It's a pain and expensive to maintain two computers.
No it isn't either difficult or expensive. I've been doing it for years. Heck I have a desktop in my home office, a near identical one in my work office, and a laptop for the occasional bit of portability. Online storage makes keeping documents synced between them trivial and having the same applications on each is not a challenge. I have VPN software if I need something on one that isn't on the others. Maintaining them is a good approximation of trivial.
You can get a VERY serviceable desktop PC with two 1080p monitors for well under $1000. You can get an extremely nice desktop with a huge amount of RAM and a nice GPU with three 4K monitors for under $2500. Probably under $1700 if you do a little bargain hunting.
I do most of my development on a virtual machine so I am glad it's a laptop.
Those statements have nothing to do with each other. The laptop provides no benefit over a desktop to developing on a virtual machine.
Something I've been puzzled by is why people often use laptops even when a desktop would be a better choice. If you really are moving around a lot and need a portable device then I get it. Laptops are super useful for people on the go. But a lot of people work at a desk all day long on a laptop which makes very little sense in a lot of cases. I use a desktop PC with some fast hardware and 3 large 28" 4K monitors. FAR more productive than any laptop. When I need a laptop I have one of those too but its often frustrating to use unless I'm single tasking or doing something simple. I'm usually juggling multiple applications and documents and doing that on a single small screen is annoying to put it mildly. Even a "big" laptop doesn't hold a candle to a well configured desktop for performance and desktop real estate.
I could see a laptop with an external GPU being a useful thing if you need occasional portability but mostly work at a desk. But if you work at a desk then it's kind of silly to use a laptop. Use the right tool for the job. We mostly use desktops and have a few laptops in the company for people to share when they need something portable.
Do you not know, being a friend is a two way street. the USA is friend to no one
No nation state really has friends. Friend is a term of convenience and nation states in reality do not have friends. The US and Canada are about as close to "friends" as any two countries can get but I assure you that is only because of interests that happen to align. The US and western Europe are "friends" and if you don't understand why then you need to go study your history before posting any more drivel.
as publicly stated the US governments demands that it must dominate the entire globe in every sphere of human activity, starting off with the military industrial complex and nuclear weapons targeted at every single other country on the globe
Citation needed.
From the rest of the planet's viewpoint it's not fuck Russia, it's fuck the war warmongering USA.
Warmongering US? As opposed to Russia which just invaded Crimea and is actively supporting a dictator in the Syrian Civil war? The same Russia that sells 20% of the world military hardware? Yeah spare me the notion that the US is worse that Russia on the warmongering.
The same thing that will reduce cost to orbit will be the biggest boon to safety: launching more frequently.
That's certainly going to be a big part of it. Kind of a chicken and egg problem though. To launch more frequently you need to reduce costs and to reduce costs you need to launch more frequently. This is a perfect example of where subsidies can make a ton of sense.
Although bear in mind that launching more frequently will come with a body count. Some of the lesson we are going to learn about how to do space travel safely are going to be learned at the cost of some lives and we're going to have to be ok with that in the big picture. There is a saying in the maritime industry that "the rules were written with blood" and the space industry will not be any different.
It's very hard to work out all the bugs of a rocket that only launches a dozen times before it's replaced by a new model, compared to a rocket that launches thousands of times a year.
Definitely true. Of course you don't want to build a thousand rockets and find out after the fact that you screwed up the design either. Basically it's going to take a long time to ramp up to significant volume if we do it right. Decades to centuries if we're being realistic given the economic incentives (or lack thereof) no matter what Elon Musk claims. We didn't go straight from the boats that Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to modern ocean liners. That took literally centuries of technological advancement. No real reason to believe that development of technology to travel in space will happen in a compressed time span either. It's a hard problem and an expensive one too.
If you have to ask that question then you know fuck-all about US/Russia relations over the last 80 years.
What is so terrifying about the US and Russia improving relations and bringing a little more piece to the world?
What's terrifying is HOW Trump is trying to do it. Peaceful cooperation with Russia is a reasonable goal but not at any cost or by abandoning countries that actually are friendly to the US. Russia is NOT a friend to the US and pretending that the interests of those two countries have somehow magically aligned because Trump is in the White House is absurd.
and maybe trolling but Trump's poll numbers didn't budge an inch even after that downright terrifying display in Helsinki.
