It's a tough thing to try and translate the Shuttle's SRB refurbs across to SpaceX's goals. We all know the costs of complete Shuttle refurbs was prohibitive - boosters were a part of that, the throwaway main tank, tiles and engine inspections, etc. It was man-rated, and that made it more expensive of course, but the Shuttle was a very complicated machine. We never really got the launch cadence to a point where things could get cheaper, because it cost upwards of half a billion every time we launched. I wouldn't consider the SRBs to be the full first stage of the Shuttle either, those main engines burned from launch all the way to orbit after all....
SpaceX's goal for the Falcon 9 is rapid turnaround with little refurbishment. "Little refurbishment" also pretty much directly translates to lower costs. The Falcon 9 - while it is a reasonable launch system - is SpaceX's development and testing platform for it's Mars missions, where it will need to do a lot of launches in a short time period to get people and equipment there, and Mars is where they have to do the same kind of retro burns and reentries that they're doing now with these landings.
This is the first booster they've actually reflown, it will most certainly have been the most carefully refurbished - the loss of a payload on this flight would have been a huge blow to SpaceX. After they get it back on dry land, it'll be inspected again to see what kind of wear and tear occurred and maybe after a dozen flights across a few boosters they'll have a good idea of what to do to refurb the current generation, and what to change to lower the refurb costs on newer generations. It's an iterative process, and these are the first iterations.
Then don't buy from there. They get the hint eventually.
But thinking about it, I've haven't seen any places with the tap and go hardware acutally doing a surcharge or a minimum. There might be some sort of agreement in the background with regards to that.
Plenty of places stick 50 cents on "normal" eftpos transactions if the amount is less than $10 though.
Or quite possibly people can get more money for their Chrome exploits elsewhere, so they naturally don't want to submit - and then lose - good exploits here in this competition.
- Do this in public, and you have to disclose your exploit to get the cash
- Demonstrate in private, somehow, get in touch with some secretive agency somehow, hope that they don't already have this exploit, hope that they simply won't steal your exploit, hope that they won't jail you for something along the lines of "attempted hacking", hope that someone else doesn't release exploit while you're doing this, eventually get cash.
- Demonstrate in private, somehow, sell in black market and hope that highest bidder isn't some secretive agency who probably has enough resources to track you down and jail you for something along the lines of "enabling hacking", and get their money back to boot.
Whenever I see one of "If these trends continue"- style prediction, I think of Disco Stu saying it.
(Disco Stu is doing a sales ptich to Homer) Disco Stu: Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue.... A-y-y-y!
Does everything have to be shortened these days? I can understand "hypertext transfer protocol" getting shortened to http.
But -
library://
LBRY://
Three extra characters, so you don't have to explain all this shit to everyone that stumbles across your service.
Hang on....
LBRY is working well as a brand so far. SEO is a top consideration for startup branding, and LBRY already dominates the search results for our brand name.
Oh, wait, "library" isn't able to be trademarked. This is all about the BRAND. Of course, that's the most important thing when you're claiming to want to perform such an important and respected public service for everyone in the world. Carry on.
Haha, I wouldn't want to know how many thousands of boring people those producers had to sift through to fill 40 minutes of airtime.
But to answer your points:
1) Personally after taking numerous shitty taxi trips from airports, I'd be glad if they just checked their ability to drive, forget their immigration status. 2) Yes, proper ones are, and yes, you can put someone's eye out. Or is removing someone's eye not a problem where you live? 3) Yes. They are classified as "less than lethal" weapons, but you can get unlucky and there are plenty of cases out there if you want to check it out. 4) Biosecurity is Very Serious Business in Australia. We are an island continent, and - cane toads and rabbits aside - have enjoyed the ability to keep most pests and nuisance animals out with simple checks at airports. I'm sorry if your country is a lost cause in that respect. 5) They are very, very sensitive, because smart smugglers triple-wrap their goods a layer at a time in a different rooms and only then do they transfer them to their luggage. If your bag is placed on a surface that had certain powdery substances on it a year ago, then you'll trigger that machine.
Where I work, you have to take into account devices that are 'upstream' when locking things out.
So I have to stand on a conveyor to fix something. I lock out the conveyor, and then I have to make sure that anything that feeds onto that conveyor (and me) is also locked out, so I have to go and lock out the screen deck above me as well.
