I'm sitting here wondering what your logic is behind this. It really defies common sense to have this mind set. Sooner or later there will be a extinction level event that we will not be able to prevent. Logically, it doesn't make any sense to remain planet bound once we develop the technology to move off planet.
What we lack is the technology to make space less hostile than Earth after 99% of the proposed ELEs. That is to say if we build bunkers into solid rock distributed around the world so at least some will be on the far side of whatever asteroid impact or gamma ray burst or whatever hits us and can weather the initial effects this the best chance for recovery even if most of mankind is wiped out. Earth is also the place it is most likely that a small group of people in a shielded location can survive long-term without the resources of a massive civilization backing them.
I mean creating a colony that'll last 20 or 50 years by duct taping old and failing technology from Earth is no good, they'd have to be able to replace everything from space suits and air locks to solar panels and electronics faster than it breaks. Even with hazmat suits and growing food in greenhouses it's a lot more low tech and if normality returns you're fairly easily back to Amish levels of self-sustainability. We have absolutely no idea how to be self-sustaining on Venus, Mars or the Moon.
Yeah, the commercial offers sucked. And the market decided. For a better product and a better deal. Made by the "corporation" called "government", which is the "corporation" that we're all shareholders, employers and employees of. The commercial suppliers simply hated an actual free market (and especially it balancing itself out).
That's like saying that if the voters voted for universal healthcare it's a free market solution. Heck, it would make communism a free market solution. It's totally okay to say that the free market doesn't always deliver and that you're sometimes better off funding it through taxes so you don't have to worry about revenue, margins and profits. It's called socialism, look it up.
You're assuming they'd continue to co-exist, that's not what happens in a natural monopoly. When you have a large fixed cost to build the infrastructure and a very small marginal cost to serve another customer it'll either spiral up (more customers -> lower cost/customer -> more customers -> monopoly) or down (less customers -> higher cost/customer -> less customers -> bankruptcy). If rural ISPs lose any significant fraction of users to Starlink that could easily set off a chain reaction where they shut down and Starlink is the new monopoly in town.
Killing an innocent bystander is no selection, at least unless the trait we're selecting against isn't "don't stand near dangerous morons".
Well, depending on how far back you go they were probably your family or your tribe. There's no doubt in my mind that natural selection is far more than individual reproduction, or certain traits should never have appeared. For example the will of some to fight and die protecting others or the selflessness some have, in a group they make the group stronger. I also think that is why almost any primitive group has created some form of religion, it creates an order and a community, rewards and punishments for right and wrong that make it stronger as a whole. That your neighbor is a total stranger you have no relationship with is a fairly modern phenomenon when you look at all of human history.
Their whole banking system relies on ActiveX controls that require IE. How about Microsoft pay to fix the damage of 20 years of trying to embrace and extend through the web that's left governments and businesses stuck using abandoned plugins and Microsoft exclusive controls?
It's rare that I come to defense of Microsoft but ActiveX has been on death row since Silverlight was released back in 2007, they've had a decade plus to fix their shit. Here in Norway they created BankID in the 2000s, when Java applets was the hot shit and we were probably as dependent on Java as they are on ActiveX. In 2014 we got Java free BankID 2.0 because they owned that problem. They did not expect Oracle (Java) and Microsoft/Mozilla/Google/Apple (browsers) to support it from now to infinity, that's just them being unreasonable.
Well one thing they might want to do is make cellular connectivity common, even is it's not the latest and greatest standard. Right now you get WiFi+BT on almost everything but cellular is always a big extra. Yes, you can use the phone as a hotspot but a laptop has a bigger battery, better space for an antenna and you're more likely to have that plugged in. If it's an in house design they can throw in there for the cost of die space it could be a mass market feature instead of a road warrior niche.
It's always funny to watch a major corporation think they figured out a great new way to revolutionize an industry by doing something no one else does - in this case, build a high-speed data network buried a whole 2" under city roads.
Of course we laugh also the other way around, when a newcomer upends the competition because they keep doing things the way they've always have done and can't imagine doing it any other way. Hindsight is easy.
Is it gonna be like this with Waymo one day too? "Sorry, can't fix that bug that repeatedly crashes cars into lamp posts, your vehicle will become inoperative within 30 days."
I think we can cross that bridge when/if Google (Alphabet) ever decides to sell Waymo cars rather than provide a geo-fenced taxi service. They're not under any obligation to keep that operating...
