Contrary to OP's post, was not "mistakenly posted to a publicly available system (in the sense OP intends it)," it was instead, insofar as this is relevant, posted to a server with atrociously ineffective "security."
That is a distinction without a difference. To riff on Arthur C Clarke's famous maxim, sufficiently bad security is indistinguishable from no security. The "security" in this case was so bad as to be effectively non-existent. I don't know exactly where you draw the line as a general proposition but it's pretty clear in this case that any claim that this was "secured" data utterly absurd.
And...I'm not aware of any physics that prevents making a flying car. What's the power-to-weight issue?
You need to go study some physics. That sounds ruder than I really mean it to be but if you don't understand that point and the physics involved then you can't really have a meaningful conversation about this topic. Anything that moves but especially anything that flies is all about thrust (power) to weight even to just get off the ground much less to do anything useful.
Planes are pretty heavy and they manage to get off the ground.
Actually planes are very light and compared to cars they are (comparatively) incredibly flimsy out of necessity. To get something off the ground it has to be engineered to be very light and to do something useful it has to be lighter still. Let's use an analogy. This is why birds have extremely light skeletons. Even a large bird like a Red Tailed Hawk only weighs something like 2kg fully grown. If they had a skeleton as dense as ours they couldn't get off the ground. The tradeoff is that birds are rather fragile and cannot handle stresses that land animals would find routine without breaking. Same deal with planes. Every extra bit of weight reduces the performance and utility of the plane.
For any given amount of thrust a plane can generate there is a weight budget. The more useful cargo and robust (heavy) hardware you want to put into a plane or the faster you want it to travel the lighter the power plant on that plane needs to be for a given amount of thrust. To make a useful flying car you (something with actual utility and reasonable safety) you would need a power source with a VASTLY greater power to weight ratio than any technology we have today. Look at any picture of existing flying cars and you'll note that they are terrible as aircraft and worse as cars. Too many tradeoffs required and virtually all of these have to do with the inflexible physics of thrust (power) to weight ratios.
It's somewhat harder to make a plane that's also street-legal, but I don't think there's any new physics required.
They've made flying cars already. But you can't use them for anything practical and you wouldn't want to be in one if it was in a collision with your family sedan. Even a small dent can render them unsafe to fly and you have to lug around large heavy wings that have zero utility on the ground and in the air you have to have over build suspensions and steering systems to make it road worthy. The reason for this state of affairs is because the power plant (typically a turbine or internal combustion engine) technology we have is so heavy that you have to make everything else very light (and by extension flimsy) to even get the vehicle off the ground. You sacrifice everything useful about the "flying car" to make it fly. We have no technology currently available to us to lighten the power source anywhere close to enough to make a flying car that is anything more than an impractical toy. This one bit of physics alone makes "flying cars" literally impossible as a practical reality.
Then there are issues with infrastructure, piloting, safety, economics, and a lot more that all team up to make flying cars go from being a dumb idea to being an insanely stupid one. The economics alone are enough to doom flying cars if you spend half a moment thinking about them.
Technically, if I were the programmer, I'd much rather write the software for controlling a flying car than one that drives on roads.
No you wouldn't. In the air is generally easier but have fun with the landing and taking off portion of the program. Especially if you plan on landing somewhere that is not an airport. Get this wrong and you destroy a building or kill some people.
Of course since flying cars are science fiction it's something of a moot point.
Yes from Apple's point of view it makes sense, nobody is arguing that. They make more up front and numerically not many people bitch about it, because most people are ignorant, which brings me to...
Lots of people are complaining about it. Slashdot is full of people who seem to think Apple owes them something. That's the whole point of this thread. I like expansion slots too and I'm the sort who will dig into the guts of my computers from time to time. But we have to recognize that there are very few like us.
They think that when their computer starts to get slow they need to throw it away and buy a new one. It's like saying, most people don't floss correctly so let's just stop selling dental floss.
No it just means Apple doesn't sell your figurative dental floss because there is no money in it for Apple. The point is to stop expecting Apple to have a change of heart about this. Buy a PC from Dell or HP that you can upgrade and move on with your life. Apple isn't interested in your upgrades and they make no money supporting them. Let it go.
And frankly most of the time when their machine starts getting too slow a bit of RAM or an SSD isn't going to really fix the problem. By the time they think they need a new machine they probably are right. Oldest computer I own is about 7-8 years old and I seldom use it anymore. Anything older is more trouble to keep operational than it is worth to me.
It so happens that we've reached the point where RAM and SSDs don't actually get cheaper anymore, at least not over a period of a few years (!), so maybe it doesn't matter after all.
The ONLY person I personally know in my day to day life who has ever bothered to swap a SSD for a spinning platter in any computer they own is me. None of my friends have done it, certainly none of my family. It's just not something that people do. People that want an SSD buy one. People that want more RAM buy that when the buy the computer and they never think about it again until they need a new computer. That's just the way it is.
I guess you think iFixit and repair cafes and the like are just fads, no?
Basically yes they are. There is always a small community of technically inclined people who like tinkering with their devices and fixing things. Key word is small. The overwhelming majority of people do not give a shit and aren't going to bother. It's cheaper and easier to insure electronics rather than repair them. Especially given that most were not designed to be repaired. Or if they must repair most people will choose to hire someone to do it for them just like they do for their car or house.
