Wait, SpaceX is getting into the space *tourism* market?
Really?
I believe they're supposed to fly Dragons to Bigelow's space station in a few years, if Bigelow can afford to launch it.
Its listed in their upcoming flight manifest, FWIW. But IIRC, its on the flight schedule *before* the man-rating flights of Dragon, so I would assume the launches they've got planned are to put more Bigelow test modules into orbit.
I've not seen anything that suggests Bigelow is even remotely close to actually manning their modules.
Well, to be fair, it can cost a lot of money to support all the browsers if you have lousy developers. Its easy to write code the right way the first time, but if you write it the wrong way, it costs a lot of money to keep twiddling with things.
Replacing their developers with people who have better knowledge/skills would be cheaper than throwing $100k at a problem that shouldn't have existed to begin with.
Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away. Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way. But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.
The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.
That's because slot machines don't mislead on the odds. They have regulations and have to have specific odds - 98% payback for Vegas slots for example. They are regularly inspected to ensure that. You lose 2% playing slots in the long run, basically. The odds are known. They aren't presented as different numbers than they actually are, and are public knowledge for all casinos.
Not to nit, but 98% is unheard of in Vegas. CT requires close to that, in aggregate, but Vegas is WAY less than that. (Its been a while since I looked, but IIRC it was in the 70%'s.)
Yeah, their space program is such a joke. All they did was put the first satellite in space, first orbit, first man and woman in space, first space station, first probes on Venus and Mars--in fact, pretty much every space "first" except man on the moon. And they're currently the only country in the world capable of even putting a man in orbit. Ha, ha, what a joke! Let's all laugh at them!
And the Italians used to rule most of Europe and the Middle East. Your point?
Russia's space program hasn't done anything but produce small incremental improvements on *Soviet* technology. Technology built by a country under the auspices of its military that *no longer exists*. Technology built using quantities of labor and resources that are no longer available to it.
If you believe for an instant that the current space program in Russia could do something like this, you're completely ignorant of the reality of the existing space program in Russia or its history. (You'd be equally ignorant if you thought NASA could do it either -- it couldn't... not even close. Technical ability has no bearing on the political or economic realities of a program like that.)
Russia is a 3rd world country that managed a historic semblance of technology and industry through near slavery of its population, and is in perpetual decline, run by criminals with delusions of grandeur.
This has as much reality behind it as North Korea claiming they're going to settle Venus.
I'm sick and tired of these banks screwing over the little guy.
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, these companies truly represent the epitome of corporate greed and corruption in america.
They're not screwing over the little guy. They're taking advantage of the greed of the little guy, the exact same thing the little guys are trying to do. It was no different with the housing bubble. Greed (and absolutely nothing more) drove the middle class to suck money out of their houses to live lavish lifestyles VASTLY beyond their means. Did the banks profit off that greed? Sure, but the trillions of dollars that were lost in the housing market were spent by the homeowners on vacations, $40k cars, flat screen TVs and other such things that someone making $50k a year *shouldn't have*. Period. A few investment bankers racking up seven figure bonuses isn't even a fraction of a percent of the money that was stolen the greed of the "99%".
Plenty of people made lots of money on it -- institutional investors and professionals. Private amateur investors are universally told IPOs are a *bad* idea to invest in. Greed drove a lot of morons to invest money on a "sure thing".
The FB IPO dragged down a bunch of other solid stocks, which have all rebounded. If you bought AAPL the day before the FB IPO, you've already made almost 7% -- in four days. A lot of other stocks were similarly pulled down by the market wanting to realize some gains and shift money into FB. Other people shorted FB, knowing the price was at least 2-3x what could be justified. (And the IPO was far too big for single-investor hype to drive the prices up that far.)
I choose to pay about 25% more for my electricity to have 100% renewable. The extra $20 a month isn't a big deal to me, and while I'm not a dirty enviro-hippy, I do think its a matter of being responsible. I can afford to pay extra for it, so I do.