That's because he is down to more or less just his psycho base supporters. An alarmingly large group but they support him no matter how crazy he gets. He could start a nuclear war and they would cheer him on the whole way and probably try to find some way to blame Obama or Clinton for it.
What I find especially odd is most of his supporters are old enough to have been cold warrior types.
His supporters are not that old as a general proposition. He has too many of them for that to be the case though certainly a fair number of them are older. Heck I'm old enough to have been around during the later decades of the cold war and the people that really lived through the middle of it are drawing social security now. Trumps supporters are more diverse than just old people.
Burning it and generating energy from the process would offsets an equal mass of fossil fuel, so it wouldn't add CO2 to the atmosphere.
You have the logic of this wrong though I understand what you are trying to say. This isn't offsetting fossil fuel consumption. It is just using a delayed form of burning from oil previously pumped. We are adding roughly the same amount of CO2 to the atmosphere if we burn X amount of oil or if we burn previously pumped oil that has been turned into plastic. Either way the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases by roughly the same amount. As long as the plastic remains plastic it's effectively prevented from turning into CO2 roughly akin to if it had been left in the ground. (there are other problems but that's a separate issue)
That actually makes the most sense-- you get the value out of the oil in the form of plastic, and then get the energy out of the oil when you're done with using the plastic.
At the cost of pumping a bunch of carbon and other stuff into the atmosphere. Plus you have to expend additional energy to turn the oil into plastic though this is something of a sunk cost if you were going to do that anyway. If you can recycle the plastic directly into another plastic then you are sort of practicing a form of carbon sequestration, albeit something of a messy and energy intensive one. Burning plastic is not as efficient as burning "pure" oil and derived fuels.
No, it costs about $1 in gas and $15 in time to stop at the car parts store on the way home to dump it responsibly. It costs $2000 in fine plus $600 in lost work if I get caught dumping it down the drain.
You forgot to risk adjust your calculations to come up with an expected cost. You multiply the cost by the chances of getting caught which in all likelihood are extremely low.
Maybe burning plastic _is_ the appropriate way to handle that waste?
Perhaps but if you are paying someone to recycle it and they burn it instead then then you aren't getting what you paid for. If I hire your company to recycle my plastic then there are clear expectations about what that means and what it should cost. If I pay you to recycle it and you burn it because that's cheaper then that is fraud, plain and simple. Whether or not that is the optimal use for the material is irrelevant to the contractual agreement. And of course there are the environmental considerations too but those are a separate matter.
Unless you can find someone to work for $0.05/hour you can't afford to 'recycle' it, though burning it is technically recycling it.
??? Burning it is most definitely NOT recycling. You know darn well what recycling means.
The cheapest thing is almost certainly also the greenest.
If that statement were true then dumping toxic waste in nearby ponds would be the greenest thing possible. It's true that green CAN be cheap but there is a reason the Tragedy of the Commons is a problem.
Space flight is very dangerous, and I don't see it becoming much more safe in my lifetime.
Maybe. It's gotten a lot safer during my lifetime but I was born near the start of the space age when we really didn't know what we were doing. We've learned a lot in the last 5 decades. (at the cost of some lives) That said it's still quite dangerous and likely to remain so for the near future. It's going to take quite a while to get the technology of chemical rockets to the point where they have a safety record even close to airlines at reasonable cost. They have a fairly good safety record today but at outrageous cost. The real question is whether we can keep or improve on the current safety record while reducing the cost to orbit. That is not going to be easy to do and won't happen overnight.
Unless we can get into space without explosive force, such as a space elevator, it is going to be dangerous, and people will die in the future from space travel.
You think a space elevator wouldn't be dangerous? You might want to think about that a little deeper. Those things are enormously dangerous even if they prove to be possible to actually build. Not just to the users of the elevator but potentially to people on the ground or in space if they fail.
Anything dealing with space is going to be dangerous. But it's conceivable it could be made safe to a reasonable degree someday. Won't be easy but it could be made to be reasonably safe for most travelers. Take the airline industry for an example. It took decades but eventually it became quite safe with good regulation and technological advancement. Same with ocean travel. I'd expect the space industry to take longer (harder problem) but I also could someday see spaceflight being "routine" to a reasonable degree.
As a result, it says, the government has little idea of whether the recyclables are getting turned into new products, buried in landfill or burned.
If you don't know then the answer is that they are being handled in whatever manner is least expensive and/or most profitable. Most likely that is either burning or landfill with the chances increasing the lower the energy inputs required to make new. To presume otherwise is to be naive. Steel and aluminum are probably recycled because the energy required to make new is enormous versus recycling. Plastics are probably just buried or burned or dumped in the ocean.
