses, the blame for the bad press afterward lies purely at the hands of Trump, not on the media and press.
We cannot - therefore, your assumption must be incorrect, in a case of proof by contradiction.
Sports are physical events, where certain biological differences clearly affect performance. Race does involve biological factors besides just skin color, and some scientists have concluded that sub-saharan africans (not just "blacks", but a more specific subgroup) have a leg-length-to-body-size ratio that favors the kind of movement seen in basketball. You will find a similar bias towards taller basketball players - height being a quite clear advantage in the game. Discrimination is in fact allowed when you're discriminating on "ability to do the job" - you see which college-level players perform well, and hire them, and if reality happened to be biased towards a specific group, that's not really a problem.
However, no reproducible study has found a statistically significant difference in mental capacity between humans of different races. There are clearly some people who are smarter than others, but race is not a reliable predictor of intelligence. And since there are no physical differences that make one better or worse at data analysis, seeing any company that does data analysis with a substantially different racial makeup is suspicious. Maybe there's an explanation - it could be coincidence, or maybe another company has a hiring policy that's biased towards asians and hired them all up. Maybe there's a factor being discriminated on that correlates with race - preferring native citizens or permanent residents over those on work visas might give this result (or it might not). Or maybe Thiel's just racist. He hasn't been charged with anything yet, they're just checking to make sure there's not anything illegal going on.
So it makes sense for them to continue to generate and push the power into an overloaded grid that has no use for it, because they make money doing that.
And while wind companies are doing that, what are the coal/gas/oil plants doing? The rational move for them is to not generate once the price of electricity drops below the price of whichever fossil fuel they use, which means less CO2 is produced. It may not be an exact "every watt of wind power generated means one watt equivalent less CO2" but it's still reducing CO2 emissions.
Not zero, but not far from it. I'd say a 1:1000 chance, and that's probably an overestimate.
Tesla's Autopilot functions at almost exactly the same level as an aircraft autopilot. Perhaps even better - an aircraft will not automatically detect and avoid other aircraft, only mapped obstacles. A Tesla will automatically brake for other vehicles moving into your lane.
I do agree that "Copilot" would be a better name, but only because people are idiots, not because it's a bad name.
Okay, so you're on a 1600x900 screen. Or maybe 1200x900, if 4:3 laptops are still around, but horizontal space doesn't seem to be a problem for either of us.
Vertically, that's not all that much more than the 1920x1080 screens I regularly use, and I've not made any special effort to optimize vertical space on my setup.
My current screen has vertical space allocated like so:
46px: Firefox window border and tabs (a bit extra wasted space because I'm not in a maximized window, but rather a 960-wide half-screen window)
38px: Main address bar + search bar
25px: bookmarks bar
913px: Page content
18px: horizontal scrollbar and bottom window border
40px: Windows taskbar
Adjusting to a 900px screen height, that alone would give 733px for page content, or about 81%. This is a worst-case for my setup - simply maximizing the window would cause the horizontal scrollbar to disappear and the top window border to shrink, saving 17px and 16px, respectively. At this point, you should be up to 766px out of 900px, or 85%.
The next easy step is disabling the bookmarks bar, for 25px, and setting the Windows taskbar to auto-hide, saving 40px. That would give you 831px of page content, or 92%, which beats at least my installation of Chrome. That's pretty good, but I can do better:
Press F11.
100% of your screen is now devoted to page content. All bars and menus are automatically hidden.
You're welcome.
What kind of stuff do you have in your header?
I have a row of tabs, the address/search bar, and a bookmarks bar. On Firefox, that's about eight pixels less than on Chrome, because the back button is slightly bigger, but the overall height is only 90 pixels. I'm not running any special extensions to hide things - I have a few addons that add buttons to the main bar, and I've disabled more than a few things, but even those were through easily-discovered menus. If you disable the bookmarks bar, that cuts about 20 pixels - and even at 800x600, 70 pixels ought to be fully tolerable.
(Agree on the resources, though - I have to restart Firefox every few days because it starts getting laggy, and I've had to adblock a lot of useless Javascript that lags the browser.)
My first exposure to programming was MicroWorlds, in third grade. I was immediately hooked, and never turned back. I think it's fairly safe to say that if it wasn't for that, my life would be completely different, and probably for the worse. Rest in peace, Dr. Papert. You set out to teach children to program and love programming, and judging by these comments, you succeeded.
