The overwhelming pressure for access from recreational users does in fact spill over to the medical user community. We are not happy about it. It gives asshats like you ammo to a completely falacious argument.
Fallacious? Ok smart guy. Show me ANY actual evidence that the vast majority of the millions of users of "medical" marijuana are not in actuality recreational pot users and have legitimate medical conditions that are demonstrably not responsive to any of the rest of modern medicine. Go ahead. I'll wait.
[crickets]
Yeah I thought so... You acknowledge my point. The recreational users are the main driver for legalization and they vastly out number any medical users that might exist. They are getting fake prescriptions for non-existent conditions because our government has an idiotic "war on drugs".
If you saw me, you would have absolutely NO WAY of knowing I have a medical problem. Funny thing is, without cannabis, I can't eat anything. I'll literally get diahreah from plain rice, or wheat thins. WITH cannabis, I can digest just about any food normally.
If you are the exception then you are the exception that proves the rule. I've met plenty of pot users in the last several decades. Most are quite up front about the fact that they are recreational users. They are also up front about the fact that "medical marijuana is just a convenient way to do an end run around the legal system. I don't actually care that they use pot recreationally but I'm insulted that they think I don't see through their little charade.
"Medical" doctors, don't have a fucking clue what is wrong with me.
There are lots of things modern medicine doesn't understand. One thing they do understand is that there isn't an epidemic of 22 year olds with glaucoma or other conditions that by some miracle only smoking pot can treat. If you are a patient with a condition that is only responsive to pot then doctors would be clamoring to write papers about you because obviously there is something interesting to examine about you. Just because doctors don't understand what (you claim) is wrong with you doesn't mean they don't care or that they are idiots.
Let me get this straight. These people are trusting their personal data to a company that literally is based around sales and use of a drug known and acknowledged to impair judgement and productivity? Awesome plan. I'm sure they were moving heaven and earth to secure their data... That's about as smart as hiring an alcoholic to be your limo driver. You might get there in one piece but I wouldn't count on it.
If your companies top priority is to keep data secure, they how/why did you get hacked. They always say that, but clearly that is not the Top Priority
Their top priority is obviously making a profit, just like any other company. Data security is only a priority insofar as it affects their ability to continue to make a profit. If the cost of data security is higher than the value of a breach then guess what is going to happen sooner or later...
I assume HIPAA rules apply since this is medical usage. Were they adhered to?
You forgot the quotes around "medical". In 99.9999% of cases it has nothing to do with medicine or treating any illness. If this really was medicine it would sold through a normal pharmacy and have FDA approval and double blind efficacy tests like every other drug. While I do not dispute that there are likely medicinal uses for some of the ingredients in marijuana, let's not pretend that the VAST majority of people who are "seeking treatment" are anything other than just recreational users. I have no problem at all with safe recreational use but calling it "medical marijuana" is just an insult to the intelligence of anyone with a functioning brain.
My place of employment had a dispensary open up literally next door to us a few years back. I can assure you with good certainty from first hand observations that nobody that showed up was a medical patient under any reasonable definition of the term. They were recreational users who were taking advantage of a loophole in the law. Anyone saying "medical marijuana" should be doing so with an exaggerated wink or finger quotes when they say it.
Dubbed eBay Authenticate, the new service will be powered by a "network of professional authenticators," and is ultimately designed to encourage buyers to part with cash on expensive items, safe in the knowledge that the merchandise is legitimate.
I'm wondering if these "professional authenticators" will be independent of the companies that made the products and have the ability to overrule them. As it stands if you want to sell a Louis Vuitton purse on eBay, LVMH (the company that owns the brand) can have the auction pulled just by claiming to eBay that it is fake regardless of the truth of that claim. I used to make my living selling stuff on eBay. I've had auctions pulled for luxury goods which I know for a fact were 100% authentic and had the documentation to prove it. (stuff like a handbag with one owner purchased from Neiman Marcus and still had the receipt) I don't deny that there is a lot of fake merchandise on eBay but eBay has had 15+ years to sort the problem out and hasn't bothered yet.
I don't have any confidence that this is anything more than marketing fluff rather than a serious attempt to deal with the problem.
Ok but admit that, given a choice, when your kid goes into anaphylaxis, you're not going to reach for the generic.
