LauncherOne is targeting $10 million per launch and would put up 2-3 satellites with each launch
Who cares what they are "targeting"? They haven't even launched a prototype yet and won't until probably next year. Any cost estimates are purely speculation at this point and all currently available launch vehicles are more expensive than that. By a lot. But even accepting the figure of $10 million per launch they still are going to be looking at startup costs well north of $1 billion before they even have a single customer. There will be a lot more expense beyond the launch costs.
You wouldn't have to ask that question if you'd bothered to read the entire text you were responding to. The rural population is not "by definition" small, it is a substantial fraction of the global population.
If you want to get pedantic about it relevant the rural population who can/will buy this service appears to be very small. Exactly who do you think it going to buy this service? Who do you think it going to be a typical customer? Some dirt poor farmer in Africa? Mountaineers? The fact that there are collectively substantial numbers of people in rural areas is insufficient data. The question is how many people in rural areas would buy this service at a price that would make it economically viable presuming it works? I don't deny there is probably a market there but I remain unconvinced that the market is large enough that it can be service economically.
There are a few thousand ocean vessels and airliners in operations at any given time. Farmers in remote areas might but many of them already have landline or cellular service. I was out in the middle of nowhere in Montana last year and I had fast cellular service almost the entire time and required no special equipment. Anybody who would use this service is going to be WAY out in the boonies and there simply aren't huge numbers of people who live that remotely, who need and can afford fast internet service and who can be reached economically to sell them the necessary equipment. I just don't see where they are going to get the millions of customers needed to make this whole thing work.
The problem with the notion of high automation in China is that China has a large supply of relatively cheap labor. It may not remain cheap forever but for the immediate future it will be cheap. Therefore the economics of widespread automation in a place with cheap labor become rather dicey.
Automation really only makes economic sense in a few circumstances: 1) When production volumes are high and labor is relatively expensive and capital is relatively cheap 2) When manual labor cannot achieve the requisite quality/consistency 3) When there are substantial safety issues that cannot be otherwise mitigated
Some of what Foxconn does would make sense to automate but given how inexpensive labor remains in China much automation would be terribly difficult to economically justify in many cases. My company does assembly work (wire harnesses) and even with relatively expensive US labor we have a difficult time justifying automation in a lot of cases. I could buy a machine for $1 million that would build some of our products completely automatically with just one operator required. But we would have to have production volumes in the hundreds of thousands at minimum to justify the purchase and we would need access to credit at reasonable rates. If we had the labor rates Foxconn has the production volumes would need to be in the many millions to justify. And Foxconn makes more complicated products than we do.
By contrast these new attempts are trying for a much larger customer base, probably reaching into millions of simultaneous connected devices.
"Probably reaching into millions"? That's a HUGE assumption about how popular this service will be and still doesn't address the fundamental economic problems. My 2 minute back of the envelope analysis:
1) You have a satellite system that will cost billions to launch (65 launches X $50 million/launch = $3.25 billion and that is a conservative number) and billions more to build and operate the satellites. 2) The receiver equipment does not (yet) exist and nobody owns one. Complete infrastructure development from scratch. Power, form and cost speculative right now. Have to convince people the system works and get customers in remote areas (hard to reach) to buy in in large numbers quickly. 3) The technical performance of this proposed system in the real world is unclear at best. 4) It is completely unclear if there is a sufficient customer base to make the economics of this idea work. Iridium thought there would be far more customers than there were. Sirius/XM took many years to get a big enough number of subscribers to be financially viable and that was much less technologically complex. 5) Cost of the service is unclear at this point. They claim "affordable" but that can mean something pretty expensive depending on who is paying. It will have to be high enough to recoup the billions in launch costs. Even if they have a million customers day one (which they won't) it will cost something like $1-3000 per customer per year just to break even on the launch costs even with fairly optimistic assumptions about launch costs.
I think it's a neat idea and I wish them luck but this is not a low risk or low cost project. Maybe they can make it work but I'd need a lot of convincing to believe it.
The satellites are cheaper, more capable, and far more numerous, and there's a lot more of a market for low latency internet access that doesn't have to follow fiber links on the ground than there was for the capability to make an occasional call with an expensive, clumsy sat-phone.
It's not clear that the total cost of implementation will be cheaper. Sattelite launches cost $50-250 million each and numerous launches would be required to provide broad coverage. 65 rockets X $50 Million = $3.25 Billion without even including the cost of the satellites. Iridium is reputed to have cost about $6 Billion so even if it is cheaper it will still be ludicrously expensive.
Just because there is a market doesn't mean it can be served economically. I agree that there is some amount of demand but it's not at all clear that the market is large enough to make the economics of this project work. It's going to require special equipment on the ground which nobody currently owns and that nobody knows the cost of. Even if you put it magically into orbit today it will take years of operation to get enough users to become profitable.