You're free to fantasize about bug-free systems, but the purveyors of real software must contend with bugs. Bugs in extensions, third party dependencies, compilers and their runtimes, drivers and every other conceivable thing. Any exploited flaw delivers the entire address space of your thread pooled browser and everything it's doing with no further effort. Process isolation at least offers an impediment to further comprise beyond the exploited process.
And even if it's not malicious/exploitable, it'll crash everything. That was my main annoyance, if you got one misbehaving tab in Chrome you can sort by CPU/memory use, find and kill it if it doesn't die on its own. In Firefox it was the "what tab is killing it now" guessing game.
It is not obvious to me that "after developing industry and copying technology" the next step is inevitable progression to original solutions. Do you have any evidence of anything being developed in-house in China that isn't copied?
It borders on an ethnic insult to argue that 1.4 billion people are incapable of coming up with something original. Even though they're short on political freedom they have lots of bright scientists and engineers. Take high speed rail for example, they did import technology from France, Germany, Japan and Canada 15 years ago but it's now all in-house and they have 60%+ of the high speed rail in the world and 2+ billion customers per year. They have the world's longest HSR line, the world's fastest HSR line and the only commercially operating maglev line in the world. In short, they're market leaders by a huge margin. As much as/. is in love with SpaceX the Chinese actually launched more rockets in 2018 than the US did. Of course their rockets are much like existing rockets but it's not like they bought a design from Russia and called it theirs. But hey, it's only rocket science...
Seriously. Why would I ever *want* this cloud bullshit? Even if we disregard all the horrible security and privacy problems, what is the actual *upside* that is so appealing? I simply don't understand it. There is no upside.
For a company? Mostly a standard service to a standard price. I've seen this now many, many times there's a huge internal negotiation between the business users and internal IT and whether their staffing demands are too high, service levels too low, required uptime and so on. Sometimes they're inefficient, sometimes the business demands are just unreasonable, but back and forth it goes. So you buy a SaaS solution like Microsoft 365 and it's like this is what you're getting, end of story. You can be happy or unhappy about it but it's the same service level as millions of others so STFU and get back to work. Or make the business case that we should switch to Google Docs but stop fussing. In a big company it's like we can hire you or we can hire a company that'll hire you, either way you don't have any particular loyalty to us we're just a paycheck. It's laws and getting fired that keep you from misusing our data and it's the same either way.
For personal users? Mostly laziness. I don't want to manage my computer or my files, I just want to log in and all my documents are there and I have the latest version of the software. The sales pitch for a SaaS solution is that there's no reason to save up improvements/fixes to make people buy new versions, you just keep on continuously improving the service. Whether that's true or it's free rent, well... maybe a bit of both? You can take a look at Photoshop CC now as we have 5+ years of history, they're improving things but of course for a lot of people any version is overkill. Oh and of course users rarely care about more privacy than they get in the SLA, most people are going to upload it to Facebook or Instagram afterwards. They're not too worried about the NSA snooping through their photo album...
That's not really the case, though. Eventually people upgrade computers, operating systems, and so on. Eventually they'll have to buy the latest version to continue using it with the latest hardware.
How often does that really happen? I can run old C64 and DOSBox games from the 80s if I want to, there's almost always some kind of compatibility setting, emulator, VM or similar solution to run old software. The only software I keep vigorously up to date is everything that needs security patches like my OS and browser and of course online games I play require I have the latest client. New generations of hardware are usually drop in replacements as software is concerned, they only see a file system not if it's HDD or SSD, SATA or NVMe. They ask for memory, doesn't matter if it's DDR3 or DDR4. Whether it's dial-up or fiber TCP/IP is the same. New hardware = 99% new possibilities for new software.
There is some sense to this. If they can cram 100 space tourists into Starship, then send it to orbit the Moon for a day (7 day space vacation), they could make LOTS of money.
The budget version would be a free return trajectory where you're never in orbit, you do one flyby around the moon at a fairly long distance because you have so high relative velocity and that's it. If you first do lunar orbit, that'd probably be the two week option where you spend a week orbiting the Moon. Then neat thing is that with no atmosphere you can get real close, the LM was normally at a 110 km circular orbit but went down to 15 km for Descent Orbit Insertion, like you could get an airplane-like closeup view. That'd take at least one more tanker mission though, maybe more.