F9-001: Success
F9-002: Success
F9-003: Success
F9-004: Primary mission success, secondary mission scrubbed due to ISS safety rules
F9-005: Success
F9-006: Success (first v1.1 flight)
F9-007: Success
F9-008: Success
F9-009: Success (first flight with landing legs)
F9-010: Success
F9-011: Success
F9-013: Success
F9-012: Success
F9-014: Success
F9-015: Success
F9-016: Success
F9-017: Success
F9-018: Success
F9-020: Failure, RUD at T+150s
F9-021: Success, first v1.1 FT, first successful landing at Canaveral
F9-019: Success
F9-022: Success
F9-023: Success, first successful landing on droneship
F9-024: Success
F9-025: Success
F9-026: Success
F9-027: Success
One failure. Out of twenty-seven, for a success rate of 96%. Unless you want to count landings as necessary for success, in which case they have a 19% success rate - but by that metric, Soyuz, Proton, Atlas, Delta, Titan, Redstone, Saturn, Ariane, Athena, and Zenit all have 0% success rates, and only Energia-Buran and STS also have a non-zero success rate, with 50% and 98%, respectively.
Over that same period North Korea fired four missiles (claiming to have fired even more but not supported by evidence) and launched two orbital rockets. The missiles may or may not have failed - they fell vastly short of their design range but that may have been deliberate - and both rockets worked, although their payloads may have failed. At least, this is all the info I could find - there's no convenient list of every launch attempt they've made, and I suspect most failed launches are never revealed.
Then you can go right to hell, and take your shitty site with you.
For computers? Quite some time. There was a one-off Atom netbook chip back in 2008, and before that was Core (the predecessor to the more popular, 64-bit capable Core 2) in 2006-2007 and some of the early Pentium 4s up to 2005. On the AMD side, you have to go back to K7, which stopped being made in 2005. So everything that you'd want to run a desktop distro on is at least eight years old.
Intel did make x86-32-only chips for smartphones until much more recently, but you wouldn't want to run a desktop distro on those, anyways. And it's not like the Linux kernel is dropping support for it, so whatever weird hack project you might theoretically want to make with a bunch of old smartphones is still just as doable.
Agreed. I saw this news elsewhere, and it's pretty clear that the assets are, bare minimum, "traced" from other games. I'd need to see a more technical analysis to know if they were directly ripped from another game (and then modified just enough to not be copy/paste), but that seems more probable than not.
We had transoceanic ships half a millenium ago, and it improved quite a bit from those days, but today's tech would be basically recognizable to someone from the 1600s, even if unbelievably large in scale. Metal ships & propellers seem to be the biggest advances (disregarding nuclear fuel sources vs ICEs) and those aren't considered new by any means.
Our ships would be basically recognizable to someone from the 1600s. What about our jetliners? Or our spacecraft? In the 1600s, only experts in relatively narrow fields would have had anything at all to relate those things to. Most would have had no idea such technology could even exist.
Just to put that number in perspective: post-Watergate Nixon polled 2% higher than Donald Trump is right now.
Because Trump is the subject of the article, and Clinton is not. Clinton would definitely deserve many notes, although mostly on her "I supported this all along" lies.
I think it is a moral imperative (on all of us) to eliminate falsehoods. I would greatly prefer it if Facebook (and other companies with considerable control over the flow of information) would restrict the spread of objectively and provably false ideas. Perhaps not actually blocking them, but how hard would it be to add a "this has been proven false" message (with citations) to people sharing, say, anti-vax propaganda? And how much benefit would the public gain by it? Quite a bit, considering the anti-vaxxers have caused actual deaths. That's an extreme case for an extreme gain, but less-extreme cases will still have gains.
Most politicians are pretty well-practiced at avoiding statements that could be factually wrong, and would not be too badly affected. Even Trump is pretty good at this - his claim about how much the wall will cost is hard to disprove without actually building the damn thing (argue against, yes - disprove, no). But he provably lies pretty often - his stories about seeing Muslims celebrating in the streets as the WTC collapsed are demonstrably false. Or his claims to have never settled a case out of court, or never declared bankruptcy.
As long as it would be done fairly (ie. all candidates are subject to the same scrutiny) and to a set standard, I think this would be a good thing.