When that happens you're going to reach for whatever is available. Beggars can't be choosers as the saying goes. And personally I'd be quite comfortable reaching for a "generic" version of an epipen as long as it had all the right FDA stamps of approval and the like.
Can you see ANYONE buying the Mylan epipen now even if they lower the price back to what it was?
Sure. I don't think most people are even remotely aware of what company makes the epipen. Furthermore the product works well in spite of the price gouging. So yes I think people would buy it if the price was right. That's the way markets are supposed to work. If someone charges too high a price the competition comes in and offers a better deal. The problem comes in when there isn't any competition. I wouldn't go so far as to say we should eliminate patents or anything drastic like that but clearly we do need government oversight of pricing when it comes to medicine. (every other country seems to have figured this out already) Medicine is not a field where wealth should be the sole determinant of whether you can get treatment or not. Allowing someone to die from anaphylactic shock because they are poor is hugely immoral and reprehensible. The government's job is in part to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
Even re-releases were affected and I think it's the main reason why vinyls are still here.
Vinyl records are still a thing because of "audiophiles" who like to pretend that they have special hearing powers the rest of us don't and hipster douchebags who like the idea of using what amounts to steampunk technology to seem superior and "edgy". Acoustically vinyl is better than cassette tape but that's pretty much the definition of damning with faint praise.
Considering cars with casette players are still available (yes, 2nd hand, I know), some may choose that compromise.
Nobody buys a car because it has a cassette player and they certainly don't base their music library around the fact that they are buying cars that are probably >10 years old. There hasn't been any cars sold with a cassette player as OEM equipment since 2010 and most dropped the equipment long before that.
As for "sucks on SO many levels", I just hope you don't base that on unmaintained cheap players and casettes
No I base it on several decades of having to live with tapes. I'm old enough to pre-date CDs (heck I pre-date the Sony walkman) and there were very good reasons why the market stampeded to CDs and dumped tapes decades ago.
I'm an indy musician. I don't have a lot of cash, and I don't have a lot of sales. Unit for unit, on small runs, cassette tape is WAY cheaper than any other medium.
The fact that it is cheaper for YOU doesn't mean it follows that it is the best choice for your customers unless you have very specific sorts of customers. You have to show that there actually is demand for it in the cheaper format. Cassette tape players are no longer as readily available as they once were so someone who uses them either has one left over from the old days or they've made a conscious decision to seek out the technology. In either case they probably have enough disposable income to afford something more modern if they want it. If they aren't willing to pay more then it probably says more about the market value of your product than it does their ability to pay for it.
But yes, from a marketing and artistic standpoint, having a physical product on offer for those who want it is important, and no, streaming and digital downloads alone don't satisfy that need.
Personally if the only physical product you offered me was a cassette tape I'd be looking around to find out where I wandered through the time machine. I don't even own a cassette player anymore (got rid of my last one probably 15 years ago) so you'd be offering my a physical product I cannot use. Offering cassette tapes either means you have a VERY niche (and probably old) audience or you are marketing to hipster douchebags who get a kick out of old-timey technology that sucks in reality.
Yes, I was around for cassettes the first time. I was around before CDs. I know all the arguments, and have lived through them. Your casual dismissal is just incorrect.
If my dismissal was incorrect then we would still be buying cassette tapes and you'd still see music from the major labels offered on them non-ironically and they'd still be getting installed as OEM equipment in cars. The simple fact is that we are not. Analog cassette tapes fell out of favor for extremely good reasons. If you've found a small pocket of people who still want to bother using them then good for you but let's not pretend it's a format we should be seeking to go back to or that it has any sort of use case that isn't a very tiny niche.
The antiquated format is being embraced by everyone from indie musicians to Eminem and Justin Bieber. Fast Company's John Paul Titlow took a look at tape's unexpected revival, and why it's not solely about retro hipsterism.
There is no reason to use tape aside from "retro hipsterism". (isn't that redundant?) Tape sucks on SO many levels. Anyone who thinks it doesn't isn't old enough to have had to live with tapes. I can see it being kind of novel to someone once or twice but the charm will wear off fast. Seriously, tape has some use cases but playing music shouldn't be one of them. We used it back in the day because there wasn't anything better available.
