On the flipside, it would be kind of nice to have a.nut domain for all the right-wing neocons and nutjobs out there. It would be easier to just block anything in that TLD
It says much that you only wish to block the whackos and nutjobs that you (by inference) disagree with. (Which is also why the.eco TLD shouldn't be run by any but a neutral authority. The possibilities of it being run by the Thought Police are fairly high.)
organizations should have claim to an entire TLD? Even if they "sit down together", that's still an awful lot of authority being placed in the hands of a very few people.
Indeed. The potential for the.eco TLD to be run by the Green Thought Police is very high.
Considering that that was before the 465 million government loan, one could assume that investors are probably very happy with their potential.
True, but having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what I posted. (As in Duh!, if the investors weren't happy with the potential they never would have invested in the first place.)
A business is an ongoing concern usually worth far more than its raw assets. The original investors all certainly knew that the company would take many years to reach a profit.
Again - true, but having absolutely nothing to do with what I posted. (As in Duh!, you sure have a grasp of the obvious and an ability to parrot phrases.)
They are ripe for a high price buyout, especially if they successfully complete the Model S. The original investors will probably make more than 10x their original investment.
The former is an assumption - as a company with a paper profit and with (at a minimum) half a billion dollars in obligations isn't high on the bargain list. The latter is a drug addled fantasy as a purchase price of two billion plus dollars is generally reserved for high performing or very high potential companies, not for startups with a paper profit, a few million in cash flow, and heavy obligations.
We aren't even talking 18 months after they delivered their first car they showed a profit!
A profit that's almost certainly a purely paper one, representing a loss in real terms.
Ask any investor if they are happy or disappointed and I'll bet you couldn't wipe the grin off their faces.
If I were an investor, I'd have a very grim look on my face - and a burning desire to take a very close look at the books. But then I have an accountant in the family, and an understanding of some of the tricks they play to create a 'profit' where none exists. (And unlike you and like any intelligent investor, I'm seeking truth not spin and 'jam tomorrow'.)
How much geekier can you get than an electric car???
If an electric car is the peak of geekdom - how far the geeks have fallen.
No, the problem is that formerly there was a gradient across adolescence from "kid - not responsible" to "adult - responsible". Today, there is a much sharper line from "teenager - not responsible" to "adult - responsible".
The upshot of this is that teenagers never face a steadily increasing slope of responsibility and severity of punishment that prepares them for the adult word. (And the coddling isn't just parental - by slow steps it's largely become societal.)
Any guesses as to how many more people will start following "Cyxymu" solely because of this attack? It's called The Streisand Effect
No, it's called a 'fad' Hawthorne01, and while real it's also temporary, ineffective, and meaningless. Just like the Iranian 'revolution' of a few weeks back, the only result is a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing - which will vanish like the morning dew as soon as the 'nets attention is diverted by the next shiny thing.
700 odd followers on Twitter? That and 3.95 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Similarly, Google lives by its search engine, and people at Google know it. There is nothing more important to Google than returning good search results, and if somebody else starts returning better ones Google is in deep trouble.
In some fantasy world where the bulk of Google's income didn't come from advertising on other people's sites, sure. But we don't live in that fantasy world.
This is 2009, Google hasn't been a search company in years.
No, real individual servers, your own individual server box, 10mb direct connection to the internet, with 100mb available for $10 more per month... the virtual deals are something like $70 a YEAR (lower with a long-term commitment).
Sorry, but you aren't getting a real full power server for $69/mo. Either somebody is selling you some snake oil, or they have some Really Big customers subsidizing everyone else. That monthly price doesn't even make enough money to cover replacement costs for a half decent laptop.
And I've been in one of their buildings (they have 3 locally) - VERY nice, modern, independent power, and calls to tech support at 3am get answered by a human being. When you have tens of thousands of REAL individual servers (not virtual) on one location, you can afford those nice extras.
Only if you are pulling in a lot more than $69/mo per box, or if you're cheaping out somewhere else can you afford those nice 'extras'.
As for content, just because you're an ignorant fuck doesn't mean the rest of us are. You need to get out more.
If NASA hadn't killed promising R&D programs like the X-33 (VentureStar), we would already have replaced the Shuttle with a system which reduced flight costs substantially, improved safety and reliability, has shorter turn-around times, and can fly more often.