And cities cover a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface./quote.
So what? That has nothing to do with whether the economics of this are workable or not.
They should be spying on (real) terrorists and neutral/enemy countries, not on friendly/allied countries.
Grow up. There is no such thing as a true friend among nation states. If you think France isn't spying on the US as well then you are naive and haven't read any of your history books. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. Spying between even the most ostensibly friendly of nations is a routine and commonly accepted occurrence. Countries that are friends today can easily be adversaries tomorrow and the US and France haven't had the closest of relationships.
Is it sad that this is the state of affairs in this world? Of course. But don't be blind about how the real world works.
Why wouldn't they? First off, nation states spy on each other. Friend or foe doesn't play into it. Any nation that has the capability to spy on another nation will use that capability. Second, friends don't always stay friends and France hasn't exactly been the closest of allies to the US. Third, France has nuclear weapons and anyone who has nuclear weapons is going to be targeted for spying to make sure they aren't up to something dangerous. Nobody thinks it is likely that France is going to do anything weird but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Finally, France has communications with the leadership of other countries, some of which are far less friendly to the US than France is. Some of these communications are likely very interesting to US intelligence services. While the NSA might not be super interested in what the French president is up to, they probably are interested in some of the parties he is talking to.
Exactly where in the NSA mission statement is this covered?
Twenty seconds on wikipedia would have answered that question for you. This is exactly the job of the NSA, particularly for SIGNINT. You might find their mission to be troubling and I might even agree but it IS their job.
Didn't we try this before with Iridium? Other than this being new and shiny why should we reasonably expect this to be economically viable even if it works technologically? By definition the number of people in remote places is small so there cannot ever be a lot of customers. Iridium went bankrupt because they never could get enough customers to recoup the costs of launching all those satellites. I'm an accountant and while I think the notion of such a satellite network is cool I just don't really see an economically viable business model here. Not without some sort of government subsidy anyway.
900 microsatellites which will provide "affordable", fast, low-latency Internet to remote parts of the world and to ships, planes and oil rigs.
"Affordable"? Maybe... though exotic projects like this don't have a great track record of keeping costs low. I suspect cellular networks would have better odds of being cheap but I'll keep an open mind. I don't really see how two way satellite communications would be cheap but maybe it's possible.
"Fast"? I suppose that depends on the definition of fast. Given the power requirements I'm again dubious but perhaps it can be done.
"Low Latency"? No. Just no. Satellite and low latency just aren't a compatible thing from what I can tell.
In practice, it is. The current political climate will not fund both well.
Political climates change. Our ambition to explore should not. Just because we struggle to get funding right now is no reason to throw human spaceflight under the bus.
That's incremental knowledge and we don't have to go to Mars to get most of the same thing.
Most science is incremental knowledge. And you DO have to go to Mars to know how human biology on Mars would work. Furthermore the research required to learn how to keep a human alive and healthy for a trip to Mars requires investment in a human mission to Mars.
When Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in 1979, the news-stand publication covers were full of images of the swirling red spot, the pizza-like Io, and its spewing volcanoes. I saw those pics all over the place.
I saw the pictures as well. By the time Voyager II went by it was less of a deal. It was NOTHING like the press that Apollo 11 received. Nothing like the Mercury program. Not even close.
An ocean/lake sunset on Titan via a boat-probe could have a similar effect. Or discovering the spectrum of plant life around a distant planet; it would ignite the public's imagination.
Discovery of life on another world would be massive news. Probably the biggest news imaginable. It would cause massive debate and really shake some philosophies. But that discovery won't really make people care about the robots themselves. Robotic exploration is scientifically useful but really only fascinating to people like you and me. Most people will really only care and be inspired if there is a human being doing the exploration. I think you are greatly overestimating how fascinating science is to the general population. The reason we have so much trouble getting funding is precisely because of this fact.
On a side note, another problem with Mars is that we don't know the biological contamination risk in either direction. Infecting/seeding either one with the others' life is very difficult to avoid.
And what is your point? That we shouldn't bother because it might be risky? Heck we can (and possibly have) contaminate other worlds with microbes from our robotic probes. Even the best efforts at cleaning them are imperfect and for some probes we simply don't even bother. At some point you have to accept the risk if you want to learn more.
I'd rather see our money spent on an unmanned Titan boat probe, an unmanned Europa submarine, and an extra-solar (alien) planet atmosphere spectragraph "artificial eclipsing" telescope.
Those are all great things but it doesn't have to be an either/or thing. I'm not at all against robotic exploration but our country could easily fund both manned and robotic missions for a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. I sigh every time I think about how much science and technology development we could fund with the absurd amount of money the US puts into its military.