The only reasons to eliminate user-replaceable batteries are to save cost, and maybe to profit from expensive battery-replacement services.
Those are legitimate reasons but they aren't the only ones. By making the batteries not user replaceable companies like Apple avoid a variety of problems. The most important consideration is that don't have to worry about poor quality batteries from third party vendors. This can cause all sorts of headaches including warranty claims, product image problems, counterfeit batteries, lawsuits, etc. Being able to maintain full control over the product should in principle result in a better or at least more consistent product. Another consideration is that by sealing the device up tight they don't have fitment issues where pieces come lose or break unexpectedly. The more parts that can move the more chances something will break.
The biggest flaw in the concept of this approach is assuming that the consumer will go to the original supplier for future accessories.
They don't have to go to the vendor for every accessory. Even a fairly modest increase in accessory purchases can make it worthwhile. Furthermore they save money by not having to design and build that part of the phone so every phone is cheaper to make as a result.
Then you have a nice long causeway with a lots of water as a further buffer before you get to anything like privately owned land.
According to Zillow there are over 100 houses for sale on Cape Canaveral just south of the Air Force Base as I type this. There are thousands of homes just a few miles to the west of the launch sites. A very reasonable safety buffer but not so far away that one could reasonably claim zero chance of something heading the wrong way.
I am pretty sure that SpaceX has some means to destroy the returning booster before it gets close to the ground the 10+ miles off course it would need to be before getting close to private property.
As am I. However the mere fact that such a thing would be necessary indicates that it is possible (however unlikely) for the rocket to miss by multiple miles. I doubt I'll live to see it happen but it isn't impossible.
Uh, spacex WAS profitable. At the current moment there is doubt.
It will take more than one rocket blowing up to make it lose money unless you are looking at a very short time scale. There is nothing about the economic big picture of SpaceX today that is meaningfully different than it was a few months ago. Now if they start having a lot of disasters then that might be a different story. But every company that builds rockets loses a few sooner or later.
If that's the price the suppliers are giving them, why wouldn't it be accurate?
Because it is nothing more than a suggestion from the supplier. It has no actual relationship to real market value.
Nobody forces people to buy from Amazon, there's an entire world wide web out there where they can compare prices and make their own determinations.
So according to you fraud is ok because nobody *has* to buy from Amazon? Weird argument you have there. Sorry but retailers shouldn't get to make any and all claims about their product regardless of veracity. This includes lying about the "market" value of the product to make it seem like it is a better deal than it actually is.
Except that they don't. Tesla has lost money to date but periodically shows a small profit and is approaching breakeven despite investing heavily in new products and technology. So far investors have liked what they have seen. Paypal was hugely profitable. SpaceX is private but there are rumors that it is profitable from credible sources.
Where exactly do they get the funds for all this expansion, or for the Gigafactory or the Tesla 3 tooling and production?
The Gigafactory is a joint venture with several partners, primarily Panasonic. Money for Tesla 3 development and tooling comes from sales of the Model S and X as well as loans and stock sales. (you are aware that the entire point of going public is to raise money to build the company right?) Plus Musk has put a lot of his own personal fortune into the ventures. It's no mystery where all these ventures get their funding. When you've started numerous successful businesses like Elon Musk has it's not terribly hard to get funding.
Cape Canaveral is just a few miles from quite a few people's literal back yards. It's not terrible hard to imagine a returning rocket booster (or parts of one) going off course by a few miles. Not likely I'll admit but not entirely impossible either.
Actually, all of the ground landings take place right next to the ocean.
It's not that hard to conceive of a rocket booster coming back to Earth going off course by a fair distance and "landing" where it shouldn't. Definitely less chance of harm to property if this happens over the ocean than over land. It's not a worry that keeps me up at night or anything but it's certainly among the possible outcomes.
Do you have the same issue with professional sports, network television, and shopping malls? Each is a huge money sink, with not much of lasting value to show for them.
