But it's not obvious to me, hypothetically as a customer, why I'd consider flying a payload on Branson's paper rocket, as opposed to a tried and true launch vehicle that's already been through it's launch failures and cost overruns.
I certainly did. People with expensive payloads are not that sensitive to price. They ARE however, quite sensitive to getting their stuff to orbit in one piece. Something that Branson has so far failed to demonstrate.
Orbital Sciences build something very similar, called Pegasus. It's air launched, is quite reliable, can throw 440kg into LEO, has a very good launch record -- and costs roughly as much ($11m a pop, if memory serves correctly.)
Branson is nuts if he thinks he can prevail against Orbital in this segment of the launch market.
They suffered from a really shit moderation system too, which encouraged groupthink to a far greater extent than Slashdot. Slashdot, imho, is a scalable, robust moderation system done right.
Digg was a sad joke in comparison, where simply having the "wrong" (e.g. liberal) opinion would have you Buried into a smoking crater.
Another problem was sad, basement-dwelling "power Diggers" posting lowest-common-denominator crap all the time. The Dig/Bury model favours quick, cheap laughs at the expense of thoughtful debate.
Although it has to be said that I got into some REALLY fun and entertaining fights with some utterly loopy American and Chinese rightwing extremists. Digg, given it's tendency to lower the IQ of everything it touches, attracted those kinds of people like flies to shit. But after the while, the aggro and stupidity got to me, and I quit my Digg habit.
Can't say I'm sad to see it getting cut up for scrap.
I think there's a BIG take-home to be had from the demise of Digg. Listen to your users.
They REALLY screwed up with Digg 4, and completely dismissed the feedback from their users out of hand.
Had they actually used their brains and done proper testing beforehand, instead of rushing half-baked shit into production, they might've done far better by now.
Did I mention that it's a really good idea to listen to your users, and not walk around with your head up your arse.
"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" -- Proverbs 16:18.
Others have said it better, but Google "Doggerland". Flooding of low-lying land since the last glacial maximum might not have bothered our ancestors, since they were simple nomads and could just move on.
Try raising the sea level by a couple of hundred metres today, and see what happens. It'll cost a few bob to move Manhattan, for instance.
Why can't somebody invent voicemail service that filters everything by default, except whitelisted numbers? I'd pay for that.
I get on average, 4-6 robocalls every weekday, and being able to do this would be a tremendous timesaver, not to mention, spare me a lot of aggravation.
Piss poor science reporting, is likely due to the shit-for-brains idiots we jokingly call "journalists".
Bearing in mind here, that "media studies graduate" is a perjorative phrase for something a bit dense from a well-off background, who had Mummy and Daddy pay their way though university, and ended up doing a soft-option humanities course as a prelude to working as a "writer" or "journalist"; because they were too stupid and dishonest to try anything more challenging or of any social utility whatsoever.
I suspect too, that journalists are arrogant and conceited enough that that think they, as the gatekeepers between the news and the public at large, have the brains and skills to write all the news, whereas they are hopelessly ill equipped to handle anything even remotely technical. The last few years has taught the world how many "newsworthy stories" can break, that NO-ONE has the slightest clue about. The global financial crisis has been described as the first major disaster that nobody understood. We see this time, and time, and time again. Distortions, fantasy, inanity and outright lies on everything from finance and politics, to nuclear energy and particle physics.
Contributing to this is the fraudulent and dishonest postmodernist garbage that humanities types are so fond of. Because to these stupid pricks, the strange implications of quantum mechanics sounds so similar to the made-up garbage they're used to, they take it as a license to simply bullshit and make stuff up.
Idiocracy is upon it, because the gatekeepers of our public life, journalists, are so consistently, uniformly shit.
Could be that 'anarchist' is just one label that stupid, uneducated, violent people who are nonetheless bright enough to want to label themselves as being something better than 'garden variety scumbag'?
I've lived in some rough inner city areas in my time, and if I had a dollar for every "bohemian", "artist", or "anarchist", I'd be a rich man.
I've never met an "anarchist" who hasn't been a drug-fucked high school dropout.
Blaming the Crusaders is just dirty Muslim propaganda.
It was the Mongols who sacked Baghad in 1258, in addition to a parade of extremely ignorant and backwards "thinkers" who turned the Islamic world from world leaders into the third world basketcase it is today.