People choosing to do things like that (buy clean electricity, the people who bought the early hybrid cars, people buying the pure electric and extended range electric cars etc) help to fund the growth of the technology where it can become ubiquitous. (Or, as another example, the people who pay $250k for a ride on Virgin Galactic -- its all the same.)
I think the main problem is application developers not understanding anything about database theory. The vast majority of databases I encounter are not normalized at all, and it's almost always because they were designed by a developer with no database background.
Or a developer who is experienced enough to know how bad an idea an overly normalized database is for most applications.
In for loops, and anyone who uses it has to pay me lots of money. I'll let them use it and as soon as they start making money I'll show up at their door to collect their soul.
If GM had spent that money on a bit of engineering to get their cars a bit closer to the efficiency of European cars, perhaps people would buy them more? No amount of avertising money will get enough people to buy yesterdecades technology cars
If people in the US cared about efficiency, GM would. But our gas prices are half what they are in Europe, so people don't really care. (And, for what its worth, the current crop of GM cars -- even in the US -- are pretty nice and competitive with other manufacturers, when equipped the same way. You can't judge the brand on the pieces of shit that end up on rental lots.)
GM is very successful selling fuel efficient cars overseas because that's what people buy. You're not going to find a Chevy Cruze decked out to the nines in the US because people in the US won't spend (in any real quantity) $30k on a compact car the way they will in Europe. That's the same plight Ford has had for a decade with cars like the Focus. The top of the line Focus in Europe is a NICE near luxury compact sports sedan. The top of the line in the US is (or was) a previous-generation platform with a lot less features because people just don't buy cars like that.
That's starting to change -- BMW's 1 series and Audi's 3 series have been having moderate success, as examples. But success to Audi and BMW are sales numbers that would be considered total failures to GM.
Modern planes, and other transport/engineering structures, are moving to composites. Which are layered, printed, sometimes pressure baked and squeezed into form. But no longer forged on this scale.
While these machines are awesome, I've wandered along a car body stamping line and watched plates go from a flat sheet to a car door in 100meters, they are becoming less necessary to us. They will still be needed, of course, for some jobs where only such a monster can help, but I think the US should look on these as potential future museum pieces, with nostalgia for a bygone age of megaengineering, rather than a source of future industrial dominance.
Even a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry would help you understand how you're wrong. There are fundamental differences at the atomic level between things that are cast, forged, and "printed" in the manner that modern metal-based 3D printing works. The Venn diagram of things forged metal is good for and composites are good for has some overlap, but not a lot.
Thankfully, the engineers who are actually building things know the difference.
Confusingly in Australia, the Liberal Party are the conservatives and the Labor Party are the liberals (with the Greens to the left of them).
Of course, our Liberal Party would probably be to the left of the US's congressional democrats on most issues..
--Q
That's the real issue. The US is so conservative, our labels don't sync up well with the rest of the world, especially in the last 25 years. Case in point: Reagan's positions would make him center or left of center in the *Democrat* party these days. The US right has more in common now with the Taliban than what was traditionally considered "conservative" for most of the US' history.
The headline is trying to incite a backlash, but this is a reflection of the decline of optical drives and the rise of tablets.
Your first statement is correct. Your second is not. Why? Windows 7 can't play them, nor can XP out of the box. Its a non-story hyped up for ad views because of an Anti-MS trolling on here.
Very few people disagree with the premise that the climate is warming.
Untrue -- that's a VERY recent (in the last year or two) change because the made up science people were using against warming was becoming unsupportable *even to the political base they were trying to influence*. To the tactics were changed from "its not warming" to "its not us doing it".
Where the disagreement is, is if that warming is a natural part of earths long term weather patterns and how much effect CO2 is having on speeding up the process.
No, among working climatologists, there's no disagreement. In fact, among anyone who has even a cursory understanding of thermodynamics, there's no disagreement. The tiny percentage of "climatologists" you see who publish papers suggesting otherwise are doing it because controversy will get you published, and its a publish-or-perish industry. And there's a LOT of money being paid to people who aren't otherwise being successful in the field to continue publishing bad science.
