I have much more meaningful discussions on G+ than I do FB, partly because the number of followers on G+ is less, so less crap.
That's a function of the people you allow to post on your feed - not the platform. Or, to put it another way, you can't have meaningful discussions on FB because you're an idiot who hasn't bothered to learn how to prevent unwanted people from posting on your page or to limit a particular discussion to a defined subset of people.
Don't blame the platform because you can't be bothered to figure out how use it.
It failed because anyone interested in joining couldn't join because it was Invite Only, then they stopped caring.
And even if you did manage to get an invite - odds are, most of your friends didn't. And even if they did, G+ was very feature incomplete - basically a graphical twitter interface and very little more.
Pretty much every I knew eventually got an account because "someday everyone will have an account, and then it will be worth using"... But even though Google finally opened the gates and let everyone in, nobody really switched over because "well, most of my friends haven't so I'll wait". Google is still waiting for that day, pretty much everyone else has given up.
I base that on the unwillingness of the businesses wanting to pay higher wages which would solve this issue. Or am I incorrect about this?
Like almost everyone else, you're blindly blaming the business and ignoring the other half of the equation - the consumer. How much will Joe or Jane Sixpack pay for a pint of strawberries? That ultimately determines how much the business can pay the picker.
You can't have low prices, high quality, and high wages for the worker - pick two.
Cassini having plutonium fuel was about as close as I can recall, but even that was a blip by comparison to the LHC.
The Cassini flyby was before Facebook and Twitter. Seriously, the rise of clickbait journalism has made it very difficult to discriminate between genuine public concern and the meme-of-the-moment.
I owned stocks that crashed. They recovered again way before I had time to do anything about it.
Good for you! That means you, or funds you own, didn't have a "sell if it drops by so much" or "drops below" order.
But you aren't everyone.
The people who it significantly affected were speculators.
And ordinary people who were invested in those stocks or market indexes, no matter how hard you handwave or blow smoke.
. Yes you could have been invested in one of those companies, but if you have a diverse stock portfolio, what are the chances that all the companies you invested in were the losers in this incident?
More moronic drivel. The claim was "nobody got hurt but speculators", not "nobody lost everything but speculators".
If you only invested in companies that lost a lot of money in this flash crash, you are essentially a speculator (by virtue of only investing in companies that speculate).
Are you really that spectacularly ignorant? The market average went down, which means that market index funds went down - something plenty of people who aren't speculators are invested in. On top of that, several major companies (like Procter & Gamble and General Electric, hardly something that would be invested in "only if you're a speculator") lost significant value.
Unlike other market/housing/banking crashes that really did affect lots of ordinary people, this one really didn't. I don't know a single person (ordinary or otherwise) who lost or gained anything (at least not anything they can recognize).
I hate to be the one to break it you - but you aren't the center of the universe, and the set "people you know" is hardly a significant sample.
Creation is usually influenced or built off earlier creations.
[[Citation Needed]]
Seriously, I'm not buying it. Despite the massive increase in copyright terms over the last few decades - there's been no noticeable drop in the rate of creation of artistic works (books, movies, music, whatever).
In a reality where all the stocks recovered completely at the end of that crash, that would be a valid question. But even in our reality, someone who was using (or the fund they owned shares in was using) an automated system to sell if the price dropped was potentially hurt.
Anyone who owned those stocks, of who owned funds which own those stocks, or who own index stocks, or... really potentially a whole lot of ordinary people, not just "a bunch of wall street [sic] speculators".
Probably the biggest eSports tournament was the 2014 LoL World Championship. It hosted 45,000 people in the stadium, and streamed to over 27 million people.
That still puts it in the lowest tiers of sporting events.
You see, it is often the case here that roads are built for speeds much higher than the actual posted limit. Parameters like lane width, grade, shoulder presence & width, presence/absence of median, etc. all contribute to an intuitive psychological understanding of what an appropriate (and safe) speed is.
I would back date the origin to something closer to the late 19th century as urbanization and cities grew. You had increasing agricultural efficiency allowing more people to live away from the land and more and larger business organizations that required "white collar" jobs to manage the organization -- clerks, accountants, record-keepers, etc.
White collar isn't necessarily middle class - Bob Cratchit was a white collar worker after all. The conflation of the two (with the massive growth of university graduates, white collar jobs, and rising salaries) is largely a post WWII phenomenon.