Are you really white knighting to protect the honor of a declining consumer electronics company?
What honor? We're talking about unrealistic expectations of users who want Apple to give them something that doesn't benefit Apple and won't be used by more than a tiny fraction of people. Do the math.
And if you think Apple is a declining company I don't think you understand the meaning of the word declining. If having hundreds of billions in excess cash, products that sell in huge numbers for premium margins, and a fanatical customer base is failure sign me up.
Could there be anything more pathetic?
Your reading comprehension seems an obvious candidate. Complaining that a company isn't bowing and scraping to your every selfish whim is another.
The real value of a "user serviceable" device is to avoid the assinine markup on storage and ram imposed by a lot of box builders.
And why is this the problem of the box builder? Tell me what benefit Apple derives from such a device? It adds measurable and significant cost to them for a feature few users care about when they are almost certain to not recoup those extra costs in additional sales. You can be sure they've done the math. It also creates a situation where they have to support users opening their devices and occasionally doing stupid things. Basically you are asking Apple to add a lot of cost to them to save you money. Are you really surprised they are not interested?
If you want expandability there are PC makers that make such devices. Apple is under no obligation to you or me to be one of them.
Systems that are difficult to maintain are fodder for landfills.
So are systems that are easy to maintain. Few people keep PCs for longer than 5-10 years. You aren't keeping them out of landfills. Just delaying the inevitable at most. And the pieces you take out are de-facto trash so all you are doing is taking the machine to the dump piecemeal instead of all at once.
Uber has unveiled its "flying car" concept aircraft at its second annual Uber Elevate Summit, which showcases prototypes for its fleet of airborne taxis.
A flying car is not the same thing as an air taxi. A flying car is a road going car that can also get airborne. An air taxi is an aircraft which is used to taxi people between airports/heliports. This is the later. It has no ability to traverse roads and therefore is not a car. You could in principle use a flying car as a taxi but since flying cars are not practical because... physics, it's a moot issue.
Can we please drop the idiotic notion of a flying car? Unless someone invents something equivalent to Tony Stark's arc reactor it will not be possible to have a flying car that is anything more than a fragile toy. No power source we possess or are in any danger of developing has sufficient power to weight ratio to change this fact. Flying cars are a stupid idea for a lot of reasons but this one fact alone is sufficient to demonstrate that fact.
Frankly if I was an Uber investor (I'm not) I'd be pissed they are wasting money on this sort of stupid stuff when they are losing money at a breathtaking clip with no signs of stopping or obvious path to profiability.
We have a thin aluminum turd designed to be as un-servicable as possible
I used to care about user serviceability until I realized that almost nobody actually does it including myself. Only a tiny fraction of a fraction of computer users ever crack the case of their machine. For the few people who care there are machines available to do this. Just not from Apple. So if this is important to you, don't buy Apple. They obviously don't want your business and frankly I can't really blame them. I don't understand the point in bitching because Apple isn't pandering specifically to you and a very narrow market segment like you. To Apple it's just a added cost that people demonstrably aren't willing to pay extra for and that very very very few people actually give a shit about.
Researchers at Skidmore College conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 60 Skidmore students and found that two spaces at the end of a period slightly improved the processing of text during reading.
I think we have a candidate for the IgNobel Prize in Who Gives a Shit for 2018.
Modern Human Space travel is almost always considered an unnecessary risk. With current technology the main reason for sending humans, is mostly for the marketing benefit, of letting us know that we can leave the planet if needed.
The main reason for sending humans into space right now is to explore. Marketing is a part of this to be sure but right now we're like the guy who has built his first couple of boats and is still learning how to sail with reasonable safety. We've barely gotten a few feet from shore. We barely know what is out there and we certainly don't have a robust vessel ready for long trips. The only way to get there is to send people into space accepting some amount of risk along the way. I disagree with this being termed unnecessary risk. Unnecessary risk is risks that you can strip out of an activity but choose not to. Not launching people into space carries risks too so it doesn't make sense to call all manned space travel unnecessarily risky.
That said I do support man space flight. To the Moon and Mars.Knowing that it is a high risk activity. But I see it important for our survival is to expand to new areas.
Yes it is high risk. High risk does not mean one should ignore unnecessary risks along the way. Only a fool takes a high risk activity and makes it needlessly riskier. I suspect at the end of the day SpaceX will prove this procedure is fine. After all it's not like we've been blowing up rockets on the launch pad while fueling them. But it is different and anything different needs to be evaluated carefully.
Loading densified propellant is a known risk with calculated benefits.
Loading it with astronauts already on board is not a fully understood risk. Apples to oranges my friend. Might be a fine procedure but they are going to have to do the work of proving that it is safe. That's normal every time you do something different than the known and proven.
You know, the solid-fuel booster rockets on the shuttle that cannot be shut down once started?
Exactly how many times was this a problem for the shuttle? Oh that's right, zero.
Von Braun, back in the 60s, already knew that you cannot really man-rate those things exactly because you have zero control over them once they went off.
Might have been true when he was alive. Demonstrable isn't true now since we have already man-rated them and flown large numbers of missions with them. The only problem we had with the boosters wasn't due to their performance or their ability to adjust throttle.
