The Army and Air Force need to be merged and the Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines need to be merged.
What planet do you live on that there's any significant overlap between the Army and the Air Force?
The overlap there is just nuts, tons of overhead, procurement programs, command structure, etc...
And pretty much none of that will go away after your nonsensical merges. The Army is still procuring different things from the Air Force, and an Army divisions will still need a different set of commanders than air wings. Etc... etc...
Are you sure about that reconditioning? your comparing it to the space shuttle engine, that needed to be torn down, inspected, and rebuilt after every flight.
Only in the early years of the program. As they gained experience, the maintenance requirements were reduced. By the early 90's, the were removing the engines for borescoping after each flight, but only rebuilding them every fifth or sixth flight. By the late 90's they were removing them every fifth or sixth flight for borescoping and only rebuilding them every ninth or tenth flight.
Recovering the first stage (not this time but maybe this year) will make a huge difference in cost. Saving the 9 engines on the first stage alone is huge.
Maybe, maybe not. The recovery infrastructure and labor isn't free, nor is the refurbishment infrastructure and labor. In theory the cost difference should be huge, in practice... we don't know. Nobody has ever refurbished and reflown liquid engines that have been dunked in salt water. AFAIK, we don't even have enough hard data to make a proper evaluation.
If I were SpaceX, the first thing I would have done is tossed an engine in the water, recovered it, and studied it. Landing legs and cushioned landing are sexy and the whole process is very impressive on paper to the less well educated space fanboy (I.E. 99% of them)... but engine refurbishment is the key to the whole process.
Sounds like much we already knew or suspected. I'm more interested in why some people keep trying to show us what an awful character Assange is, instead of focussing on what he has done. Love him and Wikileaks or hate them; the latter seems a lot more relevant.
Probably because like here, the people who support him make a ton of noise about how he is just a saint who has been vilified by a vengeful US government and those who say "Hmm... maybe he's not a good guy after all" tend to get drowned out.
This. And because it places his requests for "cooperation" from various agencies/corporations and his threats (carried out at least once) to shut down Wikileaks until he was funded in a... very interesting light. Not to mention it also casts light on the various internal rifts and defections, policy decisions at various stages of Wikileak's life, etc... etc...
Certainly they can raise the complexity and sharply increase installation and maintenance costs - but that won't buy much effective area. The ones closer to the subsolar point will increasingly shadow those further away, By the time you reach the edge, they'll effectively be in full shadow.
So considering that we have a 11,000 km ring that is 200 km width, the power generation for the light-facing half should be what you'd expect from 5500km x 200km or 1,100,000 square kilometers.
Actually the effective area is far less than that - only at the subsolar point are the panels going to be properly positioned for maximum power production. Out towards the ends of "light facing half" they're going to be practically parallel to the light.
At last month's CES, I mislaid a microphone that I'd just bought: too many items in little black pouches, and that one disappeared on a patch of dark carpet when I got something else out of my bag.
As a photographer I routinely walk around with a couple of grands worth of camera gear.
I don't label.
Many years in the submarine service taught me to be organized and to pay the hell attention to what I was doing. Labels are like locks, while they're somewhat better than nothing, all they really do is keep honest people honest. They make you feel better because you're Doing Something, but really they're only a small part of the solution.
Some of the other things that have ended up in my spam box (like emails from some special snowflakes on various mailing lists) lead me to believe that Google relies very heavily on "deleted unread" as part of it's spam filters.
And yeah, the amount of spam I receive despite also being not too careful with my Gmail addy compared to what some people claim they're receiving is miniscule for me too.
Google has their shit together when it comes to filtering spam
Hardly. Close to 90% of the newsletters, notification emails, etc... etc... that I subscribe to regularly end up in my spam folder, and I (for the hundredth time) have to tell Gmail that it isn't actually spam. Gmail is very good at filtering actual spam, but their false positive rate is extraordinarily high.
Basically doing something like pulling on the handbrake should basically physically cut the throttle. Or stomping on the brakes should activate a simple solenoid that cuts the throttle. This mechanism should be 100% separate from the computer and override most computer outputs.
So... your solution to failures, errors, and bugs is to introduce more sources of failure, error, and bugs? Brilliant.
How would a mandatory publication of all code as open source [not suggesting liberal licensing here] work out here?
