Yes, now here's what I'd like to know: how is the reusable rocket model working economically?
The Space Shuttle showed that a space plane is physically feasible, and it had many, many successful missions, but it never succeeded in its real purpose: to make access to space cheap and routine.
At this point we have the same level of success confirmation for the Falcon system that we had after roughly the same number of successful Shuttle missions. And that's good. But it's not job done yet.
There really is no difference. The problem here is the belief that Nature owes our civilization something. Nature is neither benevolent nor malevolent toward us; it is indifferent to our fate.
Supervolcano eruptions are a fact. The study of the geologic record post-dates the emergence of our civilization, so it isn't surprising that the way our civilization operates doesn't take the possibility supervolcanoes into account.
GP's reaction is fairly typical of the "reasoning" of the benevolent nature school: a supervolcano eruption in the near future would be a threat to civilization, therefore we can discount that possibility. That reasoning applies across the board to anything like climate change or sea level rise. We're not prepared for it, therefore it can't happen..
It took 4.5 billion years for an intelligent species to emerge on the planet. In our species 300,000 year history, civilization is a novelty, barely 5,000 years old, the most recent 1.6% of our species' lifespan. Yet because 1000 years is a long time to us as individuals, we see civilization as something enduring and stable. There's no evidence to support that notion on a geologic timescale.
Except that that asking for information that is held by a third party isn't covered under that amendment. That's why Congress had to pass the Pen Register Act, among other laws. Laws like that are statutory fixes for situations you couldn't reasonably expect an 18th century politician to anticipate.
Stop right there. That means you should probably use KDE.
As for i3, it doesn't do sessions at all. In return, the startup is literally instantaneous, even on an older machine. It is a tiling window manager so typically the most sensible way to use it is to have each app control the entire screen, although you can split the screen various ways -- useful if you have a large monitor.
You can easily configure i3 to automatically launch certain apps to certain workspaces. This isn't quite the same as sessions of course, but it covers most of the utility for most people.
Actually I've long been a fan of both Hyperborean and hollow-Earth theories, which are often found together and some people sincerely believed back in the 1800s (and probably still do). Antarctica fired many peoples' imaginations which is why I suppose people sent expeditions there; it was just on the edge of what could be accessible, like the Moon was in the 1960s. WIthout satellites it was just a big blank spot on the map; anything could be there. Maybe event Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness.
The combination of a (warm) antarctic subterranean civilization occurs in at least one proto-sci-fi story I read from the late 1800s, although I suppose the term should be Hypoaustral rather than Hyperborean.
These stories, and I suppose I should throw in King Kong as well, represent the end of an era for our species. When Landsat 1 was launched in 1972 physical geography was permanently demystified. There is no such thing as an uncharted isle where pirates bury their treasure or giant apes are worshipped by the natives. If there were such a thing as Skull Island it'd have an airport and visitor center.
I suppose that's why we've transplanted so much of our mythology to space.
Well, I often use a GUI, but I don't see much need for a fullblown desktop anymore, so I use i3.
These things want to be the digital switchboard for your life, which was pretty neat ten years ago, but it's obsolete now that everyone carries a smartphone. What I need is something to manage GUI output to the physical screen on my laptop and desktop, and a tiling window managers does the trick.
"Cartoon" and "Death Toll" should not be applicable to the same media presentation.
I actually think the problem here wasn't actual insensitivity, but rather failure to anticipate a shortcoming of the avatar technology employed. Zuck's cartoon representation doesn't reproduce any emotional expression, just the kind of upbeat, non-Duchenne smile you get from a hotel receptionist greeting you as the 100th guest that morning. The jolly Zuck cartoon figure surveying scenes of horrific devastation gives the inescapable impression of sociopathy.
Yes, there's a difference, but the design of a product starts with user interaction. I was lead developer on a vertical market software product but I came from a consulting development background, so I was also in effect the product manager. I took what had been a tech-centered development process and made it a user centered one, because that's what I knew how to do.
Even so, people didn't know what they wanted until they saw it. Why should they? They're experts in their existing ways of doing things, and a successful product changes the way people do things. It's a long, incremental process to make a system successful, even with a mature product.
