The last time I looked they had something like a decades worth of "buffer" on hand - yet, each year they breathlessly push the donation campaign as if the lights were going to go out if you didn't donate promptly. This year, as per usual, even though they've met their target - the breathless "donate or Wikipedia dies" continues apace.
That is what people are having a problem with - not with them raising money, but with their misleading tactics.
But certainly there are plenty of components (such as the plastic drive gears in a garage door opener) which can be printed and replaced by consumers.
And how often does the average consumer need to print out weird parts? (And how many of them actually have the skills, experience, and tools to make use of them?)
That is the fundamental limitation of 3D printing - the average consumer doesn't have significant need and/or the relevant skills. The "needs" 3D enthusiasts keep positing will enable the consumer (mass market) adoption are in fact edge cases.
Prusa Research has been pushing the technology closer to a consumer class appliance.
The problem isn't the lack of a consumer class appliance. Never has been. The problem is lack of consumer need or even desire - and that's going to be difficult to overcome. Most people don't need something printed daily, or even weekly. A significant percentage don't need something printed even monthly. There's just no mass market to be had. Other than the maker market (the folks who make cool stuff just because), the only real market in the near term (a decade or so) are other hobbyists (model railroaders, dollhouse builders, etc...) and that market isn't that big and is going to be very tough to crack. 3D printers are nowhere near capable of producing all the components required (and won't be for a good while yet), and the cost of learning a new skillset on top the cash outlay will be a strong deterrent.
The only market for 3D printers in the near term isn't the individual consumer (and likely won't ever be), but the small manufacturer serving niche communities.
Mapping our historical universe is a bit different than defining our observable universe.
Not at all - because they are one and the same. Even looking as close as the Moon, the finite speed of light means we're seeing the past. Looking out to (say) the Andromeda galaxy, it's both observable and millennia in the past. (And M31 is far from the furthest object we can see in distance or in time. We can see much more than "a tiny sliver of our own galaxy".)
We're still doing a lot of this work in the dark, both figuratively and literally.
No, not at all. "This work" is either being done by direct observation, or extrapolated from direct observation. (Which extrapolation is then proved or disproved by further comparison to direct observation.) It's not guesswork.
Uber and Air B&B really had turned into something different than their initial business. These were for people who wanted to do some Parttime work. Rent out their home when they are away. Drive additional people when commuting to work. The the Recession hit, and this became more of a source of income, vs just getting extra spending changes.
Airbnb was founded the same year as the Great Recession, Uber the following year. Though they both paint themselves as "part time supplements", they've been about additional income practically since Day One. The bits about "driving people when commuting" and "renting out while away" have never been anything but marketing.
From TFS: Russia has been the undisputed leader in annual launch rates -- a figure that spoke to the general health of its space program and aerospace industry.
It also speaks to the billions of rubles pumped into the programs by the government (not usually seen as a sign of health). It also speaks to the higher failure rate and generally shorter lifespans of the payloads launched.
I wonder whether making the source code of these probes available to the public, for vetting would help spot bugs like these?
Probably not, as the public wouldn't spend the months needed to study the hardware and interface specifications needed to understand what's going on in the software. Seriously, this is a tightly integrated system not a standalone program - without understanding the system, you can't tell a bug from working as intended.
But if you're asking why people are upset about this, it's because they're completely unhinged and hallucinating.
There, fixed that for you.
They haven't "found" anything - they've made up a bunch of completely unhinged nonsense (of the "substance x in your food is one atom different from dangerous substance y!" level) practically from whole cloth. The only people "creeped out" by this are people already dangerously disconnected from reality.
So, yes: fake news on FB is a problem, or at least a significant annoyance. But the notion that somehow this is limited to stuff from and aimed at right-leaning people in some proportion that, compared to its lefty counterparts, cost Hillary Clinton the election... I call bullshit.
FB is a wasteland of contrived "keeping up with the joneses", people trying to make their lives look larger-than-life, weirdo political rants, cat pictures, endless posts about nothing or anything, and most importantly, almost nothing of any substantive value.
That's not caused by Facebook - that's caused by you having shit taste in friends. My feed is almost exactly the opposite. (Well, modulo the cat pictures but I have a lot of cat people among my friends.)
We're aren't discussing truth, we're discussing facts. Opinions can be subjective, but the truth rarely and the facts never. As I said above, the right wing nutjob sites tell you differently, because that's how they avoid inconvenient facts - by telling the credulous that they're malleable and subjective.
For example several sites have stated that snopes, traditionally the internet bastion of fact-checking, has a strong political bias.
That would be better phrased as "right wing sites (themselves already deeply biased) believe that Snopes has a strong political bias". And their "proof" of that are extended ad hominem attacks against a single staffer and (mostly) unsupported claims. They few claims they do (laughingly) support generally use other, equally deeply biased, sites to "prove" that Snopes is wrong.
Or, in other words, the only people who believe in said bias are those already biased and immunized against the truth.
The article adds that apart from SpaceX, no other U.S. company has offered a rocket for small satellite launches, even though the demand has surged.
Well, no. The demand for smallsats hasn't actually surged, at least not outside the press release, PowerPoint, and blog industries. (There's been a short term spike, but not a long term surge.) The surge has been in demand for microsats - and in a large part that surge has been powered by the availability of cheap rides as a secondary payload on someone else's flight. That being said, there are a number of US companies working towards smallsat launch capability, but it remains to be seen whether their attempts will pan out.
Not mention "inflation" is a weighted average - not all prices inflate at the same rate. (Both NASA and the DoD, for example, maintain their own inflation models because of this.)