Also, they question the results of the warming... predicted increased hurricane strength and frequency have not come about as we'd expected.
Don't use the word "we" if you're not someone who holds a degree in climatology.
The only optimism I have is in that the one thing scientists have a proven track record of if being absolutely lousy at predicting the weather.
So, no degree in climatology. Climatologists don't have anything to do with predicting the weather -- those are meteorologists. People in either field know that. (And people in either field also know the current global climate models predict an increase in energy in the weather systems which produces strong, not greater numbers, of storms -- on average. Someone trained in climatology knows what "on average" means relative to the work a meteorologist does, too.)
George Colony who blogged that Apple would decline in the post-Jobs era.
Since day one of the Macintosh, or you might say day one of the IBM PC, people have been predicting the demise of Apple. With every new model and every new OS, legions of entrenched industry analysts stood up and said with certainty..."whoa, this may be the end of Apple".
I guess if they just keep saying that, one day it will be true and they can pat themselves on the back for being so prescient.
Well, to be fair, the first post-Jobs era at Apple did almost sink the company. Microsoft, ironically enough, is a big part of the reason Apple made it out of the mid 90's in business. And if you talk to their shareholders now, most of them will tell you that, while the post-Jobs era now has been good from a stock value and revenue standpoint, its been pretty damn concerning from a mid-term to long-term innovation and investment standpoint. Look at the pace of "real" innovation that was happening at Apple for the ten years before Jobs' departure, and look at the pace now. That should have people worried. "Innovation" now is "hype up the technology developed by a company we're suing (Samsung's high-resolution panel)" and "we're in 150 markets". Software innovation is dried up -- they're rolling out largely features that came from Android and WP7, implemented in the jailbroken community, and absorbed much later by Apple.
Apple and MS have swapped roles now -- Apple is coasting on customer hype and its near monopoly, and Microsoft is the nimble innovator. And as someone who has a lot of stock in both, I have this lingering sense of dread that both companies are going to somehow screw this up.
You sound as though you think the lower classes don't pay taxes. It's not that they're not paying their share (they are), they're not making their share especially considering the difficult and manual nature of many low-paying jobs. Sales tax forces even the homeless to pay as much for their goods as the richest among us and it's shameful.
Shameful in your opinion. I, on the other hand, think its shameful to take from the efforts of one person to make up for the lack of efforts of another.
Sales tax is an assault on the poor (and to a lesser extent the middle class), and I've been pretty upset to see it encroaching on the internet. I've always thought we should restrict sales tax to "luxury" items like furniture, electronics and so on.
Although I guess that's largely the type of thing Amazon carries, so maybe I shouldn't be so worked up about it after all.
If someone is so poor as to "deserve" not pay their share of maintaining the infrastructure they use, what are they buying from Amazon?
Youtube converts everything to 30fps, and rarely can actually play back at 30fps, anyway.
If you right click on the viewer and watch the video info, you can see the attempted frame rate (never more than 30), and the actual playback rate (rarely 30).
I though the hard part of making a space plane was that reentry is still a burn in problem. There is no way to slowly glide into the atmosphere without having to be fire and melt proof.
Strictly speaking, that's not true. The heat happens because the atmosphere is used to slow the spacecraft down from orbital speeds. Its massively cheaper than carrying your own fuel to slow down. If you could slow from 17000mph to 0mph at the same rate you accelerated up from the ground, you'd have dropped most of your speed before the atmosphere got that thick and you'd just fall at terminal velocity.
Not that it helps with this scenario, but if the asteroid miners eventually get hydrogen and oxygen available in-orbit, it theoretically opens up more possibilities for how one de-orbits.
Slashdot Mirror
Virgin Galatic's billionaire is Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Records fame. Paul Allen invested in Burt's SpaceshipOne and the Allen Radio Telescope.
Never let facts get in the way of a perfectly good opportunity for a rant against someone or something associated with Microsoft on Slashdot!
Wait, SpaceX is getting into the space *tourism* market?
Really?