P.S. Even with some degree of re-usability it's silly to assume just the cost of fuel. There will be wear and tear parts, there will be parts that must be deprecated over 10 or 100 flights, there will be launch range/mission control operation costs and they'll never come free. Fuel is just a lower bound on how cheap it could get.
Nobody is going to the moon or Mars on a tourist trip in your lifetime, try to stop being an idiot before you die.
You underestimate how much money some people have. Jeff Bezos: Net worth $142 billion (before divorce) Apollo program: $125 billion in today's dollars
Jeff Bezos could single-handedly fund the Apollo program. In fact, that should now be the new unit when describing how just how rich they are. Is there a market for $10 million joyrides to the moon? Well we know 7 tourists went to the ISS on the Soyuz when the Russians were selling seats for $20-40 million and that was a very limited opportunity. The moon sounds grander and cheaper.
Of course to normal people spending millions of dollars on this is crazy talk. But I remember passing by a TV show that was selling crazy stuff to the super rich, the store had made a gold plated $200k bicycle that was actually just intended for show. A Sheik's buyer came in, thought that was cool and that was it. That's $0.2 million for a bicycle, that sounds like the type of guy who could hire an entire flight just to throw a destination wedding.
Basically, don't underestimate what can happen when billionaire wants something.
And it's perfectly safe because the only copy is stored on a laptop.
Where the money is located is on the blockchain that's distributed for the whole world to see. They can point to it and say here's our cold wallet with the $137 million that we lost the key to. It wouldn't bring the money back but it would prove nobody else took it as part of a scam. Now if they say we don't know where the cold wallet is and that information was only on the laptop too then I'm thinking exit scam.
Better that than dozing off without autopilot. This is the fact that the populist human first sceptics should admit to. Given that, these sorts of stories aren't a problem; as the quote admits, the car was driving safely.
If someone came up with a device that made drunk driving half as dangerous, would that improve road safety or make drunk driving a lot more common causing more accidents? Sure, these people probably would have caused an accident and now thanks to the Autopilot some of them didn't. That doesn't mean turning the autopilot on and going to sleep is a good idea because it adds a lot of risk compared to an awake driver. I already see a reply about a guy with narcolepsy who should get this, so he can continue to doze off in front of the wheel. Basically, if you're about to fall asleep you should not get behind the wheel. That was true and it continues to be true and I hope all of those who do cause an accident sleeping is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
You mean a machine performed self-calibration? Welcome to 2019 style "engineering".
No, it reverse engineered a motion model from an actual physical arm. It's the difference between what say a Disney animator does where the character can only bend in the ways the character model is programmed to bend and a toddler learning to use his arms and legs. I think this could be very useful to achieve natural motion in both robotics and animation as well as many optimization problems.
Imagine you could give a computer a detailed anatomical/physical model of man, an obstacle course and like you figure out the way through. Whether it's running, climbing, crawling, jumping, swinging, whatever just a physical way to get from A to B as fast as possible. It's still just "use a (learning) algorithm to find a solution that doesn't violate any constraints and optimizes a parameter" it's not magic. But it's still pretty hard to make it work with reasonable resources.
Frankly, with news being what they are these days, I don't dare have an opinion on US politics at all.
I think that the most important part to understand about US politics is that it's an extremely adversarial, first-past-the-post system. Here in Europe and many other places we're more used to proportional representation, coalitions and compromise. What it means is that Trump won the coin flip with Hillary for the presidency, the coin flip with Ted Cruz for the Republican candidacy and it's more or less coin flips all the way down. Basically you have to start off with a dedicated fan base/special interest group that think you're the very best or you're dead right out of the gate and then accumulate momentum as the lesser evil left standing.
I mean if you look at the Super Tuesday results for Trump it was like him 34%, the "establishment" candidates (Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, Carson) 66%. None of those managed to step up as the mainstream compromise, they kept in their corner fighting for their 5-30% until Trump was way past them in the outside lane. Sanders was also a far out candidate for the Democrats, if he had won against Hillary it would be like an entirely different faction of the party and the winner takes it all. That means there's an extremely lot of unreleased tension of like what could have happened if one of those coin flips had gone the other way. What you end up with is often not what people wanted, but a result of the way the dominoes fell and the options left at each junction.