Not much of lasting value? Only to the naive who look at it from a very narrow and wrong headed perspective. Each of those examples are multi-billion dollar industries which employ millions of people and provide valuable goods and services to many more millions. If I go to my local shopping mall and buy a wrench which I then use in my workplace and maybe stop at the local sports bar and watch the game on the TV there absolutely is lasting value there. Bank accounts were enriched, work was facilitated, tax revenues were generated, people were employed, and the economy has grown. In what universe does that not qualify as lasting value? Might not be as sexy as sending rockets into space but it's no less important in the big picture.
Economics is central to everything. Steel is a very useful and cost effective material for a lot of purposes. It's not the perfect material for every use nor is it necessarily the best for many applications. I cannot imagine steel not being hugely important but let's not pretend it's the perfect material for every use.
Steel remains the best material for car frames, because of the way it deforms and then fails under stress - elastically at low energy, consuming a lot of the energy of a collision at high energy.
Aluminum body frames are becoming increasingly common as they are lighter for the same performance. Steel is easier to bend and shape and repair and it is cheaper but in many vehicles where performance or fuel economy are paramount aluminum can be a better choice. Aluminum has been used for space frames for a very long time. Race cars haven't used steel frames for ages.
Machine tools are all about cost of operation Tool steel usually wins, but of course there are applications where it just doesn't work.
Tool steel wins except when it doesn't. Lots of machine tools use other materials because steel isn't always the best choice or even a practical choice. There is a reason carbide tools are as popular as they are and it's not because people are willing to waste money.
People fetishize fancy materials that, frankly, aren't good for much beyond having higher numbers on paper.
Not when they actually have to pay for them. Seriously, steel is a great material and it's going to continue to be vital but it's not the best choice in a great many cases. Same as any other material.
However, Netflix, unlike cable providers offers single-fee, on demand, no advertising programming. This is what cord-cutters want.
It's close. But Netflix doesn't have a lot of what I want to watch and finding stuff to watch on Netflix in my experience has been a painful process. I don't really care about their original programming and their catalogs of other programming is less than amazing, especially for recent releases.
This is why netflix is cleaning house - it's on demand and doesn't force anyone to conform to their schedule.
Except that they don't offer much than I'm interested in watching. I've been a subscriber twice and dropped the service twice. I very much like what they offer in principle - ala carte all you can eat programming on my schedule. That's great. But the problem is that they don't have much that I actually want to watch. Their movie catalog was mostly old or B movies that I wasn't interested in. Few recent releases or stuff that I hadn't already seen. I don't care at all about their original programming though that's not a commentary on its quality - just doesn't suit my tastes. And navigating Netflix to find anything worth watching was a painful experience. I'd spend upwards of an hour looking through a crappy interface and end up finding nothing I wanted to watch.
I'm not interested in Sling because they don't offer DVR features worthy of bothering and it's not truly ala carte with the channel selection. I'm not going to waste my time sitting through a bunch of commercials so if I cannot skip them or fast forward through them I'm just not going to watch.
Youtube has come closest with the commercials in a manner that is almost acceptable. I might sit through a 5 second commercial but nothing longer and only one. Honestly if you cannot tell me about your product in 5 seconds you need to work on your pitch. I'm not going to sit through anything longer. It's just not worth it.
I have little interest in subscribing to a bunch of different streaming services. First one to get it right gets my money.
CO2 most certainly is a pollutant in the quantities we are releasing it into the atmosphere. Anything can be a pollutant when it is in a place that screws up an ecosystem and CO2 is no exception. We are taking billions of tons of carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years and releasing it very rapidly into an ecosystem that has not evolved to handle it. That is a pollutant by any reasonable definition of the term.
That said, even if we pretend (wrongly) that C02 isn't a pollutant, there is plenty of other toxic crap coming out of those smoke stacks that is not being controlled or paid for.
Stop what? Stop dreaming? Stop striving for a better world? Stop hoping we will find something that will truly advance us as a species?
Stop asking questions with obvious answers. When space elevators become a realistic prospect I assure you we will all know about it. Right now what you are asking is basically the equivalent of asking if some new material would let of build a warp drive. The answer is either "no" or "not anytime soon".
Believe me, I want a space elevator as much as you do. But be realistic about what it will take to build one.
Slashdot Mirror
The overwhelming pressure for access from recreational users does in fact spill over to the medical user community. We are not happy about it. It gives asshats like you ammo to a completely falacious argument.
