The Saturn V was an amazing thing for its day. But needs and the optimal equipment changes. In the era of a few big missions, that Saturn V made sense. But now we are in the era of lots of small to medium sized missions, the Falcon Heavy makes more sense.
Well the ambitions are bigger, but we also have a whole different level of experience with relightable engines and in-orbit assembly. From what I've understood of orbital mechanics you have to reach LEO first to go anywhere else and there's no real loss from hanging around there a little while as you launch more. All that matters is that you can launch the biggest module. So the Falcon Heavy could roughly re-do the Apollo mission by launching the lunar payload (48t) + third-stage (10t dry mass), then two more Falcon Heavys worth of fuel (110t total). Then you'd have roughly what the Saturn V did, you'd probably pay more than the $90 million/Heavy listed as they'd probably be expendable but for $3-400 million you'd have a Saturn V - equivalent. Launch price, not after spending billions on R&D first.
So in a completely gender blind pay scheme, women still manage to make less then men? Can all of you please shut the fuck up about the pay gap now? It's clear that any remaining difference is caused by women themselves.
I doubt it. It's still possible to argue that gender roles are what leads to women working less profitable shifts and having higher turnover, like for example that female drivers may get more sleazy propositions from drunk men late at night on weekends when prices are high or that mom is the one staying home to watch the kids at night or that they get less social acceptance for being an Uber driver. A lot of the glass ceiling wasn't that they didn't get equal pay for equal jobs but that they could get equal jobs in the first place even if they had the qualifications or they'd get harassed for being a woman. I recall reading an article on Ars Technica about Ivy Hooks, here's a few quotes from the 60s:
Before the NASA opportunity, Hooks had interviewed for jobs in the region's main industry - oil and gas extraction. Despite her degree in mathematics, these companies just wanted her for secretarial jobs. NASA, however, desperately needed talent, regardless of gender
By and large, the Apollo programs at this time remained bastions of masculinity. To thrive, Hooks had to prove her professional skills and have a thick skin. "I had some of the worst treatment I ever had that first year," Hooks recalled. "In today's day and age they'd probably all be in jail or something, or probably at least gotten fired.
"When they yank it off there's a little garter snake, or a garden snake, but definitely not venomous. I guess they were waiting for me to scream, or jump up, or do something. So I just reached over and picked it up and turned around to the guys behind me and said, 'Go play somewhere else.' That probably did more for my NASA career than any work I ever did."
That said, you get pretty much equal pay for equal work. But that's actually pretty well known for anyone who cares to know the truth, they have dug into those numbers and found that actual, comparable men and women doing the same work duties with the same amount of responsibility, overtime and whatnot have very close to equal pay. Some feminists and SJWs simply choose to ignore it. Sure there's the occasional bigot but not many enough to exclude women from getting market wage.
I wouldn't assume conspiracy. Elon is the sort who'd just let the feed roll. He's been quite open about how "space is hard" and honest and forthcoming when things go wrong. Whatever took out the video feed was accidental.
The twitter image of the drone ship smoke clearing to an empty deck + the technical webcast quite clearly saying "We've lost the center core" while the non-technical webcast not saying anything at all and ending pretty abruptly is quite compelling evidence to the contrary. And while the camera feed could have been interrupted it's highly unlikely they'd lose all telemetry anyway, they'd know if it landed or not. I don't think it's a greater conspiracy than that they'll spill the beans in an hour or two once the Tesla promo is over, but right then and there they covered it up.
Okay so it was ridiculously expensive. But that only supports how ridiculously big and powerful the Saturn V was, it doesn't diminish it. Even though I understand all the economic reasons for retiring it, it always feel strange when we go "backwards". Like there used to be a supersonic passenger aircraft, now there's not. And when it came to rockets we didn't just take a small step backwards, like the Falcon Heavy is a huge leap forwards and we're still not back to the same lift capability they had 50 years ago. Not even close. I hope the launch goes well. I hope the BFR development goes well. And heck, for all the money I hope the SLS delivers too. I want to see the world's most powerful rocket launch in my lifetime, not be something I read about in the history books.
I still do not understand how NASA lost the blue prints for the Saturn V including the F1 engines. Since it used the same fuel as the Falcon engine.
It's a myth.
(This is) a claim John Lewis made in his 1996 book, Mining the Sky, that he went looking for the Saturn 5 blueprints a few years ago and concluded, incredibly, they had been "lost."
Paul Shawcross, from NASA's Office of Inspector General, came to the agency's defense in comments published on CCNet -- a scholarly electronic newsletter covering the threat of asteroids and comets. Shawcross said the Saturn 5 blueprints are held at the Marshall Space Flight Center on microfilm.
"The Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia, also has 2,900 cubic feet of Saturn documents," he said. "Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F 1 and J 2 engine production to assist in any future restart."
Shawcross cautioned that rebuilding a Saturn 5 would require more than good blueprints.
"The problem in recreating the Saturn 5 is not finding the drawings, it is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's vintage hardware," he wrote, "and the fact that the launch pads and vehicle assembly buildings have been converted to space shuttle use, so you have no place to launch from.
And the final reason it won't be rebuilt even if you disregard all that and cost is that it would never get a man-rating today. It'd be like trying to get a T-Ford approved by modern safety standards, it would fail spectacularly. It was good enough 100 years ago, the Saturn V was good enough 50 years ago, but it wouldn't fly today. And I don't think anyone is ready to grandfather it in...
DCMA has a very specific clause that blocks copyright on ABANDONWARE.