I fail to see any difference between "load it up with propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size" and "load it up with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen"
You fail because you cannot be bothered to actually read beyond the headline. The problem isn't THAT they are using cold propellant. The problem is WHEN they are loading the propellant. Handling fuel carries a non-zero chance of catastrophic failure. Fuel that is already on board has already been handled safely and is therefore safer to the astronauts. It's not clear if loading fuel after the astronauts are already on board presents an unacceptable increase in risk. It might or it might not. Historically the rockets have been loaded with fuel and then the astronauts board. SpaceX is proposing to change this.
While most people are not qualified to judge rocket safety risks, there is only one entity that has actually *demonstrated* that they are incompetent at judging rocket safety risks, and for that matter they did so spectacularly and totally, and then managed to stay in a position to continue judging rocket safety anyway and then did so again! That would of course be NASA
Eyeroll... If NASA isn't qualified to evaluate risks then nobody is. That's one of the dumbest arguments I've read in a long time. Yes NASA has made mistakes in the past. Good luck finding any organization that has not. Literally every space agency and private company building rockets has blown up rockets. SpaceX certainly has no track record to suggest they are better at evaluating risk than NASA is.
It's still a hell of a lot safer than the deathtrap shuttle was.
What is safer? A non-operational manned launch system? Pretty easy to have a perfect safety record when you don't launch anything. And by all means ignore the fact that SpaceX has a record of blowing up rockets at a rate pretty similar to the rate we lost space shuttles.
A rocket involves many trade-offs between safety and efficiency.
Of course it does. That's not adequate justification for throwing caution to the wind. You use a new procedure because it is either more efficient (cost and/or performance) with similar safety or safer with comparable efficiency. In this case it is obviously a performance improvement but it isn't yet clear if that comes at an unacceptable increase in risk. To argue that astronauts should just shut up and strap in without appropriate investigation of the risks they are taking is a dumb way to run a space program. You don't change something that is working unless it is unambiguously better.
If you'd maximize safety in every case, it wouldn't be able to lift off.
Maximizing safety does not equal perfect safety and no one claimed otherwise. That does equate to carte blanche to implement every idea that pops into the minds of SpaceX engineers. If the idea is an improvement (price/performance/safety) then they should be able to prove it to the satisfaction of NASA. If it isn't then that's unfortunate but they'll have to figure something else out
If you're in the capsule, and there's an explosion, the launch escape system fires and you're safe.
That's like saying that we shouldn't worry about safe refueling procedures on an F15 because it has an ejection seat. That's incredibly irresponsible and almost weapons grade stupid. Emergency escape systems are nice to have but not something you want to depend on since they are almost as dangerous as the problems they protect against. Furthermore explosions can happen MUCH faster than any escape system could carry the crew to safety. Ejection systems only help with failure modes where you have some amount of time to react. Rockets are fast but not instantaneous.
The question is: are the odds of an explosion with the rocket pre-fueled, during the crew loading time, less than the odds of the crew escape system working?
You don't work in risk management do you? That is NOT the correct analysis. If you actually are relying on the escape system rather than designing a safe refueling procedure then you have a poorly designed rocket and incompetent engineers. You use escape systems for to mitigate risks that cannot be further mitigated which isn't the case here. If SpaceX is using unsafe fueling procedures then you redesign the fueling procedures until they are safe. This might involve blowing up a few more (hopefully unmanned) rockts first. You do not say "YOLO" and hope the escape system will protect your ass from incompetent engineering.
Demanding as close to zero risk as possible in spaceflight missions is good for the few humans aboard, but slows development of the field for the rest of mankind.
There is a difference between accepting a known risk and accepting an unnecessary risk. In this case there has been a concern raised based on a previous rocket exploding under similar conditions. It's not unreasonable to insist that we solve or mitigate a known failure mode prior to putting people on board the rocket. It's not to say SpaceX cannot use this procedure but rather that they will have to do some work to prove that is reasonably safe compared to known proven methods.
It's why I've always assumed a nation such as China would lead the space revolution.
Should that happen it will be because China had the political will to invest heavily in their space program whereas we did not. China doesn't want to blow up their people any more than we do. But failure modes can be solved with adequate investment. Countries that lack the political will to make space exploration a priority will inevitably take a back seat to those countries that do.
There's always a risk that you're going to blow up if you climb in a rocket. If you don't want to accept that risk, don't climb in there.
There is a difference between accepting a known risk and accepting an unnecessary risk.
Also, there has only been one case where a SpaceX rocket exploded during propellant loading
One case is more than enough to warrant caution. SpaceX has had approximately 50 launches so far. That's an approximately 2% failure rate which is alarmingly high. Two shuttles were lost at that rate of failure. I'm all for pushing the envelope but that doesn't mean we should say "hold my beer" and ignore known risks that could be mitigated.
It's relevant because someone paid to do mathematics is presumed to have the time, inclination, motivation, and ability to advance the field.
That would be a naive assumption. It's not at all unusual to find scientists and engineers who are more than fluent in some rather arcane branches of mathematics. Math is the language of science and engineering. Almost any professional physicist is going to be highly competent at mathematics. Should it really be surprising that some of them might spend a bit of time working on some random math puzzles in their spare time or that they might be pretty good at it? Where they derive their income should be at most a footnote but probably is utterly irrelevant.