Approx 10% of the cost, but 5x the science, 30% of the same Wow factor (more if plant life found), and a failure would be only 3% as embarrassing as a dead Marsnaut.
Certainly cheaper for specific tasks. I completely disagree that you'll get 5X the science. You'll just get different science. One advantage of human spaceflight is that you get science on human biology and technologies to support it which you will not get with robotic missions. That's not to imply the science from the robotic missions is less valuable - just different.
As for "30% of the wow factor"? Not a chance. Less than 1% of the wow factor. There is no robotic exploration mission you could possibly design that would gather even a fraction of a percent of the attention that a manned mission to Mars would get. It's not even close no matter how valuable the robotic mission might be scientifically.
This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.
Sufficiently large values of stupidity asymptotically approach maliciousness. In other words if the action is dumb enough there is no effective difference.
I want very little more in a car than I have on my motorcycle.
And I want quite a lot more in a car than you have on your motorcycle. Doesn't mean either of us is right or wrong but I think there are more of people like me than there are of people like you. I want a car with a quiet interior, satellite radio, heated seats, a GPS, etc. I drive rather a lot and want a car that allows me to do so with reasonable comfort. You clearly don't live where I do if you actually want a car with no heat and no AC. I've driven cars like that and you can keep them if you actually like sitting on a block of ice in December or baking in July.
I think Automakers should really, REALLY expand their configurators to include all the gritty details of electronics - for advanced buyers.
I don' t think you appreciate the cost of doing that. Every option and component you add to a car adds non-trivial cost and complexity to the vehicle. There is no real economic case to be made (currently) for vehicle manufacturers to do this. The added cost of production, development and support and the added customer confusion would hugely outweigh any economic benefit. They also have to be supported for decades afterwards. Do you really want the same bluetooth system 15 years from now? Probably not. The GPS in my truck (2009 model year) was developed around 2004 and it shows. It wasn't even state of the art back then and it is really starting to show its age now.
Being able to say "I don't want bluetooth-based this on my car" would totally be awesome. Oh well, wishful thinking.
It would be awesome but it very much is wishful thinking. They may get there one day but it won't be anytime soon. I actually run a company that supplies wire harnesses to the auto industry. They are absolutely NOT equipped to offer that sort of granular level of options even if they wanted to. There would have to be considerable standardization and a lot of supply chain development before it would be even technically feasible. Plus remember that options are by definition not on every vehicle so they have to be sold at substantial markups - the smaller the volume the bigger the markup.
Disabling windows update - at least automatically - is a good idea.
Maybe for a corporation with an IT staff. If you are like me and have to support small numbers of technologically illiterate people then automatic updates are a blessing. Otherwise those machines would literally never get updated. Ever.
Though honestly as the designated family techie the best thing (for my sanity) I ever did was move my parents to Apple products. Not so much because I think they are inherently better but they do result in less tech support problems (for me) and I got them support contracts (1on1 and Applecare) so Apple can and does deal with the majority of their technical issues rather than me. When my dad was on Windows I'd get at least 2-3 calls a month about something not working. Now I get maybe 1 call every 6 months and it's usually much easier to resolve.
And to think, their hardware is still better than most out there.
If there hardware requires weird non-standard drivers and disabling updates to work then it is by definition crap hardware. Maybe the hardware is fine and they are incompetent at software but that is not the most likely explanation. There would be no reason to disable Windows Update if the hardware worked as expected.
They still get the fewest complaints on NewEgg for much of their stuff for a reason.
Popularity and an alleged low number of complaints on NewEgg hardly constitutes proof of quality. If we are going by anecdotes the few pieces of Samsung hardware I've owned have been pretty much crap. Does that mean all Samsung products are junk? Of course not. But when I hear about them doing something so obviously stupid as disabling the standard OS update because it doesn't work with their hardware then I regard that as prima-facie evidence that their products are crap.
So the problem is not that "it is not hard to find a bare bones vehicle" but that I can't find the model I want with limited electronics: I want xenon lights, "oh, well, that comes with the comfort package that also comes with lane departure and blind spot alarms and remote start".
So put the xenon lights on yourself if that is important to you. Nothing wrong with modifying your car to suit. I've never owned a car that I haven't added at least one aftermarket feature. I've done plenty of it myself. It's possible to find almost any modification you could possibly want if you are willing to look hard enough and/or spend enough money on it.
If true then I guess I won't be buying any Samsung computers anytime soon. A company that stupid simply isn't worth doing business with. Add this to the Samsung TVs that listen to your living room and the bloatware on their Android devices and I pretty much can't see any reason to buy from Samsung these days.
