The other is $/kg, well if you look at their prices you see Falcon 9 starting at $62M
So why is NASA paying $133M per COTS supply fly to the ISS? Spacex.com/Musk is marketing bullshit as usual.
I smell troll but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, primarily the Dragon capsule and a mission to dock, return and recover it. The base price gets you an empty rocket fairing, you design the payload and operate the mission once SpaceX has delivered it to the transfer orbit. And unlike the rockets that share R&D with commercial satellite launches NASA is the only customer for the Dragon, driving price up. It'll be the same for the crewed version launching later this year if all goes well.
Well AMD already did their whole diversification strategy to "Enterprise, embedded and semi-custom" which I thought would be their final "if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen" move, it created other revenue but it also diverted more resources away from competing with Intel. Back in Q2 2016 their "traditional" CPU/GPU unit was down to $435M in revenue and hemorrhaging money (-$85M) and I thought it was only a matter of time before they threw in the towel at least in the CPU market. Sure they hyped Zen but AMD had a long history of promising the world and not delivering.
Fortunately for all of us, probably most of all AMD they actually had a winner. Last quarter (Q3, Q4 is not out yet) they had $70M in profit on $819M in sales in the same unit, that turnaround is pretty much all Zen in different variations. It was like seeing a boxer battling on the ropes being battered, bruised and dazzled making one last Hail Mary knockout attempt and hitting hard. Now if only they could do the same in the GPU market, after the GTX 9xx series totally crushed them they never quite recovered. More important than low power mobile anyway.
A more important aspect is that NASA's costs don't inflate with the CPI. They inflate with the NNSI (Nasa New Start Index), which is a much steeper rate. Why? The CPI is based on a "grab bag" of consumer goods. Consumer goods have in general become much cheaper to produce over time, moving from domestic hand labour to varying combinations of mass production and overseas production. NASA, however, still builds things in small quantities with labour from a highly trained workforce. So it's natural that their inflation index would be higher than the CPI.
Well, I wouldn't say that it's obvious. Through advances in computers and simulation I'd think that a lot of the design/prototyping/testing now happens virtually even though the actual construction is still very low volume.
How are they faring compared to international competition, like the Japanese and Chinese? Isn't there a risk that the Falcon Heavy will be somewhat outdated before it gets past its first steps?
Well there's two kinds of competition, maximum payload and $/kg to orbit. In the former, there is no competition or rather the competition would be in-orbit assembly like how we built the ISS. The market is rather unclear because since there's no operating super heavy launch vehicle you don't design payloads that require it. The other is $/kg, well if you look at their prices you see Falcon 9 starting at $62M and Falcon Heavy starting at $90M, note that they list max performance and min price so you can't actually divide those to get $/kg to orbit. What you can tell though is that they plan to deliver ~3x the performance for less then 3x the price making the Falcon Heavy cheaper per kg.
That is quite opposite from the SLS and quite possibly other plans on the board where the rocket is so special and launches so rarely that it becomes a billion dollar launch. Like for example the Iridium launches, SpaceX has been launching those 10 at a time on a Falcon 9. Would they do 30 on a Falcon Heavy instead? That's really the key issue for SpaceX, they need business. You can produce a technical marvel like the Saturn V - which would still be unrivaled - but once the moon missions were over nobody could afford it. And then there's the potential for re-usability, with three F9-class first stages to recover they'll be a lot of the cost. If they can be launched not only two times but fives or ten times... the competition shivers.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at, if that WiFi is getting data from the Internet then it's using some form of paid service too. Phones have had cellular/WiFi/Bluetooth triple play for a long time with no indication that the latter two are going away and you can set them up as a personal hotspot for your laptop or other device with no stress. Essentially this is just an integrated version of what's already trivially available. Considering that essentially all laptops have a WiFi/Bluetooth chip and antenna already I imagine it's not actually that big an additional cost it's just that nobody has done the integration work. When you get it for "free" by placing a smartphone chip in a laptop format, why the heck not?
It would be nice but in reality a lot of these bike sharing plans turn out to be a PITA to manage, causing enough nuisance for some cities to ban or curb bike sharing schemes. Some of these schemes have bikes with locks, and they are hardly an issue. Book online and open the lock with your phone. The organisation I work for has done this with all of their pool cars as well and it works great. The point is that locks force you to check out a bike before using it, making you responsible for disposing of it properly at a depot, not in a canal or wherever you feel like.
Except that you then have to build a lot of depots or it becomes a chore to get to the nearest depot and from the destination depot to where you're really going. And if you're visiting somewhere you can't just borrow a bike, leave it outside and return it when you go home because it can get lost on your watch. I wonder now with the abundance of smartphones if it would be possible to skip the whole depot bit. Basically it comes with a bike lock, you can attach it to anything and using your phone you send a photo + GPS coordinates showing you've "released" it back into the pool as long as it's a publicly accessible location and within the service area.
That way you wouldn't really need any special depots or systems, just ordinary bike racks dotted throughout the city. The bikes would just need some close proximity communication to take lock/unlock codes from the phone, you can have a button to activate so most of the time it's completely inert to make the battery last. Have some sort of security deposit to unlock the system to you, if you don't return the bike it's forfeit. If bikes go missing while allegedly locked because of user error or someone using bolt cutters look for repeat offenders otherwise ignore it.
You'll still have to deal with vandalism etc. so just have users report in missing (as in, not where the map says it should be), damaged, ditched or stolen bikes. I don't think offering rewards is a good idea because of the potential for profit-making, just ask your users for help if they see a bike that's not showing up on the map. And if somebody cheats and more or less hogs a bike by locking it in places nobody else can get to well you can put limits on how long/often you can be the sole user before you get refused, forcing you to make regular swaps.