An amateur is presumed to only be able to work on problems in his scant spare time, with a mind trained to handle problems in another field.
That would be an inaccurate assumption. Many Olympic athletes are technically amateurs because they don't get their income from their sport but in reality they have spend vast amounts of time and effort learning their chosen sport. The only thing amateur means is that you don't get your income from the activity. It does not and should not imply that they haven't devoted any time or effort into the activity. I coach the sport of wrestling and have for over 25 years. I'm technically an amateur because I do not derive any meaningful income from it but I'm good at it. Better in fact than I am at my paying job which I'm also pretty good at doing. There just isn't enough money in it for me to make my living doing something I happen to be very good at so I'm resigned to "amateur" status. It just means I'm not paid to do it for a living.
Not correct, of course, but it's similar to rooting for the underdog.
Maybe if one doesn't actually know anything about the background of the "underdog". Most of the best mathematicians I know do not devote their lives to working as a math professor at a college. Such an assumption that you have to follow a certain path is a failure of the person doing the assuming.
People should care about amateur status. It deserves to be elevated above the same achievement of a professional.
I don't agree. First off all, "amateurism" is something of an overblown myth. Just because you don't get paid to do something doesn't mean you haven't put in a huge amount of time and effort. A lot of Olympic athletes are "amateurs" because they don't get paid to play but make no mistake that they've devoted a good portion of their life to their chosen sport and are very very good at it. Second, the achievement deserves to stand on its own merits. Why should someone who devoted their life to a vocation and happens to get paid for it be more or less worthy of accolades than someone who derives their income from some other profession? That makes zero sense.
When amateurs achieve something professionals do not it becomes evidence that achievements in a field are borne out of talent rather than grinding.
There is nothing about talent that is more worthy of respect than there is about hard work. Frankly for most problems of consequence you need some measure of both. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.
It shows that you can achieve without funding and fancy equipment.
That's sort of a man bites dog argument. The reason that "funding and fancy equipment" exists is because it generally is necessary to solve a problem. Good luck finding the Higgs boson without a large particle accelerator. The theory on the other hand required nothing of the sort. There is no such requirement for most mathematics unless you regard pen and paper as "fancy equipment". As for funding, have you forgotten that mathematics is the language of science and engineering? It's not at all rare to find an engineer or scientists who is more than fluent in rather arcane branches of mathematics.
So are lots of other materials. Pretty much all of them are more expensive outside of some corner cases.
2. Concrete is extremely strong.
It is strong in compression. Not so much for certain other types of stress. It doesn't handle shear stress well at all unless you reinforce it. Plus it's is hardly the only strong material.
3. Concrete can be made into nearly any shape, it can be cast on-site in custom forms or cast offsite and trucked-in.
Again, not unique to concrete though these are definite assets of the material.
4. Concrete is not vulnerable to UV damage, unlike nearly every other building material.
Steel, aluminum, rock, brick, and many many more are not affected by UV. The only things that are are really wood and plastic.
5. Concrete is not vulnerable to common insects like termites.
Neither is steel. What is your point?
There is no othe material that can match or beat concrete across this full range of characteristics.
And concrete doesn't match any other materials characteristics so again I fail to see your point. But the most important reason we use concrete is that it is CHEAP. When you need a lot of something cost matters.
As a result of many of the above, Concrete structures LAST, a long time. Just look at all the Roman concrete that is still standing.
They last if they are designed well. Using Roman structures is misleading because of survivorship bias. Plenty of concrete structures from that era did not survive.
Even steel, which could match many of the above characteristics, still requires protection from corrosion, and that protection (usually some form of paint) ends up being vulnerable and needs to be re-applied over and over again.
Tell you what. Go ahead and build a suspension bridge out of concrete with a span the length of the Golden Gate. Concrete is a great material. It's not the end all be all of materials. We use it because it performs well and because it is cheap but it isn't the best solution to all problems. If steel were as cheap as concrete you can be sure we would use more of it than we do. But concrete is cheap so we use it in places where from a pure performance standpoint other materials might be preferable but for cost.
An amateur mathematician has made the first breakthrough in more than 60 years towards solving a well-known maths problem.
Why is it relevant whether he gets paid to solve mathematical problems or not? Amateur just means that someone doesn't derive any income from the task. It has nothing to do with competence or the lack thereof. Plenty of people are very talented at things they don't get paid for.
FIVE PERCENT of global CO2 emissions for cement production.
Captain pedantic here but it is NOT cement. It is concrete and they are not the same thing. Every time you conflate the two terms a civil engineer looses his wings. Cement is an ingredient in concrete but concrete is not cement.
We use concrete because concrete is cheap. Really, really, cheap. You can get similar results with other materials for many applications but there are few materials that are as readily available, easy to use, and inexpensive as concrete. Come up with a material with usable performance and a similarly low price point and you can be sure we would use a lot of that.
FYI one ton of concrete is a piece roughly 0.42m^3. So they are saying we each use a piece of concrete about the size of a desk each year.