After we installed a Wifi relay in the lobby, the idi^H^Hperson manning the entrance started taking sick days after sick days, claiming the wifi was making her sick.
I would personally fire such a person. Someone that stupid is going to be a detriment to the company at some point.
Then we activated it and placed a piece of black tape on the LEDs, told her 'Fine, we won't be using it then', and all was fine.
You are much kinder than I would be. I hope this person had many other wonderful qualities to offset her lack of critical reasoning ability.
The real question to me is. Do these cars really need all this shit?
So long as there is consumer demand the answer is yes.
How about a car that just takes me where I am going, don't really need it to babysit , entertain of second guess me.
Those are available if you want them. Not hard to find relatively bare bones vehicles if you bother to look. For people who want something a little more sophisticated there are extra options available. Personally I LIKE having a screen in my car with GPS. I like having satellite radio, remote entry, heated seats, AC and USB power, backup camera, etc and I'm willing to pay a bit extra for them. Personal preference and your mileage may (literally) vary.
So I'd say the cost of landfills for consumers is far too high -- it needs to be free, like it is with e-waste, if we want to avoid people dumping everywhere (and not have a police state).
It cannot be free because it has costs. You can address the costs indirectly like through taxes but you cannot provide something for free that actually has an economic cost. TANSTAAFL and all that. Furthermore even if you did make dropoff free, people still will dump things because driving halfway across your county to the local dump is time consuming and costly. The nearest landfill to me would cost me about $10-15 in gasoline to get to (plus my time) so it isn't free even the landfill doesn't charge me a drop fee. Now I don't want to live in a landfill so I personally wouldn't just dump things any old place but I can understand why people often do.
Recycling is more complicated than people think
on
Recycling Is Dying
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Raw materials, when mined, are not refined
Realistically lots of recycled materials effectively require a "refining" step. That recycled milk jug comes frequently isn't clean so it has to be processed before the materials can be utilized.
you also have to expend more effort and energy to refine them and turn them into something useful
You have to do the same for recycled materials. The real question is whether less effort and energy (thus less cost) is required to recycle. For some products (like aluminum) the energy to turn ore into ingots is MUCH higher than to recycle. For others (like plastic) the economic advantage of recycling isn't so clear because it's relatively cheap to make the virgin product.
With recycling, you bypass a lot of that, so it should be cheaper and more efficient: instead of going through all these refining steps, you just take some used HDPE, grind it up and/or melt it down, and make more HDPE containers out of it.
Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Recycled materials require that they to be sorted, contaminants have to be removed, it has to be cleaned, it has to be processed into a useable form for processing. These costs are not trivial and the waste stream is definitely not clean and well organized. Furthermore for many materials like plastics or paper the contaminants cannot always be removed or the chemical structure is altered such that they cannot be a perfect substitute for virgin materials.
So if the economics are favoring using virgin raw materials instead of recycling existing refined materials, we're doing something really wrong.
Or it means that it is a more difficult problem than you are presuming. It sounds like it should be easier but unless the energy inputs for the raw materials are very high (like for aluminum) for processing raw materials relative to recycled there is no particular reason to presume that recycling should be more energy or labor efficient than processing from raw materials. It sounds good on paper but that doesn't mean the economics work out nicely in the real world.
Speaking as a certified accountant I could not disagree more. If you think cost analysis "is never difficult" then you don't understand how to do it properly. Some trivial cost accounting problems are easy but that describes a rather small subset of the cost analysis problems out there. Let me put it this way, I get paid fairly well because cost accounting isn't something just anyone can do competently.
If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
I would hear about a missed message if there were one and every once in a while I check just to be sure but my statement stands. It's good enough that I really don't feel the need to bother checking.
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it.
Wrong ISP. It needs to be handled by the outgoing ISP, not the incoming one. Yes it will cost money but less than later in the delivery process. You aren't going to eliminate spam but you can minimize the economic impact of it.
In any case the notion that you are somehow going to get greedy a-holes to stop sending spam is delusional. If there is money to be made (and there always is) then the problem will persist. It is quite correct that it is an economic problem but there is no viable economic solution. All we have a imperfect technical solutions. If you have an actual solution to this problem then by all means share with the class but there is a reason why there is a form letter for people who think they have the solution for spam. This is nothing new.
Slashdot Mirror
LauncherOne is targeting $10 million per launch and would put up 2-3 satellites with each launch
Who cares what they are "targeting"? They haven't even launched a prototype yet and won't until probably next year. Any cost estimates are purely speculation at this point and all currently available launch vehicles are more expensive than that. By a lot. But even accepting the figure of $10 million per launch they still are going to be looking at startup costs well north of $1 billion before they even have a single customer. There will be a lot more expense beyond the launch costs.