There is a saying that people don't do what you EXPECT, they do what you INSPECT. If you want to be sure it is being handled appropriately then you need to inspect the process to be sure. If you don't inspect then you won't get what you expect.
Just like a parking brake on a car is there for a reason, the option to safely eject a USB drive is also there for a reason.
That reasons should have been relegated to the dustbin of history a long time ago. There really is no excuse for it to not be safe to yank a USB drive at any time. The only consequence from doing so is that any files that were not completely copied should be deleted and a warning message thrown. If the file system and/or hardware cannot handle being yanked at any arbitrary time then it is poorly designed because it is no secret that people WILL yank these things. If the result is file system corruption then it is a shit file system.
Insisting that people jump through hoops to accommodate shit hardware and software design is inexcusable. If someone wants faster performance from write caching then they can take extra steps to enable it but the default should always be safe-to-yank arbitrarily.
It should never even be an issue. It should on ALL systems by default be safe to yank the drive at any time without concern of a corrupted file system. If your file was still copying during the yank then the file should not show up (it wasn't complete) and maybe throw a warning that the transfer was no completed but there should be no further issues. If the file system can't handle this then it is a shit file system. Seriously, we KNOW that people are going to yank the USB drives and they should be designed accordingly. In 2018 there is really no excuse for this not working the way people expect it to work. The entire point of a portable USB drive is to be able to use it quickly and with minimal hassle. Having to do a software eject is an anachronism that we shouldn't have to deal with anymore.
If you want to do some special write caching for performance reasons that should be possible but have to go through special steps to enable and even more special steps to not revert to the default safe-to-yank setting.
And the problem is how could we transfer or find materials to build one in Mars, let alone find a practical way to build a colony there?
Quite right but that's a separate issue for the distant future. We would have to have considerable infrastructure on Mars to make building a hyperloop system worth worrying about. If we are that built up then chances are we are doing manufacturing on Mars and tapping into the raw materials available on the planet. We're certainly not going to transport the materials from Earth for something like that.
I guess in theory, it makes sense. In practice, there are many other issues involved (aside the technology) that would make things impossible...
Of course. I'm talking very broad brush theoretical stuff here. The problem is that on Earth it's a lot harder and more expensive to maintain a vacuum plus there is a lot of existing and fully paid for infrastructure to compete with. If you are starting clean slate it's a different situation but we aren't. But on a newly colonized planet we could do things differently both technically and economically. Technologies that make sense on Earth often won't be practical on Mars and vice-versa. Hyperloop seems to be one of these. Thin atmosphere, lots of particulates, temperature issues, etc seem to actually favor hyperloop or something like it in such an environment. It makes a lot more sense than it does here anyway.
I don't think hyper loops are real-world feasible. Even if the technology works, any aggrieved destructive fool - and these exist everywhere in the world, China included - can put the entire system at risk in a way that aircraft are not threatened by.
You could say the same thing about trains but your point is a fair one. That's probably not the major obstacle in my opinion. The major obstacle is probably just economics. It's a technically complicated (thus expensive) system and it's not at all clear that it can be made and operated for a cost competitive with alternative means of transportation. I think it's an interesting idea but I just have a hard time imagining it being an economically practical one even if the technology is feasible.
Interestingly hyperloop might make a lot more sense on Mars which is where Elon's ambitions lie anyway. Not much atmosphere to get in the way so the pumping costs are lower plus you would actually want protection from dust and other features. Flying isn't really an option and traditional trains probably would be problematic. So while it might not make sense here on Earth in the face of economically proven competitors, it might actually make sense elsewhere in the solar system if/when we ever get there.
Best Buy used to complain that people used their store as a showroom then went home and ordered from Amazon. That blew my mind. A retailer complaining that people come into the store?
Exactly. If you can get people into the store and still can't close the deal then you are doing something wrong. Could be price, could be service, could be "shopping experience", or something else. But if they are standing in your building and you still cannot sell them the product then you have something wildly wrong with your business model.
