I'm all for being responsible for my mistakes, but in today's world there has to be some kind of limit. Your insurance coverage is usually that limit.
Frankly, that is bullshit...
Why? Most states don't require more than 50K of insurance...
That won't replace many cars, much less pay any medical bills... If you had 50K of insurance and totaled my truck, you wouldn't have enough insurance...
If your state is one of those, then YOU carry insurance to cover the difference, you can afford it if you have 50K in a vehicle... You know there are SOME states that declare automobile accidents "No Fault" (I'm looking at you Michigan) in which case if somebody runs into you, YOUR insurance pays. Where I found it infuriating when the drunk hit my parked truck in Jackson MI that MY insurance had to pay for the damage, I see the perverse sense it makes to have laws like this.
I do exactly this, I carry insurance for ME because I live in an area were you are more often than not going to be hit by an uninsured illegal alien who doesn't legally have two pesos to rub together and is unlikely to be able to EVER pay for a $600 ambulance ride to the emergency room.
Go ahead and buy more insurance then... Better figure what kind of damage you *can* cause with that car of yours. If you seriously harm someone, you can be liable for decades of medical care, so I suggest you go for a few million of liability coverage, just on the chance you need it. Oh, and them multiply that number by 3 because the lawyer is going to get 2/3rds of any settlement... Even 10 million might not be enough you know...
What you are going to do if the bills run more than your insurance coverage... Go Bankrupt trying to pay? Toss your kids future on the ash heap of history because you had a traffic accident?
I'm all for being responsible for my mistakes, but in today's world there has to be some kind of limit. Your insurance coverage is usually that limit.
You insure what you cannot afford to loose.... But remember, having high insurance coverage makes you a target, just as much as having assets to loose.
I figure that if I get into a serious accident that's my fault and I have legal liability, I want enough insurance that it's not worth trying to go after me for more than the insurance company will pay.
So, if you don't have much in assets, don't bother buying additional insurance. Now if you HAVE something, THEN by all means, up your liability coverage, if for no other reason than to reduce your risk exposure.
I'd recommend you consider a personal liability policy instead of adding to your auto insurance limits. It will cover you for more than just auto accidents and will cost you about the same.
You ALWAYS pay more than the average risk is worth when you buy insurance.... Individuals who suffer an insured loss *sometimes* recover more than they have paid in premiums, but this is the exception.
In my 35 years as an insured motorist I have had 3 claims, two accidents and one hail claim. I estimate the TOTAL paid for these claims to be under $25K. In 35 years I've paid more than $1,000/year in premiums and I estimate that I've paid about 4 times the amount of the paid claims.
I'm keeping the auto insurance company in business.... They know that.... They make SURE you pay generally more than you cost them. You may be up on the house from time to time, but like the casino and gambling, the insurance company (the house) ALWAYS wins.
Always have an insurance - if you don't have an insurance for your stuff that's launched then it's your problem.
Insurance is a sucker's bet. Think about it.. You are literally betting that you will loose... Insurance like extended warranties are *always* bad ideas for the consumer. If nothing goes wrong, you pay, If you suffer an insured loss, you pay, perhaps a bit less than the loss, but you pay.
Use insurance as a tool, not as an investment. Of course, use it where legally mandated, as a way to reduce risk (such as buying term life insurance to protect your family) and when creditors mandate it (such as terms for getting a mortgage). After that, understand that insurance companies are out to make money by selling you peace of mind at more than the actual risk will likely cost.
"Doing his job" ? Perhaps, but that's what he's paid for. Getting public exposure in the process? Excellent... Getting paid, doing your job AND getting in the public eye? Priceless come the next election.
It's all about getting your face on the nightly news. That's why they "Never let a crisis go to waste" and ALWAYS try to associate themselves some way to something that's popular.
This is just a shameless "Hey, look at me!" ploy by a politician looking for attention during an election season. Go away Al, you are not up this time...
This is going to make that manned rating a lot harder to get. Blowing up on the pad during a test fire doesn't look good for your QA processes.
Before they can fly anything other than cargo, they are going to need to ramp up that QA process ALOT.. Not to mention their insurance rates are going to skyrocket if they keep up with these "loss of vehicle" events.
