I personally don't like it but it's one of the more surefire ways of reducing piracy whilst kicking your actual customers in the wallet to make up for any perceived piracy losses.
In my case it reduces piracy by keeping me from using their products at all. I'm not about to hand over control of my data to a company just so they can pad their bottom line to Wall Street. Sadly I'd actually pay for some of their products but they refuse to license them to me under terms I'm willing to accept.
It brings up a question I always ask: Who owns your data?
THAT is exactly the key question. It's the reason I refuse to use Lightroom to manage my photos. I'm not about to tie myself in perpetuity to another company and effectively hand over control of my data to them. While I'm not saying it's always wrong to make that choice it's a choice one should make with extreme caution. It would be one thing if the software continued to work if you stopped paying the subscription and you just stopped getting upgrades. But to disable the software and effectively deny you access to your data if you stop paying for the subscription is just shady as it gets to my mind.
All used to be well in the world of Digital Content Creation (DCC) until two very major DCC software makers -- Adobe and Autodesk -- decided to force a monthly subscription model on pretty much every software package they make to please Wall Street investors
Which is why I don't use any of their software that requires subscriptions for the software to work. I'd like to use Lightroom and Photoshop but there isn't a way in hell I'm paying for a subscription to use them. I have zero interest in software that stops working if I don't pay every month. If it were just a maintenance fee where I get updates but can stop anytime with the software continuing to work that would be different. I'm certainly not going to needlessly tie myself in perpetuity to their revenue model. I want to upgrade at my schedule when it makes economic and technical sense for me. I quite simply can, will, and have found other solutions if they insist on a subscription for their software. Fortunately there are good open source alternatives for my particular needs.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
True although to be fair that was basically a crash program where budget constraints weren't really a serious concern. Plus that was a manned mission which is inherently a lot more expensive.
Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult.
That's putting it mildly. While it certainly can be done cheaper than Apollo, $20 million is just a tiny amount of money for a goal like that. Something more realistic might be $200 million and even that would be doing it on an extremely tight budget. $20 million really isn't very much money at all.
The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon". And in today's money it's even more than you might think.
We DID do an awful lot more than just say we stepped on the moon. The money from the spin off technologies alone has more than paid for the entire Apollo program many times over, employed millions of people, and greatly improved our lives in measurable ways. And that's not including the value of telecom and other satellite data.
Thus proving that there are never a shortage of idiots who will insist on using the wrong tool for the job at hand.
More likely it's a case of the proverbial "only tool they have is a hammer so all problems look like nails". Same reasons people use spreadsheets to do things better done by databases. They know how to use a spreadsheet and don't know how to use a database so they make do with what they know how to do even when it isn't the best solution.
Do we really need lossy compression for still images any longer?
Absolutely yes. Not even a question. A lot of things you take for granted would literally not be possible or would be notably worse without lossy compression of images. Not to mention that using lossless formats when unnecessary is both wasteful and pointless for many purposes.
The network is way faster, local memory, storage, and graphics card resources are all way less expensive, and data lost from an image is data lost forever.
That doesn't mean storage space and computing power and bandwidth are infinite. And losing data from an image is not necessary a bad thing or worth being concerned about. For example it REALLY does not matter if I lose a bit of data on my pictures from my last vacation. The point is to store a memory, not to archive a well crafted image for all eternity. It simply doesn't matter if I lose a bit of information and the resources necessary to preserve it would cost more than the data is worth. 99.99999% of images taken with a smartphone would not benefit one bit from using lossless compression and in fact many would actually lose utility from doing so.
What we need is fiber everywhere, or something of equivalent speed.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the main obstacle to using lossless image formats is the speed of the network connection. It's a factor in some cases but not the biggest one in most. Nor would it make it possible/practical to use lossless compression everywhere. You could make every network connection everywhere the fastest fiber connection you can imagine and it lossy compression of images would still be a useful thing.