I was about to write that it must be a drug-induced hallucination, because there's absolutely nothing like that in the DMCA itself. But there's a clause in section 1201(a)(1) that lets the Librarian of Congress create exceptions and apparently in 2015 they apparently granted a very narrow exception valid for three years with the possibility for renewal. I'll quote most from the prelude not the actual legalese but you can find both in the final order here:
With respect to gamers, the Register concluded that the record supported granting an exemption for video games that require communication with an authentication server to allow gameplay when the requisite server is taken offline. (...) At the same time, the Register determined that proponents had failed to provide persuasive support for an exemption for online multiplayer play (...) The Register also confirmed that the exemption for gamers should not extend to jailbreaking of console software
So it's only video games, not copyrighted works in general. It's only single player games, no MMORPGs or alternative match-making. While the quoted text uses the word "online" there's no provision for networked games at all so no private servers and no LAN play. It does not let you break system-level protections like jailbreak consoles. The wording is a bit ambiguous on patches/DLC but since they're in their nature downloads I think it would be fair game to remove activation from those too. There doesn't seem to be any provision for providing those to others though if the update servers have been shut down, you only get to keep what you already have locally. So it's as narrow as possible, if it's a single-player game on a PC requiring a one-time activation you can disable it. Which IMHO all non-dick companies should do anyway before they shut down the activation server. That's all you get, clearly this project is not covered by this exemption at all.
P.S. You should also be careful to only distribute such a patch within the US. It's a uniquely American law and there's no telling what could happen in other jurisdictions...
Well, Vista was also a resource hog and particularly on machines with memory near the minimum requirements it was absurdly slow. Like XP ran decently on 128 MB RAM while Vista was a dog on 1024 MB which never got properly fixed. And the early iterations of the "SuperCache" system only made it worse by constantly trashing the disk to load things you'd soon have to evict anyway, making the system less responsive instead of more. To be honest, I don't know much about Vista post-SP1 because my early experience after trying to help a friend with it was "kill it with fire", "you can pry XP from my cold, dead hands" and "maybe Linux is ready for the desktop soon". And yes it was a premature release but it was actually late, it's like you've spent 5 years after XP and deliver this shit sandwich?
After a couple years of fixes and the improved firewall XP SP2 wasn't the Swiss cheese it had been at the initial release, by the time Vista rolled out it was pretty damn stable. And you had UAC issues, driver issues etc. that also added to its poor reputation, SP1 didn't arrive until 2008 so the stink had a full year to soak in. Same year you had XP SP3 that set a new high bar for maturity, even if Vista SP1 had improved you had 7 years of XP fixes to compete with so it never got credit for doing more than fixing the worst of it. Windows 7 was a *much* needed do-over reputation-wise because Vista's was tarred and feathered. It sticks.
I imagine you could land a payload anywhere on earth if you send it up 1000km, like this rocket can do with 140kg payload.
No, not even close as rockets have no air to glide in or wings to glide with. When NK sent their Hwasong-15 missile about 4500km straight up the experts said it could hit a target about 13000km away on a ballistic trajectory. So for a 140kg payload I'd estimate a 3000km range. And this is a considerably more powerful rocket than what NK got, it couldn't put anything in orbit and their test launch probably had essentially no payload. North Korea could almost certainly nuke Japan if they wanted, that's only 1000km away and presumably reachable with a 100+ kg payload. The US? Probably not so much, the rocket could get there but it'd have to be a very light payload. Maybe a kilo of mutated ebola or whatever, if they have that.
So, basically the complete opposite of what Uber currently says they stand for (people owning their own vehicles and using them to make some extra money "sharing" rides). Uber clearly has the best interests of the people at heart and isn't just in it to make a buck by whatever means are more convenient.
My guess is they're not even being serious, they're just trolling for PR and VC money like when Ryanair suggests standing passengers on airplanes. Outrage causes buzz and somehow it's more important that people are talking about you than what they're saying.
Let me sum up what all of this really means. No one likes privacy anymore.
That would imply that they once did, but I doubt that. Offer anyone from the past century access to Netflix and Spotify and I think most people would use it, just like today. It's the technology that wasn't there yet. And I doubt most vinyl freaks care either since it started while it was competing with equally untraceable CDs, it's mostly about doing it retro style like shooting film instead of digital cameras. I don't think the past you imagine ever existed.
And "not expensive"?
Spotify + Netflix standard = $21/month = <3 hours/month at minimum wage. Granted that doesn't include the Internet service or every possible series from every possible source but seriously... how cheap do you want content to be? Here in Norway the average wage is 44310 NOK/month, average tax rate about 27%, Spotify + Netflix = 99 + 139 NOK which put together means it's roughly 0.74% of post-tax income. You don't get Game of Thrones, tough.
People have never cared much about most of their privacy, but we've always assumed/expected that when we want something to be private we can simply not share it. The problem is that once you start cross-referencing everything it turns out to be extremely hard to do that, you really have to compartmentalize with military precision and even then Facebook seems to figure it out. I'm not really too concerned about entertainment though, even if being outed as a Celine Dion fan may be bad.
Apart from cell phone tracking, electronic tickets, license plate readers and face detection tracking everywhere you go I think the greatest danger is news going paywalled. Sure before you might know who subscribed to Pravda but you didn't know if they read it. Now with engagement metrics all around you could track each and every article, if you wanted to find your critics you could probably simply put out slightly subversive articles critical of the government and find out who's reading them with great interest.
Because that's really the killer feature here, make people give you circumstantial evidence that they don't think they need to hide. Like that story about store loyalty cards figuring out who's pregnant by changes in purchasing habits. That's the new MO, let them think they have their privacy but in reality you got them figured out. Just don't let them know that you know, because most would find it creepy. Actually, scratch what I said about entertainment... you can probably find out a lot by looking at who likes the Snowden movie, Ayn Rand, Michael Moore and so on. It all adds up.
Unfortunately, they do. That's why when I get a new power tool, I have to make modifications to pare it down to an elegant C-style device:
That's one extreme. And if you to the other extreme that's not very useful either. That the code doesn't crash doesn't mean it does anything useful or won't go into an infinite loop or that exceptions or error conditions are meaningfully handled from a user perspective or that the code is secure from unauthorized access or alteration or that data won't get corrupted, deleted or overwritten. Maybe if it's some kind of online service where you're bringing down many users, but if my game client crashes or hangs or throws an error message it almost doesn't matter. All I can do is close it and try again. So it's okay to rant about software quality but Rust would, at best, solve one little snippet of that.