Unfortunately, the Black Lives Matter movement co-opted the police militarization issue, and claim (incorrectly) that police militarization is driven by racism. For example, one of their key demands is the following:
8. The demilitarization of law enforcement, including law enforcement in schools and on college campuses.
So the BLM movement claims the police use superfluous and excessive force against black people and you're surprised they want to curb the police use of force? The militarization happens because the police think they need to go into every situation prepared for maximum force and immediate retaliation, like they're in a war zone just waiting for an insurgent to open up on them. When you're wound up that tight mistakes happen and in some cases they're fatal, like in this swatting incident. Dialing that back would probably be good for all the victims, but do they apply this extreme force equally to everyone? Or are some more equal than others...
Of course there's feedback loops here, poor socio-economic background leads to crime and prejudice, profiling etc. meaning you catch more black criminals because you assume they're more criminal so statistically they are. And you can claim that's all there is to it. But I recently saw a documentary on the Vietnam war and one of the takeaways I got was how much easier it was to shoot at "gooks". Like most soldiers - with a few exceptions, as always - weren't trying to cause civilian casualties. But in the end whether you shot the right gooks, the wrong gooks or even if the allied gooks died, the important thing was if the US soldiers made it through in one piece.
I'm not saying that's how the US police thinks. But it's a very human coping strategy to distance yourself from those you might have to shoot and create a "us against them" mentality where greater casualties for them is okay if it means less casualties for yourself. And that might make it a lot easier to think of blacks as black instead of all the things everybody have in common. I wouldn't be surprised if the same applied in greater or lesser degrees to other minorities too, while if you meet a suspect that's practically like looking in the mirror you'd be more hesitant. And with finger on the trigger that can be the difference between life and death.
They had the caller WHO THEY BELIEVED THEY WERE SHOOTING on the phone AT THE TIME THEY WERE SHOOTING HIM, and didn't bother to interact with him using the established communications channel AT ALL.
Welcome to the real world where the 911 operator is not the same person as the police officer responding. The person on the phone was goading them to continue, in what reasonable conversation do you expect them to discover the discrepancy? I mean any reasonable 911 operator would concentrate on the essentials, where's the incident, who's involved, what's happening. If they were to say "He just told me he's going to do X" and the police officer responded "Uhm, he's standing right in front of me with his hands up" then it'd just be luck.
I don't understand why there is so much animosity from slashdot community towards new languages, especially Rust. Is it to hard to learn, hence sour grapes? Or fear of job security? Come on people, be nice.
Just Rust in particular. Most of/. wants software development to be about the code and a meritocracy, not participation awards, social science experiments or bickering about whether master/slave is some kind of unhealthy dark age reference. Some of the threads that have been linked to have been like "This has to be a joke, right?" only they're not, it's people earnestly discussing it and expecting people to take it seriously. Not that bigotry or immature male humor or #metoo harassment doesn't exist, but if it starts looking like a social advocacy group first and a software development community second instead of some HR issue distracting from what you're really trying to do, well...
These deadlines are not based on what it would take to do the job right and best. However if someone went to me and say we need to solve this problem, I can usually give a fair ballpark figure on when it can be done by, and add some buffer for unforeseen problems
Been there, tried that. The problem is what you might call sub-feature scope creep/unclarity, like say we're going to deliver a car. And everyone has their pet ideas for how every part of it should be different or improved, like it needs a new engine, new gearbox, new suspension, new chassis, new interior, new this and that until not even the windshield wipers are simple. And no matter how much you've reasonable estimated for updates there's always speculative R&D projects or ideas that haven't gotten part the concept stage that get added to the mix.
And if you try to beat it down you get trapped in a meta-discussion about what the actual promise is, because some thought you were delivering a Rolls-Royce, others a Ferrari, some a truck or SUV, others a cheap inner city compact and some a green EV/hybrid. And then you're trending back towards the waterfall method where you tell me in detail what you want first, then I'll estimate it afterwards. If you want the most ridiculous line I've been asked to estimate in a project it was "Data warehouse". Like, how long does building one of those take.
And? The alternative is probably that they price themselves out of the market, consumers buy some other brand and everybody lose their jobs. In fact, if they're successful there could be more jobs at Ford despite being less in the industry. Unless you're in some form of cartel/monopolist market or public service where people have no choice but to suck it up being intentionally inefficient to protect jobs is folly. I have an old Ford that might get replaced soon, it's been good to me so obviously I'm looking at new Fords. But I'm also seriously looking at Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Volvo and a few outsiders too. I know what they were 10+ years ago may not be that relevant today, neither in terms of features or quality. It's not exactly a market to be complacent in.
My most recent move was to a house without cable service, but with FTTH. I'm on their slowest service, which is 54Mb/s down, 9.5Mb/s up. I don't notice much difference between 10 and 54Mb/s downstream, but the difference between 1 and 9.5Mb/s upstream is enormous.
On fiber I'd say even 9.5 Mb/s upstream is being a dick. One provider here makes it symmetric like from 50/50 to 1000/1000, the other have nominally asymmetric lines like I'm on 160/15. But in practice for relatively short bursts I see like 500 Mbit+ upstream it only slows down if you exceed some fairly generous bit bucket. With cable, DSL etc. the frequency bands are chosen so you get a lot more downstream than upstream but with fiber it's naturally symmetric just like say a network card. There's no reason to treat upload bandwidth as something rare and expensive. Most people use it so little and so rarely that most likely there's plenty free return capacity as long as it's fiber all the way to the backbone.
One size fits all is almost never appropriate. I know I'm most productive at the start of the morning before people start interrupting me for questions, and usually through a good part of the afternoon before 4 PM.