3D printing is awesome tech and will have tremendous utility but too many people are treating it like its some sort of magical-do-anything technology. Could it someday "print" something as sophisticated as a drug on a commercial basis? Sure, maybe. Many many years from now. As it stands we are a long way from that. It probably won't actually be what we think of as a 3D printer unless you use such a generic definition of the term as to render it almost meaningless. Think about it - how is a molecule really 3D from a macroscopic point of view? Yes it isn't technically flat but it's about as close as you can get to being literally 2D. It's kind of like how people lately are throwing around the term AI for any clever computer system even when the term doesn't really fit.
My day job is running a manufacturing company and I've got direct experience working with 3D printing in a prototyping lab from a previous day job. I've worked with some of the large Stratasys machines making plastic parts and a machine that did sintered metals too. There are a few important limitations on 3D printing the most important of which are economic rather than technical:
1) It is slow to make most items. In most circumstances 3D printing takes a LOT longer than most other manufacturing processes. 2) It is hard to make something with mixed materials. Not impossible and there is progress but don't mistake one for a Star Trek replicator. 3) 3D printing is typically VERY expensive on a unit cost basis for most items compared with other manufacturing techniques even including distribution costs once you get above very small volumes. This is the most important limitation. 4) 3D printed parts typically require some amount of manufacturing even after leaving the printer to become useful.
Now 3D printing will get faster and the technology will improve - probably quite a lot. But for economic reasons it's probably never going to see much use for mass production within the lifetime of anyone who reads this. It's primary utility will be for items that cannot be economically made and distributed in small quantities - which is still a very substantial market. Prototypes, rare/obsolete parts, very small production runs, custom parts, etc. It also will have utility in places where distribution is problematic. Think Antarctica in winter or in space where resupply is tough to impossible.
"Worth it" is a personal preference. I actually don't care that much for "the real thing", and would pay extra for Ms Butterworth; though, I have often mixed the two.
If you would actually pay extra for Ms Butterworth there is something wrong with your taste buds. I can understand someone not caring for maple syrup but I don't get anyone actually preferring colored sludge. That's like claiming Kraft Mac-N-Cheese is better than real mac and cheese made by a good chef.
Real maple syrup is too runny for my taste, and makes a soggy mess of the perfectly crispy edges of my pancakes.
Maybe try using less than a lake of it next time. Pro-tip, if it gets soggy then you are using too much.
There are lots of things we don't technically need that are still worth having. Maple syrup falls into this category. I can live without it but the world would be a poorer place.
There are many synthetic syrups on store shelves...
And they are terrible and have nothing even close to the flavor of real maple syrup.
It's like a guy at work telling me that I would not want any of the pork sausage he just made. I tried it and he was right.
Sounds like he wasn't very good at making sausage.
I was raised on store-bought sausage and fresh sausage tastes nasty.
To each their own but that's decidedly weird. That's like preferring Kraft Mac-N-Cheese to the real deal. Some store brand sausages are quite good but hand made sausages by someone who knows what they are doing are usually notably better. Not everyone knows what they are doing obviously.
There is something about Maple Syrup that is really off-putting to me. I can't stand to be in the same room as anyone who is using it. Vinegar has a similar reaction to me. Something about being in a room with someone pouring vinegar on their chips, or maple syrup on their pancakes makes my stomach churn and completely kills my appetite
To each their own but you understand that this is very weird? We're talking six standard deviations from normal here. Not being judgemental - I have some foods I can't stand in certain preparations. But that sounds like you have something wildly unusual about your taste/smell receptors.
I'm not a picky eater- but anything with either of those smells is going to turn my stomach.
Based on your previous statement I gently disagree about you claiming to not be being a picky eater.
Maybe there's a reason, but the excerpt provided does not give it or even hint at it.
Well there is the fact that to make maple sap move in quantity you need freeze thaw cycles. If temperatures warm sufficiently such that the temperature doesn't dip below freezing then you cannot make maple syrup in meaningful quantities.
I'm not able to opine on whether there is a difference or not.
Then you've never actually tasted the real thing. The difference isn't subtle.