That was short lived, but a great example of how PCs in many ways decimated a field as a single accountant could now do the work of many. I think they said that long-term it didn't hurt that much because as the ease of which you could create sophisticated models in PC applications became understood, the same number of accountants were now doing vastly more complex accounting jobs.
My favorite example is my wife's job (as it happens, she is an accountant)... Thirty years ago, at about a quarter of it's current size, they had a full time accountant, two bookkeepers, and a filing clerk. Today they have a mostly full time accountant (who also doubles as IT and HR) - and the phone girl who does data entry and filing. The difference is today they have a POS.
Accounting really hasn't changed much in that time, especially for medium and small businesses. It's only the big boys that really go in for heavy duty modeling, for smaller businesses there's just not that much need.
So, the "biggest eSports" tournament isn't even as big or logistically complicated as a lightly attended baseball game here in my mid-sized market town?
Color me unimpressed.
Seriously, as far as "big" events goes, the "World Of Tanks Grand Finals" doesn't even make the needle twitch off the zero peg. And not even the "on a computer" aspect is very interesting here in 2015.
If millions of people die because of inadequate testing then that's the fault of the people who tested the drug. There are plenty of humans who would volunteer for tests with full knowledge and understanding of the risks.
On your planet maybe. But here on Earth we don't allow human testing in the early phases of drug development. And even if they did allow human testing, the volunteers can't possibly have full knowledge and understanding of the risks - because at that stage of the game, that knowledge doesn't exist. That's why we test on animals in the first place.
There are plenty of animals that don't suffer the same was a chimps to, such as mice, that can be used for a lot of the tests.
Where they can be, they already are. Primates are among the expensive and difficult lab animals to maintain, and thus are only used where no other reasonable alternative exists. (Or, again, the world you describe is a very different one from Earth.)
I'm increasingly of the opinion that the notion of a broad middle class is a kind of historical accident caused by the confluence of growth in technology, wide and cheap resource availability and high labor demand. We may be nearing the end of the middle class as we've known it and mostly like it, and returning to a more historical pattern of broad poverty and narrow wealth.
I've been saying that for a decade now - the middle class as we know it today essentially didn't exist within living memory. (That's changing as the Greatest Generation dies off, but my point stands.) It's a product of the post-WWII explosion in technology and consumer demand. But it's the set of conditions that most living Westerners grew up in, and thus they take it for granted that it's theirs by right.
Where they seem to get nervous is over the fact that the jobs increasingly eliminated by automation are jobs that previously required a lot of education and were high wage, white collar jobs. And they're not being replaced by new jobs of the same type, they're being replaced by low-wage jobs that require hard to automate manual skills -- when they're being replaced at all.
That's the big change that's happened right under our noses over the last thirty odd years, and that almost all experts and so close to all of the masses as to make no difference completely missed... not automation (robots, etc... what's usually thought of as automation), but the microprocessor revolution. High skill jobs, formerly requiring college trained professionals (engineers and accountants for example), have vanished at a frightening rate.
In the past, machines replaced "manual labor." Today, machines are replacing "white collared labor." Getting more education won't help you anymore.
It's even worse than that - machines are replacing skilled white collar labor, professionals with degrees like engineers and accountants. Not only will more education not help you anymore, neither necessarily will experience.
It sounds to me like not only the police is wrong by applying for too many uses of the device (of course they do - it's their job to gather as much information about potential criminals as possible), also the courts appear to be wrong by not doing much evaluation of the requests. Now having to handle nine requests a day is a huge number as well (that's before accounting for holidays and weekends), yet no excuse for not following proper procedures.
What's interesting is that you make an assertion... and then act as though that assertion was a fact.
From the face of it, the courts should be more strict. Take more time to properly evaluate each one
One of the things you've failed to account for, there are probably hundreds of judges in a city of a half million - thus it's quite possible to be strict and evaluate each one and still come up with this number. It's a distributed parallel system - what sound like scary huge numbers arise quite easily from a relatively modest number of actors, especially considering the length of time involved.
But the ill-educated (or deeply biased, or prejudiced towards panic*) won't stop and think about these things. Thinking Is Hard.
And, to those moderating, yes - I know the actual number is 4,300. I'm just so damn tired of the level of ignorance so prevalent on Slashdot.
* Actually there's considerable overlap in these categories.