It's a *design* flaw though, not the usual half-assed implementation flaw. Yes, there's a social engineering component, but the design of the OS makes the job of the social engineer all too easy.
This attack is like a hybrid Trojan/phishing/MITM attack: your evil app puts up a bogus dialog box that looks like an iOS dialog box asking for Apple credentials. It then harvests this information and transmits it to the bad actor. And it isn't just Apple that's vulnerable to this; Windows does this so often that users are effectively trained to hand over their credentials without thinking.
I've been concerned about this mode of attack for years; which is why when I do run Windows I always do so from an unprivileged account. This also, by the way, keeps the administrator credentials for my machine firmly on my hardware; Microsoft really wants you to log in using your Microsoft credentials and does its best to encourage (sometimes trick) you into doing this when you install, for example, Skype. This is a perfect storm scenario for this kind of attack: users are trained that handing over the credentials to both their network and administrator accounts is a normal part of operating their computers.
I've often thought there should be a hardware solution to this. The obvious solution is some kind of hardware token; but it could be as simple as an LED on the device that can only be lit by the genuine OS routine for asking the user for his credentials; this routine would insulate those credentials from any unprivileged process.
True. But ramping up coal... supposedly the justification for this... would bring back sulfur pollution. In general CO2 nearly always comes with other nasties, except to a lesser degree with natural gas.
I wanted to point out two things. The first is that people take clean air for granted. People take stuff that was accomplished before they were old enough to pay attention for granted, like is just magically happens. Like the person on this very sight who told me, when GOES-13 failed, that the government should get its satellite imagery off the Internet like everyone else. People take the way things are when they reach young adulthood for granted, as if they happen magically. But they don't; they take sacrifices. If you've ever been behind a car in a third world country with no emissions standards you'll experience that first hand; the lifetime costs of emissions controls in the US must be thousands of dollars, but if you've never seen what cars do without them the effect of even a single car without emissions controls is almost inconceivable.
The second point is what it takes to get people change. It wasn't the hippie environmentalists doing a Svengali act on Congress. Those kids were too busy tuning and and dropping out to vote or organize politically. It was their parents who demanded change. They watched hundreds of people die in the great New York smog. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. It wasn't the first time the river caught fire, it was the thirteenth, but it was the first one that happened on national television.
The old civil engineering saw was that "dilution is the solution to pollution," but it doesn't work for CO2, which is a pollutant that operates on a global scale. But it also makes it easier for people to deny its effects -- and believe me people denied that effects of smog and water pollution were anything we could do something about back in the day. But eventually people are going to decide to do something about it; and the later they do, the more it will cost.
I remember as a kid in the 60s going up to the mountains for vacation and suddenly finding a lot easier to breathe. Then coming back to the city -- visible at a distance by the chocolate brown smudge hovering above the horizon -- and having my eyes water.
When you look at an old TV show or movie and the buildings a few hundred yards away look all hazy -- that's not the lens or the film stock. It actually friggin' looked like that. Back before the Clean Air Act we used to have "smog events" in which hundreds of people died, like the New York Smog of 1966, one of three such events that occurred in just over a decade in that city.
Shit like that is why we have an EPA and a Clean Air act. It wasn't a bunch of tree-hugging hippies, it was average people reacting to the fact the country was being turned into a shit hole.
Arrogance runs both ways. The assumption you know everything and the other person you're talking to knows nothing. When you deal with people professionally, that's often where your relationship has to start, and you just have to get past that so you can actually get something done.
That happens because bluster and posturing come from insecurity. It's very common for people to feel pressure to be somehow more capable than they feel they can manage. And the result is that they are defensive, and as the best defense is a good offense, it comes out as arrogance, whether it's on the client or consultant side. This imposes a kind of initial phase in which one or both sides struggle to establish a pecking order.