But, the vast majority of consumers don't seem able to tell. Or they prefer the HFCS version:(
They can tell the difference. The reason they buy the cheap crap is because it is cheap. You can buy a gallon of Ms Butterworth for less than $5. A gallon of real maple syrup will cost you $40-60. And yes it is worth the cost unless you are really tight for cash. And if you can't afford the real stuff you probably shouldn't be wasting money on crappy colored sugar sludge anyway.
There's a brand at my local store that is made with real sugar, at least. The price isn't significantly higher than the HFCS stuff.
Who cares? Neither one has any flavor worth bothering with. It's a false economy. It seems cheap but still is somehow overpriced.
Pure maple syrup is $20 for a tiny little bottle. Too expensive for my tastes.
Then you have no taste. Pancake syrup (artificially colored sugary sludge) doesn't even remotely resemble real maple syrup in flavor. I don't regard them as being even in the same food group much less substitutes. If your local store charges that much then shop online. You can get awesome burbon barrel aged maple syrup for $30 and that's a specialty item. (not affiliated in any way but I've bought this stuff and it's great) A small bottle of normal maple syrup in my grocery store costs $8-12. You can get a gallon for less than $50 and that will last a year or more for most people.
My dad has several trees up on the farm that he taps to make his own. If you have time & patience, it's free, and you know there's no cane sugar in it.;-)
"Free"? Only if you don't count the cost of the fuel you'll burn reducing the sap down to syrup or assign any value to your time. There also is the cost of the taps, buckets, and other gear in the process which aren't expensive but not free either. The process of making the syrup from sap takes many many hours. It takes about 40 parts sap to make 1 part syrup. I suppose you could do it over a wood fire outdoors but that's harder to control and you still need a large supply of wood.
All to get something you can buy from the store for a few dollars. It's an interesting thing to do (I've done it) but not really practical from an economic point of view. The opportunity cost is pretty high to make maple syrup unless you do it industrial scale.
Everything is eventually going to run out of propulsion gas for maneuvering, no matter how big you make the tank.
What is your point exactly? Should we have not sent the Voyager probes because they can't maneuver anymore? Missions don't have to last forever and it's certainly possible to design robotic refueling missions for those where refueling is appropriate. What we shouldn't do is design spacecraft such that they need unnecessary amounts of servicing. Hubble is a great spacecraft but it required more servicing than it really should have. Limiting ourselves only to missions where servicing is comparatively easy is going to slow us down quite a lot.
I'm not saying it's never appropriate to design a mission where servicing the spacecraft is necessary. But I think it is something to be avoided whenever possible. Any mission beyond low Earth orbit is going to be a problem to service so we might as well learn how to do high reliability as soon as possible.
a lot of the manufacturing stuff is stuck in the direct hardware access ideas of dos / win 3.1.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Manufacturing equipment generally doesn't benefit greatly from having the latest and fanciest do-dads and gee-gaws. It needs to be reliable above all else in most cases. Well made manufacturing equipment mostly should never need to be patched. There are some exceptions but they are rare. You do run into some networked CNC and robotics that needs to be more up to date but the presses that my company runs really just need to go up and down. More complexity or features would not add any value to them.
I run into all sorts of tooling that has lots of nifty features that never get used. I have a wire cutting machine 20 feet from me that does all sorts of stuff to manage wire libraries and is very programmable. None of it gets used. Partly because the interface sucks but mostly because we need something that we can just set up quickly on the fly and start making parts. The device is needlessly complicated and thus more costly than it had to be.
Someone needs to do an DirectX / opengl like layer for this stuff to use.
Sounds like a programmer who doesn't know how manufacturing actually works. If the only tool you have is a hammer...
He was pro-life, pro-military, as anti-communist as you could get. He did tax cuts for businesses.
He also raised taxes eleven times, compromised with the democrats on a variety of issues, and did a lot of other things that today would never fly with the far right and Tea Party types. If he was running for office today he would potentially have never made it out of the primaries for even suggesting the idea of raising taxes. I'm no fan of the man but I'd take Reagan in a heartbeat over Trump or W.