And that's okay, it only needs to make the world a little better. But a lot of the "lets throw it all out and redo it in Rust" advocates seem to forget or ignore all the effort that's been made to create actual user functionality that works as intended and the massive effort it would take to retest that and since real world code rarely has 100% test coverage - and why are you rewriting it, if it does exactly what it should - you'd probably create a whole lot of new bugs. Probably not bugs from a language perspective, the Rust code executes according to spec but breaking real world functionality. And the training costs until developers create fewer of those bugs than before, if they ever do because they spend more time fixing Rust compiler warnings or don't find the documentation, IDE, libraries etc. equally useful.
To me it's a bit like the DVORAK keyboard layout, even if all the claims of somewhat increased typing efficiency and less strain for English-language users are true it's ultimately so rarely the limiting factor and the global effort to switch so huge it's extremely questionable if it's worth the effort. As opposed to fixing bugs the "old fashioned" way, I mean some of the core banking code is still written in COBOL. If you've ironed out all the bugs it doesn't matter what language you used, the question is what gets you as close as necessary with the least developer effort. If you want perfect you should probably do formal proofs or something like that and even then who proofs the proof? I've had "bugs" basically boil down to faulty test cases, it's not supposed to do what the test case says.
How is a credit account "your money"? A debit card is your money - it pulls from your own bank account. But a credit card pulls from the bank's account, and you just have a promise to pay it back sometime in the future. They are not telling you what you can do with your money, but telling you want you can do with their money.
But technically nothing stops you from making a cash withdraw and buying bitcoins with it or buying gold and selling that to buy bitcoins or buying your groceries on credit while spending your cash on bitcoins. What they approve is a credit limit, it shouldn't be whether I use it to buy groceries or beers at the local pub. I'm not sure if you're seriously suggesting what you're suggesting, but I certainly don't think the bank or credit card money should be allowed to inspect my finances simply because I owe them money. That would strip the privacy of everyone with a mortgage, even if they've dedicated a part of their paycheck to down pay it..
Singapore would be a good counterexample. Consider crimes in the rest of the western world that are met with relatively light sentencing, like drug trafficking and "illegal firearm trafficking" (defined as being in possession of 2 or more illegal guns). In Singapore they are met with a mandatory death penalty, and not surprisingly there's (1) remarkably low occurrence and (2) even lower recurrence of those crimes.
A remarkably low occurrence because once you're facing the death penalty, why not do more crime. It's the problem all justice systems face, the punishment is supposed to be proportional to the crime but you have a limited dynamic range. Sure we could dial up to where jaywalking = death penalty, but then kidnap-rape-murder couldn't really be punished any harder. Singapore keeps the petty crime away through huge penalties. Does it keep serious crime away... I doubt it.
So in other words, the police themselves are saying, whatever you do, don't call the police. If you call the police, innocent people are likely to die.
No, that's just reading comprehension fail. They didn't say innocent people would die. They didn't say it would - or would not - have consequences for the police officers involved. They said it wouldn't have any consequence for the person making a false report. Which may or may not be true, orthogonal to everything else.
I'd be more apt to fire the person who put "This is not a drill" in the message when it was clearly a drill.
My guess is that it was not recorded in one piece like that, if so he must have been asleep at the wheel. It's presumably a "production" message and for exercise purposes they did:
if (isExercise ) {
play( "exercise exercise exercise" ); } play ( msg )
Which would have worked great except when the production message explicitly says it's not a drill. It may not even have been there when the system was first designed and just added later for additional impact. I have a similar test mode in a production system at work because it's for test data and executions, not test code. You can't take everything it says literally because it's a simulation. But if anyone altered the message to explicitly say it's not a simulation, well... fortunately millions won't be covering in fear if they do.
Not surprised... a relative of mine is a long haul truck driver, he's slept more nights in the sleeper berth at the back of this truck than in his real bed the last 20 years. Very often he's supposed to be somewhere at start of business or pick up before end of business so driving everything from early mornings to late evenings all according to the schedule and rest hours, which often eats into both Fridays and Sundays. Even nurses and doctors working shifts or pilots flying short haul typically get to go home at night. Not to mention the office workers... it's probably most comparable to people working long work tours on ships, military, oil platforms and such but they usually do it for a period of their life then transition to a desk job. Is it possible to combine with a home life and family? Yes, but it's certainly not easy.
Basically you end up being a semi-absentee parent who's not there for the day-to-day chores and while that might have been more accepted before fewer dads want it and few moms ever wanted it, no wonder it's 94% males. I just can't picture the mom of a 4yo being on the road all week and basically dropping in for the weekends. Compared to me I have to be at the office from 9 AM to 2:30 PM Monday through Friday. The rest of the hours I choose except for meetings and such, I can start from 6 AM and work until 9 PM (but max 12 hours/day) if I want. Is that a *huge* perk of the job? Yes. I wouldn't have a trucker's schedule if you doubled my salary.
Has anyone reputable checked their work? Because after all that Uber has done, I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if they fudged the numbers.
To be honest this comes down to a lot of assumptions and I doubt you can read this out of the BLS data, which makes that sound a bit like name-dropping. Their primary assumption seems to be that there are many goods we don't transport today because the shipping costs are too high. When you look at all the cheap shit shipped all the way from China that looks implausible. The second thing I'm thinking is that a reduction in transit cost would primarily lead to longer transits, but whether it comes from 100 or 10000 miles away it's still only one local delivery. It works if you assume that instead of going to the store and picking up 10 items I'll have 10 home deliveries.
But if local delivery is the expensive part, why would I do that? It's cheaper that everybody ships to the grocery store and I order one delivery or grab all ten items from the store myself. Same thing with the local post office, they'll store packages up to two weeks so I can drop by once and pick up all of them. It's foolish to assume that a growth in deliverables will lead to a proportional growth in deliveries. In fact, I wish someone would re-invent the robot warehouse as a package mini-pickup point. Basically trucks drop off a ton of packages on one end, they're placed one per bin. On the other end customers enter packageId + PIN or QR code or whatever, it delivers that bin. No staff, open 24x7. I think that'd be a hit...
Aren't m3's terrible CPUs? This looks like a complete ripoff when you can buy similarly spec'd laptops for less than 500.