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to OP's post, was not "mistakenly posted to a publicly available system (in the sense OP intends it)," it was instead, insofar as this is relevant, posted to a server with atrociously ineffective "security."
That is a distinction without a difference. To riff on Arthur C Clarke's famous maxim, sufficiently bad security is indistinguishable from no security. The "security" in this case was so bad as to be effectively non-existent. I don't know exactly where you draw the line as a general proposition but it's pretty clear in this case that any claim that this was "secured" data utterly absurd.
And...I'm not aware of any physics that prevents making a flying car. What's the power-to-weight issue?
You need to go study some physics. That sounds ruder than I really mean it to be but if you don't understand that point and the physics involved then you can't really have a meaningful conversation about this topic. Anything that moves but especially anything that flies is all about thrust (power) to weight even to just get off the ground much less to do anything useful.
Planes are pretty heavy and they manage to get off the ground.
Actually planes are very light and compared to cars they are (comparatively) incredibly flimsy out of necessity. To get something off the ground it has to be engineered to be very light and to do something useful it has to be lighter still. Let's use an analogy. This is why birds have extremely light skeletons. Even a large bird like a Red Tailed Hawk only weighs something like 2kg fully grown. If they had a skeleton as dense as ours they couldn't get off the ground. The tradeoff is that birds are rather fragile and cannot handle stresses that land animals would find routine without breaking. Same deal with planes. Every extra bit of weight reduces the performance and utility of the plane.
For any given amount of thrust a plane can generate there is a weight budget. The more useful cargo and robust (heavy) hardware you want to put into a plane or the faster you want it to travel the lighter the power plant on that plane needs to be for a given amount of thrust. To make a useful flying car you (something with actual utility and reasonable safety) you would need a power source with a VASTLY greater power to weight ratio than any technology we have today. Look at any picture of existing flying cars and you'll note that they are terrible as aircraft and worse as cars. Too many tradeoffs required and virtually all of these have to do with the inflexible physics of thrust (power) to weight ratios.
It's somewhat harder to make a plane that's also street-legal, but I don't think there's any new physics required.
They've made flying cars already. But you can't use them for anything practical and you wouldn't want to be in one if it was in a collision with your family sedan. Even a small dent can render them unsafe to fly and you have to lug around large heavy wings that have zero utility on the ground and in the air you have to have over build suspensions and steering systems to make it road worthy. The reason for this state of affairs is because the power plant (typically a turbine or internal combustion engine) technology we have is so heavy that you have to make everything else very light (and by extension flimsy) to even get the vehicle off the ground. You sacrifice everything useful about the "flying car" to make it fly. We have no technology currently available to us to lighten the power source anywhere close to enough to make a flying car that is anything more than an impractical toy. This one bit of physics alone makes "flying cars" literally impossible as a practical reality.
Then there are issues with infrastructure, piloting, safety, economics, and a lot more that all team up to make flying cars go from being a dumb idea to being an insanely stupid one. The economics alone are enough to doom flying cars if you spend half a moment thinking about them.
Technically, if I were the programmer, I'd much rather write the software for controlling a flying car than one that drives on roads.
No you wouldn't. In the air is generally easier but have fun with the landing and taking off portion of the program. Especially if you plan on landing somewhere that is not an airport. Get this wrong and you destroy a building or kill some people.
Of course since flying cars are science fiction it's something of a moot point.
Yes from Apple's point of view it makes sense, nobody is arguing that. They make more up front and numerically not many people bitch about it, because most people are ignorant, which brings me to...
Lots of people are complaining about it. Slashdot is full of people who seem to think Apple owes them something. That's the whole point of this thread. I like expansion slots too and I'm the sort who will dig into the guts of my computers from time to time. But we have to recognize that there are very few like us.
They think that when their computer starts to get slow they need to throw it away and buy a new one. It's like saying, most people don't floss correctly so let's just stop selling dental floss.
No it just means Apple doesn't sell your figurative dental floss because there is no money in it for Apple. The point is to stop expecting Apple to have a change of heart about this. Buy a PC from Dell or HP that you can upgrade and move on with your life. Apple isn't interested in your upgrades and they make no money supporting them. Let it go.
And frankly most of the time when their machine starts getting too slow a bit of RAM or an SSD isn't going to really fix the problem. By the time they think they need a new machine they probably are right. Oldest computer I own is about 7-8 years old and I seldom use it anymore. Anything older is more trouble to keep operational than it is worth to me.
It so happens that we've reached the point where RAM and SSDs don't actually get cheaper anymore, at least not over a period of a few years (!), so maybe it doesn't matter after all.
The ONLY person I personally know in my day to day life who has ever bothered to swap a SSD for a spinning platter in any computer they own is me. None of my friends have done it, certainly none of my family. It's just not something that people do. People that want an SSD buy one. People that want more RAM buy that when the buy the computer and they never think about it again until they need a new computer. That's just the way it is.
I guess you think iFixit and repair cafes and the like are just fads, no?
Basically yes they are. There is always a small community of technically inclined people who like tinkering with their devices and fixing things. Key word is small. The overwhelming majority of people do not give a shit and aren't going to bother. It's cheaper and easier to insure electronics rather than repair them. Especially given that most were not designed to be repaired. Or if they must repair most people will choose to hire someone to do it for them just like they do for their car or house.