Basically I go to a store for just a few reasons. 1) I want to touch and see and/or select the product prior to buying. 2) I want to talk to a product expert face to face. (and they had better actually be an expert) 3) I need something Right Now. 4) Going to the store is more convenient than shopping online (like directly on my commute to/from home) 5) The store offers a fun shopping experience I cannot get online
If you are going to offer a product then you need to either be price competitive or you need to offer more value in other ways. If a company cannot compete on price with Amazon or Walmart (and most cannot) then they need to offer something else extra. Give me a reason to come to your store and buy that isn't just a mediocre price on a product I can get elsewhere.
But seriously, I don't think "juice" means what you think it does. It's even more inaccurate than calling non-dairy products "milk".
Not possible to make it less accurate than calling it milk. Milk is a very specific thing derived solely from secretions by mammals used to feed their young. There is no product derived from plants that matches the chemical composition, nutritional profile, taste, mouth-feel, or cooking characteristics. That's not to say the veggie based products are bad or shouldn't be used. They just aren't even close to being milk in the technical sense or the legal sense.
You can squeeze soybeans or nuts all you want; you'll get neither juice nor milk. Non-dairy "milks" are generally made of highly processed, ground-up seeds mixed with thickening agents and large volumes of water.
"Soy milk" is a stable emulsion if you want to get technical about it. But we don't have a great word in common parlance for stable emulsions and we do have a good word for plant derived drinks - albeit an already corrupted one as you point out. So unless you want to invent a term (which I'm fine with), juice is as close to accurate as we have available. Given that we already describe lots of drinks that really barely fit the description of juice as juice (see fruit "juice" with just 5% or less plant derived actual juice) we're not really misleading anyone in a new way. You are correct that technically it is not juice but it's far closer to juice than it is to milk.
Well, you can cook with both of them, put them on your cereal, and drink them. How are they not interchangeable?
Because HOW you cook with them is (generally) different and they don't taste even remotely similar. Nothing wrong with using soy juice on your cereal if you want to but the act of cooking it or drinking it doesn't magically make it into milk. Recipes that use soy juice in place of milk generally require using different amounts and require other alterations because their chemical compositions are quite different and so they cook differently.
While I agree that "we've always done it this way, so we should keep doing it this way" is not an argument,
Correct.
your entire argument seems to be "because 'we've always done it this way, so we should keep doing it this way' is not an argument, we should not keep doing it that way".
You got yourself twisted up in your knickers there trying to pretend you are smart. We already have a perfectly adequate word for consumable liquids derived from plants. We call it juice. Marketing people keep trying to pretend that plant juice somehow becomes milk if it happens to be (or is made to be) white. If it didn't come from a mammal then it by definition is not milk and no amount of marketing BS will make it so. Call products what they are and life is a lot simpler.
Out of curiosity: What name should we instead give to peanutbutter?
I don't see that as a problem since nobody is trying to pretend that peanut butter is somehow a substitute for actual butter. People try all the time to pretend that soy milk and cow's milk are interchangeable when they really aren't.
The argument that we are now capable of constructing space-telescopes that are better than Hubble has no bearings on the comparative advances, since we can also create better earth-based telescopes than VLT, these days.
True in both cases but irrelevant to my point. The point is that one should not extrapolate this result too far. We have ground based telescopes now that under some conditions can exceed the results from Hubble. That is ALL you can say. It doesn't say anything about the relative capabilities of current leading edge ground or space based telescopes in general.
All other things being equal a space based telescope should get better results than a ground based one no matter how good the optical correction is just because there is less stuff in the way. However things are obviously not equal so the comparison becomes more complicated.
The 'juice' inside a coconut has always been called milk AFAIR. It's a natural thing to do, to extend the use of a word to cover something 'similar'.
It's not similar and just because something has been done a certain way doesn't make it accurate. If it comes from a plant it is by definition not milk. Milk is a substance secreted by mammals to feed their young. If it doesn't come from a mammal it isn't milk. If it comes from a plant it is juice. So the accurate term is coconut juice.
We do it all the time, and in the case of these products which are pitched as cow's mile replacements, there seems even more reason to do so.
Just because something is a substitute doesn't mean you should call it something different than what it actually is. Margarine is (sometimes) a butter substitute but we don't call it butter. If it is a liquid derived from a plant then it is (generally) supposed to be called juice. Nothing wrong with saying coconut juice or soy juice or almond juice. Just coloring something white doesn't make it milk.
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It's a pain and expensive to maintain two computers.
No it isn't either difficult or expensive. I've been doing it for years. Heck I have a desktop in my home office, a near identical one in my work office, and a laptop for the occasional bit of portability. Online storage makes keeping documents synced between them trivial and having the same applications on each is not a challenge. I have VPN software if I need something on one that isn't on the others. Maintaining them is a good approximation of trivial.