Fallacious? Ok smart guy. Show me ANY actual evidence that the vast majority of the millions of users of "medical" marijuana are not in actuality recreational pot users and have legitimate medical conditions that are demonstrably not responsive to any of the rest of modern medicine. Go ahead. I'll wait.
[crickets]
Yeah I thought so... You acknowledge my point. The recreational users are the main driver for legalization and they vastly out number any medical users that might exist. They are getting fake prescriptions for non-existent conditions because our government has an idiotic "war on drugs".
If you saw me, you would have absolutely NO WAY of knowing I have a medical problem. Funny thing is, without cannabis, I can't eat anything. I'll literally get diahreah from plain rice, or wheat thins. WITH cannabis, I can digest just about any food normally.
If you are the exception then you are the exception that proves the rule. I've met plenty of pot users in the last several decades. Most are quite up front about the fact that they are recreational users. They are also up front about the fact that "medical marijuana is just a convenient way to do an end run around the legal system. I don't actually care that they use pot recreationally but I'm insulted that they think I don't see through their little charade.
"Medical" doctors, don't have a fucking clue what is wrong with me.
There are lots of things modern medicine doesn't understand. One thing they do understand is that there isn't an epidemic of 22 year olds with glaucoma or other conditions that by some miracle only smoking pot can treat. If you are a patient with a condition that is only responsive to pot then doctors would be clamoring to write papers about you because obviously there is something interesting to examine about you. Just because doctors don't understand what (you claim) is wrong with you doesn't mean they don't care or that they are idiots.
Let me get this straight. These people are trusting their personal data to a company that literally is based around sales and use of a drug known and acknowledged to impair judgement and productivity? Awesome plan. I'm sure they were moving heaven and earth to secure their data... That's about as smart as hiring an alcoholic to be your limo driver. You might get there in one piece but I wouldn't count on it.
If your companies top priority is to keep data secure, they how/why did you get hacked. They always say that, but clearly that is not the Top Priority
Their top priority is obviously making a profit, just like any other company. Data security is only a priority insofar as it affects their ability to continue to make a profit. If the cost of data security is higher than the value of a breach then guess what is going to happen sooner or later...
I assume HIPAA rules apply since this is medical usage. Were they adhered to?
You forgot the quotes around "medical". In 99.9999% of cases it has nothing to do with medicine or treating any illness. If this really was medicine it would sold through a normal pharmacy and have FDA approval and double blind efficacy tests like every other drug. While I do not dispute that there are likely medicinal uses for some of the ingredients in marijuana, let's not pretend that the VAST majority of people who are "seeking treatment" are anything other than just recreational users. I have no problem at all with safe recreational use but calling it "medical marijuana" is just an insult to the intelligence of anyone with a functioning brain.
My place of employment had a dispensary open up literally next door to us a few years back. I can assure you with good certainty from first hand observations that nobody that showed up was a medical patient under any reasonable definition of the term. They were recreational users who were taking advantage of a loophole in the law. Anyone saying "medical marijuana" should be doing so with an exaggerated wink or finger quotes when they say it.
Dubbed eBay Authenticate, the new service will be powered by a "network of professional authenticators," and is ultimately designed to encourage buyers to part with cash on expensive items, safe in the knowledge that the merchandise is legitimate.
I'm wondering if these "professional authenticators" will be independent of the companies that made the products and have the ability to overrule them. As it stands if you want to sell a Louis Vuitton purse on eBay, LVMH (the company that owns the brand) can have the auction pulled just by claiming to eBay that it is fake regardless of the truth of that claim. I used to make my living selling stuff on eBay. I've had auctions pulled for luxury goods which I know for a fact were 100% authentic and had the documentation to prove it. (stuff like a handbag with one owner purchased from Neiman Marcus and still had the receipt) I don't deny that there is a lot of fake merchandise on eBay but eBay has had 15+ years to sort the problem out and hasn't bothered yet.
I don't have any confidence that this is anything more than marketing fluff rather than a serious attempt to deal with the problem.
Ok but admit that, given a choice, when your kid goes into anaphylaxis, you're not going to reach for the generic.
When that happens you're going to reach for whatever is available. Beggars can't be choosers as the saying goes. And personally I'd be quite comfortable reaching for a "generic" version of an epipen as long as it had all the right FDA stamps of approval and the like.