Reagan doesn't stand for the opposite of his party but neither do a lot of other republicans who get crucified in the primary for trying to govern responsibly. There are a lot of perfectly reasonable republicans but lately they've been getting shouted down by the unreasonable extremists.
If you want a party hero that would be opposite of what his party stands for today... take no look further than JFK.
I could say the same thing about most politicians from >50 years ago. The political parties looked a LOT different prior to the Civil Rights act of 1964.
Those people named? They're not moderates or conservatives. They're RINO's,
Only if you have a ridiculously far right notion of what it means to be a republican (which you clearly do). RINO is a pathetic attempt to apply a purity test to a member of the party. By today's standards Reagan would be called a RINO. Heaven forbid someone attempt to have a fruitful negotiation with someone they don't agree with complete. Or *gasp* actually compromise about anything.
These multi-billion dollar space science projects always put me on edge, especially one like this which is so far from earth that there are no easy repair scenarios such as the one that saved Hubble.
If we never go beyond repair range it's going to take an awfully long time to do anything useful in space. Gotta take some risks sooner or later.
Anyway, hereâ(TM)s hoping that Elon can bring the cost of space flight down by a factor of ten or more so a repair mission to L2 wouldnâ(TM)t be prohibitively expensive.
I think a better idea is to learn to make things that don't need repair missions. Harder task to be sure but necessary if we really want to explore our solar system in a serious way.
Not ponzi scheme since there is not once person at the top that gets all the money at any point.
Pyramid schemes don't have to have a single person at the top. Furthermore there IS a small group at the top, namely the folks who created bitcoin and did the early mining. They absolutely stand to profit massively from additional later people coming into the scheme who are unlikely to seem much if any profit.
Yes bitcoin has a LOT of the features of a pyramid scheme and multi-level marketing. Whether not it is actually a fraudulent activity the resemblance is uncanny.
They don't have to, but based on past behavior, they will.
Take off the tinfoil hat please.
What makes you think the NSA or any of the other three-letter agencies will bother with a law?
So we're supposed to live with shitty 911 service because you are paranoid about the NSA breaking the law? Newsflash dummy, they can already track your phone so all you are doing is costing lives to improve NOTHING. You aren't improving your privacy by slowing first responders. If the NSA wants to break the law, handicapping 911 service won't stop them from watching you legally or illegally. It just means a guy having a heart attack will die when he didn't have to.
Uber and Lyft get your location information, tied to your cell phone, when you look at the map to get the price of the ride.
So they get your location when you use their app which you have to explicitly allow. I fail to see the problem. It is trivial to restrict 911 services to not worrying about your location unless you dial 911. Stop looking for problems where they don't exist.
I'd like to point out the "First they came" message, about creeping government power and abuses?
Knock yourself out but if that is the basis of your argument against good location identification for 911 then you have no argument. Worse you are arguing that people should die because you have a hypothetical concern about 911 location information being used for something other than an emergency response despite there being no evidence that such activity is or will occur. Seriously take off the tinfoil hat. There are plenty of places to worry about government overreach. This is clearly not one of them.
I pray you don't have a heart attack and need 911 tell first responders how to find you in a hurry.
Because at the end of the day I can uninstall Uber but once the government mandates phone tracking for safety they'll know where you are forever for whatever reason they want.
They don't have to track your phone unless you dial 911. This is baseless FUD. Uber doesn't need your location unless you call for Uber. It is a trivial exercise to prevent either Uber or the government from receiving location data unless you contact.
If the government starts proposing a law to track you at all times then by all means get worked up about it. (yes that includes the NSA) That's a very different discussion. If I'm calling 911 I WANT them to have an accurate fix on my location. This should be a non issue. Fears about government overreach in this case are misplaced and demonstrably costs lives.
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I personally don't like it but it's one of the more surefire ways of reducing piracy whilst kicking your actual customers in the wallet to make up for any perceived piracy losses.
In my case it reduces piracy by keeping me from using their products at all. I'm not about to hand over control of my data to a company just so they can pad their bottom line to Wall Street. Sadly I'd actually pay for some of their products but they refuse to license them to me under terms I'm willing to accept.