In a country as politically and socially divided as America, perhaps. This isn't an issue in Australia (where I'm from), where the Australian Electoral Commission is widely trusted and respected to run honest elections.
Other countries have professional civil services which must abide by very strict rules governing their behaviour, where they must not favour one side of politics over the other. This does not preclude individuals having their own political opinions; they're just not allowed to act on them in an official capacity, and there are consequences for doing the wrong thing.
Like having an non-partisan public service, a non-partisan committee of civil servants administering the election and drawing the boundaries?
Like any non-banana republic?
From the point of view of other Anglo-Saxon countries, and Europe, the US is a basketcase.
Recent US elections, e.g. Florida during Bush Jr's reelection campaign, would make disgrace your average Third World shithole, let alone the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
I'm sure the Vietnamese would have plenty to say about that. They're fiercely nationalistic (as the Americans found out decades after they should have).
The world will eventually regret not opposing the rise of China, because they will be bullies 100 times worse than the Americans at their worst, with the added bonus that the Chinese are fiercely xenophobic and have a massive chip on their shoulder from their "100 years of humiliation".
I'm looking forward to an age of oppression and tyranny under the boot of the Chinese Communist Party.
The Chinese (through various proxies) tried buying Australian rare earth mines in Australia. There was political dissent within Australia, so the Chinese deployed viruses on the computers of MPs and Australian miners to get an inside track of the negotiations.
Can't remember how it ended, but I think that basically, the Chinese were caught doing the wrong thing, the negotiations ended, and the Chinese left in a huff and a blizzard of threats.
The myopia and greed really makes them no better than that other special interest group determined to crimincally enrich themselves at the expense of everybody and everything else: the bankers.
Slashdot Mirror
Sore loser much?
I don't care, it's his money.
But it's not obvious to me, hypothetically as a customer, why I'd consider flying a payload on Branson's paper rocket, as opposed to a tried and true launch vehicle that's already been through it's launch failures and cost overruns.
I certainly did. People with expensive payloads are not that sensitive to price. They ARE however, quite sensitive to getting their stuff to orbit in one piece. Something that Branson has so far failed to demonstrate.
But to pay for it all, he's got to win cargo launch business first.
He's a brave man all right.
Orbital Sciences build something very similar, called Pegasus. It's air launched, is quite reliable, can throw 440kg into LEO, has a very good launch record -- and costs roughly as much ($11m a pop, if memory serves correctly.)
Branson is nuts if he thinks he can prevail against Orbital in this segment of the launch market.
They suffered from a really shit moderation system too, which encouraged groupthink to a far greater extent than Slashdot. Slashdot, imho, is a scalable, robust moderation system done right.
Digg was a sad joke in comparison, where simply having the "wrong" (e.g. liberal) opinion would have you Buried into a smoking crater.
Another problem was sad, basement-dwelling "power Diggers" posting lowest-common-denominator crap all the time. The Dig/Bury model favours quick, cheap laughs at the expense of thoughtful debate.
Although it has to be said that I got into some REALLY fun and entertaining fights with some utterly loopy American and Chinese rightwing extremists. Digg, given it's tendency to lower the IQ of everything it touches, attracted those kinds of people like flies to shit. But after the while, the aggro and stupidity got to me, and I quit my Digg habit.
Can't say I'm sad to see it getting cut up for scrap.
I think there's a BIG take-home to be had from the demise of Digg. Listen to your users.
They REALLY screwed up with Digg 4, and completely dismissed the feedback from their users out of hand.
Had they actually used their brains and done proper testing beforehand, instead of rushing half-baked shit into production, they might've done far better by now.
Did I mention that it's a really good idea to listen to your users, and not walk around with your head up your arse.
"Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" -- Proverbs 16:18.
When our household got cable for the first time, it was great.
The first thing we did was put the parental lock on the God Channel.
The Register is a trashy British "red top" tabloid like the Sun, the Mirror and the Daily Mail. Only the medium is different.
Others have said it better, but Google "Doggerland". Flooding of low-lying land since the last glacial maximum might not have bothered our ancestors, since they were simple nomads and could just move on.
Try raising the sea level by a couple of hundred metres today, and see what happens. It'll cost a few bob to move Manhattan, for instance.