You can get a VERY serviceable desktop PC with two 1080p monitors for well under $1000. You can get an extremely nice desktop with a huge amount of RAM and a nice GPU with three 4K monitors for under $2500. Probably under $1700 if you do a little bargain hunting.
I do most of my development on a virtual machine so I am glad it's a laptop.
Those statements have nothing to do with each other. The laptop provides no benefit over a desktop to developing on a virtual machine.
Something I've been puzzled by is why people often use laptops even when a desktop would be a better choice. If you really are moving around a lot and need a portable device then I get it. Laptops are super useful for people on the go. But a lot of people work at a desk all day long on a laptop which makes very little sense in a lot of cases. I use a desktop PC with some fast hardware and 3 large 28" 4K monitors. FAR more productive than any laptop. When I need a laptop I have one of those too but its often frustrating to use unless I'm single tasking or doing something simple. I'm usually juggling multiple applications and documents and doing that on a single small screen is annoying to put it mildly. Even a "big" laptop doesn't hold a candle to a well configured desktop for performance and desktop real estate.
I could see a laptop with an external GPU being a useful thing if you need occasional portability but mostly work at a desk. But if you work at a desk then it's kind of silly to use a laptop. Use the right tool for the job. We mostly use desktops and have a few laptops in the company for people to share when they need something portable.
Do you not know, being a friend is a two way street. the USA is friend to no one
No nation state really has friends. Friend is a term of convenience and nation states in reality do not have friends. The US and Canada are about as close to "friends" as any two countries can get but I assure you that is only because of interests that happen to align. The US and western Europe are "friends" and if you don't understand why then you need to go study your history before posting any more drivel.
as publicly stated the US governments demands that it must dominate the entire globe in every sphere of human activity, starting off with the military industrial complex and nuclear weapons targeted at every single other country on the globe
Citation needed.
From the rest of the planet's viewpoint it's not fuck Russia, it's fuck the war warmongering USA.
Warmongering US? As opposed to Russia which just invaded Crimea and is actively supporting a dictator in the Syrian Civil war? The same Russia that sells 20% of the world military hardware? Yeah spare me the notion that the US is worse that Russia on the warmongering.
The same thing that will reduce cost to orbit will be the biggest boon to safety: launching more frequently.
That's certainly going to be a big part of it. Kind of a chicken and egg problem though. To launch more frequently you need to reduce costs and to reduce costs you need to launch more frequently. This is a perfect example of where subsidies can make a ton of sense.
Although bear in mind that launching more frequently will come with a body count. Some of the lesson we are going to learn about how to do space travel safely are going to be learned at the cost of some lives and we're going to have to be ok with that in the big picture. There is a saying in the maritime industry that "the rules were written with blood" and the space industry will not be any different.
It's very hard to work out all the bugs of a rocket that only launches a dozen times before it's replaced by a new model, compared to a rocket that launches thousands of times a year.
Definitely true. Of course you don't want to build a thousand rockets and find out after the fact that you screwed up the design either. Basically it's going to take a long time to ramp up to significant volume if we do it right. Decades to centuries if we're being realistic given the economic incentives (or lack thereof) no matter what Elon Musk claims. We didn't go straight from the boats that Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to modern ocean liners. That took literally centuries of technological advancement. No real reason to believe that development of technology to travel in space will happen in a compressed time span either. It's a hard problem and an expensive one too.
What are you so afraid of?
If you have to ask that question then you know fuck-all about US/Russia relations over the last 80 years.
What is so terrifying about the US and Russia improving relations and bringing a little more piece to the world?
What's terrifying is HOW Trump is trying to do it. Peaceful cooperation with Russia is a reasonable goal but not at any cost or by abandoning countries that actually are friendly to the US. Russia is NOT a friend to the US and pretending that the interests of those two countries have somehow magically aligned because Trump is in the White House is absurd.
and maybe trolling but Trump's poll numbers didn't budge an inch even after that downright terrifying display in Helsinki.
That's because he is down to more or less just his psycho base supporters. An alarmingly large group but they support him no matter how crazy he gets. He could start a nuclear war and they would cheer him on the whole way and probably try to find some way to blame Obama or Clinton for it.
What I find especially odd is most of his supporters are old enough to have been cold warrior types.