I believe they're supposed to fly Dragons to Bigelow's space station in a few years, if Bigelow can afford to launch it.
Its listed in their upcoming flight manifest, FWIW. But IIRC, its on the flight schedule *before* the man-rating flights of Dragon, so I would assume the launches they've got planned are to put more Bigelow test modules into orbit.
I've not seen anything that suggests Bigelow is even remotely close to actually manning their modules.
A system where they are fired and sent to jail for 20 years as a federal crime would help a bit as well.
The way unions control things here, they'd probably be sent to jail for 20 years and not be fired... and continue to collect pay.
Well, to be fair, it can cost a lot of money to support all the browsers if you have lousy developers. Its easy to write code the right way the first time, but if you write it the wrong way, it costs a lot of money to keep twiddling with things.
Replacing their developers with people who have better knowledge/skills would be cheaper than throwing $100k at a problem that shouldn't have existed to begin with.
Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away. Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way. But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.
The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.
That's because slot machines don't mislead on the odds. They have regulations and have to have specific odds - 98% payback for Vegas slots for example. They are regularly inspected to ensure that. You lose 2% playing slots in the long run, basically. The odds are known. They aren't presented as different numbers than they actually are, and are public knowledge for all casinos.
Not to nit, but 98% is unheard of in Vegas. CT requires close to that, in aggregate, but Vegas is WAY less than that. (Its been a while since I looked, but IIRC it was in the 70%'s.)
Yeah, their space program is such a joke. All they did was put the first satellite in space, first orbit, first man and woman in space, first space station, first probes on Venus and Mars--in fact, pretty much every space "first" except man on the moon. And they're currently the only country in the world capable of even putting a man in orbit. Ha, ha, what a joke! Let's all laugh at them!
And the Italians used to rule most of Europe and the Middle East. Your point?
Russia's space program hasn't done anything but produce small incremental improvements on *Soviet* technology. Technology built by a country under the auspices of its military that *no longer exists*. Technology built using quantities of labor and resources that are no longer available to it.
If you believe for an instant that the current space program in Russia could do something like this, you're completely ignorant of the reality of the existing space program in Russia or its history. (You'd be equally ignorant if you thought NASA could do it either -- it couldn't... not even close. Technical ability has no bearing on the political or economic realities of a program like that.)
Russia is a 3rd world country that managed a historic semblance of technology and industry through near slavery of its population, and is in perpetual decline, run by criminals with delusions of grandeur.
This has as much reality behind it as North Korea claiming they're going to settle Venus.
I'm sick and tired of these banks screwing over the little guy.
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, these companies truly represent the epitome of corporate greed and corruption in america.
They're not screwing over the little guy. They're taking advantage of the greed of the little guy, the exact same thing the little guys are trying to do. It was no different with the housing bubble. Greed (and absolutely nothing more) drove the middle class to suck money out of their houses to live lavish lifestyles VASTLY beyond their means. Did the banks profit off that greed? Sure, but the trillions of dollars that were lost in the housing market were spent by the homeowners on vacations, $40k cars, flat screen TVs and other such things that someone making $50k a year *shouldn't have*. Period. A few investment bankers racking up seven figure bonuses isn't even a fraction of a percent of the money that was stolen the greed of the "99%".
Plenty of people made lots of money on it -- institutional investors and professionals. Private amateur investors are universally told IPOs are a *bad* idea to invest in. Greed drove a lot of morons to invest money on a "sure thing".
The FB IPO dragged down a bunch of other solid stocks, which have all rebounded. If you bought AAPL the day before the FB IPO, you've already made almost 7% -- in four days. A lot of other stocks were similarly pulled down by the market wanting to realize some gains and shift money into FB. Other people shorted FB, knowing the price was at least 2-3x what could be justified. (And the IPO was far too big for single-investor hype to drive the prices up that far.)
I choose to pay about 25% more for my electricity to have 100% renewable. The extra $20 a month isn't a big deal to me, and while I'm not a dirty enviro-hippy, I do think its a matter of being responsible. I can afford to pay extra for it, so I do.