Like now the President is very much at odds with his own party. Yes, there's an (R) behind all of them but the way the dominoes fell in the Congress, Senate and Presidential election is quite different and so they're not really all that much in agreement. And since they have different constitutional powers and are fighting for their own reelections they're not very keen on resolving their differences. Because no matter how fucked up they behave they know that when it comes down to (D) or (R) most will hold their nose and vote for the same side they always do, they just have to make sure their name is on the docket...
There seem to be some kind of major correction in mid-November, but the overall trend still looks like a slow decline to single digit on the desktop and ~0% on mobile so under 5% overall.
This guy works on Microsoft's Visual Studio Core, based on Electron which is Node.js+Chromium, the source is under the MIT license and it's shipping for Win/Mac/Linux. Basically open source, cross platform all the way through. It's Microsoft adopting technology (Chromium) that they got from Google (Blink) that they got from Apple (Webkit) that they got from KDE (KHTML), if it's a conspiracy to kill "real" open source projects and pull an embrace, extend, extinguish it must be a really long con by all the major players.
I choose to interpret him positively that he feels we're past the point where competing on software libraries has meaning, like his job at Microsoft is to bring people to Azure while the competitors are the g-services, i-services and AWS but if they all use Chromium as a rendering engine that's fine, they get better value from pooling their resources than reinventing the wheel with EdgeHTML. It's just a tool they use to build services and even if you insist their services are creepy and evil it's not at the hammer and chisel level.
Imagine that tomorrow Microsoft said we're ditching the Windows kernel, we'll run on top of Linux from now on. I think he'd be fine with that. No doubt/. would be fine with that. But if he poked the BSDs and said why are you wasting your time on an alternate open source OS when Linux has clearly "won" I imagine he'd get exactly the same reactions. That seems to me a more likely interpretation of events than some secret plot to eliminate Mozilla on their path to world domination.
Hey if you can use Hubble to justify the Space Shuttle I'm sure we can use the SLS to go to Mars to replace a battery. If it's not swept under a big fucking rug in the meantime.
It's incredibly impressive, but it's sad that we don't get any closure on whether it was old age or the extremely strong dust storm that killed it. Like could this have happened the first year or was it just the straw that broke the camel's back. It would have been a lot easier to make multi-year plans for solar powered rovers with confidence, though I suppose with Curiosity and Mars 2020 both going for RTGs that might not be such a big deal. I would think solar is still the better choice for any permanent structure, but then we really need to know the worst case. Either that or we could have some hybrid power but I would imagine that the crew get plenty radioactivity without bringing their own source.
You could just plug these devices into a "smart" power strip, and have the strip disable devices it detects in standby mode.
How would that help here? The streaming box is not in stand-by, if it's not smart enough to detect the TV in in stand-by it probably won't care if it's completely off either. You'd have to program some kind of logic so that when the TV in socket 1 goes to standby it also turns the streaming box in socket 2 off. I'd probably just go with a power strip that you flip off when you go to bed and back on the in morning. So even if you forget it's usually a few hours before bedtime, not those hours + sleep + work = 15+ hours.
This is probably much harder than you think, I sometimes play chess against the computer and even though it can match rating with human players the play is quite different. Like instead of making "reasonable" mistakes and miscalculations it's making random unmotivated moves that score poorly. Likewise, it rarely has any idea what a would be a good trap for humans, instead it's just surprisingly shallow at times as if it's maxed out the ply depth for that rating. And that's in a game that has so incredibly little nuance like chess, I can't even imagine the complexity of trying to act like a plausible rookie in Starcraft II.
They have not yet solved the problem of humans surviving several months of radiation in space yet -- I'd call that a "new technology that needs to be made", although I suppose 100 tons of lead shielding would probably do the job...
Actually it's not that bad. Current estimates are that a Mars round trip will take about 60% of an astronaut's career limit and that below 16 feet of Martian soil radiation will be Earth level. With a reasonable surface budget you're straddling the career limits, but note that they mean +3% chance of dying from cancer, it's not like a lethal dose or anything. The biggest dynamic is solar flares which are fairly low power and also directional so possible to shield against. Most think there'll be an emergency shelter inside the water tank, because water is quite effective at those energy levels. There's also the galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) that you can't shield much against, but they aren't a blocker for an exploration mission. They'd make it really hard to make any kind of permanent settlement though.