His supporters are not that old as a general proposition. He has too many of them for that to be the case though certainly a fair number of them are older. Heck I'm old enough to have been around during the later decades of the cold war and the people that really lived through the middle of it are drawing social security now. Trumps supporters are more diverse than just old people.
Recycling means reuse. Not perpetual reuse.
Burning is not reuse so your point remains invalid.
Burning it and generating energy from the process would offsets an equal mass of fossil fuel, so it wouldn't add CO2 to the atmosphere.
You have the logic of this wrong though I understand what you are trying to say. This isn't offsetting fossil fuel consumption. It is just using a delayed form of burning from oil previously pumped. We are adding roughly the same amount of CO2 to the atmosphere if we burn X amount of oil or if we burn previously pumped oil that has been turned into plastic. Either way the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere increases by roughly the same amount. As long as the plastic remains plastic it's effectively prevented from turning into CO2 roughly akin to if it had been left in the ground. (there are other problems but that's a separate issue)
That actually makes the most sense-- you get the value out of the oil in the form of plastic, and then get the energy out of the oil when you're done with using the plastic.
At the cost of pumping a bunch of carbon and other stuff into the atmosphere. Plus you have to expend additional energy to turn the oil into plastic though this is something of a sunk cost if you were going to do that anyway. If you can recycle the plastic directly into another plastic then you are sort of practicing a form of carbon sequestration, albeit something of a messy and energy intensive one. Burning plastic is not as efficient as burning "pure" oil and derived fuels.
No, it costs about $1 in gas and $15 in time to stop at the car parts store on the way home to dump it responsibly. It costs $2000 in fine plus $600 in lost work if I get caught dumping it down the drain.
You forgot to risk adjust your calculations to come up with an expected cost. You multiply the cost by the chances of getting caught which in all likelihood are extremely low.
Maybe burning plastic _is_ the appropriate way to handle that waste?
Perhaps but if you are paying someone to recycle it and they burn it instead then then you aren't getting what you paid for. If I hire your company to recycle my plastic then there are clear expectations about what that means and what it should cost. If I pay you to recycle it and you burn it because that's cheaper then that is fraud, plain and simple. Whether or not that is the optimal use for the material is irrelevant to the contractual agreement. And of course there are the environmental considerations too but those are a separate matter.
Unless you can find someone to work for $0.05/hour you can't afford to 'recycle' it, though burning it is technically recycling it.
??? Burning it is most definitely NOT recycling. You know darn well what recycling means.
The cheapest thing is almost certainly also the greenest.
If that statement were true then dumping toxic waste in nearby ponds would be the greenest thing possible. It's true that green CAN be cheap but there is a reason the Tragedy of the Commons is a problem.
Space flight is very dangerous, and I don't see it becoming much more safe in my lifetime.
Maybe. It's gotten a lot safer during my lifetime but I was born near the start of the space age when we really didn't know what we were doing. We've learned a lot in the last 5 decades. (at the cost of some lives) That said it's still quite dangerous and likely to remain so for the near future. It's going to take quite a while to get the technology of chemical rockets to the point where they have a safety record even close to airlines at reasonable cost. They have a fairly good safety record today but at outrageous cost. The real question is whether we can keep or improve on the current safety record while reducing the cost to orbit. That is not going to be easy to do and won't happen overnight.
Unless we can get into space without explosive force, such as a space elevator, it is going to be dangerous, and people will die in the future from space travel.
You think a space elevator wouldn't be dangerous? You might want to think about that a little deeper. Those things are enormously dangerous even if they prove to be possible to actually build. Not just to the users of the elevator but potentially to people on the ground or in space if they fail.
Anything dealing with space is going to be dangerous. But it's conceivable it could be made safe to a reasonable degree someday. Won't be easy but it could be made to be reasonably safe for most travelers. Take the airline industry for an example. It took decades but eventually it became quite safe with good regulation and technological advancement. Same with ocean travel. I'd expect the space industry to take longer (harder problem) but I also could someday see spaceflight being "routine" to a reasonable degree.
SpaceX got rid of a backlog of their Block 4 rockets by launching without landing them back on Earth.
Oh they "landed" them. The landings were a little more... exuberant than the Block 5 rockets will be though.
As a result, it says, the government has little idea of whether the recyclables are getting turned into new products, buried in landfill or burned.