Not very well I suspect. To start with, the code is going to be tightly hardware bound - not only to that of the control unit it runs on, but to the vehicle it's installed on. So you're going a whole lot data than just the code to usefully evaluate the code for any but the most gross of errors. On top of that, this is a very specialized field, and again since the odds are the reviewer lacks the necessary background... you face the same issue.
whats.app had absolutely no intellectual property and it would take less than 1 million dollars to produce a polished work-alike.
True. But what Facebook is paying for isn't the code. It's the userbase and all the data associated with them. It's a strong quasi-contender with a hefty presence in an overlapping market segment. (Etc... etc...) Replicating those is non-trivial at best. If you think it's so easy and cheap, have at it, I wish you all the luck in the world. But I won't invest the penny I picked up off the sidewalk yesterday in your business.
Seriously, there's a lot more to technology businesses than the code and the hardware it runs on, and a lot more to running a business long term than just minding your own knitting. Facebook (and Google, and Amazon, and... a whole host of others) grasp that. Slashdot pretty much doesn't.
Its not the revenue today, its the customer base (7% of the world population are regular users and its still growing rapidly). We're not used to thinking like businessmen, thinking strategically, or planning ahead
There, FTFY.
And really, that's the issue in a lot of comments on business topics here on Slashdot - when it come to business, most of the denizens making comments are the equivalent of virgin celibate priests writing sex advice columns.
Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it. To me, this seems like a much more reasonable explanation
It seems reasonable to you that a con man would go to the trouble of doing all that mathematical analysis (to find the statistical patterns of a natural language) and constructing the special table - to defeat attempts to crack his manuscript that won't be likely to be attempted for centuries? (Needing not only the invention of the appropriate math, but also the idea of applying it to the study of language.)
BTW: Most of CA is NOT a desert. Los Angeles, the (Central) San Joaquin Valley, the Bay Area, Sacramento, etc., they ALL get too much rainfall (in most years) to be classified as a desert.
"Getting too much rainfall to technically be a desert" is meaningless pedantry - because desert or not, it doesn't get enough water to sustain it's population. As far back as the twenties and thirties, when the LA basin had a fraction of it's current population, it was already importing water. (People seem to forget nowadays that one of original big attractions of the LA area was it's warm _dry_ climate.) The same is true of the other large cities of coastal California. The same has become true of the San Joaquin Valley (only replace "population" with "agriculture").
Amazon Coins are nothing but 'points' or 'credits' or 'tokens', and those have been around for a very long time.
The blog author is... pretty much clueless. Nobody but him is confusing Bitcoins and Amazon Coins, or referring to the latter as crypto-currency. Nobody but him is confused about the difference between the two.
A major reason why dictatorships (or for that matter sometimes non-functioning governments of other forms, e.g. the Weimar Republic) is because of economic pressures as well as undisciplined monetary policies where they try to solve problems by just printing more bills. Bitcoin makes that impossible, so the end result will be that those governments will either not use such a limited currency, or will use it up until the point they want to print more where they will then either abandon the cryptocurrency or declare that some other currency must have some exchange rate with the Bitcoins and print more of those.
Actually, even non-dicatorships and fully functioning governments will come under pressure to abandon Bitcoin - because of the deflationary nature inherent in it. That places sharp limits on how large an economy it can support. This is also why pretty much everyone has moved away from the gold standard and hard money and onto fiat currency. The modern world economy simply could not exist if money was tied solely to how much shiny metal was sitting in a vault. Nor could it long survive being tied to a limited supply of nano-BTC.
The entire 'barter system' scares governments as they cant track and tax it. Things like bitcoin will be crushed, one way or another.
Only in the paranoid fantasies of tinfoil hat wearing idiots. (Not to mention, Bitcoin isn't barter. It's trade token like the chips you get at a casino.)
*Sigh*
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the US government doesn't give a flying eff what currency you keep your books in. Dollars, doughnut holes, bit coins, jars of hamster poop - as long as you can convert it to dollars (on paper) and pay the appropriate taxes, they're good.
Note that the US loves supercarriers too and keep building them, even while more rational people know that they'll be sent to the bottom within minutes of an high-intensity, high-tech war breaking out.
Only if the 'rational people' are wearing their tinfoil hats or are otherwise... less than clued in. Actual rational people with the background to grasp the issues aren't nearly so certain.
Every major war has started with equipment, tactics, strategy inherited from the last war. The start of WWI, with light horsemen charging into, and getting cut up by, machine gun fire. The officers had their ideas -- and that was _it_.
The reasons for all this are complex, but in a nutshell, it's got to do with inertia, hubris, egos, and defence pork.