Why can't somebody invent voicemail service that filters everything by default, except whitelisted numbers? I'd pay for that.
I get on average, 4-6 robocalls every weekday, and being able to do this would be a tremendous timesaver, not to mention, spare me a lot of aggravation.
Piss poor science reporting, is likely due to the shit-for-brains idiots we jokingly call "journalists".
Bearing in mind here, that "media studies graduate" is a perjorative phrase for something a bit dense from a well-off background, who had Mummy and Daddy pay their way though university, and ended up doing a soft-option humanities course as a prelude to working as a "writer" or "journalist"; because they were too stupid and dishonest to try anything more challenging or of any social utility whatsoever.
I suspect too, that journalists are arrogant and conceited enough that that think they, as the gatekeepers between the news and the public at large, have the brains and skills to write all the news, whereas they are hopelessly ill equipped to handle anything even remotely technical. The last few years has taught the world how many "newsworthy stories" can break, that NO-ONE has the slightest clue about. The global financial crisis has been described as the first major disaster that nobody understood. We see this time, and time, and time again. Distortions, fantasy, inanity and outright lies on everything from finance and politics, to nuclear energy and particle physics.
Contributing to this is the fraudulent and dishonest postmodernist garbage that humanities types are so fond of. Because to these stupid pricks, the strange implications of quantum mechanics sounds so similar to the made-up garbage they're used to, they take it as a license to simply bullshit and make stuff up.
Idiocracy is upon it, because the gatekeepers of our public life, journalists, are so consistently, uniformly shit.
Could be that 'anarchist' is just one label that stupid, uneducated, violent people who are nonetheless bright enough to want to label themselves as being something better than 'garden variety scumbag'?
I've lived in some rough inner city areas in my time, and if I had a dollar for every "bohemian", "artist", or "anarchist", I'd be a rich man.
I've never met an "anarchist" who hasn't been a drug-fucked high school dropout.
Blaming the Crusaders is just dirty Muslim propaganda.
It was the Mongols who sacked Baghad in 1258, in addition to a parade of extremely ignorant and backwards "thinkers" who turned the Islamic world from world leaders into the third world basketcase it is today.
A barbarian with lots of money is STILL a barbarian.
The Gulf Arabs still haven't gotten the memo.
In a country as politically and socially divided as America, perhaps. This isn't an issue in Australia (where I'm from), where the Australian Electoral Commission is widely trusted and respected to run honest elections.
Other countries have professional civil services which must abide by very strict rules governing their behaviour, where they must not favour one side of politics over the other. This does not preclude individuals having their own political opinions; they're just not allowed to act on them in an official capacity, and there are consequences for doing the wrong thing.
This isn't rocket science.
... get the basics right.
Like having an non-partisan public service, a non-partisan committee of civil servants administering the election and drawing the boundaries?
Like any non-banana republic?
From the point of view of other Anglo-Saxon countries, and Europe, the US is a basketcase.
Recent US elections, e.g. Florida during Bush Jr's reelection campaign, would make disgrace your average Third World shithole, let alone the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
Try to step away from the computer once in a while and experience the real world. Mr 50 Cent Army.
This is EXACTLY the kind of brainless, hateful xenophobia that starts wars. Multiply that by 1.3 billion and the world has a serious problem.
I'm sure the Vietnamese would have plenty to say about that. They're fiercely nationalistic (as the Americans found out decades after they should have).
They can't and won't. They're afraid of China.
The world will eventually regret not opposing the rise of China, because they will be bullies 100 times worse than the Americans at their worst, with the added bonus that the Chinese are fiercely xenophobic and have a massive chip on their shoulder from their "100 years of humiliation".
I'm looking forward to an age of oppression and tyranny under the boot of the Chinese Communist Party.
They're tried.
The Chinese (through various proxies) tried buying Australian rare earth mines in Australia. There was political dissent within Australia, so the Chinese deployed viruses on the computers of MPs and Australian miners to get an inside track of the negotiations.
Can't remember how it ended, but I think that basically, the Chinese were caught doing the wrong thing, the negotiations ended, and the Chinese left in a huff and a blizzard of threats.
Here's hoping that Orion's first mission lasts longer than that website.
The myopia and greed really makes them no better than that other special interest group determined to crimincally enrich themselves at the expense of everybody and everything else: the bankers.