Yep, I have ~25 years in this business.. Started coding in C, back when folks berated it for being to uppity, slow and a resource hog by the assembly guys.
Not really... Unless your program is REALLY slow.... But your definition of "slow" does depend greatly on your fame of reference.... If you are writing a device driver, milliseconds count... In a user interface, the differences between 1/4 of a second and 1/8 of a second will be hardly noticeable...
It's not until you start having delays beyond about half a second will users really care. Half of a second is a LONG time in terms of what a CPU, memory and disks can do, but it's just about a blink of an eye for the user.
Java, with it's garbage collection causing huge delays (from the perspective of the machine) that you cannot stop mid stream, introduces slight delays here and there. These are not a problem for a user interface, but they'd cause havoc for a device driver, where your response time budgets are significantly shorter than what you need when responding to a mouse click or key press by a user.
Actually, my thought was "user interface" kinds of things where the response time is not a big factor, where a fraction of a second difference doesn't really matter. This includes GUI's, CGI, and other User Interface applications. If you have to do interfaces on multiple Operating Systems, Java is great..... However...
Java suffers from having to do garbage collection and a lot of house keeping that makes the response time of the program to vary greatly from one invocation to the next. The longer you keep the JVM process running, the more variance you will likely see. If your application can stand this, Java is an option for you, otherwise, stick with something else..
You're kidding, right? Restart often? Like, the whole machine, or just the JVM? What class of problem admits restarting often as part of a viable solution?
I am not kidding at all. It is standard practice to kill and restart Java processes in high availability systems, in fact, it's a good idea to actually PLAN to do this. Sometimes it is the only way to fix specific problems which are quite difficult (or impossible) to find and fix programmatically.
Shesh, Sometimes I wonder why folks don't get this, until I remember that there is a whole generation of programmers who only know java and have never had to deal with memory and threading issues directly. They don't understand what the JVM has to do to keep the magic happening.... So they don't understand why I, the moldy old guy who's doing this since Java was developed by Sun, make them do things before I will allow them to field that nifty Java based system of theirs...
Yea, that's about it for Java.... Well that and that cool "Memory leaks are a thing of the past" idea can be nice... Yea, I know, Java still leaks memory from time to time... But they at least tried to rid us of all that malloc and free complications..
Bullocks.. There are places for using Java.. Lots of them actually...
Now, I'm not going to blow the fan boy smoke and say Java is great for everything, it's not. I've seen applications in Java that where wholly inappropriate for the language, but because that's what the development team knew, that's what we got, with horrible results, performance and foot print problems that would make your head spin. (It made mine spin, trying to keep up with the ever expanding hardware requirements to keep that garbage running.)
So what's Java good for? User interfaces (GUI, WEB you name it) it's great. Need it OS independent? Use Java. It's OK for data processing, but you will need lots of compute resources compared to the same thing in C++. Don't like the "hard work" involved in memory management, Use Java and restart often. However, if you have strict response time budgets, or cannot afford to cycle processes to keep running, and lots of extra hardware use something else... PLEASE use something else because I know I won't field those kinds of applications in Java for you, I've had enough pain in my life already and I'm going to quit your project if you try to make me do it again...
Is used for microwave communication, so it could be that. A bounced signal or something.
No possible way this is just "communication" we are overhearing, unless they where pointing directly to us.. However the power level necessary at the source to make this trip with this level of received signal is in the millions of watts, assuming they where TRYING to hit us with the signal. If they where just broadcasting in all directions, the necessary power levels increases into the billions of watts... That's a HUGE device to generate such RF power, not to mention the necessary equipment to create the power being consumed. IF they just had randomly pointed some dish at us, pumping a few million watts, the duration of the signal seems to make that unlikely. This wasn't an ET phoning earth, either on purpose or mistake.
Chances are that this is simply a naturally occurring RF signal or something which is NOT from this star. It was just too powerful considering the 94 light years it traveled.. That it happens to come from the general direction of some start without a known habitable planet is just an interesting fact. If we had a rocky planet in the habitable zone involved, it would interesting, but again unlikely to be anything but naturally caused RF.
My money is on some side lobe leakage and the janitor having a midnight snack of microwaved popcorn... But I guess we will have to wait for the rest of the data to know for sure..