You realize that "people start interrupting" because that's when they're working, right? I understand your perspective, except I'm the polar opposite who usually gets things done in the late afternoon but I'm under no illusion that's when most work is done company-wide. I get work done because it's quiet. And to be honest I think you are the exception, most people seem to take a long time to "boot" to get into work again. That goes for Mondays, mornings and just coming back from lunch. Or they're procrastinating a bit and then towards the end it's like "I should get this done before lunch" or "I should get this done today" and finally get to it.
Not really surprised they found the most productive time was in the middle of the week either. In the beginning of the week work is winding up and towards the end of the week it's winding down, the meat is obviously somewhere in the middle. The question is what's really the point, you want everything to be like Wednesday afternoon? It's like saying you want your whole steak to be like the juicy center, it's just not happening because the outer layer has to fry in the pan. You won't make Monday morning or Friday afternoon equally productive and I think everyone knows it. In fact you often introduce extra overhead by making it the recap point, like what did we get done last week and what are we doing this week.
This is what we get for doing away with real standardisation and allowing "evergreen" browsers and nonsense like "living standards" to take over. The only meaningful standards left today, for a lot of practical purposes, are the de facto ones of what works in the browsers your visitors are using right now. Anything else can change tomorrow anyway.
From your UID you should be old enough to remember all the de facto extensions back in the Netscape vs IE days, when did we ever have real standardization? The W3C was always more of a working group than a stamp of approval, the recommendations were basically the things they agreed on and everything else they did their own way. They had a few showcase Acid tests but never anything like a compliance suite.
And just because something is a standard doesn't make it a good standard, "design by committee" is not a honorific. If you want something mired in bureaucracy form a committee. A lot of the best ones is one person or a small group of developers or engineers - like Tim-Berners Lee - creating it which is then post-facto recognized as a standard. And more timely too like TCP/IP that took over the world while OSI was dicking around with their seven-layer model and the great protocol to end all protocols.
That said it is dubious when one player is starting to dominate the market and could be starting to tweak things only to break it for others. It's not like Microsoft is the first or last company to play the embrace, extend, extinguish game.
It's the government's job to step in and provide a solution if the monopolies refuse.
That's the weakest argument you could use. As a general rule of thumb if the market - that is, the users - aren't willing to pay for the service that service should not exist. Otherwise you'd approve of every public, subsidized boondoggle sucking money out of general taxes. Most public services replace or compete private services, like if there was no public fire department or waterworks I'd probably have a private fire department and some sort of well association and you have mixed markets like public/private transport.
The government should step in where there's market failure, usually because it's unfeasible for anyone else to service you and you're being gouged. Like if you don't like your local grocery store could you go to a different one. But if you can't get out of your driveway without being subject to a toll road's prices and terms you don't have a real choice. If the rest of the city district is connected to one sewer system nobody's laying down pipes for a different one. Or a second set of rails and railway stops.
Is the ISP market that bad? Potentially yes. Potentially no, like you got many kinds of networks with huge benefits of scale where there'll never be many competitors like say physical cell phone networks, with leased access you can have many names but it'll all come down to at most 3-4 different sets of infrastructure. That doesn't mean it's a market that is so limited the government has to step in. It's the kind of market you can keep competition open if you regulate it well, but if you don't it'll decent into monopoly abuse.
Yes, but the problem is not that we're starved of new medicine. There always seem to be a luxury market for millionaires that can afford the best treatment money can buy. I mean if the medicine didn't exist then doctors would simply tell you there's nothing more that can be done, it's not the prettiest part of their job but doctors deliver bad news all the time. The problem is that the medicine exists at a ridiculous price which makes them a huge burden on the system. And while each niche medicine is small there's a large number of niches making the total unbearable both to insurance companies and universal healthcare. Yet it's extremely harsh to tell people that yes we could do better but you're not worth the money.
So it the cause price gouging from medical companies or that we're developing increasingly sophisticated treatments for increasingly rare diseases, driving per-patient costs through the roof? Definitively both. Our medical knowledge keeps expanding and there's research into diseases so rare you need a global network just to find subjects. I mean if you go back 20 years ago those we're debating whether to help today generally wouldn't get any help. On the other hand the pharmaceutical industry knows you haven't got a choice, they're not the ones holding a gun to your head but a serious health condition is the same kind of duress. It's not easy to feel that any price is fair under those conditions...
A medicine to me is a chemical. This is a genetic treatment. A procedure. Cellular surgery. But not a medicine.
If you can get a pill or injection or lotion for it I think most people will call it a medicine no matter what it does. I mean what makes it a medicine and not a placebo or toxin is the effect, not the means. It's probably the most natural way to think of it for the company too, it's something they can manufacture very far away and sell. The procedure-delivery business is very different.
safeguarding our elections. That makes me feel soooooooo confident.
Well, I would imagine they are mainly talking about the media coverage around the election not the actual voting machines. And in that respect they're the right companies, if you don't exist on Facebook or Google then to most of the voters you hardly exist. The downside is that I expect this will become a crackdown on everything that doesn't come from the mainstream media or see things the way they do. So Russia took out a few ads, when you compare that to what the US has done to influence democratic elections it takes a whole lot of balls to complain. If you think any grassroot movement is an astroturf campaign that's probably just as big a democratic problem as actual astroturf campaigns. I mean to the right people this probably reads like "Despite pulling all the strings the establishment failed to get Hillary elected. We'll make sure that doesn't happen again."
I do know exceptions to this rule... older folks who just seem overly positive and oblivious to things that would otherwise bring them down. But I view that as more of a defense mechanism than a true state of contentment and peace? They seem a little "out of touch" to people who observe them for long enough.