People are threatened by the need to change, but not necessarily knowing what needs to be done. But that's natural; it's the place everyone has to start. Now I reached a point in my career where I'd dealt with hundreds of organizations around the country and thousands of users; and I'd meet with someone who'd maybe been working in the field two or three years and would be absolutely certain I couldn't possibly understand what he was going through. So I had to approach every new client as if I'd never seen any of this before. And it's OK, because (a) I'm being paid by the hour, (b) it gives me a chance to observe, and (c) people are easier to work with after you let them lead as far as they know where to go.
I don't doubt it. But it's also true that it's hard to imagine things different from what they are when you're familiar with the way they are. Lack of perspective is the human condition. Often if you talk to several people who work together, their understanding of what's going on is radically different.
Now it sounds like you've probably been on the receiving end of some high handed treatment. Let me assure you that this runs both ways. It's just something you have to get over. People underestimate the role patience has in creating change.
"Foisting" implies just getting to the sale and moving on. What I'm talking about is more like a long journey into the unknown you're take with someone.
People usually have a pretty good understanding of what they do every day. But there's no inherent reason that they would understand how what they do could be done differently.
I have never met a customer who knows what he wants until he sees it.
So I don't think the question can be answered; the only thing we know for sure is that, at this time, not enough people want something like FireFox or BB OS to make them viable; or at least if there are enough people nobody has figured out a way to get it to the people who want it.
I'm talking about negative feedback, which is an essential element of any system which exhibits oscillatory behavior in the absence of external drivers.
How you feel about a million year "trend" has been reversed is neither here nor there as to whether it has happened. What matters is evidence. The current thinking based on our best evidence is that the climate cycles you are referring to are caused by variations in insolation due to orbital forcing. However if that is true the current era should be cooling.
The past patterns of climate are not governed by some kind of mystic law, like astrology. They are caused by quantifiable physical phenomena.
Well, let's assume the periodic cycle you are talking about is driven by climactic restoring forces rather than exogenous forces like orbital forcing. Even that assumption doesn't lead an ironclad conclusion that there is no point of no return. The oscillating behavior is the product of underlying system processes that could conceivably be disrupted by sufficiently large change -- like stretching a coil spring until it becomes a wire.
But let's just assume there are restoring forces that will undo any anthropogenic changes. They don't work overnight; in fact in the data you allude to they take 36,000 years to reverse direction. So for us, and our descendants for hundreds of generations, there may as well not be any return. Even on the timescale of civilization lifespans that's a long time.
And that's really what the big climate change concern is: not the survival of the species, but the stress that the change will place on civilizations, which will manifest itself as destabilizing financial costs.
... then in effect are asking for a definition of "free speech" after the fact. Logically, this doesn't make much sense. However, if you *do* start from the axiom "free speech is good" you need to either find or construct a definition that is consistent with that axiom. In the meantime assuming that axiom does allow you to examine whether individual cases can be covered as "free speech".
If you start with the axiom that free speech is *always* good, then unless you think selling fraudulent medicine is good then your definition of "free speech" needs to exclude that.
If you start with the axiom that free speech is only *sometimes* good, then your definition can encompass selling fraudulent medicine; however that also raises the possibility that you should *sometimes* oppose free speech.
There are some people who clearly believe that free speech entails complete freedom from legal consequences -- including for libel, or deliberate misinformation that predictably harms or even kills someone. However I suspect there's an element of sloppy thinking there. We've all been raised to regard "free speech" as inviolable, so adopting a broader concept of "free speech" is a handy way of sneaking other things into the tent.
Yes, but that heat cuts both ways; it both creates hurricanes and destroys them. That's why you can't necessarily conclude that they'll be more frequent.
Does anybody believe Musk can do *everything* he says he wants to do, and pull it off without so much as a delay?
Some people might think he can do them all eventually, but even those of us who expect some of his ideas never to go anywhere can't ever be quite sure about which ideas those will be. He's had a history of sticking with things even through a lot of intermediate failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, now here's what I'd like to know: how is the reusable rocket model working economically?
The Space Shuttle showed that a space plane is physically feasible, and it had many, many successful missions, but it never succeeded in its real purpose: to make access to space cheap and routine.
At this point we have the same level of success confirmation for the Falcon system that we had after roughly the same number of successful Shuttle missions. And that's good. But it's not job done yet.