If a machine has the ability to reach me where I'm working, zones or otherwise, it gets locked out. Now a lot of things could have happened in this case, but the most likely are :
- Nobody realised that this could occur (poor risk assessment or task assessment) - It was understood that this could occur and procedures were in place but they didn't work for some reason (poor risk management and failure of the hierarchy of controls) - Procedures were in place (eg. lock out all robots within reach of you on the assembly line, or when working on robot 130,lock out 129 and 131 as well), but this wasn't performed for some reason by the employee. Safety culture at work, production pressures, lack of training in lockout procedure, failure to notice a hazard (again, lack of training), getting casual about lockouts because "nothing's happened the last 50 times I've done it" - lots of reasons to be had there.
One thing is certain though - one "simple" thing could have stopped an accident like this from happening and it only takes that one thing. You have a bunch of defenses at your disposal (eg guarding, lockouts, laser barriers, procedures, training, threats of sacking if you don't follow the procedures) - only one of those had to do it's job and they'd still be alive today.
My 25 years working in the mining industry - where accidents like this still happen regularly - has proven this to me time and time again. It is usually immediately obvious after the investigation what that one simple thing was. I guess we'll find out in due course.
Plenty of places have electric companies who send tones down the line to receivers in your fusebox that switch various loads in your house. Electric hot water is one, pool pumps are another. For a lower rate, you get a certain number of guaranteed "on" hours a day and the power company gets to turn off your pool pump during peak hours.
Of course, you don't need a smart meter for this, you can use a "ripple control receiver", like they have been doing for the last 40+ years..... but that isn't shiny new tech.
You would have to be clinically insane to think this is a happy scenario for the electricity retailer.
Of course not. But it's the correct thing to do.
And if there *is* a bit of sweeping under the rug, it goes from being a "simple" error in the metering mechanisms to good old fraud, which applies just as much to companies as is does to customers trying to cheat on their power bills. And fraud tends to attract the attention of government authorities and the press - and that's a big old shitstorm nobody wants.
So your legal counsel will always suggest the path of due diligence once things come to a certain level of attention. That "certain level" is debatable, but if there's an increase in billing complaints and ANY investigations suggest that there's a systemic metering error going on, then you're on very thin ice if you choose to ignore it.
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
Australia is unique in that it is an island continent. You can't just drive across the border to get some smokes.
You can fly in with your suitcase full of packs of cigarettes and have them taxed to hell and back in customs, or you can use a boat to go from the northern coast of Australia to PNG / Indonesia, which is not a short trip by any stretch.
Then you have to get your boatload of cigarettes that are boxed in bright, attractive packaging to your customers without arousing suspicion, because every pack of cigarettes in Australia is plain white with pictures of mouth cancer &etc on it by law. So you stuff about and put them all into little baggies, or whaterever, increasing your labour and distribution costs further.
So what will happen is that you'll have a few large black market operators that are regularly picked off by Customs, and black market cigarettes will be hard to come by, and hopefully people will just save themselves the hassle, quit smoking, and drink themselves to death instead with the money they've saved.
No, ROM chips are manufactured with the data an intrinsic part of the silicon, the chip mask changes for different data. If it's writable once, it's a PROM, not a ROM.
And if it's erasable by UV light it's an EPROM
And if instead of UV light you can use a higher voltage to erase it, it's electrically erasable programmable ROM, or EEPROM.
Which these days is pretty much the same as the generic "flash memory" term that you've used.
So.... where were we again?
Oh yeah, ROM being a poorly chosen misnomer. I disagree.
"ROM" - to the end user, past and present - is software you can't change. The BASIC interpreter on your C64, the section of Android that boots and runs the basic system apps, that package is referred to as a ROM, be it a physical chip with a UV window, or these days the zip file that is sent around and then programmed into your EEPROM on your phone.
If someone gave me an OS/9 ROM for my COCO II, yes, that would be a chip. Someone gives me "Bert's Buttery Smooth Vanilla Marshmallow ROM" for my Nexus, well that's a file that gets loaded to my phone, but essentially it's the same item - the operating system.
Smart meters here in Australia have a set of contacts that are switchable by the utility. Typically they are used for off-peak hot water, a load of 15 or so amps.
So, a house fire traced back to a faulty meter means that they can be 'hacked to literally explode'. Excellent extrapolation there guys.
Smart meters may - or may not - have a relay to control loads on a different tariff than the usual "always on 24/7" one. They may possibly be hacked to turn this relay on - or off, making them a bit of a nuisance.