It brings up a question I always ask: Who owns your data?
THAT is exactly the key question. It's the reason I refuse to use Lightroom to manage my photos. I'm not about to tie myself in perpetuity to another company and effectively hand over control of my data to them. While I'm not saying it's always wrong to make that choice it's a choice one should make with extreme caution. It would be one thing if the software continued to work if you stopped paying the subscription and you just stopped getting upgrades. But to disable the software and effectively deny you access to your data if you stop paying for the subscription is just shady as it gets to my mind.
All used to be well in the world of Digital Content Creation (DCC) until two very major DCC software makers -- Adobe and Autodesk -- decided to force a monthly subscription model on pretty much every software package they make to please Wall Street investors
Which is why I don't use any of their software that requires subscriptions for the software to work. I'd like to use Lightroom and Photoshop but there isn't a way in hell I'm paying for a subscription to use them. I have zero interest in software that stops working if I don't pay every month. If it were just a maintenance fee where I get updates but can stop anytime with the software continuing to work that would be different. I'm certainly not going to needlessly tie myself in perpetuity to their revenue model. I want to upgrade at my schedule when it makes economic and technical sense for me. I quite simply can, will, and have found other solutions if they insist on a subscription for their software. Fortunately there are good open source alternatives for my particular needs.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
True although to be fair that was basically a crash program where budget constraints weren't really a serious concern. Plus that was a manned mission which is inherently a lot more expensive.
Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult.
That's putting it mildly. While it certainly can be done cheaper than Apollo, $20 million is just a tiny amount of money for a goal like that. Something more realistic might be $200 million and even that would be doing it on an extremely tight budget. $20 million really isn't very much money at all.
The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon". And in today's money it's even more than you might think.
We DID do an awful lot more than just say we stepped on the moon. The money from the spin off technologies alone has more than paid for the entire Apollo program many times over, employed millions of people, and greatly improved our lives in measurable ways. And that's not including the value of telecom and other satellite data.
Thus proving that there are never a shortage of idiots who will insist on using the wrong tool for the job at hand.
More likely it's a case of the proverbial "only tool they have is a hammer so all problems look like nails". Same reasons people use spreadsheets to do things better done by databases. They know how to use a spreadsheet and don't know how to use a database so they make do with what they know how to do even when it isn't the best solution.
Do we really need lossy compression for still images any longer?
Absolutely yes. Not even a question. A lot of things you take for granted would literally not be possible or would be notably worse without lossy compression of images. Not to mention that using lossless formats when unnecessary is both wasteful and pointless for many purposes.
The network is way faster, local memory, storage, and graphics card resources are all way less expensive, and data lost from an image is data lost forever.
That doesn't mean storage space and computing power and bandwidth are infinite. And losing data from an image is not necessary a bad thing or worth being concerned about. For example it REALLY does not matter if I lose a bit of data on my pictures from my last vacation. The point is to store a memory, not to archive a well crafted image for all eternity. It simply doesn't matter if I lose a bit of information and the resources necessary to preserve it would cost more than the data is worth. 99.99999% of images taken with a smartphone would not benefit one bit from using lossless compression and in fact many would actually lose utility from doing so.
What we need is fiber everywhere, or something of equivalent speed.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the main obstacle to using lossless image formats is the speed of the network connection. It's a factor in some cases but not the biggest one in most. Nor would it make it possible/practical to use lossless compression everywhere. You could make every network connection everywhere the fastest fiber connection you can imagine and it lossy compression of images would still be a useful thing.
3D printing is awesome tech and will have tremendous utility but too many people are treating it like its some sort of magical-do-anything technology. Could it someday "print" something as sophisticated as a drug on a commercial basis? Sure, maybe. Many many years from now. As it stands we are a long way from that. It probably won't actually be what we think of as a 3D printer unless you use such a generic definition of the term as to render it almost meaningless. Think about it - how is a molecule really 3D from a macroscopic point of view? Yes it isn't technically flat but it's about as close as you can get to being literally 2D. It's kind of like how people lately are throwing around the term AI for any clever computer system even when the term doesn't really fit.