Once momentum of the object has slowed below orbital speed, it should fall towards earth and burn up in the atmosphere.
Slowing it below orbital speed just makes the whole problem 100x harder due to the vastly increased amount of time you need to hold the laser steady on target. All you actually need to do is get the periapsis down to around 200-300km, and atmospheric drag will do the rest.
Tracking should not be that hard as radar aimed weapons have been around for many years.
Tracking isn't the problem - aiming the laser at, and holding it steady on, the target is the problem.
notice how they aren't publishing leaks of any kind of quality for the last several years.
They helped Snowden get out of the US and then from Hong Kong to Russia, and then helped him to stay there with his girlfriend. That was only June 2013, so clearly they have been doing some very useful work in the "last several years".
Nice try, but sorry, no. The grandparent discussed "quality material", not aiding fugitives. Taking a quick glance at Wikipedia, it looks like they stopped releasing anything of note around 2013.
Wikileaks can only leak what people give to them. You can't really blame them for not releasing more stuff, since it's not like they write it themselves.
Which raises the question, why aren't people giving them stuff anymore? Certainly part of it is tinfoil hat paranoia (justified or no) - but I suspect a large part of it is Assange's hijacking Wikileaks to serve as a platform for his ego and fallout from the internal political battles back in 2010 or so.
I was about to say much the same thing... Just because we [residents of the Puget Sound Basin] don't live in a dried brown wasteland like California, that doesn't mean we don't have problems of our own. We've had a series of drier than normal summers (low groundwater recharge), and last winter was (as your link shows) extraordinarily dry (less water coming into the rivers and resevoirs).
Here's a picture I took roughly two years ago showing the normal snowpack on the Olympics around this time of year. (That snow normally persists well into May or June.) But, if you look at this webcam, you can see the much smaller pack we have this year. If you look at The Brothers (just left of center in my picture, almost to the left hand side of the webcam), the difference is particularly stark.
Can you just put enough laser energy on to it to perturb it out of orbit without ablating/vaporizing material?
In theory, yes. Light does exert pressure on objects.... In practice, the pressure is so infinitesimally small that's is much easier* to go the ablation/vaporization route.
That being said, this device isn't actually useful other than as a proof-of-concept ISS's altitude (400km) is low enough that debris is eventually slowed and de-orbited by atmospheric drag, and the 100km range isn't enough to reach the altitude (600km+) where 90% of the long lived junk resides.
* For certain values of "easier", in reality it's not very easy at all.
From TFS: "In the early days of brands on Facebook, it was crucial for companies to garner as many "likes" as possible to boost their image".
It's still like that, except with individual posts rather than pages. If a post doesn't get enough 'likes', 90% of the people following that page will never see it unless they've gone to the trouble of turning notifications on or the page owner has ponied up the bucks to 'boost' the page.
what we're saying is that arranging for velocity AND position to be 'null' at the same time is harder than simply arranging for velocity to be null and position to be +/- 100m(or so).
*Sigh*
I understand what you're saying - but as with my previously reply, you don't grasp the problem.
The appearance of the vehicle "working hard at the last second" during the first attempt was a consequence of running out of hydraulic fluid - and would have occurred regardless of the size of the target. The appearance of the vehicle "working hard at the last second" during the last attempt was a consequence of the throttle valve not operating to spec - and would have occurred regardless of the size of the target.
From the point of view of the final landing sequence it's not all that much easier to arrange for velocity to be null and position to be +/- 100m than it is to arrange the same +/- 1m. Selecting a landing point occurs at a relatively high altitude (and on a, relatively speaking, relaxed timeline) and final trim starts around a kilometer or so up (AIUI). From there, jittering the variables (burn time and timing, gimbal angles, and throttle settings) a tiny amount one way or another to maintain targeting isn't a substantial burden (on the software or the hardware) compared to the much larger problem of nulling your velocities.
You're talking about some kind of articulated arm (which can survive being essentially inside rocket exhaust)
I think you're picturing something different. I'm picturing something pretty big that comes in from the sides, staying well away from the exhaust.
That just makes an already heavy, complex, and expensive system even heavier, more complex, and more expensive than I envisioned.
I do get what he's saying. What neither of you seem to grasp is that the size of the target isn't as relevant as you think, because you have to null your horizontal velocity regardless of the size of the target. It doesn't matter whether you're stopping on a postage stamp or anywhere in a given block - either way you still have to stop. It's the stopping that's problem, not the deciding where to stop. Stopping is very difficult for the Falcon 9 because it's T/W ratio is so far out of the optimal range and a larger target area won't make it all that much easier.