Rumor? Yea, call me back in November. They have zero credibility and I doubt they have anything truly earth shaking that's provable.
Not that being true is a prerequisite to do political damage to somebody...I'm sure they will drop something, but it's likely to just be some useless junk they try to spin into the news cycle at the appropriate time. It won't turn out to be anything.
I was not aware they ever did any vetting, and if they did, what their standard of care was
Of course they do vetting... They ask two questions... 1. Is it a good story (not true, just plausible is all that's required)? You can make it up as a total work of fiction, but if SOMEBODY might think it's true you meet this requirement. 2. Will it draw attention to us? It doesn't matter if it's good or bad attention.
Unless your story meets these standards, forget it.... Well, unless you are willing to pay something for it. Websites and press releases cost money you know.
You seriously miss my point... I'm not claiming coal is clean here.. I'm claiming that solar and wind are NOT without environmental impact when you consider the complete lifecycle of the equipment. Photovoltaic solar is incredibly messy.. Perhaps you don't care because that "mess" is located half a world away (in China) and not in your back yard? The production and maintenance of wind turbines is similar in it's environmental impact and being made from huge amounts of fiberglass will be a HUGE mess to get rid of.. Then there is all the hydraulic oil and lubricants that keep these things pointed in the right direction and the blades turning.... And that's just for starters. Surely you see that even these methods of energy production are not without their problems.
Now if you want to start making noise about what's "cleaner" then have at it with somebody else. Coal is pretty messy stuff, but it's cheap and plentiful. Natural Gas is much cleaner, just not as cheap. Solar is VERY expensive and a pretty big mess too. Wind is not without it's long and short term impacts. Just admit to yourself that "CLEAN ENERGY" doesn't really exist and never will if you are being honest about the total lifecycle of the equipment.
I hate to break it to folks, there is no such thing coming.
The industrial use and production of energy is a messy business, both environmentally and financially. This will not change.
Consider the recent advent of two major "clean" energy alternatives, solar and wind. They are FAR from "clean" environmentally no matter how you slice them. Photovoltaic solar is really a horrible thing for the environment. Manufacturing and scrapping of solar cells is a messy thing and creating and operating those "let's build a huge array of mirrors to focus the sunlight to make something really hot thing is even worse as it takes huge swaths of land, has a serious issue with local wildlife and is *really* expensive. Wind isn't all that much better. It takes large areas of land, puts substantial structures on it and has a detrimental affect on the local environment too (killing birds, bats, bugs and such).
About the only real hope here is fusion, but we are a LONG way from even being able to field an operating industrial level facility so there is no way we can judge the environmental impact of such a thing. I can tell you that right now, they are pretty messy, with superconducting magnets and emitting radiation.
"Clean" energy is like "Free" food. It doesn't really exist.
Because when the enemy takes out your satellites you can't communicate anymore. And if you can't command and control, you've lost.
Quite right.. Which is why the Iraqi Army lost two back to back conflicts with the USA. The Command And Control networks where degraded to the point of ineffectiveness within an hour of the bombing starting. They where reduced to passing notes and carrier pidgins which left the front line troops with no backup and no way to coordinate the hasty retreat they so desperately needed.
I thought the point of the article was somebody making the claim that they cannot void your warranty without proving your software load caused the issue?
Give me a Cisco over a Dell for reliable performance and ease of finding people who can support it.
Cisco is the "rock solid" hardware and software vendor of choice in routing and switching. They are not the fastest, they are not the cheapest, but they are the most reliable routing and switching platforms going, at least that's how they are historically seen. Other vendors are starting to approach their reputation of course, but if reliable is what you are buying and you don't really care about the cost, you still buy Cisco.
Now if cost is your driver, you are going to be buying junk like Netgear "pro safe" offerings, which are functional (up to a point), but hard to manage and despite the "life time warranty" fail often. Yes, I know this because... I use both...
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I'm all for being responsible for my mistakes, but in today's world there has to be some kind of limit. Your insurance coverage is usually that limit.
Frankly, that is bullshit...
Why? Most states don't require more than 50K of insurance...