I'm guessing it's part of Microsoft's balancing act to not piss off the OEMs too much. They'll do "boutique" high-end convertibles/laptops and oddities like the Surface Studio, if they start hitting the value segment hard it's all out war. I think they're just putting it out there for the fools that think a Microsoft PC running a Microsoft OS is somehow better, if they got most the tooling set up and get a good margin it's basically free profit. And they can maybe up-sell you on a Surface Pen, Surface Dock or some other expensive accessories later.
Let's face it, a lot of people don't know what will deliver what they need - I know exactly what I want from a computer, I got no real clue what washing machine I want. I know the result I want, but what brand or model and if it'll really matter... nah. I might end up buying a more expensive one just to be sure it's good enough, because it's less hassle to pay a bit too much than to find out later I cheaped out too much. That's really all Microsoft needs to convince people, this $800 laptop will work for you. Maybe a $500 laptop would work for you, maybe not. Let's buy the $800 one and get on with life.
It's rational sometimes too, my mom is the kind who likes to go penny-pinching at the grocery store. I'm the kind of person who'd rather go looking for deals when I'm buying big ticket items, I'd rather find a $300 Black Friday savings than 300 x $1 savings here and there, maybe I don't win on dollars but on time and effort yes. That and risk, this quality item is almost certainly good enough. This cheap knock-off... if I can't reasonably say if it'll be good enough it's often not worth the hassle.
How about this: Amazon will sell a service where Alexa will listen for certain inaudible acoustic commands, which you can embed a unique ID into your Broadcast, or Radio program, or insert into your song, and Amazon will provide you intelligence or data about how many people and what demographics are listening to your content.
That's... actually not that unlikely an idea, like a service-neutral super-Nielsen rating. The microphone is listening anyway, all it takes is a different trigger signal to say "I'm content {7c76a643-711e-4b5e-af72-f40a77ca0075}", along with a timestamp you could buffer up tons of these in a few kb and flush when the device is talking to the network anyway. You'd probably need some kind of consent but that's one EULA change away. I'm sure it can be justified with some "enhancing the customer experience" fluff, by which I mean even more targeted ads. Not just TV and radio, you could embed it in streaming services, use it for game intros, trailers, embed into CD/DVD/BluRay/UHD BluRay discs and it could even work for pirated media. And I think the people happy with Alexa would embrace it...
As in going full-on gluttony working in my underpants which would be fun at first but eventually becoming one of those fat slob/shut-ins. What I like about work socialization is that it's totally casual and a secondary objective to getting a paycheck. If socialization is the primary objective then I feel the pressure to be interesting enough or they'll be moving on, not just dates but friendships too and I'm not great at smalltalk. I've hardly ever befriended a total stranger, it's like we've been classmates, studied together, worked together, played at the same sports team or had some other reason to hang out for a while which has warmed up into friendships.
That said, I don't think the socialization has much to do with work or feeling like a team. As in I could totally see myself working in some sort of shared office space where we'd have different jobs for different companies and still do lunches and water cooler talk and goofing around a bit together. A lot of the people I work with do other bits that I don't really know much about and they don't really know that much about what I do anyway. And when we're on a break we don't really want to talk about work anyway. The whole "pulling together" thing is a bit overrated for me, I work because I got pride in what I do. I'm not doing it to save my colleagues' ass or for company deliveries/profits.
An analogy I've used is that if we're a ship then I'm the one setting the sails. I'm not the captain or navigator, though I'd certainly advice or caution them if I think they're making a mistake. But if we're sailing off a cliff that wasn't my decision, my responsibility or my blame and while I'll certainly try to help I'm not putting that burden on my shoulders. We're certainly a team setting the sails and it's not competitive, but I'm not going to cover for the screw-up again and again. Honest mistakes and inexperience yes, but not incompetence, recklessness and slacking. If you're not weeding out the obvious problems but covering for them and collectively punishing us for their failures that's highly demotivating for me.
Yeah... not really a problem on any site that allows user comments with links though. In fact this traffic would be more confusing, like okay I'm seeing a lot of traffic from reddit but what sub-board has linked me now or what celeb linked me on Facebook or what video is going viral on YouTube. Then again you'll probably see a substantial amount of any traffic in non-private mode, so not really a big deal I guess.
Meh, in private browsing mode they really should kill the referrer from any top level page. If it's an <img>, <iframe> or <video> tag it's cool... but if I go from foo.com to bar.com via an <a href> it shouldn't secretly tell bar.com I came from foo.com. Transparency in what information you're exposing is essential to security and most people aren't aware it's happening.
Well we've seen them do smooth landings so I assume the simulation ended with them hovering right over the water. A 2009 quote said:
Weighing in at over 7,700 kg (17,000 lbs), the thrust assembly and nine Merlin engines represents over half the dry mass of the Falcon 9 first stage.
Basically you got a very heavy end which means it'd splash pretty much straight down in the direction it's built to withstand max-q, it wouldn't really tip over trying to keep its balance as some of the failed landings did. And the empty tanks obviously provide a lot of buoyancy as long as they stay intact, in fact either the LOX or RP-1 tank should suffice alone. The impressive part is the quasi-landing. That it can survive the drop into the ocean, eh... the heavy part probably took less of a beating than a diver jumping from the 10m board.
Well, they said the robot covered 50+ miles and the preferred walking speed is around 3.1 mph so ~16 hours. If we also assume some time saved waiting for the elevator, for customers blocking the halls or to open the door, exchange courtesies etc. and that it takes no bathroom or smoke breaks I'd say a week's worth of human work saved. In three months, that's 1/12th of a position. Though I might be kind that I account no time for fixing problems, maintenance or repairs. If it managed to take the peaks or be available when there's no other staff on call it might do slightly better but yeah... underwhelming.
I'm kinda surprised they don't use them for more "internal" needs though, for example I know our local hospital uses robots like these to distribute fresh bed linens and collect used ones, distribute food from an industrial size kitchen, run an internal mail service and other practical tasks that don't directly interact with the patients. It might sound like old fashioned Taylorism and stop watch measurements but shaving off a minute here and there does add up. Or use it for more complimentary service, it might give value without costing much.