Though if they're that good at targeting, maybe programming up an adaptive 'catcher' robot would work? I'm thinking of something along the lines of 3 arms that have a range of motion, and when the rocket's within a few feet, they gently 'grab' the rocket using shaped and padded interfaces(I'm picturing a semi-circle matching that of the rocket) and provide stability.
That's "good at targeting" a couple of orders of magnitude better than what they've demonstrated to date (which is, pardon my french, already pretty fucking amazing). You're talking about some kind of articulated arm (which can survive being essentially inside rocket exhaust)... Which is, quite frankly, makes things much harder and more complicated and introduces a metric buttload of additional possible points of failure. Much easier to simply re-engineer the throttle valve.
The rest of what you say is generally true, although a larger target *would* help. The advantage of a larger target is that, while you still have to zero your horizontal velocity, you don't have to zero it anywhere terribly precise.
Yeah, you do. Given the narrow footprint and the low CG of the vehicle, if the horizontal velocity wasn't as close to zero as you can get at touchdown - it's very likely to tip over. (Even if you don't damage the landing legs in the process.) The upper part of the vehicle isn't heavy, but it has a very long lever arm.
You can pick an optimal set of thrusts that results in the correct orientation and velocities (horizontal and vertical) without worrying overmuch *where* that series of thrusts has you touching down.
In the end, that makes far less difference than you think because while you can reduce the amount of horizontal velocity that needs to be nulled you cannot eliminate it. (Not without launch criteria that include "near zero wind at the recovery site", which is beyond impractical.) The result is, with the current vehicle, you still have to null horizontal velocity at the last second before touch down. The basic problem is that the vehicle is badly designed for what it's being asked to do.
. Both attempts so far clearly demonstrate the ability to do an excellent good job of targeting a (relatively) tiny barge, but currently, if the rocket would come down even 100' (30m) to one side of its target spot, it needs to induce a horizontal momentum (which requires leaving a vertical attitude as well, it can't just translate sideways) and then null that momentum at the right moment (and fix its attitude). That's hard.
Both times they've hit the barge almost dead center - I fail to see how that's an arguement for a larger landing area since neither failure was caused by the landing area being too small. Both vehicles would have crashed regardless of the size of the landing area due to control system failures. (Attitude control on the first, throttle control on the second.) That's what neither you nor the OP seem to grasp.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a function of the people you allow to post on your feed - not the platform. Or, to put it another way, you can't have meaningful discussions on FB because you're an idiot who hasn't bothered to learn how to prevent unwanted people from posting on your page or to limit a particular discussion to a defined subset of people.
Don't blame the platform because you can't be bothered to figure out how use it.
And even if you did manage to get an invite - odds are, most of your friends didn't. And even if they did, G+ was very feature incomplete - basically a graphical twitter interface and very little more.
Pretty much every I knew eventually got an account because "someday everyone will have an account, and then it will be worth using"... But even though Google finally opened the gates and let everyone in, nobody really switched over because "well, most of my friends haven't so I'll wait". Google is still waiting for that day, pretty much everyone else has given up.
Like almost everyone else, you're blindly blaming the business and ignoring the other half of the equation - the consumer. How much will Joe or Jane Sixpack pay for a pint of strawberries? That ultimately determines how much the business can pay the picker.
You can't have low prices, high quality, and high wages for the worker - pick two.
The Cassini flyby was before Facebook and Twitter. Seriously, the rise of clickbait journalism has made it very difficult to discriminate between genuine public concern and the meme-of-the-moment.
Good for you! That means you, or funds you own, didn't have a "sell if it drops by so much" or "drops below" order.
But you aren't everyone.
And ordinary people who were invested in those stocks or market indexes, no matter how hard you handwave or blow smoke.
More moronic drivel. The claim was "nobody got hurt but speculators", not "nobody lost everything but speculators".
Are you really that spectacularly ignorant? The market average went down, which means that market index funds went down - something plenty of people who aren't speculators are invested in. On top of that, several major companies (like Procter & Gamble and General Electric, hardly something that would be invested in "only if you're a speculator") lost significant value.
I hate to be the one to break it you - but you aren't the center of the universe, and the set "people you know" is hardly a significant sample.