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I'm sitting here wondering what your logic is behind this. It really defies common sense to have this mind set. Sooner or later there will be a extinction level event that we will not be able to prevent. Logically, it doesn't make any sense to remain planet bound once we develop the technology to move off planet.
What we lack is the technology to make space less hostile than Earth after 99% of the proposed ELEs. That is to say if we build bunkers into solid rock distributed around the world so at least some will be on the far side of whatever asteroid impact or gamma ray burst or whatever hits us and can weather the initial effects this the best chance for recovery even if most of mankind is wiped out. Earth is also the place it is most likely that a small group of people in a shielded location can survive long-term without the resources of a massive civilization backing them.
I mean creating a colony that'll last 20 or 50 years by duct taping old and failing technology from Earth is no good, they'd have to be able to replace everything from space suits and air locks to solar panels and electronics faster than it breaks. Even with hazmat suits and growing food in greenhouses it's a lot more low tech and if normality returns you're fairly easily back to Amish levels of self-sustainability. We have absolutely no idea how to be self-sustaining on Venus, Mars or the Moon.
Yeah, the commercial offers sucked. And the market decided. For a better product and a better deal. Made by the "corporation" called "government", which is the "corporation" that we're all shareholders, employers and employees of. The commercial suppliers simply hated an actual free market (and especially it balancing itself out).
That's like saying that if the voters voted for universal healthcare it's a free market solution. Heck, it would make communism a free market solution. It's totally okay to say that the free market doesn't always deliver and that you're sometimes better off funding it through taxes so you don't have to worry about revenue, margins and profits. It's called socialism, look it up.
You're assuming they'd continue to co-exist, that's not what happens in a natural monopoly. When you have a large fixed cost to build the infrastructure and a very small marginal cost to serve another customer it'll either spiral up (more customers -> lower cost/customer -> more customers -> monopoly) or down (less customers -> higher cost/customer -> less customers -> bankruptcy). If rural ISPs lose any significant fraction of users to Starlink that could easily set off a chain reaction where they shut down and Starlink is the new monopoly in town.
Killing an innocent bystander is no selection, at least unless the trait we're selecting against isn't "don't stand near dangerous morons".
Well, depending on how far back you go they were probably your family or your tribe. There's no doubt in my mind that natural selection is far more than individual reproduction, or certain traits should never have appeared. For example the will of some to fight and die protecting others or the selflessness some have, in a group they make the group stronger. I also think that is why almost any primitive group has created some form of religion, it creates an order and a community, rewards and punishments for right and wrong that make it stronger as a whole. That your neighbor is a total stranger you have no relationship with is a fairly modern phenomenon when you look at all of human history.
Their whole banking system relies on ActiveX controls that require IE. How about Microsoft pay to fix the damage of 20 years of trying to embrace and extend through the web that's left governments and businesses stuck using abandoned plugins and Microsoft exclusive controls?
It's rare that I come to defense of Microsoft but ActiveX has been on death row since Silverlight was released back in 2007, they've had a decade plus to fix their shit. Here in Norway they created BankID in the 2000s, when Java applets was the hot shit and we were probably as dependent on Java as they are on ActiveX. In 2014 we got Java free BankID 2.0 because they owned that problem. They did not expect Oracle (Java) and Microsoft/Mozilla/Google/Apple (browsers) to support it from now to infinity, that's just them being unreasonable.
Well one thing they might want to do is make cellular connectivity common, even is it's not the latest and greatest standard. Right now you get WiFi+BT on almost everything but cellular is always a big extra. Yes, you can use the phone as a hotspot but a laptop has a bigger battery, better space for an antenna and you're more likely to have that plugged in. If it's an in house design they can throw in there for the cost of die space it could be a mass market feature instead of a road warrior niche.
It's always funny to watch a major corporation think they figured out a great new way to revolutionize an industry by doing something no one else does - in this case, build a high-speed data network buried a whole 2" under city roads.
Of course we laugh also the other way around, when a newcomer upends the competition because they keep doing things the way they've always have done and can't imagine doing it any other way. Hindsight is easy.
Is it gonna be like this with Waymo one day too? "Sorry, can't fix that bug that repeatedly crashes cars into lamp posts, your vehicle will become inoperative within 30 days."
I think we can cross that bridge when/if Google (Alphabet) ever decides to sell Waymo cars rather than provide a geo-fenced taxi service. They're not under any obligation to keep that operating...