There really is no difference. The problem here is the belief that Nature owes our civilization something. Nature is neither benevolent nor malevolent toward us; it is indifferent to our fate.
Supervolcano eruptions are a fact. The study of the geologic record post-dates the emergence of our civilization, so it isn't surprising that the way our civilization operates doesn't take the possibility supervolcanoes into account.
GP's reaction is fairly typical of the "reasoning" of the benevolent nature school: a supervolcano eruption in the near future would be a threat to civilization, therefore we can discount that possibility. That reasoning applies across the board to anything like climate change or sea level rise. We're not prepared for it, therefore it can't happen..
It took 4.5 billion years for an intelligent species to emerge on the planet. In our species 300,000 year history, civilization is a novelty, barely 5,000 years old, the most recent 1.6% of our species' lifespan. Yet because 1000 years is a long time to us as individuals, we see civilization as something enduring and stable. There's no evidence to support that notion on a geologic timescale.
Except that that asking for information that is held by a third party isn't covered under that amendment. That's why Congress had to pass the Pen Register Act, among other laws. Laws like that are statutory fixes for situations you couldn't reasonably expect an 18th century politician to anticipate.
Or you could buy a $99 Kindle Paperwhite and a $30 IP68 case.
I use quite a lot KDE/Qt apps,
Stop right there. That means you should probably use KDE.
As for i3, it doesn't do sessions at all. In return, the startup is literally instantaneous, even on an older machine. It is a tiling window manager so typically the most sensible way to use it is to have each app control the entire screen, although you can split the screen various ways -- useful if you have a large monitor.
You can easily configure i3 to automatically launch certain apps to certain workspaces. This isn't quite the same as sessions of course, but it covers most of the utility for most people.
Actually I've long been a fan of both Hyperborean and hollow-Earth theories, which are often found together and some people sincerely believed back in the 1800s (and probably still do). Antarctica fired many peoples' imaginations which is why I suppose people sent expeditions there; it was just on the edge of what could be accessible, like the Moon was in the 1960s. WIthout satellites it was just a big blank spot on the map; anything could be there. Maybe event Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness.
The combination of a (warm) antarctic subterranean civilization occurs in at least one proto-sci-fi story I read from the late 1800s, although I suppose the term should be Hypoaustral rather than Hyperborean.
These stories, and I suppose I should throw in King Kong as well, represent the end of an era for our species. When Landsat 1 was launched in 1972 physical geography was permanently demystified. There is no such thing as an uncharted isle where pirates bury their treasure or giant apes are worshipped by the natives. If there were such a thing as Skull Island it'd have an airport and visitor center.
I suppose that's why we've transplanted so much of our mythology to space.
That's like saying the bug in this software is probably due to a subroutine.
Well, I often use a GUI, but I don't see much need for a fullblown desktop anymore, so I use i3.
These things want to be the digital switchboard for your life, which was pretty neat ten years ago, but it's obsolete now that everyone carries a smartphone. What I need is something to manage GUI output to the physical screen on my laptop and desktop, and a tiling window managers does the trick.
"Cartoon" and "Death Toll" should not be applicable to the same media presentation.
I actually think the problem here wasn't actual insensitivity, but rather failure to anticipate a shortcoming of the avatar technology employed. Zuck's cartoon representation doesn't reproduce any emotional expression, just the kind of upbeat, non-Duchenne smile you get from a hotel receptionist greeting you as the 100th guest that morning. The jolly Zuck cartoon figure surveying scenes of horrific devastation gives the inescapable impression of sociopathy.
Yes, there's a difference, but the design of a product starts with user interaction. I was lead developer on a vertical market software product but I came from a consulting development background, so I was also in effect the product manager. I took what had been a tech-centered development process and made it a user centered one, because that's what I knew how to do.
Even so, people didn't know what they wanted until they saw it. Why should they? They're experts in their existing ways of doing things, and a successful product changes the way people do things. It's a long, incremental process to make a system successful, even with a mature product.