But you are a clueless drooling moron.
[[Citation Needed]]
Seriously, I'm not buying it. Despite the massive increase in copyright terms over the last few decades - there's been no noticeable drop in the rate of creation of artistic works (books, movies, music, whatever).
In a reality where all the stocks recovered completely at the end of that crash, that would be a valid question. But even in our reality, someone who was using (or the fund they owned shares in was using) an automated system to sell if the price dropped was potentially hurt.
Anyone who owned those stocks, of who owned funds which own those stocks, or who own index stocks, or... really potentially a whole lot of ordinary people, not just "a bunch of wall street [sic] speculators".
That still puts it in the lowest tiers of sporting events.
Horseshit.
White collar isn't necessarily middle class - Bob Cratchit was a white collar worker after all. The conflation of the two (with the massive growth of university graduates, white collar jobs, and rising salaries) is largely a post WWII phenomenon.
My favorite example is my wife's job (as it happens, she is an accountant)... Thirty years ago, at about a quarter of it's current size, they had a full time accountant, two bookkeepers, and a filing clerk. Today they have a mostly full time accountant (who also doubles as IT and HR) - and the phone girl who does data entry and filing. The difference is today they have a POS.
Accounting really hasn't changed much in that time, especially for medium and small businesses. It's only the big boys that really go in for heavy duty modeling, for smaller businesses there's just not that much need.
So, the "biggest eSports" tournament isn't even as big or logistically complicated as a lightly attended baseball game here in my mid-sized market town?
Color me unimpressed.
Seriously, as far as "big" events goes, the "World Of Tanks Grand Finals" doesn't even make the needle twitch off the zero peg. And not even the "on a computer" aspect is very interesting here in 2015.
On your planet maybe. But here on Earth we don't allow human testing in the early phases of drug development. And even if they did allow human testing, the volunteers can't possibly have full knowledge and understanding of the risks - because at that stage of the game, that knowledge doesn't exist. That's why we test on animals in the first place.
Where they can be, they already are. Primates are among the expensive and difficult lab animals to maintain, and thus are only used where no other reasonable alternative exists. (Or, again, the world you describe is a very different one from Earth.)
I've been saying that for a decade now - the middle class as we know it today essentially didn't exist within living memory. (That's changing as the Greatest Generation dies off, but my point stands.) It's a product of the post-WWII explosion in technology and consumer demand. But it's the set of conditions that most living Westerners grew up in, and thus they take it for granted that it's theirs by right.
That's the big change that's happened right under our noses over the last thirty odd years, and that almost all experts and so close to all of the masses as to make no difference completely missed... not automation (robots, etc... what's usually thought of as automation), but the microprocessor revolution. High skill jobs, formerly requiring college trained professionals (engineers and accountants for example), have vanished at a frightening rate.
It's even worse than that - machines are replacing skilled white collar labor, professionals with degrees like engineers and accountants. Not only will more education not help you anymore, neither necessarily will experience.
What's interesting is that you make an assertion... and then act as though that assertion was a fact.
One of the things you've failed to account for, there are probably hundreds of judges in a city of a half million - thus it's quite possible to be strict and evaluate each one and still come up with this number. It's a distributed parallel system - what sound like scary huge numbers arise quite easily from a relatively modest number of actors, especially considering the length of time involved.
But the ill-educated (or deeply biased, or prejudiced towards panic*) won't stop and think about these things. Thinking Is Hard.
And, to those moderating, yes - I know the actual number is 4,300. I'm just so damn tired of the level of ignorance so prevalent on Slashdot.
* Actually there's considerable overlap in these categories.
Slowing it below orbital speed just makes the whole problem 100x harder due to the vastly increased amount of time you need to hold the laser steady on target. All you actually need to do is get the periapsis down to around 200-300km, and atmospheric drag will do the rest.
Tracking isn't the problem - aiming the laser at, and holding it steady on, the target is the problem.
Nice try, but sorry, no. The grandparent discussed "quality material", not aiding fugitives. Taking a quick glance at Wikipedia, it looks like they stopped releasing anything of note around 2013.
Which raises the question, why aren't people giving them stuff anymore? Certainly part of it is tinfoil hat paranoia (justified or no) - but I suspect a large part of it is Assange's hijacking Wikileaks to serve as a platform for his ego and fallout from the internal political battles back in 2010 or so.