The reasons for this are simple, at least to people who understand the problem (as opposed to, oh, I don't know.... clueless gits) - nobody has a crystal ball. Nobody. You do the best you can with the budget and time available and hope. Until someone invents a crystal ball, that's all you can do.
Also, I am curious how hypersonic weapons will fare against a ship equipped with either a Gauss cannon, or more importantly, a laser. Wouldn't both of these be an adequate defense against a hypersonic missle, if implemented properly?
There's more to the problem than delivering a killing amount of energy (whether kinetic or EM) to the target. You need a radar that can quickly spot the missile* and a target tracking system that can determine it's course, position, and speed. With these, you then need to predict the future position of the weapon. Then you need to slew your anti-missile weapon onto the firing bearing and launch/fire (presuming the weapon is in fact ready to fire**). Individually these functions have long been mastered, but hypersonic weapons makes the whole process more difficult because they reduce the time available for the defender to detect, evaluate, decide, and engage. (And when it comes to re-engagement if you miss... they turn the problem up to 19.)
* This is why phased array radars are becoming the gold standard, since you don't have to physically move the antenna you can scan at a much higher rate. Processing power becomes a key limitation however.
** This is reasoning behind VLS, you can ready multiple weapons in parallel, you don't need to slew the launcher back to the loading position and reload, and you don't need to slew back onto the firing bearing.
Slashdot Mirror
What planet do you live on that there's any significant overlap between the Army and the Air Force?
And pretty much none of that will go away after your nonsensical merges. The Army is still procuring different things from the Air Force, and an Army divisions will still need a different set of commanders than air wings. Etc... etc...
Given that they've recovered precisely zero engines after flight... that's something of an assumption.
Only in the early years of the program. As they gained experience, the maintenance requirements were reduced. By the early 90's, the were removing the engines for borescoping after each flight, but only rebuilding them every fifth or sixth flight. By the late 90's they were removing them every fifth or sixth flight for borescoping and only rebuilding them every ninth or tenth flight.
Maybe, maybe not. The recovery infrastructure and labor isn't free, nor is the refurbishment infrastructure and labor. In theory the cost difference should be huge, in practice... we don't know. Nobody has ever refurbished and reflown liquid engines that have been dunked in salt water. AFAIK, we don't even have enough hard data to make a proper evaluation.
If I were SpaceX, the first thing I would have done is tossed an engine in the water, recovered it, and studied it. Landing legs and cushioned landing are sexy and the whole process is very impressive on paper to the less well educated space fanboy (I.E. 99% of them)... but engine refurbishment is the key to the whole process.
This. And because it places his requests for "cooperation" from various agencies/corporations and his threats (carried out at least once) to shut down Wikileaks until he was funded in a... very interesting light. Not to mention it also casts light on the various internal rifts and defections, policy decisions at various stages of Wikileak's life, etc... etc...
Certainly they can raise the complexity and sharply increase installation and maintenance costs - but that won't buy much effective area. The ones closer to the subsolar point will increasingly shadow those further away, By the time you reach the edge, they'll effectively be in full shadow.
Actually the effective area is far less than that - only at the subsolar point are the panels going to be properly positioned for maximum power production. Out towards the ends of "light facing half" they're going to be practically parallel to the light.
As a photographer I routinely walk around with a couple of grands worth of camera gear.
I don't label.
Many years in the submarine service taught me to be organized and to pay the hell attention to what I was doing. Labels are like locks, while they're somewhat better than nothing, all they really do is keep honest people honest. They make you feel better because you're Doing Something, but really they're only a small part of the solution.
Some of the other things that have ended up in my spam box (like emails from some special snowflakes on various mailing lists) lead me to believe that Google relies very heavily on "deleted unread" as part of it's spam filters.
And yeah, the amount of spam I receive despite also being not too careful with my Gmail addy compared to what some people claim they're receiving is miniscule for me too.
Hardly. Close to 90% of the newsletters, notification emails, etc... etc... that I subscribe to regularly end up in my spam folder, and I (for the hundredth time) have to tell Gmail that it isn't actually spam. Gmail is very good at filtering actual spam, but their false positive rate is extraordinarily high.
So... your solution to failures, errors, and bugs is to introduce more sources of failure, error, and bugs? Brilliant.
Not very well I suspect. To start with, the code is going to be tightly hardware bound - not only to that of the control unit it runs on, but to the vehicle it's installed on. So you're going a whole lot data than just the code to usefully evaluate the code for any but the most gross of errors. On top of that, this is a very specialized field, and again since the odds are the reviewer lacks the necessary background... you face the same issue.