It's a *design* flaw though, not the usual half-assed implementation flaw. Yes, there's a social engineering component, but the design of the OS makes the job of the social engineer all too easy.
This attack is like a hybrid Trojan/phishing/MITM attack: your evil app puts up a bogus dialog box that looks like an iOS dialog box asking for Apple credentials. It then harvests this information and transmits it to the bad actor. And it isn't just Apple that's vulnerable to this; Windows does this so often that users are effectively trained to hand over their credentials without thinking.
I've been concerned about this mode of attack for years; which is why when I do run Windows I always do so from an unprivileged account. This also, by the way, keeps the administrator credentials for my machine firmly on my hardware; Microsoft really wants you to log in using your Microsoft credentials and does its best to encourage (sometimes trick) you into doing this when you install, for example, Skype. This is a perfect storm scenario for this kind of attack: users are trained that handing over the credentials to both their network and administrator accounts is a normal part of operating their computers.
I've often thought there should be a hardware solution to this. The obvious solution is some kind of hardware token; but it could be as simple as an LED on the device that can only be lit by the genuine OS routine for asking the user for his credentials; this routine would insulate those credentials from any unprivileged process.
True. But ramping up coal ... supposedly the justification for this ... would bring back sulfur pollution. In general CO2 nearly always comes with other nasties, except to a lesser degree with natural gas.
I wanted to point out two things. The first is that people take clean air for granted. People take stuff that was accomplished before they were old enough to pay attention for granted, like is just magically happens. Like the person on this very sight who told me, when GOES-13 failed, that the government should get its satellite imagery off the Internet like everyone else. People take the way things are when they reach young adulthood for granted, as if they happen magically. But they don't; they take sacrifices. If you've ever been behind a car in a third world country with no emissions standards you'll experience that first hand; the lifetime costs of emissions controls in the US must be thousands of dollars, but if you've never seen what cars do without them the effect of even a single car without emissions controls is almost inconceivable.
The second point is what it takes to get people change. It wasn't the hippie environmentalists doing a Svengali act on Congress. Those kids were too busy tuning and and dropping out to vote or organize politically. It was their parents who demanded change. They watched hundreds of people die in the great New York smog. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. It wasn't the first time the river caught fire, it was the thirteenth, but it was the first one that happened on national television.
The old civil engineering saw was that "dilution is the solution to pollution," but it doesn't work for CO2, which is a pollutant that operates on a global scale. But it also makes it easier for people to deny its effects -- and believe me people denied that effects of smog and water pollution were anything we could do something about back in the day. But eventually people are going to decide to do something about it; and the later they do, the more it will cost.
I remember as a kid in the 60s going up to the mountains for vacation and suddenly finding a lot easier to breathe. Then coming back to the city -- visible at a distance by the chocolate brown smudge hovering above the horizon -- and having my eyes water.
When you look at an old TV show or movie and the buildings a few hundred yards away look all hazy -- that's not the lens or the film stock. It actually friggin' looked like that. Back before the Clean Air Act we used to have "smog events" in which hundreds of people died, like the New York Smog of 1966, one of three such events that occurred in just over a decade in that city.
Shit like that is why we have an EPA and a Clean Air act. It wasn't a bunch of tree-hugging hippies, it was average people reacting to the fact the country was being turned into a shit hole.
Arrogance runs both ways. The assumption you know everything and the other person you're talking to knows nothing. When you deal with people professionally, that's often where your relationship has to start, and you just have to get past that so you can actually get something done.
That happens because bluster and posturing come from insecurity. It's very common for people to feel pressure to be somehow more capable than they feel they can manage. And the result is that they are defensive, and as the best defense is a good offense, it comes out as arrogance, whether it's on the client or consultant side. This imposes a kind of initial phase in which one or both sides struggle to establish a pecking order.
People are threatened by the need to change, but not necessarily knowing what needs to be done. But that's natural; it's the place everyone has to start. Now I reached a point in my career where I'd dealt with hundreds of organizations around the country and thousands of users; and I'd meet with someone who'd maybe been working in the field two or three years and would be absolutely certain I couldn't possibly understand what he was going through. So I had to approach every new client as if I'd never seen any of this before. And it's OK, because (a) I'm being paid by the hour, (b) it gives me a chance to observe, and (c) people are easier to work with after you let them lead as far as they know where to go.