You're free to fantasize about bug-free systems, but the purveyors of real software must contend with bugs. Bugs in extensions, third party dependencies, compilers and their runtimes, drivers and every other conceivable thing. Any exploited flaw delivers the entire address space of your thread pooled browser and everything it's doing with no further effort. Process isolation at least offers an impediment to further comprise beyond the exploited process.
And even if it's not malicious/exploitable, it'll crash everything. That was my main annoyance, if you got one misbehaving tab in Chrome you can sort by CPU/memory use, find and kill it if it doesn't die on its own. In Firefox it was the "what tab is killing it now" guessing game.
It is not obvious to me that "after developing industry and copying technology" the next step is inevitable progression to original solutions. Do you have any evidence of anything being developed in-house in China that isn't copied?
It borders on an ethnic insult to argue that 1.4 billion people are incapable of coming up with something original. Even though they're short on political freedom they have lots of bright scientists and engineers. Take high speed rail for example, they did import technology from France, Germany, Japan and Canada 15 years ago but it's now all in-house and they have 60%+ of the high speed rail in the world and 2+ billion customers per year. They have the world's longest HSR line, the world's fastest HSR line and the only commercially operating maglev line in the world. In short, they're market leaders by a huge margin. As much as /. is in love with SpaceX the Chinese actually launched more rockets in 2018 than the US did. Of course their rockets are much like existing rockets but it's not like they bought a design from Russia and called it theirs. But hey, it's only rocket science...
Seriously. Why would I ever *want* this cloud bullshit? Even if we disregard all the horrible security and privacy problems, what is the actual *upside* that is so appealing? I simply don't understand it. There is no upside.
For a company? Mostly a standard service to a standard price. I've seen this now many, many times there's a huge internal negotiation between the business users and internal IT and whether their staffing demands are too high, service levels too low, required uptime and so on. Sometimes they're inefficient, sometimes the business demands are just unreasonable, but back and forth it goes. So you buy a SaaS solution like Microsoft 365 and it's like this is what you're getting, end of story. You can be happy or unhappy about it but it's the same service level as millions of others so STFU and get back to work. Or make the business case that we should switch to Google Docs but stop fussing. In a big company it's like we can hire you or we can hire a company that'll hire you, either way you don't have any particular loyalty to us we're just a paycheck. It's laws and getting fired that keep you from misusing our data and it's the same either way.
For personal users? Mostly laziness. I don't want to manage my computer or my files, I just want to log in and all my documents are there and I have the latest version of the software. The sales pitch for a SaaS solution is that there's no reason to save up improvements/fixes to make people buy new versions, you just keep on continuously improving the service. Whether that's true or it's free rent, well... maybe a bit of both? You can take a look at Photoshop CC now as we have 5+ years of history, they're improving things but of course for a lot of people any version is overkill. Oh and of course users rarely care about more privacy than they get in the SLA, most people are going to upload it to Facebook or Instagram afterwards. They're not too worried about the NSA snooping through their photo album...
That's not really the case, though. Eventually people upgrade computers, operating systems, and so on. Eventually they'll have to buy the latest version to continue using it with the latest hardware.
How often does that really happen? I can run old C64 and DOSBox games from the 80s if I want to, there's almost always some kind of compatibility setting, emulator, VM or similar solution to run old software. The only software I keep vigorously up to date is everything that needs security patches like my OS and browser and of course online games I play require I have the latest client. New generations of hardware are usually drop in replacements as software is concerned, they only see a file system not if it's HDD or SSD, SATA or NVMe. They ask for memory, doesn't matter if it's DDR3 or DDR4. Whether it's dial-up or fiber TCP/IP is the same. New hardware = 99% new possibilities for new software.
There is some sense to this. If they can cram 100 space tourists into Starship, then send it to orbit the Moon for a day (7 day space vacation), they could make LOTS of money.
The budget version would be a free return trajectory where you're never in orbit, you do one flyby around the moon at a fairly long distance because you have so high relative velocity and that's it. If you first do lunar orbit, that'd probably be the two week option where you spend a week orbiting the Moon. Then neat thing is that with no atmosphere you can get real close, the LM was normally at a 110 km circular orbit but went down to 15 km for Descent Orbit Insertion, like you could get an airplane-like closeup view. That'd take at least one more tanker mission though, maybe more.