You wouldn't have to ask that question if you'd bothered to read the entire text you were responding to. The rural population is not "by definition" small, it is a substantial fraction of the global population.
If you want to get pedantic about it relevant the rural population who can/will buy this service appears to be very small. Exactly who do you think it going to buy this service? Who do you think it going to be a typical customer? Some dirt poor farmer in Africa? Mountaineers? The fact that there are collectively substantial numbers of people in rural areas is insufficient data. The question is how many people in rural areas would buy this service at a price that would make it economically viable presuming it works? I don't deny there is probably a market there but I remain unconvinced that the market is large enough that it can be service economically.
There are a few thousand ocean vessels and airliners in operations at any given time. Farmers in remote areas might but many of them already have landline or cellular service. I was out in the middle of nowhere in Montana last year and I had fast cellular service almost the entire time and required no special equipment. Anybody who would use this service is going to be WAY out in the boonies and there simply aren't huge numbers of people who live that remotely, who need and can afford fast internet service and who can be reached economically to sell them the necessary equipment. I just don't see where they are going to get the millions of customers needed to make this whole thing work.
The problem with the notion of high automation in China is that China has a large supply of relatively cheap labor. It may not remain cheap forever but for the immediate future it will be cheap. Therefore the economics of widespread automation in a place with cheap labor become rather dicey.
Automation really only makes economic sense in a few circumstances:
1) When production volumes are high and labor is relatively expensive and capital is relatively cheap
2) When manual labor cannot achieve the requisite quality/consistency
3) When there are substantial safety issues that cannot be otherwise mitigated
Some of what Foxconn does would make sense to automate but given how inexpensive labor remains in China much automation would be terribly difficult to economically justify in many cases. My company does assembly work (wire harnesses) and even with relatively expensive US labor we have a difficult time justifying automation in a lot of cases. I could buy a machine for $1 million that would build some of our products completely automatically with just one operator required. But we would have to have production volumes in the hundreds of thousands at minimum to justify the purchase and we would need access to credit at reasonable rates. If we had the labor rates Foxconn has the production volumes would need to be in the many millions to justify. And Foxconn makes more complicated products than we do.
By contrast these new attempts are trying for a much larger customer base, probably reaching into millions of simultaneous connected devices.
"Probably reaching into millions"? That's a HUGE assumption about how popular this service will be and still doesn't address the fundamental economic problems. My 2 minute back of the envelope analysis:
1) You have a satellite system that will cost billions to launch (65 launches X $50 million/launch = $3.25 billion and that is a conservative number) and billions more to build and operate the satellites.
2) The receiver equipment does not (yet) exist and nobody owns one. Complete infrastructure development from scratch. Power, form and cost speculative right now. Have to convince people the system works and get customers in remote areas (hard to reach) to buy in in large numbers quickly.
3) The technical performance of this proposed system in the real world is unclear at best.
4) It is completely unclear if there is a sufficient customer base to make the economics of this idea work. Iridium thought there would be far more customers than there were. Sirius/XM took many years to get a big enough number of subscribers to be financially viable and that was much less technologically complex.
5) Cost of the service is unclear at this point. They claim "affordable" but that can mean something pretty expensive depending on who is paying. It will have to be high enough to recoup the billions in launch costs. Even if they have a million customers day one (which they won't) it will cost something like $1-3000 per customer per year just to break even on the launch costs even with fairly optimistic assumptions about launch costs.
I think it's a neat idea and I wish them luck but this is not a low risk or low cost project. Maybe they can make it work but I'd need a lot of convincing to believe it.
The satellites are cheaper, more capable, and far more numerous, and there's a lot more of a market for low latency internet access that doesn't have to follow fiber links on the ground than there was for the capability to make an occasional call with an expensive, clumsy sat-phone.
It's not clear that the total cost of implementation will be cheaper. Sattelite launches cost $50-250 million each and numerous launches would be required to provide broad coverage. 65 rockets X $50 Million = $3.25 Billion without even including the cost of the satellites. Iridium is reputed to have cost about $6 Billion so even if it is cheaper it will still be ludicrously expensive.
Just because there is a market doesn't mean it can be served economically. I agree that there is some amount of demand but it's not at all clear that the market is large enough to make the economics of this project work. It's going to require special equipment on the ground which nobody currently owns and that nobody knows the cost of. Even if you put it magically into orbit today it will take years of operation to get enough users to become profitable.
And cities cover a tiny fraction of the Earth's surface./quote.
So what? That has nothing to do with whether the economics of this are workable or not.
They should be spying on (real) terrorists and neutral/enemy countries, not on friendly/allied countries.