People choosing to do things like that (buy clean electricity, the people who bought the early hybrid cars, people buying the pure electric and extended range electric cars etc) help to fund the growth of the technology where it can become ubiquitous. (Or, as another example, the people who pay $250k for a ride on Virgin Galactic -- its all the same.)
I think the main problem is application developers not understanding anything about database theory. The vast majority of databases I encounter are not normalized at all, and it's almost always because they were designed by a developer with no database background.
Or a developer who is experienced enough to know how bad an idea an overly normalized database is for most applications.
In for loops, and anyone who uses it has to pay me lots of money. I'll let them use it and as soon as they start making money I'll show up at their door to collect their soul.
Thankfully I always use "x" for my loops.
If GM had spent that money on a bit of engineering to get their cars a bit closer to the efficiency of European cars, perhaps people would buy them more? No amount of avertising money will get enough people to buy yesterdecades technology cars
If people in the US cared about efficiency, GM would. But our gas prices are half what they are in Europe, so people don't really care. (And, for what its worth, the current crop of GM cars -- even in the US -- are pretty nice and competitive with other manufacturers, when equipped the same way. You can't judge the brand on the pieces of shit that end up on rental lots.)
GM is very successful selling fuel efficient cars overseas because that's what people buy. You're not going to find a Chevy Cruze decked out to the nines in the US because people in the US won't spend (in any real quantity) $30k on a compact car the way they will in Europe. That's the same plight Ford has had for a decade with cars like the Focus. The top of the line Focus in Europe is a NICE near luxury compact sports sedan. The top of the line in the US is (or was) a previous-generation platform with a lot less features because people just don't buy cars like that.
That's starting to change -- BMW's 1 series and Audi's 3 series have been having moderate success, as examples. But success to Audi and BMW are sales numbers that would be considered total failures to GM.
Modern planes, and other transport/engineering structures, are moving to composites. Which are layered, printed, sometimes pressure baked and squeezed into form. But no longer forged on this scale.
While these machines are awesome, I've wandered along a car body stamping line and watched plates go from a flat sheet to a car door in 100meters, they are becoming less necessary to us. They will still be needed, of course, for some jobs where only such a monster can help, but I think the US should look on these as potential future museum pieces, with nostalgia for a bygone age of megaengineering, rather than a source of future industrial dominance.
Even a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry would help you understand how you're wrong. There are fundamental differences at the atomic level between things that are cast, forged, and "printed" in the manner that modern metal-based 3D printing works. The Venn diagram of things forged metal is good for and composites are good for has some overlap, but not a lot.
Thankfully, the engineers who are actually building things know the difference.
he's a "big L" Liberal.
Confusingly in Australia, the Liberal Party are the conservatives and the Labor Party are the liberals (with the Greens to the left of them).
Of course, our Liberal Party would probably be to the left of the US's congressional democrats on most issues..
--Q
That's the real issue. The US is so conservative, our labels don't sync up well with the rest of the world, especially in the last 25 years. Case in point: Reagan's positions would make him center or left of center in the *Democrat* party these days. The US right has more in common now with the Taliban than what was traditionally considered "conservative" for most of the US' history.
The headline is trying to incite a backlash, but this is a reflection of the decline of optical drives and the rise of tablets.
Your first statement is correct. Your second is not. Why? Windows 7 can't play them, nor can XP out of the box.
Its a non-story hyped up for ad views because of an Anti-MS trolling on here.
I'm going to sue for every stock I have that has lost value.
And when I'm done, I'm going to sue all the companies who didn't go up as much as I would've liked!
I'll be rich!
Very few people disagree with the premise that the climate is warming.
Untrue -- that's a VERY recent (in the last year or two) change because the made up science people were using against warming was becoming unsupportable *even to the political base they were trying to influence*. To the tactics were changed from "its not warming" to "its not us doing it".
Where the disagreement is, is if that warming is a natural part of earths long term weather patterns and how much effect CO2 is having on speeding up the process.