I was about to say much the same thing... Just because we [residents of the Puget Sound Basin] don't live in a dried brown wasteland like California, that doesn't mean we don't have problems of our own. We've had a series of drier than normal summers (low groundwater recharge), and last winter was (as your link shows) extraordinarily dry (less water coming into the rivers and resevoirs).
Here's a picture I took roughly two years ago showing the normal snowpack on the Olympics around this time of year. (That snow normally persists well into May or June.) But, if you look at this webcam, you can see the much smaller pack we have this year. If you look at The Brothers (just left of center in my picture, almost to the left hand side of the webcam), the difference is particularly stark.
In theory, yes. Light does exert pressure on objects.... In practice, the pressure is so infinitesimally small that's is much easier* to go the ablation/vaporization route.
That being said, this device isn't actually useful other than as a proof-of-concept ISS's altitude (400km) is low enough that debris is eventually slowed and de-orbited by atmospheric drag, and the 100km range isn't enough to reach the altitude (600km+) where 90% of the long lived junk resides.
* For certain values of "easier", in reality it's not very easy at all.
From TFS: "In the early days of brands on Facebook, it was crucial for companies to garner as many "likes" as possible to boost their image".
It's still like that, except with individual posts rather than pages. If a post doesn't get enough 'likes', 90% of the people following that page will never see it unless they've gone to the trouble of turning notifications on or the page owner has ponied up the bucks to 'boost' the page.
*Sigh*
I understand what you're saying - but as with my previously reply, you don't grasp the problem.
The appearance of the vehicle "working hard at the last second" during the first attempt was a consequence of running out of hydraulic fluid - and would have occurred regardless of the size of the target. The appearance of the vehicle "working hard at the last second" during the last attempt was a consequence of the throttle valve not operating to spec - and would have occurred regardless of the size of the target.
From the point of view of the final landing sequence it's not all that much easier to arrange for velocity to be null and position to be +/- 100m than it is to arrange the same +/- 1m. Selecting a landing point occurs at a relatively high altitude (and on a, relatively speaking, relaxed timeline) and final trim starts around a kilometer or so up (AIUI). From there, jittering the variables (burn time and timing, gimbal angles, and throttle settings) a tiny amount one way or another to maintain targeting isn't a substantial burden (on the software or the hardware) compared to the much larger problem of nulling your velocities.
That just makes an already heavy, complex, and expensive system even heavier, more complex, and more expensive than I envisioned.
I do get what he's saying. What neither of you seem to grasp is that the size of the target isn't as relevant as you think, because you have to null your horizontal velocity regardless of the size of the target. It doesn't matter whether you're stopping on a postage stamp or anywhere in a given block - either way you still have to stop. It's the stopping that's problem, not the deciding where to stop. Stopping is very difficult for the Falcon 9 because it's T/W ratio is so far out of the optimal range and a larger target area won't make it all that much easier.
That's "good at targeting" a couple of orders of magnitude better than what they've demonstrated to date (which is, pardon my french, already pretty fucking amazing). You're talking about some kind of articulated arm (which can survive being essentially inside rocket exhaust)... Which is, quite frankly, makes things much harder and more complicated and introduces a metric buttload of additional possible points of failure. Much easier to simply re-engineer the throttle valve.
At the cost of increasing the difficulty of targeting the landing, and still having to null any horizontal velocity due to the wind. TAANSTAFL.
Yeah, you do. Given the narrow footprint and the low CG of the vehicle, if the horizontal velocity wasn't as close to zero as you can get at touchdown - it's very likely to tip over. (Even if you don't damage the landing legs in the process.) The upper part of the vehicle isn't heavy, but it has a very long lever arm.
In the end, that makes far less difference than you think because while you can reduce the amount of horizontal velocity that needs to be nulled you cannot eliminate it. (Not without launch criteria that include "near zero wind at the recovery site", which is beyond impractical.) The result is, with the current vehicle, you still have to null horizontal velocity at the last second before touch down. The basic problem is that the vehicle is badly designed for what it's being asked to do.
Both times they've hit the barge almost dead center - I fail to see how that's an arguement for a larger landing area since neither failure was caused by the landing area being too small. Both vehicles would have crashed regardless of the size of the landing area due to control system failures. (Attitude control on the first, throttle control on the second.) That's what neither you nor the OP seem to grasp.