Well your contentment is reality vs expectation, not reality vs past performance. I find a lot of old people expected they'd suffer a decline in vision, hearing, motor skills etc. and even though they're obviously in worse shape than ten years ago they've just accepted that as natural. Hell, I'm not even 40 yet but I realize I'm not 20 anymore and I expect being 60 or 80 will be considerably worse. If you're going to be miserable just because your body is aging and eventually can't do everything you used to then you're pretty much doomed to be miserable. If I tripped and fell ending up in a wheelchair in a nursing home tomorrow it would be utterly terrible. If I'm in a wheelchair in a nursing home when I'm 90... that's being 90. There's no point in having unrealistic expectations about being 20 forever.
Just look at the sad situation regarding 4k content: The vast majority of even high-budget movies is still produced with 2k digital intermediates, and fake-4k is "derived" from this via mere upscaling. And amongst the very few productions that actually use 4k digital intermediates, many of them reach that kind of resolution in only a few scenes, when there is outdoor daylight and the picture is not mostly blurred by the "artistic over-use" of unnaturally shallow depth of field (aka "bokeh").
True, though in their defense releasing a UHD version also gives you Rec. 2020 color and HDR even if the resolution is just an upscale. And in many cases they have gone back to the original film assets for the non-VFX scenes. And there's an increasing trend to do it properly for new films (Chappie, Deadpool, Dunkirk, Logan, Interstellar, The Revenant for example) so... it's getting there.
... as a monitor. Because no videos will be in 8K!
As far as I know Red, Panasonic, Sharp, Canon all have an 8K camera in the $100k range. You also have a ton of cameras between 4K and 8K down to around the $5k range. There's probably a market for these at some high end movie studios, sure there's no consumer format but I hardly expect this to be at a consumer price either...
Unfortunately, if you look at history and human behavior, the answer has already been written. (...) The chasm between the wealthy elite and the other 99.999% of the human race is growing wider, not shrinking.
But there's always been this elite, how rich and powerful were the pharaohs to the slaves that built the pyramids? The Roman Emperor to the beggars on the streets? The Church built enormous cathedrals with exquisite ornamentation. Wealthy merchant families existed long before the Rockefellers like the Medici family. Revolutions happen not because the rich get richer, but because the poor become poorer.
UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses.
And? That's half of the "bread and circus" you need to avoid a revolution. If you got food on the table, clothes on your back, roof over your head... you don't start a revolution simply because it's not nice enough. And the other part is whether you're content, like are you being oppressed or persecuted or treated like second class citizens. And to be honest the almighty dollar is a pretty indifferent god, it cares about your work results it doesn't care what color skin you have, who you pray to and who you sleep with. I wouldn't say kind god but an equal opportunity exploiter.
Remember that once you take the human component out you also take out the biggest cost driver. What's the marginal cost of an extra kilo of potatoes is if you don't need the farmer, truck driver or store clerk? Yes, you still need land, fertilizer, farm machinery, the truck and gas to operate it but they can all probably be made cheaper too. The refinement too, if you compare the cost of a burger in a burger joint to the cost of the ingredients in the burger there's obviously a pretty big mark-up that isn't just the energy needed to bake the bread, grind and cook the meat, slice the vegetables and assemble it.
Basically I think the cost of providing enough to avoid any real uprising will be low enough the rich will simply do it. Not that I expect them to give more than necessary, but resentment and riots take time to build and money flows quite easily so I expect any real call for revolution to get quenched without quickly. A good example is Greece, which has been intentionally held on the pain threshold by the EU and IMF for some time. They know what austerity measures they can push through and which would go too far. Hell, not even Venezuela has revolted yet...
6. Flexible-purpose robotics is also similarly very tricky, but definitely do-able eventually.
Well, for the longest time I said that a true AI would be a chess computer that said "How about a game of Go?" But AlphaZero kinda make me eat my words, it's a single program that can play chess, Go and shogi (Japanese chess) at a world class level, without any human guidance. Even when AlphaGo beat Lee Sodol I thought well, it's still dependent on that human policy network to weed out the "sensible" moves from the senseless moves. And then they went and took that out, I thought well it's one algorithm that's great for Go. But now with AlphaZero I have a feeling they got a DNN that could smash it in almost any traditional board game.
Now board games are obviously a narrow field of expertise in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, it's still broader than most people. I mean you don't see Magnus Carlsen play high level Go or Lee Sodol play high level chess. I bet it could master Star Trek 3D chess in a few hours just for shits and giggles. Many people felt AlphaGo itself was far ahead of expectations and even after that it's made progress I thought would take decades within a few years. That said, in the 60s they probably thought we'd have flying cars and fusion reactors and a moon base by now so I also expect AI to underwhelm in some areas. I'm just not sure which.
Which is why the US response to NK escalation needs to be something more like: "OK, China. You like letting your NK lap dog run crazy? Fine. Remember back in the 1970s when we stepped in and stopped Taiwan from obtaining nuclear weapons? Yeah, that prosperous island that you consider a rogue province, and want back under your control? Well, if NK doesn't change its ways and give up nuclear weapons, we're going the help Taiwan get to where Japan is on nuclear weapons - about a week away from having them once the decision is made.
Yeah well except the whole point of proxy wars is to pretend they're operating on their own and avoid pointing the finger directly at each other, even if both know who is pulling the strings. This would be a perfect setup and pretext for China to set up a reverse Cuban missile crisis. Either Trump would have to back down looking like a war mongering, nuclear-proliferating mad man who just brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation again or China will - probably after securing a nuclear alliance with Russia - say that to protect China from US aggression we're reclaiming Taiwan, either let it go or WW3 is on.
Since China today is very far from Mao's China they could probably offer them to become some sort of Hong Kong-style special administrative region deal where effectively very little would change except to be "back" as part of one China. Unless the nukes really go flying but I don't think anyone wants to see China in total war mode. They got 1.4 billion people and is the epicenter of manufacturing, even if US is still economically stronger when what you need is men and bullets having it is a lot easier than buying it.