My day job is running a manufacturing company and I've got direct experience working with 3D printing in a prototyping lab from a previous day job. I've worked with some of the large Stratasys machines making plastic parts and a machine that did sintered metals too. There are a few important limitations on 3D printing the most important of which are economic rather than technical:
1) It is slow to make most items. In most circumstances 3D printing takes a LOT longer than most other manufacturing processes.
2) It is hard to make something with mixed materials. Not impossible and there is progress but don't mistake one for a Star Trek replicator.
3) 3D printing is typically VERY expensive on a unit cost basis for most items compared with other manufacturing techniques even including distribution costs once you get above very small volumes. This is the most important limitation.
4) 3D printed parts typically require some amount of manufacturing even after leaving the printer to become useful.
Now 3D printing will get faster and the technology will improve - probably quite a lot. But for economic reasons it's probably never going to see much use for mass production within the lifetime of anyone who reads this. It's primary utility will be for items that cannot be economically made and distributed in small quantities - which is still a very substantial market. Prototypes, rare/obsolete parts, very small production runs, custom parts, etc. It also will have utility in places where distribution is problematic. Think Antarctica in winter or in space where resupply is tough to impossible.
If you already have the trees, taps, and buckets, then collection is free.
That's like saying owning a house is free once you've made all the payments.
40 to 1? Are you trying to make maple bouillon cubes?
Yes 40 to 1. I'm just the messenger here and you don't have to take my word for it.
A simple double boiler will do for any small batch.
Small batch? You need 10 gallons of sap to make a single quart of syrup so that isn't exactly a tiny double boiler.
"Worth it" is a personal preference. I actually don't care that much for "the real thing", and would pay extra for Ms Butterworth; though, I have often mixed the two.
If you would actually pay extra for Ms Butterworth there is something wrong with your taste buds. I can understand someone not caring for maple syrup but I don't get anyone actually preferring colored sludge. That's like claiming Kraft Mac-N-Cheese is better than real mac and cheese made by a good chef.
Real maple syrup is too runny for my taste, and makes a soggy mess of the perfectly crispy edges of my pancakes.
Maybe try using less than a lake of it next time. Pro-tip, if it gets soggy then you are using too much.
Humans don't need maple syrup.
There are lots of things we don't technically need that are still worth having. Maple syrup falls into this category. I can live without it but the world would be a poorer place.
There are many synthetic syrups on store shelves ...
And they are terrible and have nothing even close to the flavor of real maple syrup.
It's like a guy at work telling me that I would not want any of the pork sausage he just made. I tried it and he was right.
Sounds like he wasn't very good at making sausage.
I was raised on store-bought sausage and fresh sausage tastes nasty.
To each their own but that's decidedly weird. That's like preferring Kraft Mac-N-Cheese to the real deal. Some store brand sausages are quite good but hand made sausages by someone who knows what they are doing are usually notably better. Not everyone knows what they are doing obviously.
There is something about Maple Syrup that is really off-putting to me. I can't stand to be in the same room as anyone who is using it. Vinegar has a similar reaction to me. Something about being in a room with someone pouring vinegar on their chips, or maple syrup on their pancakes makes my stomach churn and completely kills my appetite
To each their own but you understand that this is very weird? We're talking six standard deviations from normal here. Not being judgemental - I have some foods I can't stand in certain preparations. But that sounds like you have something wildly unusual about your taste/smell receptors.
I'm not a picky eater- but anything with either of those smells is going to turn my stomach.
Based on your previous statement I gently disagree about you claiming to not be being a picky eater.
Maybe there's a reason, but the excerpt provided does not give it or even hint at it.
Well there is the fact that to make maple sap move in quantity you need freeze thaw cycles. If temperatures warm sufficiently such that the temperature doesn't dip below freezing then you cannot make maple syrup in meaningful quantities.