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The Saturn V was an amazing thing for its day. But needs and the optimal equipment changes. In the era of a few big missions, that Saturn V made sense. But now we are in the era of lots of small to medium sized missions, the Falcon Heavy makes more sense.
Well the ambitions are bigger, but we also have a whole different level of experience with relightable engines and in-orbit assembly. From what I've understood of orbital mechanics you have to reach LEO first to go anywhere else and there's no real loss from hanging around there a little while as you launch more. All that matters is that you can launch the biggest module. So the Falcon Heavy could roughly re-do the Apollo mission by launching the lunar payload (48t) + third-stage (10t dry mass), then two more Falcon Heavys worth of fuel (110t total). Then you'd have roughly what the Saturn V did, you'd probably pay more than the $90 million/Heavy listed as they'd probably be expendable but for $3-400 million you'd have a Saturn V - equivalent. Launch price, not after spending billions on R&D first.
So in a completely gender blind pay scheme, women still manage to make less then men? Can all of you please shut the fuck up about the pay gap now? It's clear that any remaining difference is caused by women themselves.
I doubt it. It's still possible to argue that gender roles are what leads to women working less profitable shifts and having higher turnover, like for example that female drivers may get more sleazy propositions from drunk men late at night on weekends when prices are high or that mom is the one staying home to watch the kids at night or that they get less social acceptance for being an Uber driver. A lot of the glass ceiling wasn't that they didn't get equal pay for equal jobs but that they could get equal jobs in the first place even if they had the qualifications or they'd get harassed for being a woman. I recall reading an article on Ars Technica about Ivy Hooks, here's a few quotes from the 60s:
Before the NASA opportunity, Hooks had interviewed for jobs in the region's main industry - oil and gas extraction. Despite her degree in mathematics, these companies just wanted her for secretarial jobs. NASA, however, desperately needed talent, regardless of gender
By and large, the Apollo programs at this time remained bastions of masculinity. To thrive, Hooks had to prove her professional skills and have a thick skin. "I had some of the worst treatment I ever had that first year," Hooks recalled. "In today's day and age they'd probably all be in jail or something, or probably at least gotten fired.
"When they yank it off there's a little garter snake, or a garden snake, but definitely not venomous. I guess they were waiting for me to scream, or jump up, or do something. So I just reached over and picked it up and turned around to the guys behind me and said, 'Go play somewhere else.' That probably did more for my NASA career than any work I ever did."
That said, you get pretty much equal pay for equal work. But that's actually pretty well known for anyone who cares to know the truth, they have dug into those numbers and found that actual, comparable men and women doing the same work duties with the same amount of responsibility, overtime and whatnot have very close to equal pay. Some feminists and SJWs simply choose to ignore it. Sure there's the occasional bigot but not many enough to exclude women from getting market wage.
I wouldn't assume conspiracy. Elon is the sort who'd just let the feed roll. He's been quite open about how "space is hard" and honest and forthcoming when things go wrong. Whatever took out the video feed was accidental.
The twitter image of the drone ship smoke clearing to an empty deck + the technical webcast quite clearly saying "We've lost the center core" while the non-technical webcast not saying anything at all and ending pretty abruptly is quite compelling evidence to the contrary. And while the camera feed could have been interrupted it's highly unlikely they'd lose all telemetry anyway, they'd know if it landed or not. I don't think it's a greater conspiracy than that they'll spill the beans in an hour or two once the Tesla promo is over, but right then and there they covered it up.
Okay so it was ridiculously expensive. But that only supports how ridiculously big and powerful the Saturn V was, it doesn't diminish it. Even though I understand all the economic reasons for retiring it, it always feel strange when we go "backwards". Like there used to be a supersonic passenger aircraft, now there's not. And when it came to rockets we didn't just take a small step backwards, like the Falcon Heavy is a huge leap forwards and we're still not back to the same lift capability they had 50 years ago. Not even close. I hope the launch goes well. I hope the BFR development goes well. And heck, for all the money I hope the SLS delivers too. I want to see the world's most powerful rocket launch in my lifetime, not be something I read about in the history books.
I still do not understand how NASA lost the blue prints for the Saturn V including the F1 engines. Since it used the same fuel as the Falcon engine.
It's a myth.
(This is) a claim John Lewis made in his 1996 book, Mining the Sky, that he went looking for the Saturn 5 blueprints a few years ago and concluded, incredibly, they had been "lost."
Paul Shawcross, from NASA's Office of Inspector General, came to the agency's defense in comments published on CCNet -- a scholarly electronic newsletter covering the threat of asteroids and comets. Shawcross said the Saturn 5 blueprints are held at the Marshall Space Flight Center on microfilm.
"The Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia, also has 2,900 cubic feet of Saturn documents," he said. "Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F 1 and J 2 engine production to assist in any future restart."
Shawcross cautioned that rebuilding a Saturn 5 would require more than good blueprints.
"The problem in recreating the Saturn 5 is not finding the drawings, it is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's vintage hardware," he wrote, "and the fact that the launch pads and vehicle assembly buildings have been converted to space shuttle use, so you have no place to launch from.
And the final reason it won't be rebuilt even if you disregard all that and cost is that it would never get a man-rating today. It'd be like trying to get a T-Ford approved by modern safety standards, it would fail spectacularly. It was good enough 100 years ago, the Saturn V was good enough 50 years ago, but it wouldn't fly today. And I don't think anyone is ready to grandfather it in...
Fake news. Clearly a Slackware user would never reproduce.
DCMA has a very specific clause that blocks copyright on ABANDONWARE.