P.S. Even with some degree of re-usability it's silly to assume just the cost of fuel. There will be wear and tear parts, there will be parts that must be deprecated over 10 or 100 flights, there will be launch range/mission control operation costs and they'll never come free. Fuel is just a lower bound on how cheap it could get.
Nobody is going to the moon or Mars on a tourist trip in your lifetime, try to stop being an idiot before you die.
You underestimate how much money some people have.
Jeff Bezos: Net worth $142 billion (before divorce)
Apollo program: $125 billion in today's dollars
Jeff Bezos could single-handedly fund the Apollo program. In fact, that should now be the new unit when describing how just how rich they are. Is there a market for $10 million joyrides to the moon? Well we know 7 tourists went to the ISS on the Soyuz when the Russians were selling seats for $20-40 million and that was a very limited opportunity. The moon sounds grander and cheaper.
Of course to normal people spending millions of dollars on this is crazy talk. But I remember passing by a TV show that was selling crazy stuff to the super rich, the store had made a gold plated $200k bicycle that was actually just intended for show. A Sheik's buyer came in, thought that was cool and that was it. That's $0.2 million for a bicycle, that sounds like the type of guy who could hire an entire flight just to throw a destination wedding.
Basically, don't underestimate what can happen when billionaire wants something.
And it's perfectly safe because the only copy is stored on a laptop.
Where the money is located is on the blockchain that's distributed for the whole world to see. They can point to it and say here's our cold wallet with the $137 million that we lost the key to. It wouldn't bring the money back but it would prove nobody else took it as part of a scam. Now if they say we don't know where the cold wallet is and that information was only on the laptop too then I'm thinking exit scam.
Better that than dozing off without autopilot. This is the fact that the populist human first sceptics should admit to. Given that, these sorts of stories aren't a problem; as the quote admits, the car was driving safely.
If someone came up with a device that made drunk driving half as dangerous, would that improve road safety or make drunk driving a lot more common causing more accidents? Sure, these people probably would have caused an accident and now thanks to the Autopilot some of them didn't. That doesn't mean turning the autopilot on and going to sleep is a good idea because it adds a lot of risk compared to an awake driver. I already see a reply about a guy with narcolepsy who should get this, so he can continue to doze off in front of the wheel. Basically, if you're about to fall asleep you should not get behind the wheel. That was true and it continues to be true and I hope all of those who do cause an accident sleeping is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
You mean a machine performed self-calibration? Welcome to 2019 style "engineering".
No, it reverse engineered a motion model from an actual physical arm. It's the difference between what say a Disney animator does where the character can only bend in the ways the character model is programmed to bend and a toddler learning to use his arms and legs. I think this could be very useful to achieve natural motion in both robotics and animation as well as many optimization problems.
Imagine you could give a computer a detailed anatomical/physical model of man, an obstacle course and like you figure out the way through. Whether it's running, climbing, crawling, jumping, swinging, whatever just a physical way to get from A to B as fast as possible. It's still just "use a (learning) algorithm to find a solution that doesn't violate any constraints and optimizes a parameter" it's not magic. But it's still pretty hard to make it work with reasonable resources.
Frankly, with news being what they are these days, I don't dare have an opinion on US politics at all.
I think that the most important part to understand about US politics is that it's an extremely adversarial, first-past-the-post system. Here in Europe and many other places we're more used to proportional representation, coalitions and compromise. What it means is that Trump won the coin flip with Hillary for the presidency, the coin flip with Ted Cruz for the Republican candidacy and it's more or less coin flips all the way down. Basically you have to start off with a dedicated fan base/special interest group that think you're the very best or you're dead right out of the gate and then accumulate momentum as the lesser evil left standing.
I mean if you look at the Super Tuesday results for Trump it was like him 34%, the "establishment" candidates (Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, Carson) 66%. None of those managed to step up as the mainstream compromise, they kept in their corner fighting for their 5-30% until Trump was way past them in the outside lane. Sanders was also a far out candidate for the Democrats, if he had won against Hillary it would be like an entirely different faction of the party and the winner takes it all. That means there's an extremely lot of unreleased tension of like what could have happened if one of those coin flips had gone the other way. What you end up with is often not what people wanted, but a result of the way the dominoes fell and the options left at each junction.