Grow up. There is no such thing as a true friend among nation states. If you think France isn't spying on the US as well then you are naive and haven't read any of your history books. Countries don't have friends, they have interests. Spying between even the most ostensibly friendly of nations is a routine and commonly accepted occurrence. Countries that are friends today can easily be adversaries tomorrow and the US and France haven't had the closest of relationships.
Is it sad that this is the state of affairs in this world? Of course. But don't be blind about how the real world works.
Why should the NSA spy on French presidents?
Why wouldn't they? First off, nation states spy on each other. Friend or foe doesn't play into it. Any nation that has the capability to spy on another nation will use that capability. Second, friends don't always stay friends and France hasn't exactly been the closest of allies to the US. Third, France has nuclear weapons and anyone who has nuclear weapons is going to be targeted for spying to make sure they aren't up to something dangerous. Nobody thinks it is likely that France is going to do anything weird but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Finally, France has communications with the leadership of other countries, some of which are far less friendly to the US than France is. Some of these communications are likely very interesting to US intelligence services. While the NSA might not be super interested in what the French president is up to, they probably are interested in some of the parties he is talking to.
Exactly where in the NSA mission statement is this covered?
Twenty seconds on wikipedia would have answered that question for you. This is exactly the job of the NSA, particularly for SIGNINT. You might find their mission to be troubling and I might even agree but it IS their job.
Didn't we try this before with Iridium? Other than this being new and shiny why should we reasonably expect this to be economically viable even if it works technologically? By definition the number of people in remote places is small so there cannot ever be a lot of customers. Iridium went bankrupt because they never could get enough customers to recoup the costs of launching all those satellites. I'm an accountant and while I think the notion of such a satellite network is cool I just don't really see an economically viable business model here. Not without some sort of government subsidy anyway.
900 microsatellites which will provide "affordable", fast, low-latency Internet to remote parts of the world and to ships, planes and oil rigs.
"Affordable"? Maybe... though exotic projects like this don't have a great track record of keeping costs low. I suspect cellular networks would have better odds of being cheap but I'll keep an open mind. I don't really see how two way satellite communications would be cheap but maybe it's possible.
"Fast"? I suppose that depends on the definition of fast. Given the power requirements I'm again dubious but perhaps it can be done.
"Low Latency"? No. Just no. Satellite and low latency just aren't a compatible thing from what I can tell.
In practice, it is. The current political climate will not fund both well.
Political climates change. Our ambition to explore should not. Just because we struggle to get funding right now is no reason to throw human spaceflight under the bus.
That's incremental knowledge and we don't have to go to Mars to get most of the same thing.
Most science is incremental knowledge. And you DO have to go to Mars to know how human biology on Mars would work. Furthermore the research required to learn how to keep a human alive and healthy for a trip to Mars requires investment in a human mission to Mars.
When Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter in 1979, the news-stand publication covers were full of images of the swirling red spot, the pizza-like Io, and its spewing volcanoes. I saw those pics all over the place.
I saw the pictures as well. By the time Voyager II went by it was less of a deal. It was NOTHING like the press that Apollo 11 received. Nothing like the Mercury program. Not even close.
An ocean/lake sunset on Titan via a boat-probe could have a similar effect. Or discovering the spectrum of plant life around a distant planet; it would ignite the public's imagination.
Discovery of life on another world would be massive news. Probably the biggest news imaginable. It would cause massive debate and really shake some philosophies. But that discovery won't really make people care about the robots themselves. Robotic exploration is scientifically useful but really only fascinating to people like you and me. Most people will really only care and be inspired if there is a human being doing the exploration. I think you are greatly overestimating how fascinating science is to the general population. The reason we have so much trouble getting funding is precisely because of this fact.
On a side note, another problem with Mars is that we don't know the biological contamination risk in either direction. Infecting/seeding either one with the others' life is very difficult to avoid.
And what is your point? That we shouldn't bother because it might be risky? Heck we can (and possibly have) contaminate other worlds with microbes from our robotic probes. Even the best efforts at cleaning them are imperfect and for some probes we simply don't even bother. At some point you have to accept the risk if you want to learn more.
I'd rather see our money spent on an unmanned Titan boat probe, an unmanned Europa submarine, and an extra-solar (alien) planet atmosphere spectragraph "artificial eclipsing" telescope.
Those are all great things but it doesn't have to be an either/or thing. I'm not at all against robotic exploration but our country could easily fund both manned and robotic missions for a tiny fraction of what we spend on defense. I sigh every time I think about how much science and technology development we could fund with the absurd amount of money the US puts into its military.
Approx 10% of the cost, but 5x the science, 30% of the same Wow factor (more if plant life found), and a failure would be only 3% as embarrassing as a dead Marsnaut.