But explosions? Or house fires even? A bit hard to believe.
Some cars with rear disc brakes have a tiny drum and a set of correspondingly tiny brake pads for the park brake inside the rotor. These aren't used in normal braking and can't deal with the heat generated when they're applied when the car is moving.
Problem 1 - Lose one earpiece. Solution 1 - Maybe use a tether of some sort to keep the earpieces together?
Problem 2 - Battery dies Solution 2 - Maybe have that tether double as a charging lead? You could plug it into some sort of handy port on the phone to keep the batteries charged up.
Problem 3 - Audio sync between earpieces. Solution 3 - Perhaps shift the audio hardware to the phone, decode the audio there and then transfer simple audio signals down the tether to the earpieces? That might work.
When the moon is viewed at the horizon from your position it is approximately one Earth radii (6000km) further away from you compared to when it's directly overhead.
Do you have friends and/or family with Apple products? If so, then this is a window into their little world of seamless messaging, something that is a complete shitshow on Android. Basically, once you've got a person's Apple ID, you can send them a message and it will appear:
On their iPad On their iPhone - and the backend will switch to SMS if necessary to deliver it, if you're without data. On their iMac, or whatever their desktop/laptop line is called now.
And they can reply to and follow the complete conversation on any device.
The biggest thing about iMessage is that it's been consistent for years across IOS devices. One consistent messaging interface, compared to Android and it's pile of apps that attempt to substitute for the missing OEM unified messaging app. Here's a few that I can think of off the top of my head :
Messages (and any aftermarket SMS app) Hangouts Allo Whatsapp Facebook Messenger Kik
There's no one app that can do messaging via data or SMS across the desktop and phone space. Apple users don't have to deal with this fragmentation. Everyone's got iMessage. And it's pretty damn slick.
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It's a tough thing to try and translate the Shuttle's SRB refurbs across to SpaceX's goals. We all know the costs of complete Shuttle refurbs was prohibitive - boosters were a part of that, the throwaway main tank, tiles and engine inspections, etc. It was man-rated, and that made it more expensive of course, but the Shuttle was a very complicated machine. We never really got the launch cadence to a point where things could get cheaper, because it cost upwards of half a billion every time we launched. I wouldn't consider the SRBs to be the full first stage of the Shuttle either, those main engines burned from launch all the way to orbit after all....
SpaceX's goal for the Falcon 9 is rapid turnaround with little refurbishment. "Little refurbishment" also pretty much directly translates to lower costs. The Falcon 9 - while it is a reasonable launch system - is SpaceX's development and testing platform for it's Mars missions, where it will need to do a lot of launches in a short time period to get people and equipment there, and Mars is where they have to do the same kind of retro burns and reentries that they're doing now with these landings.
This is the first booster they've actually reflown, it will most certainly have been the most carefully refurbished - the loss of a payload on this flight would have been a huge blow to SpaceX. After they get it back on dry land, it'll be inspected again to see what kind of wear and tear occurred and maybe after a dozen flights across a few boosters they'll have a good idea of what to do to refurb the current generation, and what to change to lower the refurb costs on newer generations. It's an iterative process, and these are the first iterations.
Then don't buy from there. They get the hint eventually.
But thinking about it, I've haven't seen any places with the tap and go hardware acutally doing a surcharge or a minimum. There might be some sort of agreement in the background with regards to that.
Plenty of places stick 50 cents on "normal" eftpos transactions if the amount is less than $10 though.
Chrome might have remained unhackable.
Or quite possibly people can get more money for their Chrome exploits elsewhere, so they naturally don't want to submit - and then lose - good exploits here in this competition.
Well, it's a case of:
- Do this in public, and you have to disclose your exploit to get the cash
- Demonstrate in private, somehow, get in touch with some secretive agency somehow, hope that they don't already have this exploit, hope that they simply won't steal your exploit, hope that they won't jail you for something along the lines of "attempted hacking", hope that someone else doesn't release exploit while you're doing this, eventually get cash.
- Demonstrate in private, somehow, sell in black market and hope that highest bidder isn't some secretive agency who probably has enough resources to track you down and jail you for something along the lines of "enabling hacking", and get their money back to boot.
Whenever I see one of "If these trends continue"- style prediction, I think of Disco Stu saying it.
(Disco Stu is doing a sales ptich to Homer)
Disco Stu: Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue.... A-y-y-y!