Slashdot Mirror
The other is $/kg, well if you look at their prices you see Falcon 9 starting at $62M
So why is NASA paying $133M per COTS supply fly to the ISS? Spacex.com/Musk is marketing bullshit as usual.
I smell troll but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, primarily the Dragon capsule and a mission to dock, return and recover it. The base price gets you an empty rocket fairing, you design the payload and operate the mission once SpaceX has delivered it to the transfer orbit. And unlike the rockets that share R&D with commercial satellite launches NASA is the only customer for the Dragon, driving price up. It'll be the same for the crewed version launching later this year if all goes well.
Well AMD already did their whole diversification strategy to "Enterprise, embedded and semi-custom" which I thought would be their final "if you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen" move, it created other revenue but it also diverted more resources away from competing with Intel. Back in Q2 2016 their "traditional" CPU/GPU unit was down to $435M in revenue and hemorrhaging money (-$85M) and I thought it was only a matter of time before they threw in the towel at least in the CPU market. Sure they hyped Zen but AMD had a long history of promising the world and not delivering.
Fortunately for all of us, probably most of all AMD they actually had a winner. Last quarter (Q3, Q4 is not out yet) they had $70M in profit on $819M in sales in the same unit, that turnaround is pretty much all Zen in different variations. It was like seeing a boxer battling on the ropes being battered, bruised and dazzled making one last Hail Mary knockout attempt and hitting hard. Now if only they could do the same in the GPU market, after the GTX 9xx series totally crushed them they never quite recovered. More important than low power mobile anyway.
A more important aspect is that NASA's costs don't inflate with the CPI. They inflate with the NNSI (Nasa New Start Index), which is a much steeper rate. Why? The CPI is based on a "grab bag" of consumer goods. Consumer goods have in general become much cheaper to produce over time, moving from domestic hand labour to varying combinations of mass production and overseas production. NASA, however, still builds things in small quantities with labour from a highly trained workforce. So it's natural that their inflation index would be higher than the CPI.
Well, I wouldn't say that it's obvious. Through advances in computers and simulation I'd think that a lot of the design/prototyping/testing now happens virtually even though the actual construction is still very low volume.
How are they faring compared to international competition, like the Japanese and Chinese? Isn't there a risk that the Falcon Heavy will be somewhat outdated before it gets past its first steps?
Well there's two kinds of competition, maximum payload and $/kg to orbit. In the former, there is no competition or rather the competition would be in-orbit assembly like how we built the ISS. The market is rather unclear because since there's no operating super heavy launch vehicle you don't design payloads that require it. The other is $/kg, well if you look at their prices you see Falcon 9 starting at $62M and Falcon Heavy starting at $90M, note that they list max performance and min price so you can't actually divide those to get $/kg to orbit. What you can tell though is that they plan to deliver ~3x the performance for less then 3x the price making the Falcon Heavy cheaper per kg.
That is quite opposite from the SLS and quite possibly other plans on the board where the rocket is so special and launches so rarely that it becomes a billion dollar launch. Like for example the Iridium launches, SpaceX has been launching those 10 at a time on a Falcon 9. Would they do 30 on a Falcon Heavy instead? That's really the key issue for SpaceX, they need business. You can produce a technical marvel like the Saturn V - which would still be unrivaled - but once the moon missions were over nobody could afford it. And then there's the potential for re-usability, with three F9-class first stages to recover they'll be a lot of the cost. If they can be launched not only two times but fives or ten times... the competition shivers.
I'm not really sure what you're getting at, if that WiFi is getting data from the Internet then it's using some form of paid service too. Phones have had cellular/WiFi/Bluetooth triple play for a long time with no indication that the latter two are going away and you can set them up as a personal hotspot for your laptop or other device with no stress. Essentially this is just an integrated version of what's already trivially available. Considering that essentially all laptops have a WiFi/Bluetooth chip and antenna already I imagine it's not actually that big an additional cost it's just that nobody has done the integration work. When you get it for "free" by placing a smartphone chip in a laptop format, why the heck not?
It would be nice but in reality a lot of these bike sharing plans turn out to be a PITA to manage, causing enough nuisance for some cities to ban or curb bike sharing schemes. Some of these schemes have bikes with locks, and they are hardly an issue. Book online and open the lock with your phone. The organisation I work for has done this with all of their pool cars as well and it works great. The point is that locks force you to check out a bike before using it, making you responsible for disposing of it properly at a depot, not in a canal or wherever you feel like.
Except that you then have to build a lot of depots or it becomes a chore to get to the nearest depot and from the destination depot to where you're really going. And if you're visiting somewhere you can't just borrow a bike, leave it outside and return it when you go home because it can get lost on your watch. I wonder now with the abundance of smartphones if it would be possible to skip the whole depot bit. Basically it comes with a bike lock, you can attach it to anything and using your phone you send a photo + GPS coordinates showing you've "released" it back into the pool as long as it's a publicly accessible location and within the service area.
That way you wouldn't really need any special depots or systems, just ordinary bike racks dotted throughout the city. The bikes would just need some close proximity communication to take lock/unlock codes from the phone, you can have a button to activate so most of the time it's completely inert to make the battery last. Have some sort of security deposit to unlock the system to you, if you don't return the bike it's forfeit. If bikes go missing while allegedly locked because of user error or someone using bolt cutters look for repeat offenders otherwise ignore it.
You'll still have to deal with vandalism etc. so just have users report in missing (as in, not where the map says it should be), damaged, ditched or stolen bikes. I don't think offering rewards is a good idea because of the potential for profit-making, just ask your users for help if they see a bike that's not showing up on the map. And if somebody cheats and more or less hogs a bike by locking it in places nobody else can get to well you can put limits on how long/often you can be the sole user before you get refused, forcing you to make regular swaps.