That won't replace many cars, much less pay any medical bills... If you had 50K of insurance and totaled my truck, you wouldn't have enough insurance...
If your state is one of those, then YOU carry insurance to cover the difference, you can afford it if you have 50K in a vehicle... You know there are SOME states that declare automobile accidents "No Fault" (I'm looking at you Michigan) in which case if somebody runs into you, YOUR insurance pays. Where I found it infuriating when the drunk hit my parked truck in Jackson MI that MY insurance had to pay for the damage, I see the perverse sense it makes to have laws like this.
I do exactly this, I carry insurance for ME because I live in an area were you are more often than not going to be hit by an uninsured illegal alien who doesn't legally have two pesos to rub together and is unlikely to be able to EVER pay for a $600 ambulance ride to the emergency room.
Same thing... Bankruptcy is a civil suit...
No, in the long run, you will pay more than you get.... ALWAYS.... It's how Vegas makes money and how insurance company's operate..
Go ahead and buy more insurance then... Better figure what kind of damage you *can* cause with that car of yours. If you seriously harm someone, you can be liable for decades of medical care, so I suggest you go for a few million of liability coverage, just on the chance you need it. Oh, and them multiply that number by 3 because the lawyer is going to get 2/3rds of any settlement... Even 10 million might not be enough you know...
What you are going to do if the bills run more than your insurance coverage... Go Bankrupt trying to pay? Toss your kids future on the ash heap of history because you had a traffic accident?
I'm all for being responsible for my mistakes, but in today's world there has to be some kind of limit. Your insurance coverage is usually that limit.
You insure what you cannot afford to loose.... But remember, having high insurance coverage makes you a target, just as much as having assets to loose.
I figure that if I get into a serious accident that's my fault and I have legal liability, I want enough insurance that it's not worth trying to go after me for more than the insurance company will pay.
So, if you don't have much in assets, don't bother buying additional insurance. Now if you HAVE something, THEN by all means, up your liability coverage, if for no other reason than to reduce your risk exposure.
I'd recommend you consider a personal liability policy instead of adding to your auto insurance limits. It will cover you for more than just auto accidents and will cost you about the same.
You ALWAYS pay more than the average risk is worth when you buy insurance.... Individuals who suffer an insured loss *sometimes* recover more than they have paid in premiums, but this is the exception.
In my 35 years as an insured motorist I have had 3 claims, two accidents and one hail claim. I estimate the TOTAL paid for these claims to be under $25K. In 35 years I've paid more than $1,000/year in premiums and I estimate that I've paid about 4 times the amount of the paid claims.
I'm keeping the auto insurance company in business.... They know that.... They make SURE you pay generally more than you cost them. You may be up on the house from time to time, but like the casino and gambling, the insurance company (the house) ALWAYS wins.
Who in their right mind would launch a satellite worth as much as their entire company on an experimental rocket?
Someone who is taking a risk, hoping for a big payday if they succeed.
For the failures, there are the bankruptcy courts..
It's called getting rich quick.. Rolling the dice... Betting the farm... Ect.. People do it all the time and loose.
Always have an insurance - if you don't have an insurance for your stuff that's launched then it's your problem.
Insurance is a sucker's bet. Think about it.. You are literally betting that you will loose... Insurance like extended warranties are *always* bad ideas for the consumer. If nothing goes wrong, you pay, If you suffer an insured loss, you pay, perhaps a bit less than the loss, but you pay.
Use insurance as a tool, not as an investment. Of course, use it where legally mandated, as a way to reduce risk (such as buying term life insurance to protect your family) and when creditors mandate it (such as terms for getting a mortgage). After that, understand that insurance companies are out to make money by selling you peace of mind at more than the actual risk will likely cost.
"Doing his job" ? Perhaps, but that's what he's paid for. Getting public exposure in the process? Excellent... Getting paid, doing your job AND getting in the public eye? Priceless come the next election.
It's all about getting your face on the nightly news. That's why they "Never let a crisis go to waste" and ALWAYS try to associate themselves some way to something that's popular.
This is just a shameless "Hey, look at me!" ploy by a politician looking for attention during an election season. Go away Al, you are not up this time...
This is going to make that manned rating a lot harder to get. Blowing up on the pad during a test fire doesn't look good for your QA processes.