That's the whole point of the competition.
The cash prize + internet fame is designed to be enough of an incentive for you to give out the details instead of selling it on the black market.
Does everything have to be shortened these days?
I can understand "hypertext transfer protocol" getting shortened to http.
But -
library://
LBRY://
Three extra characters, so you don't have to explain all this shit to everyone that stumbles across your service.
Hang on....
LBRY is working well as a brand so far. SEO is a top consideration for startup branding, and LBRY already dominates the search results for our brand name.
Oh, wait, "library" isn't able to be trademarked. This is all about the BRAND. Of course, that's the most important thing when you're claiming to want to perform such an important and respected public service for everyone in the world. Carry on.
Haha, I wouldn't want to know how many thousands of boring people those producers had to sift through to fill 40 minutes of airtime.
But to answer your points:
1) Personally after taking numerous shitty taxi trips from airports, I'd be glad if they just checked their ability to drive, forget their immigration status.
2) Yes, proper ones are, and yes, you can put someone's eye out. Or is removing someone's eye not a problem where you live?
3) Yes. They are classified as "less than lethal" weapons, but you can get unlucky and there are plenty of cases out there if you want to check it out.
4) Biosecurity is Very Serious Business in Australia. We are an island continent, and - cane toads and rabbits aside - have enjoyed the ability to keep most pests and nuisance animals out with simple checks at airports. I'm sorry if your country is a lost cause in that respect.
5) They are very, very sensitive, because smart smugglers triple-wrap their goods a layer at a time in a different rooms and only then do they transfer them to their luggage. If your bag is placed on a surface that had certain powdery substances on it a year ago, then you'll trigger that machine.
Where I work, you have to take into account devices that are 'upstream' when locking things out.
So I have to stand on a conveyor to fix something. I lock out the conveyor, and then I have to make sure that anything that feeds onto that conveyor (and me) is also locked out, so I have to go and lock out the screen deck above me as well.
If a machine has the ability to reach me where I'm working, zones or otherwise, it gets locked out.
Now a lot of things could have happened in this case, but the most likely are :
- Nobody realised that this could occur (poor risk assessment or task assessment)
- It was understood that this could occur and procedures were in place but they didn't work for some reason (poor risk management and failure of the hierarchy of controls)
- Procedures were in place (eg. lock out all robots within reach of you on the assembly line, or when working on robot 130,lock out 129 and 131 as well), but this wasn't performed for some reason by the employee. Safety culture at work, production pressures, lack of training in lockout procedure, failure to notice a hazard (again, lack of training), getting casual about lockouts because "nothing's happened the last 50 times I've done it" - lots of reasons to be had there.
One thing is certain though - one "simple" thing could have stopped an accident like this from happening and it only takes that one thing. You have a bunch of defenses at your disposal (eg guarding, lockouts, laser barriers, procedures, training, threats of sacking if you don't follow the procedures) - only one of those had to do it's job and they'd still be alive today.
My 25 years working in the mining industry - where accidents like this still happen regularly - has proven this to me time and time again. It is usually immediately obvious after the investigation what that one simple thing was. I guess we'll find out in due course.
Plenty of places have electric companies who send tones down the line to receivers in your fusebox that switch various loads in your house. Electric hot water is one, pool pumps are another. For a lower rate, you get a certain number of guaranteed "on" hours a day and the power company gets to turn off your pool pump during peak hours.
Of course, you don't need a smart meter for this, you can use a "ripple control receiver", like they have been doing for the last 40+ years..... but that isn't shiny new tech.
You would have to be clinically insane to think this is a happy scenario for the electricity retailer.
Of course not. But it's the correct thing to do.
And if there *is* a bit of sweeping under the rug, it goes from being a "simple" error in the metering mechanisms to good old fraud, which applies just as much to companies as is does to customers trying to cheat on their power bills. And fraud tends to attract the attention of government authorities and the press - and that's a big old shitstorm nobody wants.
So your legal counsel will always suggest the path of due diligence once things come to a certain level of attention. That "certain level" is debatable, but if there's an increase in billing complaints and ANY investigations suggest that there's a systemic metering error going on, then you're on very thin ice if you choose to ignore it.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt05...
I don't know if we are *truly* alone in the University, but it sure is empty here in the proof-reading department.
Well, we could also just outright ban them, but that would make cigarette companies sad.
Australia is unique in that it is an island continent. You can't just drive across the border to get some smokes.