Can you see ANYONE buying the Mylan epipen now even if they lower the price back to what it was?
Sure. I don't think most people are even remotely aware of what company makes the epipen. Furthermore the product works well in spite of the price gouging. So yes I think people would buy it if the price was right. That's the way markets are supposed to work. If someone charges too high a price the competition comes in and offers a better deal. The problem comes in when there isn't any competition. I wouldn't go so far as to say we should eliminate patents or anything drastic like that but clearly we do need government oversight of pricing when it comes to medicine. (every other country seems to have figured this out already) Medicine is not a field where wealth should be the sole determinant of whether you can get treatment or not. Allowing someone to die from anaphylactic shock because they are poor is hugely immoral and reprehensible. The government's job is in part to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
But if you have the new iPhone, you won't be able to plug in the adapter either.
That would be true if they lose the 3mm-to-lightning adapter that comes standard in the box with every iPhone.
Even re-releases were affected and I think it's the main reason why vinyls are still here.
Vinyl records are still a thing because of "audiophiles" who like to pretend that they have special hearing powers the rest of us don't and hipster douchebags who like the idea of using what amounts to steampunk technology to seem superior and "edgy". Acoustically vinyl is better than cassette tape but that's pretty much the definition of damning with faint praise.
Considering cars with casette players are still available (yes, 2nd hand, I know), some may choose that compromise.
Nobody buys a car because it has a cassette player and they certainly don't base their music library around the fact that they are buying cars that are probably >10 years old. There hasn't been any cars sold with a cassette player as OEM equipment since 2010 and most dropped the equipment long before that.
As for "sucks on SO many levels", I just hope you don't base that on unmaintained cheap players and casettes
No I base it on several decades of having to live with tapes. I'm old enough to pre-date CDs (heck I pre-date the Sony walkman) and there were very good reasons why the market stampeded to CDs and dumped tapes decades ago.
I'm an indy musician. I don't have a lot of cash, and I don't have a lot of sales. Unit for unit, on small runs, cassette tape is WAY cheaper than any other medium.
The fact that it is cheaper for YOU doesn't mean it follows that it is the best choice for your customers unless you have very specific sorts of customers. You have to show that there actually is demand for it in the cheaper format. Cassette tape players are no longer as readily available as they once were so someone who uses them either has one left over from the old days or they've made a conscious decision to seek out the technology. In either case they probably have enough disposable income to afford something more modern if they want it. If they aren't willing to pay more then it probably says more about the market value of your product than it does their ability to pay for it.
But yes, from a marketing and artistic standpoint, having a physical product on offer for those who want it is important, and no, streaming and digital downloads alone don't satisfy that need.
Personally if the only physical product you offered me was a cassette tape I'd be looking around to find out where I wandered through the time machine. I don't even own a cassette player anymore (got rid of my last one probably 15 years ago) so you'd be offering my a physical product I cannot use. Offering cassette tapes either means you have a VERY niche (and probably old) audience or you are marketing to hipster douchebags who get a kick out of old-timey technology that sucks in reality.
Yes, I was around for cassettes the first time. I was around before CDs. I know all the arguments, and have lived through them. Your casual dismissal is just incorrect.
If my dismissal was incorrect then we would still be buying cassette tapes and you'd still see music from the major labels offered on them non-ironically and they'd still be getting installed as OEM equipment in cars. The simple fact is that we are not. Analog cassette tapes fell out of favor for extremely good reasons. If you've found a small pocket of people who still want to bother using them then good for you but let's not pretend it's a format we should be seeking to go back to or that it has any sort of use case that isn't a very tiny niche.
The antiquated format is being embraced by everyone from indie musicians to Eminem and Justin Bieber. Fast Company's John Paul Titlow took a look at tape's unexpected revival, and why it's not solely about retro hipsterism.
There is no reason to use tape aside from "retro hipsterism". (isn't that redundant?) Tape sucks on SO many levels. Anyone who thinks it doesn't isn't old enough to have had to live with tapes. I can see it being kind of novel to someone once or twice but the charm will wear off fast. Seriously, tape has some use cases but playing music shouldn't be one of them. We used it back in the day because there wasn't anything better available.