I was about to write that it must be a drug-induced hallucination, because there's absolutely nothing like that in the DMCA itself. But there's a clause in section 1201(a)(1) that lets the Librarian of Congress create exceptions and apparently in 2015 they apparently granted a very narrow exception valid for three years with the possibility for renewal. I'll quote most from the prelude not the actual legalese but you can find both in the final order here:
With respect to gamers, the Register concluded that the record supported granting an exemption for video games that require communication with an authentication server to allow gameplay when the requisite server is taken offline. (...) At the same time, the Register determined that proponents had failed to provide persuasive support for an exemption for online multiplayer play (...) The Register also confirmed that the exemption for gamers should not extend to jailbreaking of console software
So it's only video games, not copyrighted works in general. It's only single player games, no MMORPGs or alternative match-making. While the quoted text uses the word "online" there's no provision for networked games at all so no private servers and no LAN play. It does not let you break system-level protections like jailbreak consoles. The wording is a bit ambiguous on patches/DLC but since they're in their nature downloads I think it would be fair game to remove activation from those too. There doesn't seem to be any provision for providing those to others though if the update servers have been shut down, you only get to keep what you already have locally. So it's as narrow as possible, if it's a single-player game on a PC requiring a one-time activation you can disable it. Which IMHO all non-dick companies should do anyway before they shut down the activation server. That's all you get, clearly this project is not covered by this exemption at all.
P.S. You should also be careful to only distribute such a patch within the US. It's a uniquely American law and there's no telling what could happen in other jurisdictions...
Well, Vista was also a resource hog and particularly on machines with memory near the minimum requirements it was absurdly slow. Like XP ran decently on 128 MB RAM while Vista was a dog on 1024 MB which never got properly fixed. And the early iterations of the "SuperCache" system only made it worse by constantly trashing the disk to load things you'd soon have to evict anyway, making the system less responsive instead of more. To be honest, I don't know much about Vista post-SP1 because my early experience after trying to help a friend with it was "kill it with fire", "you can pry XP from my cold, dead hands" and "maybe Linux is ready for the desktop soon". And yes it was a premature release but it was actually late, it's like you've spent 5 years after XP and deliver this shit sandwich?
After a couple years of fixes and the improved firewall XP SP2 wasn't the Swiss cheese it had been at the initial release, by the time Vista rolled out it was pretty damn stable. And you had UAC issues, driver issues etc. that also added to its poor reputation, SP1 didn't arrive until 2008 so the stink had a full year to soak in. Same year you had XP SP3 that set a new high bar for maturity, even if Vista SP1 had improved you had 7 years of XP fixes to compete with so it never got credit for doing more than fixing the worst of it. Windows 7 was a *much* needed do-over reputation-wise because Vista's was tarred and feathered. It sticks.
I imagine you could land a payload anywhere on earth if you send it up 1000km, like this rocket can do with 140kg payload.
No, not even close as rockets have no air to glide in or wings to glide with. When NK sent their Hwasong-15 missile about 4500km straight up the experts said it could hit a target about 13000km away on a ballistic trajectory. So for a 140kg payload I'd estimate a 3000km range. And this is a considerably more powerful rocket than what NK got, it couldn't put anything in orbit and their test launch probably had essentially no payload. North Korea could almost certainly nuke Japan if they wanted, that's only 1000km away and presumably reachable with a 100+ kg payload. The US? Probably not so much, the rocket could get there but it'd have to be a very light payload. Maybe a kilo of mutated ebola or whatever, if they have that.
So, basically the complete opposite of what Uber currently says they stand for (people owning their own vehicles and using them to make some extra money "sharing" rides). Uber clearly has the best interests of the people at heart and isn't just in it to make a buck by whatever means are more convenient.
My guess is they're not even being serious, they're just trolling for PR and VC money like when Ryanair suggests standing passengers on airplanes. Outrage causes buzz and somehow it's more important that people are talking about you than what they're saying.
Let me sum up what all of this really means. No one likes privacy anymore.
That would imply that they once did, but I doubt that. Offer anyone from the past century access to Netflix and Spotify and I think most people would use it, just like today. It's the technology that wasn't there yet. And I doubt most vinyl freaks care either since it started while it was competing with equally untraceable CDs, it's mostly about doing it retro style like shooting film instead of digital cameras. I don't think the past you imagine ever existed.
And "not expensive"?
Spotify + Netflix standard = $21/month = <3 hours/month at minimum wage. Granted that doesn't include the Internet service or every possible series from every possible source but seriously... how cheap do you want content to be? Here in Norway the average wage is 44310 NOK/month, average tax rate about 27%, Spotify + Netflix = 99 + 139 NOK which put together means it's roughly 0.74% of post-tax income. You don't get Game of Thrones, tough.
People have never cared much about most of their privacy, but we've always assumed/expected that when we want something to be private we can simply not share it. The problem is that once you start cross-referencing everything it turns out to be extremely hard to do that, you really have to compartmentalize with military precision and even then Facebook seems to figure it out. I'm not really too concerned about entertainment though, even if being outed as a Celine Dion fan may be bad.
Apart from cell phone tracking, electronic tickets, license plate readers and face detection tracking everywhere you go I think the greatest danger is news going paywalled. Sure before you might know who subscribed to Pravda but you didn't know if they read it. Now with engagement metrics all around you could track each and every article, if you wanted to find your critics you could probably simply put out slightly subversive articles critical of the government and find out who's reading them with great interest.
Because that's really the killer feature here, make people give you circumstantial evidence that they don't think they need to hide. Like that story about store loyalty cards figuring out who's pregnant by changes in purchasing habits. That's the new MO, let them think they have their privacy but in reality you got them figured out. Just don't let them know that you know, because most would find it creepy. Actually, scratch what I said about entertainment... you can probably find out a lot by looking at who likes the Snowden movie, Ayn Rand, Michael Moore and so on. It all adds up.
Unfortunately, they do. That's why when I get a new power tool, I have to make modifications to pare it down to an elegant C-style device:
That's one extreme. And if you to the other extreme that's not very useful either. That the code doesn't crash doesn't mean it does anything useful or won't go into an infinite loop or that exceptions or error conditions are meaningfully handled from a user perspective or that the code is secure from unauthorized access or alteration or that data won't get corrupted, deleted or overwritten. Maybe if it's some kind of online service where you're bringing down many users, but if my game client crashes or hangs or throws an error message it almost doesn't matter. All I can do is close it and try again. So it's okay to rant about software quality but Rust would, at best, solve one little snippet of that.