All I can say is "the grass is always greener" and "sour grapes". The X-33, like the Shuttle, had too many untested/unproven technologies to result in a craft that was cheaper/safer/more reliable/etc... It's almost certain it would have been a white elephant. Though to be fair, a new generation of white elephant isn't entirely a bad thing as we won't ever develop the requisite technologies without actually flying multiple generations of craft.
Which, by the way, is what is needed to help stimulate a growing space economy.
The space economy is already a multi-billion dollar affair. Most proponents of improved space access like to pretend the existing economy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, but it does. Mainly what they are trying to do is redefine 'space economy' as equivalent to 'space activities other than that done existing big aerospace corporation', even when the new startups are doing or planning on doing the same activity.
Or to put it less gently, the amount of doublethink, self delusion, special pleading, and smoke blowing in the space proponent community is astonishing.
It all depends on reduced cost of, and increased reliability of access to orbit.
It also depends on finding a market for all those boosters. Right now, all the bets are on one faltering horse - tourism.
If the objective were to create a private market for access to space, NASA could do this easily. All they need to do is announce that they will buy payload to LEO delivery services from the private market, at market rates. Right now market rates for a single launch of a modest payload are higher than the total size of this program.
NASA, and the USAF, have been buying payload to orbit delivery services (other than the vast minority represented by Shuttle launches) from the private market for decades. (Not to mention B2B transactions by private satellite operators.) Though space proponents don't like to admit it - Boeing, LockMart, etc are private companies.
Remember what I said above about re defining terms and special pleadings? When space proponents say "purchase launches from the private market", that's code for "subsidizing our preferred booster manufacturers".
when you can get 10 Tb of transfer a month for $69, servers and bandwidth are essentially free.
Maybe you can get that from a typical hosting company, who oversells their capacity and bet that nobody uses even a fraction of it and who has one administrator for a whole low rent data center... But real servers (dedicated servers, not virtuals crammed 100 to a box), full capacity pipes, and dedicated administrators with a triple nine data center cost considerably more.
On top of which, you conveniently forgot the cost of providing content - which isn't cheap.
This deal assumes that people will use anything other than Google. There is no difference between zero dollars times 93 percent and zero dollars times 83 percent.
That's a pretty good assumption actually, or more accurately that's a statement of fact rather than an assumption. While Google does get a majority of search traffic, it by no means gets all.
What this guy is likely referring to is that the users weren't willing to spend 5 minutes to learn something that's a little different because they expected OO to work exactly like Word.
Right, users don't like OO so they must be stupid and lazy. You're exactly the kind of slashdotter I was referring to in my original post.
Still, the owners hated it so much, they just weren't used to it and got frustrated enough that even in these tough economic times, they went out and forked over the cash for a copy of MS Word. Of course that's sad, but it happens every day with non-techies.
Why is it sad that they forked out cash for a program that does what they want in they way they wanted it done? While Open Office is free, not all costs are counted in cash dollars. (I've tried three times to shift from Word to OO, and given up in frustration each time.)
I find it annoying the number of 'techies' who refuse to understand that people can and do make their decisions based on things other than politics and religion. Some techies (read "much of Slashdot) are worse than fundies when it comes down to looking down their collective noses at those who don't worship at the same altar they do.
Against all odds and logic, the company is reasonably profitable.
Shame on them - how dare they offend the geeks (who mostly type on keyboards nowadays and imagine that makes them equal to the hardware hackers of yore) by not going out of business? How dare they cater to the exact same mass market that's been their bread and butter for half a century and profit thereby rather than being what they geeks imagine they should be and vanishing into the mists of time?
Seriously Slashdot, get over yourselves. Radio Shack has been primarily a retailer of low end consumer grade electronics since the 1960's. There's no reason at all to assume they shouldn't be profitable and continue to prosper - that market hasn't vanished and is unlikely in the extreme to ever diminish.
How many high pressure CO2 cartridges can you fit in one of those, and would they provide enough thrust to get your device out of earth's orbit?
Not enough, and no. (Note to mention you'll need a guidance and stabilization system weighing much more than the payload available.)
I would imagine you need substantially less thrust to break from earth's orbit for a lowly half-pound payload than say, a space shuttle,
You could break the Shuttle out of Earth's orbit with as little as a half pound of thrust (if you wanted to take a couple of years to do it) - it's total velocity change that matters, not thrust. The velocity change required is identical regardless of size.