I'm not able to opine on whether there is a difference or not.
Then you've never actually tasted the real thing. The difference isn't subtle.
But, the vast majority of consumers don't seem able to tell. Or they prefer the HFCS version :(
They can tell the difference. The reason they buy the cheap crap is because it is cheap. You can buy a gallon of Ms Butterworth for less than $5. A gallon of real maple syrup will cost you $40-60. And yes it is worth the cost unless you are really tight for cash. And if you can't afford the real stuff you probably shouldn't be wasting money on crappy colored sugar sludge anyway.
There's a brand at my local store that is made with real sugar, at least. The price isn't significantly higher than the HFCS stuff.
Who cares? Neither one has any flavor worth bothering with. It's a false economy. It seems cheap but still is somehow overpriced.
Pure maple syrup is $20 for a tiny little bottle. Too expensive for my tastes.
Then you have no taste. Pancake syrup (artificially colored sugary sludge) doesn't even remotely resemble real maple syrup in flavor. I don't regard them as being even in the same food group much less substitutes. If your local store charges that much then shop online. You can get awesome burbon barrel aged maple syrup for $30 and that's a specialty item. (not affiliated in any way but I've bought this stuff and it's great) A small bottle of normal maple syrup in my grocery store costs $8-12. You can get a gallon for less than $50 and that will last a year or more for most people.
My dad has several trees up on the farm that he taps to make his own. If you have time & patience, it's free, and you know there's no cane sugar in it. ;-)
"Free"? Only if you don't count the cost of the fuel you'll burn reducing the sap down to syrup or assign any value to your time. There also is the cost of the taps, buckets, and other gear in the process which aren't expensive but not free either. The process of making the syrup from sap takes many many hours. It takes about 40 parts sap to make 1 part syrup. I suppose you could do it over a wood fire outdoors but that's harder to control and you still need a large supply of wood.
All to get something you can buy from the store for a few dollars. It's an interesting thing to do (I've done it) but not really practical from an economic point of view. The opportunity cost is pretty high to make maple syrup unless you do it industrial scale.
Everything is eventually going to run out of propulsion gas for maneuvering, no matter how big you make the tank.
What is your point exactly? Should we have not sent the Voyager probes because they can't maneuver anymore? Missions don't have to last forever and it's certainly possible to design robotic refueling missions for those where refueling is appropriate. What we shouldn't do is design spacecraft such that they need unnecessary amounts of servicing. Hubble is a great spacecraft but it required more servicing than it really should have. Limiting ourselves only to missions where servicing is comparatively easy is going to slow us down quite a lot.
I'm not saying it's never appropriate to design a mission where servicing the spacecraft is necessary. But I think it is something to be avoided whenever possible. Any mission beyond low Earth orbit is going to be a problem to service so we might as well learn how to do high reliability as soon as possible.
a lot of the manufacturing stuff is stuck in the direct hardware access ideas of dos / win 3.1.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Manufacturing equipment generally doesn't benefit greatly from having the latest and fanciest do-dads and gee-gaws. It needs to be reliable above all else in most cases. Well made manufacturing equipment mostly should never need to be patched. There are some exceptions but they are rare. You do run into some networked CNC and robotics that needs to be more up to date but the presses that my company runs really just need to go up and down. More complexity or features would not add any value to them.
I run into all sorts of tooling that has lots of nifty features that never get used. I have a wire cutting machine 20 feet from me that does all sorts of stuff to manage wire libraries and is very programmable. None of it gets used. Partly because the interface sucks but mostly because we need something that we can just set up quickly on the fly and start making parts. The device is needlessly complicated and thus more costly than it had to be.
Someone needs to do an DirectX / opengl like layer for this stuff to use.
Sounds like a programmer who doesn't know how manufacturing actually works. If the only tool you have is a hammer...
He was pro-life, pro-military, as anti-communist as you could get. He did tax cuts for businesses.