No, among working climatologists, there's no disagreement. In fact, among anyone who has even a cursory understanding of thermodynamics, there's no disagreement. The tiny percentage of "climatologists" you see who publish papers suggesting otherwise are doing it because controversy will get you published, and its a publish-or-perish industry. And there's a LOT of money being paid to people who aren't otherwise being successful in the field to continue publishing bad science.
Also, they question the results of the warming... predicted increased hurricane strength and frequency have not come about as we'd expected.
Don't use the word "we" if you're not someone who holds a degree in climatology.
The only optimism I have is in that the one thing scientists have a proven track record of if being absolutely lousy at predicting the weather.
So, no degree in climatology. Climatologists don't have anything to do with predicting the weather -- those are meteorologists. People in either field know that. (And people in either field also know the current global climate models predict an increase in energy in the weather systems which produces strong, not greater numbers, of storms -- on average. Someone trained in climatology knows what "on average" means relative to the work a meteorologist does, too.)
George Colony who blogged that Apple would decline in the post-Jobs era.
Since day one of the Macintosh, or you might say day one of the IBM PC, people have been predicting the demise of Apple. With every new model and every new OS, legions of entrenched industry analysts stood up and said with certainty..."whoa, this may be the end of Apple".
I guess if they just keep saying that, one day it will be true and they can pat themselves on the back for being so prescient.
Well, to be fair, the first post-Jobs era at Apple did almost sink the company. Microsoft, ironically enough, is a big part of the reason Apple made it out of the mid 90's in business. And if you talk to their shareholders now, most of them will tell you that, while the post-Jobs era now has been good from a stock value and revenue standpoint, its been pretty damn concerning from a mid-term to long-term innovation and investment standpoint. Look at the pace of "real" innovation that was happening at Apple for the ten years before Jobs' departure, and look at the pace now. That should have people worried. "Innovation" now is "hype up the technology developed by a company we're suing (Samsung's high-resolution panel)" and "we're in 150 markets". Software innovation is dried up -- they're rolling out largely features that came from Android and WP7, implemented in the jailbroken community, and absorbed much later by Apple.
Apple and MS have swapped roles now -- Apple is coasting on customer hype and its near monopoly, and Microsoft is the nimble innovator. And as someone who has a lot of stock in both, I have this lingering sense of dread that both companies are going to somehow screw this up.
You sound as though you think the lower classes don't pay taxes. It's not that they're not paying their share (they are), they're not making their share especially considering the difficult and manual nature of many low-paying jobs. Sales tax forces even the homeless to pay as much for their goods as the richest among us and it's shameful.
Shameful in your opinion. I, on the other hand, think its shameful to take from the efforts of one person to make up for the lack of efforts of another.
Sales tax is an assault on the poor (and to a lesser extent the middle class), and I've been pretty upset to see it encroaching on the internet. I've always thought we should restrict sales tax to "luxury" items like furniture, electronics and so on.
Although I guess that's largely the type of thing Amazon carries, so maybe I shouldn't be so worked up about it after all.
If someone is so poor as to "deserve" not pay their share of maintaining the infrastructure they use, what are they buying from Amazon?
Youtube converts everything to 30fps, and rarely can actually play back at 30fps, anyway.
If you right click on the viewer and watch the video info, you can see the attempted frame rate (never more than 30), and the actual playback rate (rarely 30).
I though the hard part of making a space plane was that reentry is still a burn in problem. There is no way to slowly glide into the atmosphere without having to be fire and melt proof.
Strictly speaking, that's not true. The heat happens because the atmosphere is used to slow the spacecraft down from orbital speeds. Its massively cheaper than carrying your own fuel to slow down. If you could slow from 17000mph to 0mph at the same rate you accelerated up from the ground, you'd have dropped most of your speed before the atmosphere got that thick and you'd just fall at terminal velocity.
Not that it helps with this scenario, but if the asteroid miners eventually get hydrogen and oxygen available in-orbit, it theoretically opens up more possibilities for how one de-orbits.
China has approximately 400 million people in its middle class, and growing.
Yes, people will develop applications for it.