Certainly cheaper for specific tasks. I completely disagree that you'll get 5X the science. You'll just get different science. One advantage of human spaceflight is that you get science on human biology and technologies to support it which you will not get with robotic missions. That's not to imply the science from the robotic missions is less valuable - just different.
As for "30% of the wow factor"? Not a chance. Less than 1% of the wow factor. There is no robotic exploration mission you could possibly design that would gather even a fraction of a percent of the attention that a manned mission to Mars would get. It's not even close no matter how valuable the robotic mission might be scientifically.
This is not malicious. It is stupid and ignorant, but not malicious.
Sufficiently large values of stupidity asymptotically approach maliciousness. In other words if the action is dumb enough there is no effective difference.
I want very little more in a car than I have on my motorcycle.
And I want quite a lot more in a car than you have on your motorcycle. Doesn't mean either of us is right or wrong but I think there are more of people like me than there are of people like you. I want a car with a quiet interior, satellite radio, heated seats, a GPS, etc. I drive rather a lot and want a car that allows me to do so with reasonable comfort. You clearly don't live where I do if you actually want a car with no heat and no AC. I've driven cars like that and you can keep them if you actually like sitting on a block of ice in December or baking in July.
I think Automakers should really, REALLY expand their configurators to include all the gritty details of electronics - for advanced buyers.
I don' t think you appreciate the cost of doing that. Every option and component you add to a car adds non-trivial cost and complexity to the vehicle. There is no real economic case to be made (currently) for vehicle manufacturers to do this. The added cost of production, development and support and the added customer confusion would hugely outweigh any economic benefit. They also have to be supported for decades afterwards. Do you really want the same bluetooth system 15 years from now? Probably not. The GPS in my truck (2009 model year) was developed around 2004 and it shows. It wasn't even state of the art back then and it is really starting to show its age now.
Being able to say "I don't want bluetooth-based this on my car" would totally be awesome.
Oh well, wishful thinking.
It would be awesome but it very much is wishful thinking. They may get there one day but it won't be anytime soon. I actually run a company that supplies wire harnesses to the auto industry. They are absolutely NOT equipped to offer that sort of granular level of options even if they wanted to. There would have to be considerable standardization and a lot of supply chain development before it would be even technically feasible. Plus remember that options are by definition not on every vehicle so they have to be sold at substantial markups - the smaller the volume the bigger the markup.
Disabling windows update - at least automatically - is a good idea.
Maybe for a corporation with an IT staff. If you are like me and have to support small numbers of technologically illiterate people then automatic updates are a blessing. Otherwise those machines would literally never get updated. Ever.
Though honestly as the designated family techie the best thing (for my sanity) I ever did was move my parents to Apple products. Not so much because I think they are inherently better but they do result in less tech support problems (for me) and I got them support contracts (1on1 and Applecare) so Apple can and does deal with the majority of their technical issues rather than me. When my dad was on Windows I'd get at least 2-3 calls a month about something not working. Now I get maybe 1 call every 6 months and it's usually much easier to resolve.
And to think, their hardware is still better than most out there.
If there hardware requires weird non-standard drivers and disabling updates to work then it is by definition crap hardware. Maybe the hardware is fine and they are incompetent at software but that is not the most likely explanation. There would be no reason to disable Windows Update if the hardware worked as expected.
They still get the fewest complaints on NewEgg for much of their stuff for a reason.
Popularity and an alleged low number of complaints on NewEgg hardly constitutes proof of quality. If we are going by anecdotes the few pieces of Samsung hardware I've owned have been pretty much crap. Does that mean all Samsung products are junk? Of course not. But when I hear about them doing something so obviously stupid as disabling the standard OS update because it doesn't work with their hardware then I regard that as prima-facie evidence that their products are crap.
So the problem is not that "it is not hard to find a bare bones vehicle" but that I can't find the model I want with limited electronics: I want xenon lights, "oh, well, that comes with the comfort package that also comes with lane departure and blind spot alarms and remote start".
So put the xenon lights on yourself if that is important to you. Nothing wrong with modifying your car to suit. I've never owned a car that I haven't added at least one aftermarket feature. I've done plenty of it myself. It's possible to find almost any modification you could possibly want if you are willing to look hard enough and/or spend enough money on it.
If true then I guess I won't be buying any Samsung computers anytime soon. A company that stupid simply isn't worth doing business with. Add this to the Samsung TVs that listen to your living room and the bloatware on their Android devices and I pretty much can't see any reason to buy from Samsung these days.
After we installed a Wifi relay in the lobby, the idi^H^Hperson manning the entrance started taking sick days after sick days, claiming the wifi was making her sick.