The only reasons to eliminate user-replaceable batteries are to save cost, and maybe to profit from expensive battery-replacement services.
Those are legitimate reasons but they aren't the only ones. By making the batteries not user replaceable companies like Apple avoid a variety of problems. The most important consideration is that don't have to worry about poor quality batteries from third party vendors. This can cause all sorts of headaches including warranty claims, product image problems, counterfeit batteries, lawsuits, etc. Being able to maintain full control over the product should in principle result in a better or at least more consistent product. Another consideration is that by sealing the device up tight they don't have fitment issues where pieces come lose or break unexpectedly. The more parts that can move the more chances something will break.
The biggest flaw in the concept of this approach is assuming that the consumer will go to the original supplier for future accessories.
They don't have to go to the vendor for every accessory. Even a fairly modest increase in accessory purchases can make it worthwhile. Furthermore they save money by not having to design and build that part of the phone so every phone is cheaper to make as a result.
Have you ever been to Cape Canaveral?
Several times. Been on a tour to the VAB as well.
Then you have a nice long causeway with a lots of water as a further buffer before you get to anything like privately owned land.
According to Zillow there are over 100 houses for sale on Cape Canaveral just south of the Air Force Base as I type this. There are thousands of homes just a few miles to the west of the launch sites. A very reasonable safety buffer but not so far away that one could reasonably claim zero chance of something heading the wrong way.
I am pretty sure that SpaceX has some means to destroy the returning booster before it gets close to the ground the 10+ miles off course it would need to be before getting close to private property.
As am I. However the mere fact that such a thing would be necessary indicates that it is possible (however unlikely) for the rocket to miss by multiple miles. I doubt I'll live to see it happen but it isn't impossible.
Uh, spacex WAS profitable. At the current moment there is doubt.
It will take more than one rocket blowing up to make it lose money unless you are looking at a very short time scale. There is nothing about the economic big picture of SpaceX today that is meaningfully different than it was a few months ago. Now if they start having a lot of disasters then that might be a different story. But every company that builds rockets loses a few sooner or later.
If that's the price the suppliers are giving them, why wouldn't it be accurate?
Because it is nothing more than a suggestion from the supplier. It has no actual relationship to real market value.
Nobody forces people to buy from Amazon, there's an entire world wide web out there where they can compare prices and make their own determinations.
So according to you fraud is ok because nobody *has* to buy from Amazon? Weird argument you have there. Sorry but retailers shouldn't get to make any and all claims about their product regardless of veracity. This includes lying about the "market" value of the product to make it seem like it is a better deal than it actually is.
All of Musk's businesses lose money every year
Except that they don't. Tesla has lost money to date but periodically shows a small profit and is approaching breakeven despite investing heavily in new products and technology. So far investors have liked what they have seen. Paypal was hugely profitable. SpaceX is private but there are rumors that it is profitable from credible sources.
Where exactly do they get the funds for all this expansion, or for the Gigafactory or the Tesla 3 tooling and production?
The Gigafactory is a joint venture with several partners, primarily Panasonic. Money for Tesla 3 development and tooling comes from sales of the Model S and X as well as loans and stock sales. (you are aware that the entire point of going public is to raise money to build the company right?) Plus Musk has put a lot of his own personal fortune into the ventures. It's no mystery where all these ventures get their funding. When you've started numerous successful businesses like Elon Musk has it's not terribly hard to get funding.
Cape Canaveral isn't anyone's back yard.
Cape Canaveral is just a few miles from quite a few people's literal back yards. It's not terrible hard to imagine a returning rocket booster (or parts of one) going off course by a few miles. Not likely I'll admit but not entirely impossible either.
Actually, all of the ground landings take place right next to the ocean.
It's not that hard to conceive of a rocket booster coming back to Earth going off course by a fair distance and "landing" where it shouldn't. Definitely less chance of harm to property if this happens over the ocean than over land. It's not a worry that keeps me up at night or anything but it's certainly among the possible outcomes.
Do you have the same issue with professional sports, network television, and shopping malls? Each is a huge money sink, with not much of lasting value to show for them.