Are you really white knighting to protect the honor of a declining consumer electronics company?
What honor? We're talking about unrealistic expectations of users who want Apple to give them something that doesn't benefit Apple and won't be used by more than a tiny fraction of people. Do the math.
And if you think Apple is a declining company I don't think you understand the meaning of the word declining. If having hundreds of billions in excess cash, products that sell in huge numbers for premium margins, and a fanatical customer base is failure sign me up.
Could there be anything more pathetic?
Your reading comprehension seems an obvious candidate. Complaining that a company isn't bowing and scraping to your every selfish whim is another.
The real value of a "user serviceable" device is to avoid the assinine markup on storage and ram imposed by a lot of box builders.
And why is this the problem of the box builder? Tell me what benefit Apple derives from such a device? It adds measurable and significant cost to them for a feature few users care about when they are almost certain to not recoup those extra costs in additional sales. You can be sure they've done the math. It also creates a situation where they have to support users opening their devices and occasionally doing stupid things. Basically you are asking Apple to add a lot of cost to them to save you money. Are you really surprised they are not interested?
If you want expandability there are PC makers that make such devices. Apple is under no obligation to you or me to be one of them.
Systems that are difficult to maintain are fodder for landfills.
So are systems that are easy to maintain. Few people keep PCs for longer than 5-10 years. You aren't keeping them out of landfills. Just delaying the inevitable at most. And the pieces you take out are de-facto trash so all you are doing is taking the machine to the dump piecemeal instead of all at once.
Uber has unveiled its "flying car" concept aircraft at its second annual Uber Elevate Summit, which showcases prototypes for its fleet of airborne taxis.
A flying car is not the same thing as an air taxi. A flying car is a road going car that can also get airborne. An air taxi is an aircraft which is used to taxi people between airports/heliports. This is the later. It has no ability to traverse roads and therefore is not a car. You could in principle use a flying car as a taxi but since flying cars are not practical because... physics, it's a moot issue.
Can we please drop the idiotic notion of a flying car? Unless someone invents something equivalent to Tony Stark's arc reactor it will not be possible to have a flying car that is anything more than a fragile toy. No power source we possess or are in any danger of developing has sufficient power to weight ratio to change this fact. Flying cars are a stupid idea for a lot of reasons but this one fact alone is sufficient to demonstrate that fact.
Frankly if I was an Uber investor (I'm not) I'd be pissed they are wasting money on this sort of stupid stuff when they are losing money at a breathtaking clip with no signs of stopping or obvious path to profiability.
We have a thin aluminum turd designed to be as un-servicable as possible
I used to care about user serviceability until I realized that almost nobody actually does it including myself. Only a tiny fraction of a fraction of computer users ever crack the case of their machine. For the few people who care there are machines available to do this. Just not from Apple. So if this is important to you, don't buy Apple. They obviously don't want your business and frankly I can't really blame them. I don't understand the point in bitching because Apple isn't pandering specifically to you and a very narrow market segment like you. To Apple it's just a added cost that people demonstrably aren't willing to pay extra for and that very very very few people actually give a shit about.
Researchers at Skidmore College conducted an eye-tracking experiment with 60 Skidmore students and found that two spaces at the end of a period slightly improved the processing of text during reading.
I think we have a candidate for the IgNobel Prize in Who Gives a Shit for 2018.
Modern Human Space travel is almost always considered an unnecessary risk. With current technology the main reason for sending humans, is mostly for the marketing benefit, of letting us know that we can leave the planet if needed.
The main reason for sending humans into space right now is to explore. Marketing is a part of this to be sure but right now we're like the guy who has built his first couple of boats and is still learning how to sail with reasonable safety. We've barely gotten a few feet from shore. We barely know what is out there and we certainly don't have a robust vessel ready for long trips. The only way to get there is to send people into space accepting some amount of risk along the way. I disagree with this being termed unnecessary risk. Unnecessary risk is risks that you can strip out of an activity but choose not to. Not launching people into space carries risks too so it doesn't make sense to call all manned space travel unnecessarily risky.
That said I do support man space flight. To the Moon and Mars.Knowing that it is a high risk activity. But I see it important for our survival is to expand to new areas.
Yes it is high risk. High risk does not mean one should ignore unnecessary risks along the way. Only a fool takes a high risk activity and makes it needlessly riskier. I suspect at the end of the day SpaceX will prove this procedure is fine. After all it's not like we've been blowing up rockets on the launch pad while fueling them. But it is different and anything different needs to be evaluated carefully.
Loading densified propellant is a known risk with calculated benefits.
Loading it with astronauts already on board is not a fully understood risk. Apples to oranges my friend. Might be a fine procedure but they are going to have to do the work of proving that it is safe. That's normal every time you do something different than the known and proven.
You know, the solid-fuel booster rockets on the shuttle that cannot be shut down once started?
Exactly how many times was this a problem for the shuttle? Oh that's right, zero.
Von Braun, back in the 60s, already knew that you cannot really man-rate those things exactly because you have zero control over them once they went off.
Might have been true when he was alive. Demonstrable isn't true now since we have already man-rated them and flown large numbers of missions with them. The only problem we had with the boosters wasn't due to their performance or their ability to adjust throttle.