You're overstating the Shuttle's reboost utility for the station. Of all of the Shuttle's RCS thrusters it can only use its venier thrusters for reboost maneuvers.
No, I'm precisely stating the facts. You and others keep bringing in irrelevancies about which thrusters can be used and how the Shuttle docks - totally ignoring the fact that the Shuttle can and does provide reboost and regular basis.
The ISS was designed to only really require ATV/HTV/Progress resupply once it was fully armed and operational.
Right - which is why, to extend the Station's life, the Augustine Commission is recommending extending the Shuttle's life span.
I'm utterly amazed by the number of people in this discussion who can plainly look at a wall painted white, and then insist that the wall is painted black.
Then why were there such problems during the post Columbia stand down?
Space flights still take quite a bit of advanced planning - so just sending other spacecraft instead of scheduled Shuttle flights wasn't an immediate option.
They had two years to plan and execute additional reboosts - and they weren't enough. Unless the Russians or the ESA step up to the plate, when the Shuttle goes the station goes - and neither of them have announced any plans for increasing flight rates past 2010 despite years of advance notice.
[the Shuttle provides] a significant amount of reboost capacity.
As established above: No. It's a nice bonus, saving ISS refueling flights (and thereby money) - but it's not vital.
Except, you didn't establish it above. You also ignore that adding reboosts post 2010 involves offloading cargo - at a time when cargo capacity is already at a premium because the Shuttle is going offline.
A Proton launch to LEO costs something around $100 million and delivers 22,000kg - so this gets us over 100 tonnes of payload for the price of one single Shuttle launch (24 tonnes).
The Proton can put that payload into LEO - but 'LEO' isn't 'delivered to station'. Subtract the 15,000-18,00 kg required to achieve the 'delivered to station' part of the mission, and the numbers start looking bleaker. (Hint: There's a reason why the Russians don't use Proton for station support.) It gets even worse when you consider the marginal cost of a Shuttle mission (the real cost of adding a flight to the manifest) is only around $60 million.
I'm not saying it'll be easy, I'm not saying it's possible right now. But it can (and I think will) be done.
Done by who? The Russians aren't going to pay for it, nor will the ESA. And those two, plus the US, are about the only people who can afford to.
I don't see any problems in filling the "Shuttle gap"
You don't see a problem because you are unwilling to face inconvenient facts and substitute handwaving and supposition in their place.
Yes, I did read what I responded to. Even more, and unlike you, I comprehended the meaning.
It doesn't matter one bit what he observed - because he didn't make his decision based on any knowledge of the actual effects of what he observed. Once you take away knowledge, emotion is all that is left. (Ok, may be superstition is left too.)
Had the subject of discussion been what they were fed on the farm, you're comment would be relevant. But the subject of the discussion was what they are fed in feedlots.
And really, organic food has never been about health.
On the contrary. The supposed health benefits were the original selling point (and continue to be a major advertising point), and the environmental benefits came about later.
I've heard your response many times as well - and it's wrong too.
Cows in feedlots (which is where they gain over 60% of the final weight) don't eat grass, they eat grain. They don't gain weight from plant cellulose, they gain weight from starches and sugars.
The grain they eat is grown on farming land that could be used to raise food directly for people, and consumes water that could be used to raise food directly for people. Which means rather than getting full value from that land and water - we get less than 10%.
My biggest concern right now is feedlot beef, I have a cousin who works in an abattoir and he's gone right off eating beef that's been raised in feedlots due to what he sees when he cuts them (mongoloid internal organs for a starters and quite a bit of disease).
In other words, he's made a judgment based entirely on emotion and utterly lacking in scientific support.
Not to mention I have a natural aversion to eating "meat product" grown in a factory part owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation.
The review did not look at pesticides or the environmental impact of different farming practices.
says it all really.
No, it pretty much says nothing. This wasn't an environmental impact review, but a food qualities review. I'd no more expect it to say anything about environmental impact than about the color of the farmer's shirt, as both are irrelevant to the topic.
Slashdot Mirror
It says much that you only wish to block the whackos and nutjobs that you (by inference) disagree with. (Which is also why the .eco TLD shouldn't be run by any but a neutral authority. The possibilities of it being run by the Thought Police are fairly high.)