Open source is neither a magic wand or a panacea.
True. But what Facebook is paying for isn't the code. It's the userbase and all the data associated with them. It's a strong quasi-contender with a hefty presence in an overlapping market segment. (Etc... etc...) Replicating those is non-trivial at best. If you think it's so easy and cheap, have at it, I wish you all the luck in the world. But I won't invest the penny I picked up off the sidewalk yesterday in your business.
Seriously, there's a lot more to technology businesses than the code and the hardware it runs on, and a lot more to running a business long term than just minding your own knitting. Facebook (and Google, and Amazon, and... a whole host of others) grasp that. Slashdot pretty much doesn't.
There, FTFY.
And really, that's the issue in a lot of comments on business topics here on Slashdot - when it come to business, most of the denizens making comments are the equivalent of virgin celibate priests writing sex advice columns.
It seems reasonable to you that a con man would go to the trouble of doing all that mathematical analysis (to find the statistical patterns of a natural language) and constructing the special table - to defeat attempts to crack his manuscript that won't be likely to be attempted for centuries? (Needing not only the invention of the appropriate math, but also the idea of applying it to the study of language.)
The mind boggles at what else you must believe.
"Getting too much rainfall to technically be a desert" is meaningless pedantry - because desert or not, it doesn't get enough water to sustain it's population. As far back as the twenties and thirties, when the LA basin had a fraction of it's current population, it was already importing water. (People seem to forget nowadays that one of original big attractions of the LA area was it's warm _dry_ climate.) The same is true of the other large cities of coastal California. The same has become true of the San Joaquin Valley (only replace "population" with "agriculture").
And it's a horrorshow - it takes the worst of Slashdot and the worst of Slashdot Beta, mixes them up and... the sum is worse than the parts.
Amazon Coins are nothing but 'points' or 'credits' or 'tokens', and those have been around for a very long time.
The blog author is... pretty much clueless. Nobody but him is confusing Bitcoins and Amazon Coins, or referring to the latter as crypto-currency. Nobody but him is confused about the difference between the two.
Projecting their (often oddball) traits onto the masses is one of the most popular indoor sports on Slashdot.
Actually, even non-dicatorships and fully functioning governments will come under pressure to abandon Bitcoin - because of the deflationary nature inherent in it. That places sharp limits on how large an economy it can support. This is also why pretty much everyone has moved away from the gold standard and hard money and onto fiat currency. The modern world economy simply could not exist if money was tied solely to how much shiny metal was sitting in a vault. Nor could it long survive being tied to a limited supply of nano-BTC.
Only in the paranoid fantasies of tinfoil hat wearing idiots. (Not to mention, Bitcoin isn't barter. It's trade token like the chips you get at a casino.)
*Sigh*
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the US government doesn't give a flying eff what currency you keep your books in. Dollars, doughnut holes, bit coins, jars of hamster poop - as long as you can convert it to dollars (on paper) and pay the appropriate taxes, they're good.
You've just missed it, it's been there for years.
Only if the 'rational people' are wearing their tinfoil hats or are otherwise... less than clued in. Actual rational people with the background to grasp the issues aren't nearly so certain.
The reasons for this are simple, at least to people who understand the problem (as opposed to, oh, I don't know.... clueless gits) - nobody has a crystal ball. Nobody. You do the best you can with the budget and time available and hope. Until someone invents a crystal ball, that's all you can do.
There's more to the problem than delivering a killing amount of energy (whether kinetic or EM) to the target. You need a radar that can quickly spot the missile* and a target tracking system that can determine it's course, position, and speed. With these, you then need to predict the future position of the weapon. Then you need to slew your anti-missile weapon onto the firing bearing and launch/fire (presuming the weapon is in fact ready to fire**). Individually these functions have long been mastered, but hypersonic weapons makes the whole process more difficult because they reduce the time available for the defender to detect, evaluate, decide, and engage. (And when it comes to re-engagement if you miss... they turn the problem up to 19.)
* This is why phased array radars are becoming the gold standard, since you don't have to physically move the antenna you can scan at a much higher rate. Processing power becomes a key limitation however.
** This is reasoning behind VLS, you can ready multiple weapons in parallel, you don't need to slew the launcher back to the loading position and reload, and you don't need to slew back onto the firing bearing.
Yes, where you adjust the threshold.