Decent starting point, but you stopped thinking far too quickly.
Centralizing power generation (moving from millions of small gasoline engines to hundreds of big oil/coal turbine generators) allows for greater efficiency. Most things work better at scale - you get more power extracted per unit fuel. And it allows you to cost-effectively install better pollution-reducing devices - big scrubbers on the exhaust, to keep particulates and such down. So even if the power grid were 100% fossil fuels, it would still be a gain.
But the grid isn't 100% fossil fuels. In some places those are a minority already - where hydro or geothermal or nuclear dominate. And it decouples the generators from the infrastructure - if all cars ran off batteries, we could switch over to whatever new power method works best, as we invent it. If we had cheap, efficient, clean nuclear fusion, switching to it would be easy if we were on electric cars. Switching from gasoline/diesel engines to fusion engines would require a lot more change to the infrastructure - new fueling stations built, new pipelines for deuterium run, new mechanics trained on new engine types.
I'm American, and I habitually avoid "tonnes" because, when spoken, there's no way to know if it's the "1000 kilograms" metric tonne, the "2000 pounds" American ton (aka short ton, or customary ton), or the "2240 pounds" British ton (aka long ton, imperial ton, or, most confusingly, also called the metric ton). "Megagram" is far harder to confuse with anything else, and even if it's not natural for most people to use, it's obvious what it means - 1000 kilograms, or 1000000 grams. Even Americans can figure out what it means.
So it's used primarily by Americans who wish their country could hurry the fuck up and switch to metric already.
SpaceX does not "already" have one. They definitely didn't when SLS started.
SLS is big. Really big. 70Mg to orbit with just the base model, potentially up to 150Mg with upgrades. It will be classified as a "Super-Heavy-Lift Launch Vehicle", the same class as Saturn V.
Falcon 9, as currently flown, can orbit 13Mg ("Medium Lift"). The biggest rocket currently flying, Delta IV Heavy, can orbit nearly 29Mg, making it one of two flying Heavy Lift Launch Vehicles. The analogous Falcon Heavy vehicle is specified to orbit 53Mg, putting it on the edge between HLLV and SHLLV.
That said, SLS is an absolute disaster of a project. It reuses almost every part of the Shuttle's powertrain - same engines, same fuel tanks, boosters that are identical except for being 25% longer. It uses an upper-stage engine that's flown since before Saturn. Years of study were spent on related designs, like Ares. And yet it will cost $18,000,000,000 and eight years to design, build and launch one of them? In eight years, SpaceX went from not existing, to building their own rocket using their own engine to launch their own spacecraft. And it's looking likely that, eight years from now, they'll have not one but two of their own super-heavy-lift rockets, Falcon Heavy and the Mars Colonial Transporter launcher.
After the Space Shuttle retired, and with all replacement programs canned by Congress, NASA had no way to get astronauts into space, except by hitching a ride with the Russians, and NASA had no native way to resupply the ISS.
The COTS program has already fixed one of those. NASA now has access to two locally-made spacecraft that can fly on either the entirely-American Falcon 9, or the partially-foreign Antares or Atlas V. This gives pretty robust resiliency - a single accident cannot halt the entire system. (Two back-to-back RUDs can do that, though, as we saw).
The CCD program is getting NASA access to two spacecraft capable of shuttling astronauts to low orbit - one built to fly atop basically any lift rocket that can handle the load. Three other spacecraft are in the program, theoretically able to replace either of the two main CCD craft should they fall too far behind schedule or too far over budget - helping to ensure robust access to space.
Where would NASA be right now without them? Well, they could still loft satellites or probes on the high-price ULA vehicles, but they'd probably have to abandon the ISS. Between only having Russia for crew transfers, and only having Russia, Japan and the ESA for resupply missions, they would not have been able to effectively operate the ISS.
The entire cost of COTS, CRS and CCD combined is $12.3B. For comparison, the Constellation program cost $9B, and produced no flyable launch vehicles or spacecraft before it was canceled. SLS will have cost us $18B by the time it makes its first test flight. Considering the commercial programs* have given us multiple, redundant systems, and included the cost of dozens of missions, while SLS is a single spacecraft for a single rocket that will perform a single flight on its $18B budget, I think we're getting a pretty good deal.