Indeed. The potential for the .eco TLD to be run by the Green Thought Police is very high.
True, but having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what I posted. (As in Duh!, if the investors weren't happy with the potential they never would have invested in the first place.)
Again - true, but having absolutely nothing to do with what I posted. (As in Duh!, you sure have a grasp of the obvious and an ability to parrot phrases.)
The former is an assumption - as a company with a paper profit and with (at a minimum) half a billion dollars in obligations isn't high on the bargain list. The latter is a drug addled fantasy as a purchase price of two billion plus dollars is generally reserved for high performing or very high potential companies, not for startups with a paper profit, a few million in cash flow, and heavy obligations.
A profit that's almost certainly a purely paper one, representing a loss in real terms.
If I were an investor, I'd have a very grim look on my face - and a burning desire to take a very close look at the books. But then I have an accountant in the family, and an understanding of some of the tricks they play to create a 'profit' where none exists. (And unlike you and like any intelligent investor, I'm seeking truth not spin and 'jam tomorrow'.)
If an electric car is the peak of geekdom - how far the geeks have fallen.
No, the problem is that formerly there was a gradient across adolescence from "kid - not responsible" to "adult - responsible". Today, there is a much sharper line from "teenager - not responsible" to "adult - responsible".
The upshot of this is that teenagers never face a steadily increasing slope of responsibility and severity of punishment that prepares them for the adult word. (And the coddling isn't just parental - by slow steps it's largely become societal.)
No, it's called a 'fad' Hawthorne01, and while real it's also temporary, ineffective, and meaningless. Just like the Iranian 'revolution' of a few weeks back, the only result is a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing - which will vanish like the morning dew as soon as the 'nets attention is diverted by the next shiny thing.
700 odd followers on Twitter? That and 3.95 will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
In some fantasy world where the bulk of Google's income didn't come from advertising on other people's sites, sure. But we don't live in that fantasy world.
This is 2009, Google hasn't been a search company in years.
Sorry, but you aren't getting a real full power server for $69/mo. Either somebody is selling you some snake oil, or they have some Really Big customers subsidizing everyone else. That monthly price doesn't even make enough money to cover replacement costs for a half decent laptop.
Only if you are pulling in a lot more than $69/mo per box, or if you're cheaping out somewhere else can you afford those nice 'extras'.
As for content, just because you're an ignorant fuck doesn't mean the rest of us are. You need to get out more.
All I can say is "the grass is always greener" and "sour grapes". The X-33, like the Shuttle, had too many untested/unproven technologies to result in a craft that was cheaper/safer/more reliable/etc... It's almost certain it would have been a white elephant. Though to be fair, a new generation of white elephant isn't entirely a bad thing as we won't ever develop the requisite technologies without actually flying multiple generations of craft.
The space economy is already a multi-billion dollar affair. Most proponents of improved space access like to pretend the existing economy doesn't exist or doesn't matter, but it does. Mainly what they are trying to do is redefine 'space economy' as equivalent to 'space activities other than that done existing big aerospace corporation', even when the new startups are doing or planning on doing the same activity.
Or to put it less gently, the amount of doublethink, self delusion, special pleading, and smoke blowing in the space proponent community is astonishing.
It also depends on finding a market for all those boosters. Right now, all the bets are on one faltering horse - tourism.
NASA, and the USAF, have been buying payload to orbit delivery services (other than the vast minority represented by Shuttle launches) from the private market for decades. (Not to mention B2B transactions by private satellite operators.) Though space proponents don't like to admit it - Boeing, LockMart, etc are private companies.
Remember what I said above about re defining terms and special pleadings? When space proponents say "purchase launches from the private market", that's code for "subsidizing our preferred booster manufacturers".
Maybe you can get that from a typical hosting company, who oversells their capacity and bet that nobody uses even a fraction of it and who has one administrator for a whole low rent data center... But real servers (dedicated servers, not virtuals crammed 100 to a box), full capacity pipes, and dedicated administrators with a triple nine data center cost considerably more.
On top of which, you conveniently forgot the cost of providing content - which isn't cheap.
That's a pretty good assumption actually, or more accurately that's a statement of fact rather than an assumption. While Google does get a majority of search traffic, it by no means gets all.