If you don't know then the answer is that they are being handled in whatever manner is least expensive and/or most profitable. Most likely that is either burning or landfill with the chances increasing the lower the energy inputs required to make new. To presume otherwise is to be naive. Steel and aluminum are probably recycled because the energy required to make new is enormous versus recycling. Plastics are probably just buried or burned or dumped in the ocean.
There is a saying that people don't do what you EXPECT, they do what you INSPECT. If you want to be sure it is being handled appropriately then you need to inspect the process to be sure. If you don't inspect then you won't get what you expect.
Just like a parking brake on a car is there for a reason, the option to safely eject a USB drive is also there for a reason.
That reasons should have been relegated to the dustbin of history a long time ago. There really is no excuse for it to not be safe to yank a USB drive at any time. The only consequence from doing so is that any files that were not completely copied should be deleted and a warning message thrown. If the file system and/or hardware cannot handle being yanked at any arbitrary time then it is poorly designed because it is no secret that people WILL yank these things. If the result is file system corruption then it is a shit file system.
Insisting that people jump through hoops to accommodate shit hardware and software design is inexcusable. If someone wants faster performance from write caching then they can take extra steps to enable it but the default should always be safe-to-yank arbitrarily.
It should never even be an issue. It should on ALL systems by default be safe to yank the drive at any time without concern of a corrupted file system. If your file was still copying during the yank then the file should not show up (it wasn't complete) and maybe throw a warning that the transfer was no completed but there should be no further issues. If the file system can't handle this then it is a shit file system. Seriously, we KNOW that people are going to yank the USB drives and they should be designed accordingly. In 2018 there is really no excuse for this not working the way people expect it to work. The entire point of a portable USB drive is to be able to use it quickly and with minimal hassle. Having to do a software eject is an anachronism that we shouldn't have to deal with anymore.
If you want to do some special write caching for performance reasons that should be possible but have to go through special steps to enable and even more special steps to not revert to the default safe-to-yank setting.
And the problem is how could we transfer or find materials to build one in Mars, let alone find a practical way to build a colony there?
Quite right but that's a separate issue for the distant future. We would have to have considerable infrastructure on Mars to make building a hyperloop system worth worrying about. If we are that built up then chances are we are doing manufacturing on Mars and tapping into the raw materials available on the planet. We're certainly not going to transport the materials from Earth for something like that.
I guess in theory, it makes sense. In practice, there are many other issues involved (aside the technology) that would make things impossible...
Of course. I'm talking very broad brush theoretical stuff here. The problem is that on Earth it's a lot harder and more expensive to maintain a vacuum plus there is a lot of existing and fully paid for infrastructure to compete with. If you are starting clean slate it's a different situation but we aren't. But on a newly colonized planet we could do things differently both technically and economically. Technologies that make sense on Earth often won't be practical on Mars and vice-versa. Hyperloop seems to be one of these. Thin atmosphere, lots of particulates, temperature issues, etc seem to actually favor hyperloop or something like it in such an environment. It makes a lot more sense than it does here anyway.
I don't think hyper loops are real-world feasible. Even if the technology works, any aggrieved destructive fool - and these exist everywhere in the world, China included - can put the entire system at risk in a way that aircraft are not threatened by.
You could say the same thing about trains but your point is a fair one. That's probably not the major obstacle in my opinion. The major obstacle is probably just economics. It's a technically complicated (thus expensive) system and it's not at all clear that it can be made and operated for a cost competitive with alternative means of transportation. I think it's an interesting idea but I just have a hard time imagining it being an economically practical one even if the technology is feasible.
Interestingly hyperloop might make a lot more sense on Mars which is where Elon's ambitions lie anyway. Not much atmosphere to get in the way so the pumping costs are lower plus you would actually want protection from dust and other features. Flying isn't really an option and traditional trains probably would be problematic. So while it might not make sense here on Earth in the face of economically proven competitors, it might actually make sense elsewhere in the solar system if/when we ever get there.
Best Buy used to complain that people used their store as a showroom then went home and ordered from Amazon. That blew my mind. A retailer complaining that people come into the store?
Exactly. If you can get people into the store and still can't close the deal then you are doing something wrong. Could be price, could be service, could be "shopping experience", or something else. But if they are standing in your building and you still cannot sell them the product then you have something wildly wrong with your business model.
Basically I go to a store for just a few reasons.
1) I want to touch and see and/or select the product prior to buying.
2) I want to talk to a product expert face to face. (and they had better actually be an expert)
3) I need something Right Now.