The lander's radar got a reflection from the plasma from the decent engine and indicated close proximity to the ground.
Not very likely, even if the engine exhaust was plasma, the geometry of the spacecraft and the low density of the exhaust mitigate against that occurrence.
Slashdot Mirror
This. Plus, it's 2016 not 1976 - and Scientific American is not quite the reputable source it once was.
The last time I looked they had something like a decades worth of "buffer" on hand - yet, each year they breathlessly push the donation campaign as if the lights were going to go out if you didn't donate promptly. This year, as per usual, even though they've met their target - the breathless "donate or Wikipedia dies" continues apace.
That is what people are having a problem with - not with them raising money, but with their misleading tactics.
Their awful UI and their awful selection and their pay-as-you-go (as opposed to all-you-can-eat) model.
That's the real shame here... the Left screaming and hollering about hackers, while trying to pretend the released information doesn't exist.
Looking at the sample content on their website... you didn't miss much.
And how often does the average consumer need to print out weird parts? (And how many of them actually have the skills, experience, and tools to make use of them?)
That is the fundamental limitation of 3D printing - the average consumer doesn't have significant need and/or the relevant skills. The "needs" 3D enthusiasts keep positing will enable the consumer (mass market) adoption are in fact edge cases.
The problem isn't the lack of a consumer class appliance. Never has been. The problem is lack of consumer need or even desire - and that's going to be difficult to overcome. Most people don't need something printed daily, or even weekly. A significant percentage don't need something printed even monthly. There's just no mass market to be had. Other than the maker market (the folks who make cool stuff just because), the only real market in the near term (a decade or so) are other hobbyists (model railroaders, dollhouse builders, etc...) and that market isn't that big and is going to be very tough to crack. 3D printers are nowhere near capable of producing all the components required (and won't be for a good while yet), and the cost of learning a new skillset on top the cash outlay will be a strong deterrent.
The only market for 3D printers in the near term isn't the individual consumer (and likely won't ever be), but the small manufacturer serving niche communities.
Not at all - because they are one and the same. Even looking as close as the Moon, the finite speed of light means we're seeing the past. Looking out to (say) the Andromeda galaxy, it's both observable and millennia in the past. (And M31 is far from the furthest object we can see in distance or in time. We can see much more than "a tiny sliver of our own galaxy".)
No, not at all. "This work" is either being done by direct observation, or extrapolated from direct observation. (Which extrapolation is then proved or disproved by further comparison to direct observation.) It's not guesswork.
Um, no. Much larger than that - more like a considerable way back to the Big Bang.
Airbnb was founded the same year as the Great Recession, Uber the following year. Though they both paint themselves as "part time supplements", they've been about additional income practically since Day One. The bits about "driving people when commuting" and "renting out while away" have never been anything but marketing.
From TFS: Russia has been the undisputed leader in annual launch rates -- a figure that spoke to the general health of its space program and aerospace industry.
It also speaks to the billions of rubles pumped into the programs by the government (not usually seen as a sign of health). It also speaks to the higher failure rate and generally shorter lifespans of the payloads launched.
Probably not, as the public wouldn't spend the months needed to study the hardware and interface specifications needed to understand what's going on in the software. Seriously, this is a tightly integrated system not a standalone program - without understanding the system, you can't tell a bug from working as intended.
There, fixed that for you.
They haven't "found" anything - they've made up a bunch of completely unhinged nonsense (of the "substance x in your food is one atom different from dangerous substance y!" level) practically from whole cloth. The only people "creeped out" by this are people already dangerously disconnected from reality.
Not really, no. It's a problem for everyone around you who would have been warned had the sound been present - but who now won't be.
So what? The difference won't visible to the naked eye. This kind of fake 'news' doesn't belong here.
So much this! My kingdom for mod points today!
That's not caused by Facebook - that's caused by you having shit taste in friends. My feed is almost exactly the opposite. (Well, modulo the cat pictures but I have a lot of cat people among my friends.)
We're aren't discussing truth, we're discussing facts. Opinions can be subjective, but the truth rarely and the facts never. As I said above, the right wing nutjob sites tell you differently, because that's how they avoid inconvenient facts - by telling the credulous that they're malleable and subjective.
An interesting conclusion given I said nothing about the left. And one that, along with the rest of your reply, proves the truth of what I said.
And no, bias and conviction are not the same thing. That's another lie spread by the right in an attempt to avoid the truth.
That would be better phrased as "right wing sites (themselves already deeply biased) believe that Snopes has a strong political bias". And their "proof" of that are extended ad hominem attacks against a single staffer and (mostly) unsupported claims. They few claims they do (laughingly) support generally use other, equally deeply biased, sites to "prove" that Snopes is wrong.
Or, in other words, the only people who believe in said bias are those already biased and immunized against the truth.
Can't argue that point. Or that it's not a Good Thing.
Of course they didn't change their conclusion because the important matters didn't change - she's still white, wealthy, and powerful.
From TFS:
Well, no. The demand for smallsats hasn't actually surged, at least not outside the press release, PowerPoint, and blog industries. (There's been a short term spike, but not a long term surge.) The surge has been in demand for microsats - and in a large part that surge has been powered by the availability of cheap rides as a secondary payload on someone else's flight. That being said, there are a number of US companies working towards smallsat launch capability, but it remains to be seen whether their attempts will pan out.
Not mention "inflation" is a weighted average - not all prices inflate at the same rate. (Both NASA and the DoD, for example, maintain their own inflation models because of this.)
Not very likely, even if the engine exhaust was plasma, the geometry of the spacecraft and the low density of the exhaust mitigate against that occurrence.