Right, users don't like OO so they must be stupid and lazy. You're exactly the kind of slashdotter I was referring to in my original post.
Why is it sad that they forked out cash for a program that does what they want in they way they wanted it done? While Open Office is free, not all costs are counted in cash dollars. (I've tried three times to shift from Word to OO, and given up in frustration each time.)
I find it annoying the number of 'techies' who refuse to understand that people can and do make their decisions based on things other than politics and religion. Some techies (read "much of Slashdot) are worse than fundies when it comes down to looking down their collective noses at those who don't worship at the same altar they do.
Shame on them - how dare they offend the geeks (who mostly type on keyboards nowadays and imagine that makes them equal to the hardware hackers of yore) by not going out of business? How dare they cater to the exact same mass market that's been their bread and butter for half a century and profit thereby rather than being what they geeks imagine they should be and vanishing into the mists of time?
Seriously Slashdot, get over yourselves. Radio Shack has been primarily a retailer of low end consumer grade electronics since the 1960's. There's no reason at all to assume they shouldn't be profitable and continue to prosper - that market hasn't vanished and is unlikely in the extreme to ever diminish.
Not enough, and no. (Note to mention you'll need a guidance and stabilization system weighing much more than the payload available.)
You could break the Shuttle out of Earth's orbit with as little as a half pound of thrust (if you wanted to take a couple of years to do it) - it's total velocity change that matters, not thrust. The velocity change required is identical regardless of size.
Satellites have had commercial applications for decades - it's a multibillion dollar business and has been for decades.
No, I'm precisely stating the facts. You and others keep bringing in irrelevancies about which thrusters can be used and how the Shuttle docks - totally ignoring the fact that the Shuttle can and does provide reboost and regular basis.
Right - which is why, to extend the Station's life, the Augustine Commission is recommending extending the Shuttle's life span.
I'm utterly amazed by the number of people in this discussion who can plainly look at a wall painted white, and then insist that the wall is painted black.
They had two years to plan and execute additional reboosts - and they weren't enough. Unless the Russians or the ESA step up to the plate, when the Shuttle goes the station goes - and neither of them have announced any plans for increasing flight rates past 2010 despite years of advance notice.
Except, you didn't establish it above. You also ignore that adding reboosts post 2010 involves offloading cargo - at a time when cargo capacity is already at a premium because the Shuttle is going offline.
The Proton can put that payload into LEO - but 'LEO' isn't 'delivered to station'. Subtract the 15,000-18,00 kg required to achieve the 'delivered to station' part of the mission, and the numbers start looking bleaker. (Hint: There's a reason why the Russians don't use Proton for station support.) It gets even worse when you consider the marginal cost of a Shuttle mission (the real cost of adding a flight to the manifest) is only around $60 million.
Done by who? The Russians aren't going to pay for it, nor will the ESA. And those two, plus the US, are about the only people who can afford to.
You don't see a problem because you are unwilling to face inconvenient facts and substitute handwaving and supposition in their place.
Yes, I did read what I responded to. Even more, and unlike you, I comprehended the meaning.
It doesn't matter one bit what he observed - because he didn't make his decision based on any knowledge of the actual effects of what he observed. Once you take away knowledge, emotion is all that is left. (Ok, may be superstition is left too.)
Had the subject of discussion been what they were fed on the farm, you're comment would be relevant. But the subject of the discussion was what they are fed in feedlots.
Feedlots != Farms.
On the contrary. The supposed health benefits were the original selling point (and continue to be a major advertising point), and the environmental benefits came about later.
I've heard your response many times as well - and it's wrong too.
Cows in feedlots (which is where they gain over 60% of the final weight) don't eat grass, they eat grain. They don't gain weight from plant cellulose, they gain weight from starches and sugars.
The grain they eat is grown on farming land that could be used to raise food directly for people, and consumes water that could be used to raise food directly for people. Which means rather than getting full value from that land and water - we get less than 10%.
In other words, he's made a judgment based entirely on emotion and utterly lacking in scientific support.
No, that's bias not a 'natural' attitude.
No, it pretty much says nothing. This wasn't an environmental impact review, but a food qualities review. I'd no more expect it to say anything about environmental impact than about the color of the farmer's shirt, as both are irrelevant to the topic.
Progress can do so - at the cost of other cargo.