Before they can fly anything other than cargo, they are going to need to ramp up that QA process ALOT.. Not to mention their insurance rates are going to skyrocket if they keep up with these "loss of vehicle" events.
Yep, I have ~25 years in this business.. Started coding in C, back when folks berated it for being to uppity, slow and a resource hog by the assembly guys.
Not really... Unless your program is REALLY slow.... But your definition of "slow" does depend greatly on your fame of reference.... If you are writing a device driver, milliseconds count... In a user interface, the differences between 1/4 of a second and 1/8 of a second will be hardly noticeable...
It's not until you start having delays beyond about half a second will users really care. Half of a second is a LONG time in terms of what a CPU, memory and disks can do, but it's just about a blink of an eye for the user.
Java, with it's garbage collection causing huge delays (from the perspective of the machine) that you cannot stop mid stream, introduces slight delays here and there. These are not a problem for a user interface, but they'd cause havoc for a device driver, where your response time budgets are significantly shorter than what you need when responding to a mouse click or key press by a user.
Actually, my thought was "user interface" kinds of things where the response time is not a big factor, where a fraction of a second difference doesn't really matter. This includes GUI's, CGI, and other User Interface applications. If you have to do interfaces on multiple Operating Systems, Java is great..... However...
Java suffers from having to do garbage collection and a lot of house keeping that makes the response time of the program to vary greatly from one invocation to the next. The longer you keep the JVM process running, the more variance you will likely see. If your application can stand this, Java is an option for you, otherwise, stick with something else..
Use Java and restart often.
You're kidding, right? Restart often? Like, the whole machine, or just the JVM? What class of problem admits restarting often as part of a viable solution?
I am not kidding at all. It is standard practice to kill and restart Java processes in high availability systems, in fact, it's a good idea to actually PLAN to do this. Sometimes it is the only way to fix specific problems which are quite difficult (or impossible) to find and fix programmatically.
Shesh, Sometimes I wonder why folks don't get this, until I remember that there is a whole generation of programmers who only know java and have never had to deal with memory and threading issues directly. They don't understand what the JVM has to do to keep the magic happening.... So they don't understand why I, the moldy old guy who's doing this since Java was developed by Sun, make them do things before I will allow them to field that nifty Java based system of theirs...
Yea, that's about it for Java.... Well that and that cool "Memory leaks are a thing of the past" idea can be nice... Yea, I know, Java still leaks memory from time to time... But they at least tried to rid us of all that malloc and free complications..
Agreed. Not the best choice for anything.
Bullocks.. There are places for using Java.. Lots of them actually...
Now, I'm not going to blow the fan boy smoke and say Java is great for everything, it's not. I've seen applications in Java that where wholly inappropriate for the language, but because that's what the development team knew, that's what we got, with horrible results, performance and foot print problems that would make your head spin. (It made mine spin, trying to keep up with the ever expanding hardware requirements to keep that garbage running.)
So what's Java good for? User interfaces (GUI, WEB you name it) it's great. Need it OS independent? Use Java. It's OK for data processing, but you will need lots of compute resources compared to the same thing in C++. Don't like the "hard work" involved in memory management, Use Java and restart often. However, if you have strict response time budgets, or cannot afford to cycle processes to keep running, and lots of extra hardware use something else... PLEASE use something else because I know I won't field those kinds of applications in Java for you, I've had enough pain in my life already and I'm going to quit your project if you try to make me do it again...
Is used for microwave communication, so it could be that. A bounced signal or something.
No possible way this is just "communication" we are overhearing, unless they where pointing directly to us.. However the power level necessary at the source to make this trip with this level of received signal is in the millions of watts, assuming they where TRYING to hit us with the signal. If they where just broadcasting in all directions, the necessary power levels increases into the billions of watts... That's a HUGE device to generate such RF power, not to mention the necessary equipment to create the power being consumed. IF they just had randomly pointed some dish at us, pumping a few million watts, the duration of the signal seems to make that unlikely. This wasn't an ET phoning earth, either on purpose or mistake.