I fail to see any difference between "load it up with propellant at super-cold temperatures to shrink its size" and "load it up with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen"
You fail because you cannot be bothered to actually read beyond the headline. The problem isn't THAT they are using cold propellant. The problem is WHEN they are loading the propellant. Handling fuel carries a non-zero chance of catastrophic failure. Fuel that is already on board has already been handled safely and is therefore safer to the astronauts. It's not clear if loading fuel after the astronauts are already on board presents an unacceptable increase in risk. It might or it might not. Historically the rockets have been loaded with fuel and then the astronauts board. SpaceX is proposing to change this.
While most people are not qualified to judge rocket safety risks, there is only one entity that has actually *demonstrated* that they are incompetent at judging rocket safety risks, and for that matter they did so spectacularly and totally, and then managed to stay in a position to continue judging rocket safety anyway and then did so again! That would of course be NASA
Eyeroll... If NASA isn't qualified to evaluate risks then nobody is. That's one of the dumbest arguments I've read in a long time. Yes NASA has made mistakes in the past. Good luck finding any organization that has not. Literally every space agency and private company building rockets has blown up rockets. SpaceX certainly has no track record to suggest they are better at evaluating risk than NASA is.
It's still a hell of a lot safer than the deathtrap shuttle was.
What is safer? A non-operational manned launch system? Pretty easy to have a perfect safety record when you don't launch anything. And by all means ignore the fact that SpaceX has a record of blowing up rockets at a rate pretty similar to the rate we lost space shuttles.
A rocket involves many trade-offs between safety and efficiency.
Of course it does. That's not adequate justification for throwing caution to the wind. You use a new procedure because it is either more efficient (cost and/or performance) with similar safety or safer with comparable efficiency. In this case it is obviously a performance improvement but it isn't yet clear if that comes at an unacceptable increase in risk. To argue that astronauts should just shut up and strap in without appropriate investigation of the risks they are taking is a dumb way to run a space program. You don't change something that is working unless it is unambiguously better.
If you'd maximize safety in every case, it wouldn't be able to lift off.
Maximizing safety does not equal perfect safety and no one claimed otherwise. That does equate to carte blanche to implement every idea that pops into the minds of SpaceX engineers. If the idea is an improvement (price/performance/safety) then they should be able to prove it to the satisfaction of NASA. If it isn't then that's unfortunate but they'll have to figure something else out
If you're in the capsule, and there's an explosion, the launch escape system fires and you're safe.
That's like saying that we shouldn't worry about safe refueling procedures on an F15 because it has an ejection seat. That's incredibly irresponsible and almost weapons grade stupid. Emergency escape systems are nice to have but not something you want to depend on since they are almost as dangerous as the problems they protect against. Furthermore explosions can happen MUCH faster than any escape system could carry the crew to safety. Ejection systems only help with failure modes where you have some amount of time to react. Rockets are fast but not instantaneous.
The question is: are the odds of an explosion with the rocket pre-fueled, during the crew loading time, less than the odds of the crew escape system working?
You don't work in risk management do you? That is NOT the correct analysis. If you actually are relying on the escape system rather than designing a safe refueling procedure then you have a poorly designed rocket and incompetent engineers. You use escape systems for to mitigate risks that cannot be further mitigated which isn't the case here. If SpaceX is using unsafe fueling procedures then you redesign the fueling procedures until they are safe. This might involve blowing up a few more (hopefully unmanned) rockts first. You do not say "YOLO" and hope the escape system will protect your ass from incompetent engineering.
Demanding as close to zero risk as possible in spaceflight missions is good for the few humans aboard, but slows development of the field for the rest of mankind.
There is a difference between accepting a known risk and accepting an unnecessary risk. In this case there has been a concern raised based on a previous rocket exploding under similar conditions. It's not unreasonable to insist that we solve or mitigate a known failure mode prior to putting people on board the rocket. It's not to say SpaceX cannot use this procedure but rather that they will have to do some work to prove that is reasonably safe compared to known proven methods.
It's why I've always assumed a nation such as China would lead the space revolution.
Should that happen it will be because China had the political will to invest heavily in their space program whereas we did not. China doesn't want to blow up their people any more than we do. But failure modes can be solved with adequate investment. Countries that lack the political will to make space exploration a priority will inevitably take a back seat to those countries that do.
There's always a risk that you're going to blow up if you climb in a rocket. If you don't want to accept that risk, don't climb in there.
There is a difference between accepting a known risk and accepting an unnecessary risk.
Also, there has only been one case where a SpaceX rocket exploded during propellant loading
One case is more than enough to warrant caution. SpaceX has had approximately 50 launches so far. That's an approximately 2% failure rate which is alarmingly high. Two shuttles were lost at that rate of failure. I'm all for pushing the envelope but that doesn't mean we should say "hold my beer" and ignore known risks that could be mitigated.
It's relevant because someone paid to do mathematics is presumed to have the time, inclination, motivation, and ability to advance the field.
That would be a naive assumption. It's not at all unusual to find scientists and engineers who are more than fluent in some rather arcane branches of mathematics. Math is the language of science and engineering. Almost any professional physicist is going to be highly competent at mathematics. Should it really be surprising that some of them might spend a bit of time working on some random math puzzles in their spare time or that they might be pretty good at it? Where they derive their income should be at most a footnote but probably is utterly irrelevant.