And that's okay, it only needs to make the world a little better. But a lot of the "lets throw it all out and redo it in Rust" advocates seem to forget or ignore all the effort that's been made to create actual user functionality that works as intended and the massive effort it would take to retest that and since real world code rarely has 100% test coverage - and why are you rewriting it, if it does exactly what it should - you'd probably create a whole lot of new bugs. Probably not bugs from a language perspective, the Rust code executes according to spec but breaking real world functionality. And the training costs until developers create fewer of those bugs than before, if they ever do because they spend more time fixing Rust compiler warnings or don't find the documentation, IDE, libraries etc. equally useful.
To me it's a bit like the DVORAK keyboard layout, even if all the claims of somewhat increased typing efficiency and less strain for English-language users are true it's ultimately so rarely the limiting factor and the global effort to switch so huge it's extremely questionable if it's worth the effort. As opposed to fixing bugs the "old fashioned" way, I mean some of the core banking code is still written in COBOL. If you've ironed out all the bugs it doesn't matter what language you used, the question is what gets you as close as necessary with the least developer effort. If you want perfect you should probably do formal proofs or something like that and even then who proofs the proof? I've had "bugs" basically boil down to faulty test cases, it's not supposed to do what the test case says.
How is a credit account "your money"? A debit card is your money - it pulls from your own bank account. But a credit card pulls from the bank's account, and you just have a promise to pay it back sometime in the future. They are not telling you what you can do with your money, but telling you want you can do with their money.
But technically nothing stops you from making a cash withdraw and buying bitcoins with it or buying gold and selling that to buy bitcoins or buying your groceries on credit while spending your cash on bitcoins. What they approve is a credit limit, it shouldn't be whether I use it to buy groceries or beers at the local pub. I'm not sure if you're seriously suggesting what you're suggesting, but I certainly don't think the bank or credit card money should be allowed to inspect my finances simply because I owe them money. That would strip the privacy of everyone with a mortgage, even if they've dedicated a part of their paycheck to down pay it..
Singapore would be a good counterexample. Consider crimes in the rest of the western world that are met with relatively light sentencing, like drug trafficking and "illegal firearm trafficking" (defined as being in possession of 2 or more illegal guns). In Singapore they are met with a mandatory death penalty, and not surprisingly there's (1) remarkably low occurrence and (2) even lower recurrence of those crimes.
A remarkably low occurrence because once you're facing the death penalty, why not do more crime. It's the problem all justice systems face, the punishment is supposed to be proportional to the crime but you have a limited dynamic range. Sure we could dial up to where jaywalking = death penalty, but then kidnap-rape-murder couldn't really be punished any harder. Singapore keeps the petty crime away through huge penalties. Does it keep serious crime away... I doubt it.
So in other words, the police themselves are saying, whatever you do, don't call the police. If you call the police, innocent people are likely to die.
No, that's just reading comprehension fail. They didn't say innocent people would die. They didn't say it would - or would not - have consequences for the police officers involved. They said it wouldn't have any consequence for the person making a false report. Which may or may not be true, orthogonal to everything else.
I'd be more apt to fire the person who put "This is not a drill" in the message when it was clearly a drill.
My guess is that it was not recorded in one piece like that, if so he must have been asleep at the wheel. It's presumably a "production" message and for exercise purposes they did:
if (isExercise ) {
play( "exercise exercise exercise" );
}
play ( msg )
Which would have worked great except when the production message explicitly says it's not a drill. It may not even have been there when the system was first designed and just added later for additional impact. I have a similar test mode in a production system at work because it's for test data and executions, not test code. You can't take everything it says literally because it's a simulation. But if anyone altered the message to explicitly say it's not a simulation, well... fortunately millions won't be covering in fear if they do.
And yet, not enough people want to do this job:
Not surprised... a relative of mine is a long haul truck driver, he's slept more nights in the sleeper berth at the back of this truck than in his real bed the last 20 years. Very often he's supposed to be somewhere at start of business or pick up before end of business so driving everything from early mornings to late evenings all according to the schedule and rest hours, which often eats into both Fridays and Sundays. Even nurses and doctors working shifts or pilots flying short haul typically get to go home at night. Not to mention the office workers... it's probably most comparable to people working long work tours on ships, military, oil platforms and such but they usually do it for a period of their life then transition to a desk job. Is it possible to combine with a home life and family? Yes, but it's certainly not easy.
Basically you end up being a semi-absentee parent who's not there for the day-to-day chores and while that might have been more accepted before fewer dads want it and few moms ever wanted it, no wonder it's 94% males. I just can't picture the mom of a 4yo being on the road all week and basically dropping in for the weekends. Compared to me I have to be at the office from 9 AM to 2:30 PM Monday through Friday. The rest of the hours I choose except for meetings and such, I can start from 6 AM and work until 9 PM (but max 12 hours/day) if I want. Is that a *huge* perk of the job? Yes. I wouldn't have a trucker's schedule if you doubled my salary.
Has anyone reputable checked their work? Because after all that Uber has done, I wouldn't be even slightly surprised if they fudged the numbers.
To be honest this comes down to a lot of assumptions and I doubt you can read this out of the BLS data, which makes that sound a bit like name-dropping. Their primary assumption seems to be that there are many goods we don't transport today because the shipping costs are too high. When you look at all the cheap shit shipped all the way from China that looks implausible. The second thing I'm thinking is that a reduction in transit cost would primarily lead to longer transits, but whether it comes from 100 or 10000 miles away it's still only one local delivery. It works if you assume that instead of going to the store and picking up 10 items I'll have 10 home deliveries.
But if local delivery is the expensive part, why would I do that? It's cheaper that everybody ships to the grocery store and I order one delivery or grab all ten items from the store myself. Same thing with the local post office, they'll store packages up to two weeks so I can drop by once and pick up all of them. It's foolish to assume that a growth in deliverables will lead to a proportional growth in deliveries. In fact, I wish someone would re-invent the robot warehouse as a package mini-pickup point. Basically trucks drop off a ton of packages on one end, they're placed one per bin. On the other end customers enter packageId + PIN or QR code or whatever, it delivers that bin. No staff, open 24x7. I think that'd be a hit...
Aren't m3's terrible CPUs? This looks like a complete ripoff when you can buy similarly spec'd laptops for less than 500.