Not much of lasting value? Only to the naive who look at it from a very narrow and wrong headed perspective. Each of those examples are multi-billion dollar industries which employ millions of people and provide valuable goods and services to many more millions. If I go to my local shopping mall and buy a wrench which I then use in my workplace and maybe stop at the local sports bar and watch the game on the TV there absolutely is lasting value there. Bank accounts were enriched, work was facilitated, tax revenues were generated, people were employed, and the economy has grown. In what universe does that not qualify as lasting value? Might not be as sexy as sending rockets into space but it's no less important in the big picture.
Economics is rather central to construction.
Economics is central to everything. Steel is a very useful and cost effective material for a lot of purposes. It's not the perfect material for every use nor is it necessarily the best for many applications. I cannot imagine steel not being hugely important but let's not pretend it's the perfect material for every use.
Steel remains the best material for car frames, because of the way it deforms and then fails under stress - elastically at low energy, consuming a lot of the energy of a collision at high energy.
Aluminum body frames are becoming increasingly common as they are lighter for the same performance. Steel is easier to bend and shape and repair and it is cheaper but in many vehicles where performance or fuel economy are paramount aluminum can be a better choice. Aluminum has been used for space frames for a very long time. Race cars haven't used steel frames for ages.
Machine tools are all about cost of operation Tool steel usually wins, but of course there are applications where it just doesn't work.
Tool steel wins except when it doesn't. Lots of machine tools use other materials because steel isn't always the best choice or even a practical choice. There is a reason carbide tools are as popular as they are and it's not because people are willing to waste money.
People fetishize fancy materials that, frankly, aren't good for much beyond having higher numbers on paper.
Not when they actually have to pay for them. Seriously, steel is a great material and it's going to continue to be vital but it's not the best choice in a great many cases. Same as any other material.
However, Netflix, unlike cable providers offers single-fee, on demand, no advertising programming. This is what cord-cutters want.
It's close. But Netflix doesn't have a lot of what I want to watch and finding stuff to watch on Netflix in my experience has been a painful process. I don't really care about their original programming and their catalogs of other programming is less than amazing, especially for recent releases.
This is why netflix is cleaning house - it's on demand and doesn't force anyone to conform to their schedule.
Except that they don't offer much than I'm interested in watching. I've been a subscriber twice and dropped the service twice. I very much like what they offer in principle - ala carte all you can eat programming on my schedule. That's great. But the problem is that they don't have much that I actually want to watch. Their movie catalog was mostly old or B movies that I wasn't interested in. Few recent releases or stuff that I hadn't already seen. I don't care at all about their original programming though that's not a commentary on its quality - just doesn't suit my tastes. And navigating Netflix to find anything worth watching was a painful experience. I'd spend upwards of an hour looking through a crappy interface and end up finding nothing I wanted to watch.
I'm not interested in Sling because they don't offer DVR features worthy of bothering and it's not truly ala carte with the channel selection. I'm not going to waste my time sitting through a bunch of commercials so if I cannot skip them or fast forward through them I'm just not going to watch.
Youtube has come closest with the commercials in a manner that is almost acceptable. I might sit through a 5 second commercial but nothing longer and only one. Honestly if you cannot tell me about your product in 5 seconds you need to work on your pitch. I'm not going to sit through anything longer. It's just not worth it.
I have little interest in subscribing to a bunch of different streaming services. First one to get it right gets my money.
CO2 is -not- a pollutant.
CO2 most certainly is a pollutant in the quantities we are releasing it into the atmosphere. Anything can be a pollutant when it is in a place that screws up an ecosystem and CO2 is no exception. We are taking billions of tons of carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years and releasing it very rapidly into an ecosystem that has not evolved to handle it. That is a pollutant by any reasonable definition of the term.
That said, even if we pretend (wrongly) that C02 isn't a pollutant, there is plenty of other toxic crap coming out of those smoke stacks that is not being controlled or paid for.
Stop what? Stop dreaming? Stop striving for a better world? Stop hoping we will find something that will truly advance us as a species?
Stop asking questions with obvious answers. When space elevators become a realistic prospect I assure you we will all know about it. Right now what you are asking is basically the equivalent of asking if some new material would let of build a warp drive. The answer is either "no" or "not anytime soon".
Believe me, I want a space elevator as much as you do. But be realistic about what it will take to build one.