* SLS is technically "commercial" as it is being made by several independent corporations. However, the key difference is that it is not competitive. If Aerojet Rocketdyne cannot produce engines at sufficient quality and quantity, or at a low enough price, NASA has no alternative. Same for the boosters and Orbital ATK, or the upper stage and Boeing, etc.. (The other difference is that the COTS/CRS/CCD program rockets are assembled by the contractor, while SLS will be assembled by NASA, but this is not a particularly meaningful distinction)
Hey dumbass, this was a private industry launch. NASA has been contracting with independent companies for cargo to the ISS since the Space Shuttle stopped flying - both to Russian space firms, and to several American ones.
For this flight, the contract was to Orbital ATK, but due to the grounding of the Antares 100 lift vehicle (after one exploded in late 2014), Orbital ATK subcontracted the launch vehicle (at their own cost) to United Launch Alliance. The Cygnus spacecraft is also made by Orbital ATK, and is part of the cost.
Total cargo was 3513kg. It was part of an ongoing NASA contract, with precise details not known, but the original contract was $1.9B for eight flights, or $237M per launch. This contract was later extended with three more flights, presumably at similar costs.
This was the heaviest Cygnus launch to date, so dividing the payload mass by the cost gives us a lower bound on cost-per-mass of $67K per kilogram, or $31K per pound. So you're off by at least two orders of magnitude, probably closer to three.
Incidentally, the price-per-kilogram of a Saturn IB launch was $25K/kg (or thereabouts - it never flew to the ISS's orbit, so I had to make some estimates), and the price-per-kilogram of a Space Shuttle launch was $98K/kg (full program cost divided by successful launches) to $28K/kg (individual launch cost). All three of those numbers are adjusted for inflation, BTW, I'm not trying to bullshit on this. Also incidentally, the Falcon 9/Dragon flights to the ISS under the same program have a cost-per-mass of $40K/kg (they're more public with their pricing), although this includes a substantial deorbiting payload, which only SpaceX currently offers in any substantial amount.
And for one last dose of perspective, shipping from L.A. to NYC is $23/kg ($9/lb), for an overnight Fedex shipment of 400kg (the mass of the earliest test CRS flights). You literally think that shipping to outer space should cost no more than twice what it costs to ship around the country. Maybe you should get some perspective before you start bitching?
There's some app-tier logic that tends to fuck this up. I myself had to deal with it.
In my case, I had written a set of webservices that took in parameters as POST form variables, and updated records accordingly. Parameters that were not sent were not modified. POST form variables are string-only, so I had originally planned for the empty string ("") to be the value indicating "set this field to null", but that caused problems for the web-tier developer, so (under mild protest) I made it so the string "null" would set a field to null.
I had written it generically, and in such a way that it transformed the set-to-null string into an actual null prior to processing, so even fields which could not be set to null, like name fields, would be modified that way.
And then there was a user named "Au Null".
And then I forced the web-tier developer to figure out how to send an actual empty string.
And then I used JSON forms for all future webservices, when I was given an option, so an actual null data type could be used.
Every type of power plant has a role to fill.
Nuclear, alongside geothermal and hydroelectric, is well-suited to handling base load. It "throttles" very slowly - you generally want to keep it at a consistent power output. It pairs quite well with hydro (you can use the reservoir for "free" energy storage, letting it fill when load is below what the nuke plant provides, then let it drain when you need peak power), but it's also something that can be used for sole base load pretty much anywhere, whereas geothermal/hydroelectric don't work everywhere. The pollution of nuclear fission can be managed, and even "green" power has an environmental impact.
Solar and wind serve a purpose as well, handling the peak load (which is often quite substantial - for rough estimates, peak power consumption can be treated as 2x base load). You can work with just solar/wind, but that requires either a lot of long-distance power transmission, or a lot of power storage, both of which have both infrastructure costs, and power losses. It's also inherently risky to be too heavily focused on any one generation system - diverse ecosystems can withstand stress better.
Oil/gas/coal also have their niche. They're good for on-site emergency power, because they scale down well, and require little space. They're also good for off-grid power, where demand exceeds what portable solar can provide (eg. welding). And they might be good for "emergency" power for the grid as well - if conditions are temporarily bad for other forms of power (a drought in a hydro-heavy region), or even just a long-term high demand, a mothballed coal plant could be brought online relatively quickly, and will function for as long as fuel can be supplied.