I would personally fire such a person. Someone that stupid is going to be a detriment to the company at some point.
Then we activated it and placed a piece of black tape on the LEDs, told her 'Fine, we won't be using it then', and all was fine.
You are much kinder than I would be. I hope this person had many other wonderful qualities to offset her lack of critical reasoning ability.
The real question to me is. Do these cars really need all this shit?
So long as there is consumer demand the answer is yes.
How about a car that just takes me where I am going, don't really need it to babysit , entertain of second guess me.
Those are available if you want them. Not hard to find relatively bare bones vehicles if you bother to look. For people who want something a little more sophisticated there are extra options available. Personally I LIKE having a screen in my car with GPS. I like having satellite radio, remote entry, heated seats, AC and USB power, backup camera, etc and I'm willing to pay a bit extra for them. Personal preference and your mileage may (literally) vary.
A synonym for electrosensitivity is hypochondriac.
You have to test at about the 20th percentile to be a bean counter.
If you're going to make up BS to insult someone for no reason someone at least make it clever BS. Seriously, who peed in your cereal this morning?
Hint: Because it is difficult to you, doesn't make it difficult.
Cute. Hint: Since you don't know anything about accounting it makes you look stupid when you prove that fact publicly.
So I'd say the cost of landfills for consumers is far too high -- it needs to be free, like it is with e-waste, if we want to avoid people dumping everywhere (and not have a police state).
It cannot be free because it has costs. You can address the costs indirectly like through taxes but you cannot provide something for free that actually has an economic cost. TANSTAAFL and all that. Furthermore even if you did make dropoff free, people still will dump things because driving halfway across your county to the local dump is time consuming and costly. The nearest landfill to me would cost me about $10-15 in gasoline to get to (plus my time) so it isn't free even the landfill doesn't charge me a drop fee. Now I don't want to live in a landfill so I personally wouldn't just dump things any old place but I can understand why people often do.
Raw materials, when mined, are not refined
Realistically lots of recycled materials effectively require a "refining" step. That recycled milk jug comes frequently isn't clean so it has to be processed before the materials can be utilized.
you also have to expend more effort and energy to refine them and turn them into something useful
You have to do the same for recycled materials. The real question is whether less effort and energy (thus less cost) is required to recycle. For some products (like aluminum) the energy to turn ore into ingots is MUCH higher than to recycle. For others (like plastic) the economic advantage of recycling isn't so clear because it's relatively cheap to make the virgin product.
With recycling, you bypass a lot of that, so it should be cheaper and more efficient: instead of going through all these refining steps, you just take some used HDPE, grind it up and/or melt it down, and make more HDPE containers out of it.
Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Recycled materials require that they to be sorted, contaminants have to be removed, it has to be cleaned, it has to be processed into a useable form for processing. These costs are not trivial and the waste stream is definitely not clean and well organized. Furthermore for many materials like plastics or paper the contaminants cannot always be removed or the chemical structure is altered such that they cannot be a perfect substitute for virgin materials.
So if the economics are favoring using virgin raw materials instead of recycling existing refined materials, we're doing something really wrong.
Or it means that it is a more difficult problem than you are presuming. It sounds like it should be easier but unless the energy inputs for the raw materials are very high (like for aluminum) for processing raw materials relative to recycled there is no particular reason to presume that recycling should be more energy or labor efficient than processing from raw materials. It sounds good on paper but that doesn't mean the economics work out nicely in the real world.
A good cost analysis is never difficult.
Speaking as a certified accountant I could not disagree more. If you think cost analysis "is never difficult" then you don't understand how to do it properly. Some trivial cost accounting problems are easy but that describes a rather small subset of the cost analysis problems out there. Let me put it this way, I get paid fairly well because cost accounting isn't something just anyone can do competently.
If you don't check your spam folder than you cannot make a statement of your FP rate, until someone tells you that they sent you an email and you realize you never saw it - but you may be too late to do anything about it by then as the spam folder retention is not particularly long on gmail.
I would hear about a missed message if there were one and every once in a while I check just to be sure but my statement stands. It's good enough that I really don't feel the need to bother checking.
No. By the time spam makes it to your ISP you've already paid for it.
Wrong ISP. It needs to be handled by the outgoing ISP, not the incoming one. Yes it will cost money but less than later in the delivery process. You aren't going to eliminate spam but you can minimize the economic impact of it.
In any case the notion that you are somehow going to get greedy a-holes to stop sending spam is delusional. If there is money to be made (and there always is) then the problem will persist. It is quite correct that it is an economic problem but there is no viable economic solution. All we have a imperfect technical solutions. If you have an actual solution to this problem then by all means share with the class but there is a reason why there is a form letter for people who think they have the solution for spam. This is nothing new.