Unfortunately, the Black Lives Matter movement co-opted the police militarization issue, and claim (incorrectly) that police militarization is driven by racism. For example, one of their key demands is the following:
8. The demilitarization of law enforcement, including law enforcement in schools and on college campuses.
So the BLM movement claims the police use superfluous and excessive force against black people and you're surprised they want to curb the police use of force? The militarization happens because the police think they need to go into every situation prepared for maximum force and immediate retaliation, like they're in a war zone just waiting for an insurgent to open up on them. When you're wound up that tight mistakes happen and in some cases they're fatal, like in this swatting incident. Dialing that back would probably be good for all the victims, but do they apply this extreme force equally to everyone? Or are some more equal than others...
Of course there's feedback loops here, poor socio-economic background leads to crime and prejudice, profiling etc. meaning you catch more black criminals because you assume they're more criminal so statistically they are. And you can claim that's all there is to it. But I recently saw a documentary on the Vietnam war and one of the takeaways I got was how much easier it was to shoot at "gooks". Like most soldiers - with a few exceptions, as always - weren't trying to cause civilian casualties. But in the end whether you shot the right gooks, the wrong gooks or even if the allied gooks died, the important thing was if the US soldiers made it through in one piece.
I'm not saying that's how the US police thinks. But it's a very human coping strategy to distance yourself from those you might have to shoot and create a "us against them" mentality where greater casualties for them is okay if it means less casualties for yourself. And that might make it a lot easier to think of blacks as black instead of all the things everybody have in common. I wouldn't be surprised if the same applied in greater or lesser degrees to other minorities too, while if you meet a suspect that's practically like looking in the mirror you'd be more hesitant. And with finger on the trigger that can be the difference between life and death.
They had the caller WHO THEY BELIEVED THEY WERE SHOOTING on the phone AT THE TIME THEY WERE SHOOTING HIM, and didn't bother to interact with him using the established communications channel AT ALL.
Welcome to the real world where the 911 operator is not the same person as the police officer responding. The person on the phone was goading them to continue, in what reasonable conversation do you expect them to discover the discrepancy? I mean any reasonable 911 operator would concentrate on the essentials, where's the incident, who's involved, what's happening. If they were to say "He just told me he's going to do X" and the police officer responded "Uhm, he's standing right in front of me with his hands up" then it'd just be luck.
I don't understand why there is so much animosity from slashdot community towards new languages, especially Rust. Is it to hard to learn, hence sour grapes? Or fear of job security? Come on people, be nice.
Just Rust in particular. Most of /. wants software development to be about the code and a meritocracy, not participation awards, social science experiments or bickering about whether master/slave is some kind of unhealthy dark age reference. Some of the threads that have been linked to have been like "This has to be a joke, right?" only they're not, it's people earnestly discussing it and expecting people to take it seriously. Not that bigotry or immature male humor or #metoo harassment doesn't exist, but if it starts looking like a social advocacy group first and a software development community second instead of some HR issue distracting from what you're really trying to do, well...
These deadlines are not based on what it would take to do the job right and best. However if someone went to me and say we need to solve this problem, I can usually give a fair ballpark figure on when it can be done by, and add some buffer for unforeseen problems
Been there, tried that. The problem is what you might call sub-feature scope creep/unclarity, like say we're going to deliver a car. And everyone has their pet ideas for how every part of it should be different or improved, like it needs a new engine, new gearbox, new suspension, new chassis, new interior, new this and that until not even the windshield wipers are simple. And no matter how much you've reasonable estimated for updates there's always speculative R&D projects or ideas that haven't gotten part the concept stage that get added to the mix.
And if you try to beat it down you get trapped in a meta-discussion about what the actual promise is, because some thought you were delivering a Rolls-Royce, others a Ferrari, some a truck or SUV, others a cheap inner city compact and some a green EV/hybrid. And then you're trending back towards the waterfall method where you tell me in detail what you want first, then I'll estimate it afterwards. If you want the most ridiculous line I've been asked to estimate in a project it was "Data warehouse". Like, how long does building one of those take.
North American is best American!
Oh god, didn't you settle this in the 1860s already. Stop rubbing it in.
And? The alternative is probably that they price themselves out of the market, consumers buy some other brand and everybody lose their jobs. In fact, if they're successful there could be more jobs at Ford despite being less in the industry. Unless you're in some form of cartel/monopolist market or public service where people have no choice but to suck it up being intentionally inefficient to protect jobs is folly. I have an old Ford that might get replaced soon, it's been good to me so obviously I'm looking at new Fords. But I'm also seriously looking at Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Volvo and a few outsiders too. I know what they were 10+ years ago may not be that relevant today, neither in terms of features or quality. It's not exactly a market to be complacent in.
My most recent move was to a house without cable service, but with FTTH. I'm on their slowest service, which is 54Mb/s down, 9.5Mb/s up. I don't notice much difference between 10 and 54Mb/s downstream, but the difference between 1 and 9.5Mb/s upstream is enormous.
On fiber I'd say even 9.5 Mb/s upstream is being a dick. One provider here makes it symmetric like from 50/50 to 1000/1000, the other have nominally asymmetric lines like I'm on 160/15. But in practice for relatively short bursts I see like 500 Mbit+ upstream it only slows down if you exceed some fairly generous bit bucket. With cable, DSL etc. the frequency bands are chosen so you get a lot more downstream than upstream but with fiber it's naturally symmetric just like say a network card. There's no reason to treat upload bandwidth as something rare and expensive. Most people use it so little and so rarely that most likely there's plenty free return capacity as long as it's fiber all the way to the backbone.
One size fits all is almost never appropriate. I know I'm most productive at the start of the morning before people start interrupting me for questions, and usually through a good part of the afternoon before 4 PM.