I'm guessing it's part of Microsoft's balancing act to not piss off the OEMs too much. They'll do "boutique" high-end convertibles/laptops and oddities like the Surface Studio, if they start hitting the value segment hard it's all out war. I think they're just putting it out there for the fools that think a Microsoft PC running a Microsoft OS is somehow better, if they got most the tooling set up and get a good margin it's basically free profit. And they can maybe up-sell you on a Surface Pen, Surface Dock or some other expensive accessories later.
Let's face it, a lot of people don't know what will deliver what they need - I know exactly what I want from a computer, I got no real clue what washing machine I want. I know the result I want, but what brand or model and if it'll really matter... nah. I might end up buying a more expensive one just to be sure it's good enough, because it's less hassle to pay a bit too much than to find out later I cheaped out too much. That's really all Microsoft needs to convince people, this $800 laptop will work for you. Maybe a $500 laptop would work for you, maybe not. Let's buy the $800 one and get on with life.
It's rational sometimes too, my mom is the kind who likes to go penny-pinching at the grocery store. I'm the kind of person who'd rather go looking for deals when I'm buying big ticket items, I'd rather find a $300 Black Friday savings than 300 x $1 savings here and there, maybe I don't win on dollars but on time and effort yes. That and risk, this quality item is almost certainly good enough. This cheap knock-off... if I can't reasonably say if it'll be good enough it's often not worth the hassle.
How about this: Amazon will sell a service where Alexa will listen for certain inaudible acoustic commands, which you can embed a unique ID into your Broadcast, or Radio program, or insert into your song, and Amazon will provide you intelligence or data about how many people and what demographics are listening to your content.
That's... actually not that unlikely an idea, like a service-neutral super-Nielsen rating. The microphone is listening anyway, all it takes is a different trigger signal to say "I'm content {7c76a643-711e-4b5e-af72-f40a77ca0075}", along with a timestamp you could buffer up tons of these in a few kb and flush when the device is talking to the network anyway. You'd probably need some kind of consent but that's one EULA change away. I'm sure it can be justified with some "enhancing the customer experience" fluff, by which I mean even more targeted ads. Not just TV and radio, you could embed it in streaming services, use it for game intros, trailers, embed into CD/DVD/BluRay/UHD BluRay discs and it could even work for pirated media. And I think the people happy with Alexa would embrace it...
As in going full-on gluttony working in my underpants which would be fun at first but eventually becoming one of those fat slob/shut-ins. What I like about work socialization is that it's totally casual and a secondary objective to getting a paycheck. If socialization is the primary objective then I feel the pressure to be interesting enough or they'll be moving on, not just dates but friendships too and I'm not great at smalltalk. I've hardly ever befriended a total stranger, it's like we've been classmates, studied together, worked together, played at the same sports team or had some other reason to hang out for a while which has warmed up into friendships.
That said, I don't think the socialization has much to do with work or feeling like a team. As in I could totally see myself working in some sort of shared office space where we'd have different jobs for different companies and still do lunches and water cooler talk and goofing around a bit together. A lot of the people I work with do other bits that I don't really know much about and they don't really know that much about what I do anyway. And when we're on a break we don't really want to talk about work anyway. The whole "pulling together" thing is a bit overrated for me, I work because I got pride in what I do. I'm not doing it to save my colleagues' ass or for company deliveries/profits.
An analogy I've used is that if we're a ship then I'm the one setting the sails. I'm not the captain or navigator, though I'd certainly advice or caution them if I think they're making a mistake. But if we're sailing off a cliff that wasn't my decision, my responsibility or my blame and while I'll certainly try to help I'm not putting that burden on my shoulders. We're certainly a team setting the sails and it's not competitive, but I'm not going to cover for the screw-up again and again. Honest mistakes and inexperience yes, but not incompetence, recklessness and slacking. If you're not weeding out the obvious problems but covering for them and collectively punishing us for their failures that's highly demotivating for me.
Yeah... not really a problem on any site that allows user comments with links though. In fact this traffic would be more confusing, like okay I'm seeing a lot of traffic from reddit but what sub-board has linked me now or what celeb linked me on Facebook or what video is going viral on YouTube. Then again you'll probably see a substantial amount of any traffic in non-private mode, so not really a big deal I guess.
Meh, in private browsing mode they really should kill the referrer from any top level page. If it's an <img>, <iframe> or <video> tag it's cool... but if I go from foo.com to bar.com via an <a href> it shouldn't secretly tell bar.com I came from foo.com. Transparency in what information you're exposing is essential to security and most people aren't aware it's happening.
How? Beats me.
Well we've seen them do smooth landings so I assume the simulation ended with them hovering right over the water. A 2009 quote said:
Weighing in at over 7,700 kg (17,000 lbs), the thrust assembly and nine Merlin engines represents over half the dry mass of the Falcon 9 first stage.
Basically you got a very heavy end which means it'd splash pretty much straight down in the direction it's built to withstand max-q, it wouldn't really tip over trying to keep its balance as some of the failed landings did. And the empty tanks obviously provide a lot of buoyancy as long as they stay intact, in fact either the LOX or RP-1 tank should suffice alone. The impressive part is the quasi-landing. That it can survive the drop into the ocean, eh... the heavy part probably took less of a beating than a diver jumping from the 10m board.
Well, they said the robot covered 50+ miles and the preferred walking speed is around 3.1 mph so ~16 hours. If we also assume some time saved waiting for the elevator, for customers blocking the halls or to open the door, exchange courtesies etc. and that it takes no bathroom or smoke breaks I'd say a week's worth of human work saved. In three months, that's 1/12th of a position. Though I might be kind that I account no time for fixing problems, maintenance or repairs. If it managed to take the peaks or be available when there's no other staff on call it might do slightly better but yeah... underwhelming.
I'm kinda surprised they don't use them for more "internal" needs though, for example I know our local hospital uses robots like these to distribute fresh bed linens and collect used ones, distribute food from an industrial size kitchen, run an internal mail service and other practical tasks that don't directly interact with the patients. It might sound like old fashioned Taylorism and stop watch measurements but shaving off a minute here and there does add up. Or use it for more complimentary service, it might give value without costing much.