I don't doubt it. But it's also true that it's hard to imagine things different from what they are when you're familiar with the way they are. Lack of perspective is the human condition. Often if you talk to several people who work together, their understanding of what's going on is radically different.
Now it sounds like you've probably been on the receiving end of some high handed treatment. Let me assure you that this runs both ways. It's just something you have to get over. People underestimate the role patience has in creating change.
"Foisting" implies just getting to the sale and moving on. What I'm talking about is more like a long journey into the unknown you're take with someone.
People usually have a pretty good understanding of what they do every day. But there's no inherent reason that they would understand how what they do could be done differently.
I have never met a customer who knows what he wants until he sees it.
So I don't think the question can be answered; the only thing we know for sure is that, at this time, not enough people want something like FireFox or BB OS to make them viable; or at least if there are enough people nobody has figured out a way to get it to the people who want it.
I'm talking about negative feedback, which is an essential element of any system which exhibits oscillatory behavior in the absence of external drivers.
How you feel about a million year "trend" has been reversed is neither here nor there as to whether it has happened. What matters is evidence. The current thinking based on our best evidence is that the climate cycles you are referring to are caused by variations in insolation due to orbital forcing. However if that is true the current era should be cooling.
The past patterns of climate are not governed by some kind of mystic law, like astrology. They are caused by quantifiable physical phenomena.
Well, let's assume the periodic cycle you are talking about is driven by climactic restoring forces rather than exogenous forces like orbital forcing. Even that assumption doesn't lead an ironclad conclusion that there is no point of no return. The oscillating behavior is the product of underlying system processes that could conceivably be disrupted by sufficiently large change -- like stretching a coil spring until it becomes a wire.
But let's just assume there are restoring forces that will undo any anthropogenic changes. They don't work overnight; in fact in the data you allude to they take 36,000 years to reverse direction. So for us, and our descendants for hundreds of generations, there may as well not be any return. Even on the timescale of civilization lifespans that's a long time.
And that's really what the big climate change concern is: not the survival of the species, but the stress that the change will place on civilizations, which will manifest itself as destabilizing financial costs.
... then in effect are asking for a definition of "free speech" after the fact. Logically, this doesn't make much sense. However, if you *do* start from the axiom "free speech is good" you need to either find or construct a definition that is consistent with that axiom. In the meantime assuming that axiom does allow you to examine whether individual cases can be covered as "free speech".
If you start with the axiom that free speech is *always* good, then unless you think selling fraudulent medicine is good then your definition of "free speech" needs to exclude that.
If you start with the axiom that free speech is only *sometimes* good, then your definition can encompass selling fraudulent medicine; however that also raises the possibility that you should *sometimes* oppose free speech.
There are some people who clearly believe that free speech entails complete freedom from legal consequences -- including for libel, or deliberate misinformation that predictably harms or even kills someone. However I suspect there's an element of sloppy thinking there. We've all been raised to regard "free speech" as inviolable, so adopting a broader concept of "free speech" is a handy way of sneaking other things into the tent.
I give up. You obviously know more than the IPCC and your awesome physical intuition beats the hell out of their computer models.
There. That was irony.
Yep. And what separates reality from sci-fi isn't just what is physically possible. It's often what is financially possible.
Yes, but that heat cuts both ways; it both creates hurricanes and destroys them. That's why you can't necessarily conclude that they'll be more frequent.
Cap'n Nobvious News.
Does anybody believe Musk can do *everything* he says he wants to do, and pull it off without so much as a delay?
Some people might think he can do them all eventually, but even those of us who expect some of his ideas never to go anywhere can't ever be quite sure about which ideas those will be. He's had a history of sticking with things even through a lot of intermediate failure.
Of the 15 people that have spent more than a year in space does not constitute a statistically significant sample size
Oh really? What, pray, is the statistical test you are using to determine a sufficient sample size?
Seriously, don't play that card if you can't back it up.