You realize that "people start interrupting" because that's when they're working, right? I understand your perspective, except I'm the polar opposite who usually gets things done in the late afternoon but I'm under no illusion that's when most work is done company-wide. I get work done because it's quiet. And to be honest I think you are the exception, most people seem to take a long time to "boot" to get into work again. That goes for Mondays, mornings and just coming back from lunch. Or they're procrastinating a bit and then towards the end it's like "I should get this done before lunch" or "I should get this done today" and finally get to it.
Not really surprised they found the most productive time was in the middle of the week either. In the beginning of the week work is winding up and towards the end of the week it's winding down, the meat is obviously somewhere in the middle. The question is what's really the point, you want everything to be like Wednesday afternoon? It's like saying you want your whole steak to be like the juicy center, it's just not happening because the outer layer has to fry in the pan. You won't make Monday morning or Friday afternoon equally productive and I think everyone knows it. In fact you often introduce extra overhead by making it the recap point, like what did we get done last week and what are we doing this week.
This is what we get for doing away with real standardisation and allowing "evergreen" browsers and nonsense like "living standards" to take over. The only meaningful standards left today, for a lot of practical purposes, are the de facto ones of what works in the browsers your visitors are using right now. Anything else can change tomorrow anyway.
From your UID you should be old enough to remember all the de facto extensions back in the Netscape vs IE days, when did we ever have real standardization? The W3C was always more of a working group than a stamp of approval, the recommendations were basically the things they agreed on and everything else they did their own way. They had a few showcase Acid tests but never anything like a compliance suite.
And just because something is a standard doesn't make it a good standard, "design by committee" is not a honorific. If you want something mired in bureaucracy form a committee. A lot of the best ones is one person or a small group of developers or engineers - like Tim-Berners Lee - creating it which is then post-facto recognized as a standard. And more timely too like TCP/IP that took over the world while OSI was dicking around with their seven-layer model and the great protocol to end all protocols.
That said it is dubious when one player is starting to dominate the market and could be starting to tweak things only to break it for others. It's not like Microsoft is the first or last company to play the embrace, extend, extinguish game.
It's the government's job to step in and provide a solution if the monopolies refuse.
That's the weakest argument you could use. As a general rule of thumb if the market - that is, the users - aren't willing to pay for the service that service should not exist. Otherwise you'd approve of every public, subsidized boondoggle sucking money out of general taxes. Most public services replace or compete private services, like if there was no public fire department or waterworks I'd probably have a private fire department and some sort of well association and you have mixed markets like public/private transport.
The government should step in where there's market failure, usually because it's unfeasible for anyone else to service you and you're being gouged. Like if you don't like your local grocery store could you go to a different one. But if you can't get out of your driveway without being subject to a toll road's prices and terms you don't have a real choice. If the rest of the city district is connected to one sewer system nobody's laying down pipes for a different one. Or a second set of rails and railway stops.
Is the ISP market that bad? Potentially yes. Potentially no, like you got many kinds of networks with huge benefits of scale where there'll never be many competitors like say physical cell phone networks, with leased access you can have many names but it'll all come down to at most 3-4 different sets of infrastructure. That doesn't mean it's a market that is so limited the government has to step in. It's the kind of market you can keep competition open if you regulate it well, but if you don't it'll decent into monopoly abuse.
Yes, but the problem is not that we're starved of new medicine. There always seem to be a luxury market for millionaires that can afford the best treatment money can buy. I mean if the medicine didn't exist then doctors would simply tell you there's nothing more that can be done, it's not the prettiest part of their job but doctors deliver bad news all the time. The problem is that the medicine exists at a ridiculous price which makes them a huge burden on the system. And while each niche medicine is small there's a large number of niches making the total unbearable both to insurance companies and universal healthcare. Yet it's extremely harsh to tell people that yes we could do better but you're not worth the money.
So it the cause price gouging from medical companies or that we're developing increasingly sophisticated treatments for increasingly rare diseases, driving per-patient costs through the roof? Definitively both. Our medical knowledge keeps expanding and there's research into diseases so rare you need a global network just to find subjects. I mean if you go back 20 years ago those we're debating whether to help today generally wouldn't get any help. On the other hand the pharmaceutical industry knows you haven't got a choice, they're not the ones holding a gun to your head but a serious health condition is the same kind of duress. It's not easy to feel that any price is fair under those conditions...
A medicine to me is a chemical. This is a genetic treatment. A procedure. Cellular surgery. But not a medicine.
If you can get a pill or injection or lotion for it I think most people will call it a medicine no matter what it does. I mean what makes it a medicine and not a placebo or toxin is the effect, not the means. It's probably the most natural way to think of it for the company too, it's something they can manufacture very far away and sell. The procedure-delivery business is very different.
safeguarding our elections. That makes me feel soooooooo confident.
Well, I would imagine they are mainly talking about the media coverage around the election not the actual voting machines. And in that respect they're the right companies, if you don't exist on Facebook or Google then to most of the voters you hardly exist. The downside is that I expect this will become a crackdown on everything that doesn't come from the mainstream media or see things the way they do. So Russia took out a few ads, when you compare that to what the US has done to influence democratic elections it takes a whole lot of balls to complain. If you think any grassroot movement is an astroturf campaign that's probably just as big a democratic problem as actual astroturf campaigns. I mean to the right people this probably reads like "Despite pulling all the strings the establishment failed to get Hillary elected. We'll make sure that doesn't happen again."
I do know exceptions to this rule ... older folks who just seem overly positive and oblivious to things that would otherwise bring them down. But I view that as more of a defense mechanism than a true state of contentment and peace? They seem a little "out of touch" to people who observe them for long enough.