He also raised taxes eleven times, compromised with the democrats on a variety of issues, and did a lot of other things that today would never fly with the far right and Tea Party types. If he was running for office today he would potentially have never made it out of the primaries for even suggesting the idea of raising taxes. I'm no fan of the man but I'd take Reagan in a heartbeat over Trump or W.
Reagan doesn't stand for the opposite of his party but neither do a lot of other republicans who get crucified in the primary for trying to govern responsibly. There are a lot of perfectly reasonable republicans but lately they've been getting shouted down by the unreasonable extremists.
If you want a party hero that would be opposite of what his party stands for today ... take no look further than JFK.
I could say the same thing about most politicians from >50 years ago. The political parties looked a LOT different prior to the Civil Rights act of 1964.
Those people named? They're not moderates or conservatives. They're RINO's,
Only if you have a ridiculously far right notion of what it means to be a republican (which you clearly do). RINO is a pathetic attempt to apply a purity test to a member of the party. By today's standards Reagan would be called a RINO. Heaven forbid someone attempt to have a fruitful negotiation with someone they don't agree with complete. Or *gasp* actually compromise about anything.
These multi-billion dollar space science projects always put me on edge, especially one like this which is so far from earth that there are no easy repair scenarios such as the one that saved Hubble.
If we never go beyond repair range it's going to take an awfully long time to do anything useful in space. Gotta take some risks sooner or later.
Anyway, hereâ(TM)s hoping that Elon can bring the cost of space flight down by a factor of ten or more so a repair mission to L2 wouldnâ(TM)t be prohibitively expensive.
I think a better idea is to learn to make things that don't need repair missions. Harder task to be sure but necessary if we really want to explore our solar system in a serious way.
And? you also just described the entire federal banking system as well.
Only to someone who has no idea how the federal banking system actually works.
Not ponzi scheme since there is not once person at the top that gets all the money at any point.
Pyramid schemes don't have to have a single person at the top. Furthermore there IS a small group at the top, namely the folks who created bitcoin and did the early mining. They absolutely stand to profit massively from additional later people coming into the scheme who are unlikely to seem much if any profit.
Yes bitcoin has a LOT of the features of a pyramid scheme and multi-level marketing. Whether not it is actually a fraudulent activity the resemblance is uncanny.
They don't have to, but based on past behavior, they will.
Take off the tinfoil hat please.
What makes you think the NSA or any of the other three-letter agencies will bother with a law?
So we're supposed to live with shitty 911 service because you are paranoid about the NSA breaking the law? Newsflash dummy, they can already track your phone so all you are doing is costing lives to improve NOTHING. You aren't improving your privacy by slowing first responders. If the NSA wants to break the law, handicapping 911 service won't stop them from watching you legally or illegally. It just means a guy having a heart attack will die when he didn't have to.
Uber and Lyft get your location information, tied to your cell phone, when you look at the map to get the price of the ride.
So they get your location when you use their app which you have to explicitly allow. I fail to see the problem. It is trivial to restrict 911 services to not worrying about your location unless you dial 911. Stop looking for problems where they don't exist.
I'd like to point out the "First they came" message, about creeping government power and abuses?
Knock yourself out but if that is the basis of your argument against good location identification for 911 then you have no argument. Worse you are arguing that people should die because you have a hypothetical concern about 911 location information being used for something other than an emergency response despite there being no evidence that such activity is or will occur. Seriously take off the tinfoil hat. There are plenty of places to worry about government overreach. This is clearly not one of them.
I pray you don't have a heart attack and need 911 tell first responders how to find you in a hurry.
Because at the end of the day I can uninstall Uber but once the government mandates phone tracking for safety they'll know where you are forever for whatever reason they want.
They don't have to track your phone unless you dial 911. This is baseless FUD. Uber doesn't need your location unless you call for Uber. It is a trivial exercise to prevent either Uber or the government from receiving location data unless you contact.
If the government starts proposing a law to track you at all times then by all means get worked up about it. (yes that includes the NSA) That's a very different discussion. If I'm calling 911 I WANT them to have an accurate fix on my location. This should be a non issue. Fears about government overreach in this case are misplaced and demonstrably costs lives.