An amateur is presumed to only be able to work on problems in his scant spare time, with a mind trained to handle problems in another field.
That would be an inaccurate assumption. Many Olympic athletes are technically amateurs because they don't get their income from their sport but in reality they have spend vast amounts of time and effort learning their chosen sport. The only thing amateur means is that you don't get your income from the activity. It does not and should not imply that they haven't devoted any time or effort into the activity. I coach the sport of wrestling and have for over 25 years. I'm technically an amateur because I do not derive any meaningful income from it but I'm good at it. Better in fact than I am at my paying job which I'm also pretty good at doing. There just isn't enough money in it for me to make my living doing something I happen to be very good at so I'm resigned to "amateur" status. It just means I'm not paid to do it for a living.
Not correct, of course, but it's similar to rooting for the underdog.
Maybe if one doesn't actually know anything about the background of the "underdog". Most of the best mathematicians I know do not devote their lives to working as a math professor at a college. Such an assumption that you have to follow a certain path is a failure of the person doing the assuming.
People should care about amateur status. It deserves to be elevated above the same achievement of a professional.
I don't agree. First off all, "amateurism" is something of an overblown myth. Just because you don't get paid to do something doesn't mean you haven't put in a huge amount of time and effort. A lot of Olympic athletes are "amateurs" because they don't get paid to play but make no mistake that they've devoted a good portion of their life to their chosen sport and are very very good at it. Second, the achievement deserves to stand on its own merits. Why should someone who devoted their life to a vocation and happens to get paid for it be more or less worthy of accolades than someone who derives their income from some other profession? That makes zero sense.
When amateurs achieve something professionals do not it becomes evidence that achievements in a field are borne out of talent rather than grinding.
There is nothing about talent that is more worthy of respect than there is about hard work. Frankly for most problems of consequence you need some measure of both. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.
It shows that you can achieve without funding and fancy equipment.
That's sort of a man bites dog argument. The reason that "funding and fancy equipment" exists is because it generally is necessary to solve a problem. Good luck finding the Higgs boson without a large particle accelerator. The theory on the other hand required nothing of the sort. There is no such requirement for most mathematics unless you regard pen and paper as "fancy equipment". As for funding, have you forgotten that mathematics is the language of science and engineering? It's not at all rare to find an engineer or scientists who is more than fluent in rather arcane branches of mathematics.
1. Concrete is safe in terms of structure fires.
So are lots of other materials. Pretty much all of them are more expensive outside of some corner cases.
2. Concrete is extremely strong.
It is strong in compression. Not so much for certain other types of stress. It doesn't handle shear stress well at all unless you reinforce it. Plus it's is hardly the only strong material.
3. Concrete can be made into nearly any shape, it can be cast on-site in custom forms or cast offsite and trucked-in.
Again, not unique to concrete though these are definite assets of the material.
4. Concrete is not vulnerable to UV damage, unlike nearly every other building material.
Steel, aluminum, rock, brick, and many many more are not affected by UV. The only things that are are really wood and plastic.
5. Concrete is not vulnerable to common insects like termites.
Neither is steel. What is your point?
There is no othe material that can match or beat concrete across this full range of characteristics.
And concrete doesn't match any other materials characteristics so again I fail to see your point. But the most important reason we use concrete is that it is CHEAP. When you need a lot of something cost matters.
As a result of many of the above, Concrete structures LAST, a long time. Just look at all the Roman concrete that is still standing.
They last if they are designed well. Using Roman structures is misleading because of survivorship bias. Plenty of concrete structures from that era did not survive.
Even steel, which could match many of the above characteristics, still requires protection from corrosion, and that protection (usually some form of paint) ends up being vulnerable and needs to be re-applied over and over again.
Tell you what. Go ahead and build a suspension bridge out of concrete with a span the length of the Golden Gate. Concrete is a great material. It's not the end all be all of materials. We use it because it performs well and because it is cheap but it isn't the best solution to all problems. If steel were as cheap as concrete you can be sure we would use more of it than we do. But concrete is cheap so we use it in places where from a pure performance standpoint other materials might be preferable but for cost.
An amateur mathematician has made the first breakthrough in more than 60 years towards solving a well-known maths problem.
Why is it relevant whether he gets paid to solve mathematical problems or not? Amateur just means that someone doesn't derive any income from the task. It has nothing to do with competence or the lack thereof. Plenty of people are very talented at things they don't get paid for.
FIVE PERCENT of global CO2 emissions for cement production.
Captain pedantic here but it is NOT cement. It is concrete and they are not the same thing. Every time you conflate the two terms a civil engineer looses his wings. Cement is an ingredient in concrete but concrete is not cement.
We use concrete because concrete is cheap. Really, really, cheap. You can get similar results with other materials for many applications but there are few materials that are as readily available, easy to use, and inexpensive as concrete. Come up with a material with usable performance and a similarly low price point and you can be sure we would use a lot of that.
FYI one ton of concrete is a piece roughly 0.42m^3. So they are saying we each use a piece of concrete about the size of a desk each year.