Like now the President is very much at odds with his own party. Yes, there's an (R) behind all of them but the way the dominoes fell in the Congress, Senate and Presidential election is quite different and so they're not really all that much in agreement. And since they have different constitutional powers and are fighting for their own reelections they're not very keen on resolving their differences. Because no matter how fucked up they behave they know that when it comes down to (D) or (R) most will hold their nose and vote for the same side they always do, they just have to make sure their name is on the docket...
There seem to be some kind of major correction in mid-November, but the overall trend still looks like a slow decline to single digit on the desktop and ~0% on mobile so under 5% overall.
This guy works on Microsoft's Visual Studio Core, based on Electron which is Node.js+Chromium, the source is under the MIT license and it's shipping for Win/Mac/Linux. Basically open source, cross platform all the way through. It's Microsoft adopting technology (Chromium) that they got from Google (Blink) that they got from Apple (Webkit) that they got from KDE (KHTML), if it's a conspiracy to kill "real" open source projects and pull an embrace, extend, extinguish it must be a really long con by all the major players.
I choose to interpret him positively that he feels we're past the point where competing on software libraries has meaning, like his job at Microsoft is to bring people to Azure while the competitors are the g-services, i-services and AWS but if they all use Chromium as a rendering engine that's fine, they get better value from pooling their resources than reinventing the wheel with EdgeHTML. It's just a tool they use to build services and even if you insist their services are creepy and evil it's not at the hammer and chisel level.
Imagine that tomorrow Microsoft said we're ditching the Windows kernel, we'll run on top of Linux from now on. I think he'd be fine with that. No doubt /. would be fine with that. But if he poked the BSDs and said why are you wasting your time on an alternate open source OS when Linux has clearly "won" I imagine he'd get exactly the same reactions. That seems to me a more likely interpretation of events than some secret plot to eliminate Mozilla on their path to world domination.
Hey if you can use Hubble to justify the Space Shuttle I'm sure we can use the SLS to go to Mars to replace a battery. If it's not swept under a big fucking rug in the meantime.
It's incredibly impressive, but it's sad that we don't get any closure on whether it was old age or the extremely strong dust storm that killed it. Like could this have happened the first year or was it just the straw that broke the camel's back. It would have been a lot easier to make multi-year plans for solar powered rovers with confidence, though I suppose with Curiosity and Mars 2020 both going for RTGs that might not be such a big deal. I would think solar is still the better choice for any permanent structure, but then we really need to know the worst case. Either that or we could have some hybrid power but I would imagine that the crew get plenty radioactivity without bringing their own source.
You could just plug these devices into a "smart" power strip, and have the strip disable devices it detects in standby mode.
How would that help here? The streaming box is not in stand-by, if it's not smart enough to detect the TV in in stand-by it probably won't care if it's completely off either. You'd have to program some kind of logic so that when the TV in socket 1 goes to standby it also turns the streaming box in socket 2 off. I'd probably just go with a power strip that you flip off when you go to bed and back on the in morning. So even if you forget it's usually a few hours before bedtime, not those hours + sleep + work = 15+ hours.
This is probably much harder than you think, I sometimes play chess against the computer and even though it can match rating with human players the play is quite different. Like instead of making "reasonable" mistakes and miscalculations it's making random unmotivated moves that score poorly. Likewise, it rarely has any idea what a would be a good trap for humans, instead it's just surprisingly shallow at times as if it's maxed out the ply depth for that rating. And that's in a game that has so incredibly little nuance like chess, I can't even imagine the complexity of trying to act like a plausible rookie in Starcraft II.
They have not yet solved the problem of humans surviving several months of radiation in space yet -- I'd call that a "new technology that needs to be made", although I suppose 100 tons of lead shielding would probably do the job...
Actually it's not that bad. Current estimates are that a Mars round trip will take about 60% of an astronaut's career limit and that below 16 feet of Martian soil radiation will be Earth level. With a reasonable surface budget you're straddling the career limits, but note that they mean +3% chance of dying from cancer, it's not like a lethal dose or anything. The biggest dynamic is solar flares which are fairly low power and also directional so possible to shield against. Most think there'll be an emergency shelter inside the water tank, because water is quite effective at those energy levels. There's also the galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) that you can't shield much against, but they aren't a blocker for an exploration mission. They'd make it really hard to make any kind of permanent settlement though.