Well your contentment is reality vs expectation, not reality vs past performance. I find a lot of old people expected they'd suffer a decline in vision, hearing, motor skills etc. and even though they're obviously in worse shape than ten years ago they've just accepted that as natural. Hell, I'm not even 40 yet but I realize I'm not 20 anymore and I expect being 60 or 80 will be considerably worse. If you're going to be miserable just because your body is aging and eventually can't do everything you used to then you're pretty much doomed to be miserable. If I tripped and fell ending up in a wheelchair in a nursing home tomorrow it would be utterly terrible. If I'm in a wheelchair in a nursing home when I'm 90... that's being 90. There's no point in having unrealistic expectations about being 20 forever.
Just look at the sad situation regarding 4k content: The vast majority of even high-budget movies is still produced with 2k digital intermediates, and fake-4k is "derived" from this via mere upscaling. And amongst the very few productions that actually use 4k digital intermediates, many of them reach that kind of resolution in only a few scenes, when there is outdoor daylight and the picture is not mostly blurred by the "artistic over-use" of unnaturally shallow depth of field (aka "bokeh").
True, though in their defense releasing a UHD version also gives you Rec. 2020 color and HDR even if the resolution is just an upscale. And in many cases they have gone back to the original film assets for the non-VFX scenes. And there's an increasing trend to do it properly for new films (Chappie, Deadpool, Dunkirk, Logan, Interstellar, The Revenant for example) so... it's getting there.
... as a monitor. Because no videos will be in 8K!
As far as I know Red, Panasonic, Sharp, Canon all have an 8K camera in the $100k range. You also have a ton of cameras between 4K and 8K down to around the $5k range. There's probably a market for these at some high end movie studios, sure there's no consumer format but I hardly expect this to be at a consumer price either...
Unfortunately, if you look at history and human behavior, the answer has already been written. (...) The chasm between the wealthy elite and the other 99.999% of the human race is growing wider, not shrinking.
But there's always been this elite, how rich and powerful were the pharaohs to the slaves that built the pyramids? The Roman Emperor to the beggars on the streets? The Church built enormous cathedrals with exquisite ornamentation. Wealthy merchant families existed long before the Rockefellers like the Medici family. Revolutions happen not because the rich get richer, but because the poor become poorer.
UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses.
And? That's half of the "bread and circus" you need to avoid a revolution. If you got food on the table, clothes on your back, roof over your head... you don't start a revolution simply because it's not nice enough. And the other part is whether you're content, like are you being oppressed or persecuted or treated like second class citizens. And to be honest the almighty dollar is a pretty indifferent god, it cares about your work results it doesn't care what color skin you have, who you pray to and who you sleep with. I wouldn't say kind god but an equal opportunity exploiter.
Remember that once you take the human component out you also take out the biggest cost driver. What's the marginal cost of an extra kilo of potatoes is if you don't need the farmer, truck driver or store clerk? Yes, you still need land, fertilizer, farm machinery, the truck and gas to operate it but they can all probably be made cheaper too. The refinement too, if you compare the cost of a burger in a burger joint to the cost of the ingredients in the burger there's obviously a pretty big mark-up that isn't just the energy needed to bake the bread, grind and cook the meat, slice the vegetables and assemble it.
Basically I think the cost of providing enough to avoid any real uprising will be low enough the rich will simply do it. Not that I expect them to give more than necessary, but resentment and riots take time to build and money flows quite easily so I expect any real call for revolution to get quenched without quickly. A good example is Greece, which has been intentionally held on the pain threshold by the EU and IMF for some time. They know what austerity measures they can push through and which would go too far. Hell, not even Venezuela has revolted yet...
6. Flexible-purpose robotics is also similarly very tricky, but definitely do-able eventually.
Well, for the longest time I said that a true AI would be a chess computer that said "How about a game of Go?" But AlphaZero kinda make me eat my words, it's a single program that can play chess, Go and shogi (Japanese chess) at a world class level, without any human guidance. Even when AlphaGo beat Lee Sodol I thought well, it's still dependent on that human policy network to weed out the "sensible" moves from the senseless moves. And then they went and took that out, I thought well it's one algorithm that's great for Go. But now with AlphaZero I have a feeling they got a DNN that could smash it in almost any traditional board game.
Now board games are obviously a narrow field of expertise in the grand scheme of things. On the other hand, it's still broader than most people. I mean you don't see Magnus Carlsen play high level Go or Lee Sodol play high level chess. I bet it could master Star Trek 3D chess in a few hours just for shits and giggles. Many people felt AlphaGo itself was far ahead of expectations and even after that it's made progress I thought would take decades within a few years. That said, in the 60s they probably thought we'd have flying cars and fusion reactors and a moon base by now so I also expect AI to underwhelm in some areas. I'm just not sure which.
Which is why the US response to NK escalation needs to be something more like: "OK, China. You like letting your NK lap dog run crazy? Fine. Remember back in the 1970s when we stepped in and stopped Taiwan from obtaining nuclear weapons? Yeah, that prosperous island that you consider a rogue province, and want back under your control? Well, if NK doesn't change its ways and give up nuclear weapons, we're going the help Taiwan get to where Japan is on nuclear weapons - about a week away from having them once the decision is made.
Yeah well except the whole point of proxy wars is to pretend they're operating on their own and avoid pointing the finger directly at each other, even if both know who is pulling the strings. This would be a perfect setup and pretext for China to set up a reverse Cuban missile crisis. Either Trump would have to back down looking like a war mongering, nuclear-proliferating mad man who just brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation again or China will - probably after securing a nuclear alliance with Russia - say that to protect China from US aggression we're reclaiming Taiwan, either let it go or WW3 is on.
Since China today is very far from Mao's China they could probably offer them to become some sort of Hong Kong-style special administrative region deal where effectively very little would change except to be "back" as part of one China. Unless the nukes really go flying but I don't think anyone wants to see China in total war mode. They got 1.4 billion people and is the epicenter of manufacturing, even if US is still economically stronger when what you need is men and bullets having it is a lot easier than buying it.