You can fly in with your suitcase full of packs of cigarettes and have them taxed to hell and back in customs, or you can use a boat to go from the northern coast of Australia to PNG / Indonesia, which is not a short trip by any stretch.
Then you have to get your boatload of cigarettes that are boxed in bright, attractive packaging to your customers without arousing suspicion, because every pack of cigarettes in Australia is plain white with pictures of mouth cancer &etc on it by law. So you stuff about and put them all into little baggies, or whaterever, increasing your labour and distribution costs further.
So what will happen is that you'll have a few large black market operators that are regularly picked off by Customs, and black market cigarettes will be hard to come by, and hopefully people will just save themselves the hassle, quit smoking, and drink themselves to death instead with the money they've saved.
No, ROM chips are manufactured with the data an intrinsic part of the silicon, the chip mask changes for different data. If it's writable once, it's a PROM, not a ROM.
And if it's erasable by UV light it's an EPROM
And if instead of UV light you can use a higher voltage to erase it, it's electrically erasable programmable ROM, or EEPROM.
Which these days is pretty much the same as the generic "flash memory" term that you've used.
So.... where were we again?
Oh yeah, ROM being a poorly chosen misnomer. I disagree.
"ROM" - to the end user, past and present - is software you can't change. The BASIC interpreter on your C64, the section of Android that boots and runs the basic system apps, that package is referred to as a ROM, be it a physical chip with a UV window, or these days the zip file that is sent around and then programmed into your EEPROM on your phone.
If someone gave me an OS/9 ROM for my COCO II, yes, that would be a chip. Someone gives me "Bert's Buttery Smooth Vanilla Marshmallow ROM" for my Nexus, well that's a file that gets loaded to my phone, but essentially it's the same item - the operating system.
Smart meters here in Australia have a set of contacts that are switchable by the utility. Typically they are used for off-peak hot water, a load of 15 or so amps.
So, a house fire traced back to a faulty meter means that they can be 'hacked to literally explode'. Excellent extrapolation there guys.
Smart meters may - or may not - have a relay to control loads on a different tariff than the usual "always on 24/7" one. They may possibly be hacked to turn this relay on - or off, making them a bit of a nuisance.
But explosions? Or house fires even? A bit hard to believe.
Some cars with rear disc brakes have a tiny drum and a set of correspondingly tiny brake pads for the park brake inside the rotor. These aren't used in normal braking and can't deal with the heat generated when they're applied when the car is moving.
"Broad and Scientific" are not contradictory poses.
Broad - accept any solution that might be out there.
Scientific - thoroughly research said solutions for suitability with regards to many factors.
Perhaps Forbes was thinking of "Broad and Specific", which would indeed be somewhat contradictory.
Problem 1 - Lose one earpiece.
Solution 1 - Maybe use a tether of some sort to keep the earpieces together?
Problem 2 - Battery dies
Solution 2 - Maybe have that tether double as a charging lead? You could plug it into some sort of handy port on the phone to keep the batteries charged up.
Problem 3 - Audio sync between earpieces.
Solution 3 - Perhaps shift the audio hardware to the phone, decode the audio there and then transfer simple audio signals down the tether to the earpieces? That might work.
When the moon is viewed at the horizon from your position it is approximately one Earth radii (6000km) further away from you compared to when it's directly overhead.
Do you have friends and/or family with Apple products? If so, then this is a window into their little world of seamless messaging, something that is a complete shitshow on Android. Basically, once you've got a person's Apple ID, you can send them a message and it will appear:
On their iPad
On their iPhone - and the backend will switch to SMS if necessary to deliver it, if you're without data.
On their iMac, or whatever their desktop/laptop line is called now.
And they can reply to and follow the complete conversation on any device.
The biggest thing about iMessage is that it's been consistent for years across IOS devices. One consistent messaging interface, compared to Android and it's pile of apps that attempt to substitute for the missing OEM unified messaging app. Here's a few that I can think of off the top of my head :
Messages (and any aftermarket SMS app)
Hangouts
Allo
Whatsapp
Facebook Messenger
Kik
There's no one app that can do messaging via data or SMS across the desktop and phone space. Apple users don't have to deal with this fragmentation. Everyone's got iMessage. And it's pretty damn slick.
Huh, I thought it was something along the lines of, "Tribal faith healer".
Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition......
Even if it goes against accepted medical science.
"You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine." - Tim Minchin.