Chances are that this is simply a naturally occurring RF signal or something which is NOT from this star. It was just too powerful considering the 94 light years it traveled.. That it happens to come from the general direction of some start without a known habitable planet is just an interesting fact. If we had a rocky planet in the habitable zone involved, it would interesting, but again unlikely to be anything but naturally caused RF.
My money is on some side lobe leakage and the janitor having a midnight snack of microwaved popcorn... But I guess we will have to wait for the rest of the data to know for sure..
Rumor? Yea, call me back in November. They have zero credibility and I doubt they have anything truly earth shaking that's provable.
Not that being true is a prerequisite to do political damage to somebody...I'm sure they will drop something, but it's likely to just be some useless junk they try to spin into the news cycle at the appropriate time. It won't turn out to be anything.
I was not aware they ever did any vetting, and if they did, what their standard of care was
Of course they do vetting... They ask two questions... 1. Is it a good story (not true, just plausible is all that's required)? You can make it up as a total work of fiction, but if SOMEBODY might think it's true you meet this requirement. 2. Will it draw attention to us? It doesn't matter if it's good or bad attention.
Unless your story meets these standards, forget it.... Well, unless you are willing to pay something for it. Websites and press releases cost money you know.
You seriously miss my point... I'm not claiming coal is clean here.. I'm claiming that solar and wind are NOT without environmental impact when you consider the complete lifecycle of the equipment. Photovoltaic solar is incredibly messy.. Perhaps you don't care because that "mess" is located half a world away (in China) and not in your back yard? The production and maintenance of wind turbines is similar in it's environmental impact and being made from huge amounts of fiberglass will be a HUGE mess to get rid of.. Then there is all the hydraulic oil and lubricants that keep these things pointed in the right direction and the blades turning.... And that's just for starters. Surely you see that even these methods of energy production are not without their problems.
Now if you want to start making noise about what's "cleaner" then have at it with somebody else. Coal is pretty messy stuff, but it's cheap and plentiful. Natural Gas is much cleaner, just not as cheap. Solar is VERY expensive and a pretty big mess too. Wind is not without it's long and short term impacts. Just admit to yourself that "CLEAN ENERGY" doesn't really exist and never will if you are being honest about the total lifecycle of the equipment.
I hate to break it to folks, there is no such thing coming.
The industrial use and production of energy is a messy business, both environmentally and financially. This will not change.
Consider the recent advent of two major "clean" energy alternatives, solar and wind. They are FAR from "clean" environmentally no matter how you slice them. Photovoltaic solar is really a horrible thing for the environment. Manufacturing and scrapping of solar cells is a messy thing and creating and operating those "let's build a huge array of mirrors to focus the sunlight to make something really hot thing is even worse as it takes huge swaths of land, has a serious issue with local wildlife and is *really* expensive. Wind isn't all that much better. It takes large areas of land, puts substantial structures on it and has a detrimental affect on the local environment too (killing birds, bats, bugs and such).
About the only real hope here is fusion, but we are a LONG way from even being able to field an operating industrial level facility so there is no way we can judge the environmental impact of such a thing. I can tell you that right now, they are pretty messy, with superconducting magnets and emitting radiation.
"Clean" energy is like "Free" food. It doesn't really exist.
Because when the enemy takes out your satellites you can't communicate anymore. And if you can't command and control, you've lost.
Quite right.. Which is why the Iraqi Army lost two back to back conflicts with the USA. The Command And Control networks where degraded to the point of ineffectiveness within an hour of the bombing starting. They where reduced to passing notes and carrier pidgins which left the front line troops with no backup and no way to coordinate the hasty retreat they so desperately needed.
I thought the point of the article was somebody making the claim that they cannot void your warranty without proving your software load caused the issue?
Give me a Cisco over a Dell for reliable performance and ease of finding people who can support it.
Cisco is the "rock solid" hardware and software vendor of choice in routing and switching. They are not the fastest, they are not the cheapest, but they are the most reliable routing and switching platforms going, at least that's how they are historically seen. Other vendors are starting to approach their reputation of course, but if reliable is what you are buying and you don't really care about the cost, you still buy Cisco.
Now if cost is your driver, you are going to be buying junk like Netgear "pro safe" offerings, which are functional (up to a point), but hard to manage and despite the "life time warranty" fail often. Yes, I know this because... I use both...