4) Going to the store is more convenient than shopping online (like directly on my commute to/from home)
5) The store offers a fun shopping experience I cannot get online
If you are going to offer a product then you need to either be price competitive or you need to offer more value in other ways. If a company cannot compete on price with Amazon or Walmart (and most cannot) then they need to offer something else extra. Give me a reason to come to your store and buy that isn't just a mediocre price on a product I can get elsewhere.
But seriously, I don't think "juice" means what you think it does. It's even more inaccurate than calling non-dairy products "milk".
Not possible to make it less accurate than calling it milk. Milk is a very specific thing derived solely from secretions by mammals used to feed their young. There is no product derived from plants that matches the chemical composition, nutritional profile, taste, mouth-feel, or cooking characteristics. That's not to say the veggie based products are bad or shouldn't be used. They just aren't even close to being milk in the technical sense or the legal sense.
You can squeeze soybeans or nuts all you want; you'll get neither juice nor milk. Non-dairy "milks" are generally made of highly processed, ground-up seeds mixed with thickening agents and large volumes of water.
"Soy milk" is a stable emulsion if you want to get technical about it. But we don't have a great word in common parlance for stable emulsions and we do have a good word for plant derived drinks - albeit an already corrupted one as you point out. So unless you want to invent a term (which I'm fine with), juice is as close to accurate as we have available. Given that we already describe lots of drinks that really barely fit the description of juice as juice (see fruit "juice" with just 5% or less plant derived actual juice) we're not really misleading anyone in a new way. You are correct that technically it is not juice but it's far closer to juice than it is to milk.
Well, you can cook with both of them, put them on your cereal, and drink them. How are they not interchangeable?
Because HOW you cook with them is (generally) different and they don't taste even remotely similar. Nothing wrong with using soy juice on your cereal if you want to but the act of cooking it or drinking it doesn't magically make it into milk. Recipes that use soy juice in place of milk generally require using different amounts and require other alterations because their chemical compositions are quite different and so they cook differently.
While I agree that "we've always done it this way, so we should keep doing it this way" is not an argument,
Correct.
your entire argument seems to be "because 'we've always done it this way, so we should keep doing it this way' is not an argument, we should not keep doing it that way".
You got yourself twisted up in your knickers there trying to pretend you are smart. We already have a perfectly adequate word for consumable liquids derived from plants. We call it juice. Marketing people keep trying to pretend that plant juice somehow becomes milk if it happens to be (or is made to be) white. If it didn't come from a mammal then it by definition is not milk and no amount of marketing BS will make it so. Call products what they are and life is a lot simpler.
says the guy who calls all non-government rockets "SpaceX"
Who exactly are you referring to. Sure as hell isn't me because I've never said anything of the sort.
Out of curiosity: What name should we instead give to peanutbutter?
I don't see that as a problem since nobody is trying to pretend that peanut butter is somehow a substitute for actual butter. People try all the time to pretend that soy milk and cow's milk are interchangeable when they really aren't.
The argument that we are now capable of constructing space-telescopes that are better than Hubble has no bearings on the comparative advances, since we can also create better earth-based telescopes than VLT, these days.
True in both cases but irrelevant to my point. The point is that one should not extrapolate this result too far. We have ground based telescopes now that under some conditions can exceed the results from Hubble. That is ALL you can say. It doesn't say anything about the relative capabilities of current leading edge ground or space based telescopes in general.
All other things being equal a space based telescope should get better results than a ground based one no matter how good the optical correction is just because there is less stuff in the way. However things are obviously not equal so the comparison becomes more complicated.
The 'juice' inside a coconut has always been called milk AFAIR. It's a natural thing to do, to extend the use of a word to cover something 'similar'.
It's not similar and just because something has been done a certain way doesn't make it accurate. If it comes from a plant it is by definition not milk. Milk is a substance secreted by mammals to feed their young. If it doesn't come from a mammal it isn't milk. If it comes from a plant it is juice. So the accurate term is coconut juice.
We do it all the time, and in the case of these products which are pitched as cow's mile replacements, there seems even more reason to do so.
Just because something is a substitute doesn't mean you should call it something different than what it actually is. Margarine is (sometimes) a butter substitute but we don't call it butter. If it is a liquid derived from a plant then it is (generally) supposed to be called juice. Nothing wrong with saying coconut juice or soy juice or almond juice. Just coloring something white doesn't make it milk.