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User: Bruce+Perens

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  1. Re: Waiting on NASA on SpaceX Delays Plans To Send Space Tourists To Circle Moon (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry bud, I know you don't like it that way, but those were the very first integrated circuits in the Apollo guidance computer.

  2. I know that some science fiction authors have written stories about people not being able to survive away from Earth. But that's just science fiction, and I can't say I found it to be good science fiction either. Actually we don't have any proof yet that the gravity on Mars is a problem for reproduction. And we know how to shield radiation. I like just using a lot of dirt or water but there are more advanced materials too. Life is a lot more tenacious than I think you give it credit. Including people.

  3. Re:Waiting on NASA on SpaceX Delays Plans To Send Space Tourists To Circle Moon (cnet.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We should have spent the first decade pouring billions into better computers, better alloys, better robotics, better polymers, etc. before shooting for the moon.

    And Ferdinand Magellan should have waited for inertial navigation.

    Of course, that's silly. A good deal of technology was developed for Apollo, including the integrated circuit. But you could say the same thing today - that we need to develop better technology before we should consider such a mission - that you could have said in 1960. At some point you have to go and that generally happens as soon as it's first possible.

  4. Re:SpaceX has other priorities right now on SpaceX Delays Plans To Send Space Tourists To Circle Moon (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    No NASA rating is needed for SpaceX to fly humans anywhere in any of their rockets

    No, as we know from Mad Mike Hughes, any idiot can make a "rocket" and fly whoever is willing (in this case, only himself). But SpaceX thinks they will have the larger rocket soon enough that there is no point in playing these games with Falcon Heavy.

  5. Liquid hydrogen is troublesome stuff. It has to be colder than anything else you could use, and you have to keep it that way. It leaks out of anything. Liquid methane is a lot easier to handle.

    It does make carbon and water when you burn it.

  6. Things you can't do with solid fuel on SpaceX Delays Plans To Send Space Tourists To Circle Moon (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Not to mention that landing a solid-fuel rocket would be... problematical :-)

  7. Alternative propulsion systems are unfortunately a pipe dream. I wish it was otherwise. Rockets are pretty clean burning (especially the methane LOX one which will be the next SpaceX rocket). Let's not throw out the baby with the bath-water, we need to get the human race off of the planet. Regardless of how nice we are to it, it's only one planet and planets are not forever.

  8. Re:Waiting on NASA on SpaceX Delays Plans To Send Space Tourists To Circle Moon (cnet.com) · · Score: 1

    You would not say that if you knew someone who worked on the lunar module program. NASA was no picnic back then, either.

    I guess Heinlein was right, when he wrote about an entrepreneur running a successful space program. In fairness to NASA, they had to do all they did first, before this was possible.

  9. SpaceX has other priorities right now on SpaceX Delays Plans To Send Space Tourists To Circle Moon (cnet.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Human-qualifying the Falcon Heavy, which would be necessary for tourist flights around the moon, isn't a priority for SpaceX. They're pretty much through with Falcon-9 engineering. Now they will make the Dragon 2 work, but their main direction is to eventually replace Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 heavy with a much larger methane and liquid oxygen rocket which is as powerful as Falcon Heavy with just one "stick" rather than three.

    There's a lot to be done between here and there, and every rocket engineering project has major risk, but this will potentially be a much more practical path to human space exploration than the SLS system which is an albatross around NASA's neck IMO and exists mainly as a pork-barrel jobs program.

    In fairness to NASA and congress, we didn't know that SpaceX would be this successful when SLS was approved.

  10. Fords have killed tens of people today... on A Tesla on Autopilot Crashed Into a Parked Police Car (fortune.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Fords have killed tens of people today and do every day. On any typical day, more than 100 people die in the U.S. from auto accidents while riding in brands other than Tesla. In contrast, a handful of people have died in Teslas.

    While the NTSB is interested in batteries and self-driving systems, their announcements of investigations create a false impression that Teslas are more dangerous than other vehicles. The opposite is most likely the case, since a self-driving system, properly used, has the collision-avoiding attention of the driver and of a computer too.

    So, why so much bad news about Tesla?

    Tesla is also the most shorted stock at present, with short positions covering more than a quarter of all outstanding shares and perhaps as much as one third. That means a great many investors are desperate to see Tesla's stock reach a much lower price soon, or they'll be forced to buy it at its present price in order to fulfill their short positions, potentially bankrupting many of them and sending some out of the windows of Wall Street skyscrapers. These investors are desperately seeding, feeding, and writing negative stories about Tesla in the hope of depressing the stock price. Musk recently taunted them by buying another 10 Million dollars in stock, making it even more likely that there won't be enough stock in the market to cover short positions. If that's the case, short-sellers could end up in debt for thousands of dollars per shorted share -- as the price balloons until enough stockholders are persuaded to sell. Will short-sellers do anything to give Tesla bad press? You bet.

    And of course there's the interest of the gasoline industry, which will go out of business given the proliferation of fully-electric vehicles that are actually good enough to compete with gasoline ones, a position that only Tesla holds so far. Entrenched automotive manufacturers also have every reason to seed and feed bad press while they fail to build their own battery manufacturing plants. Before Tesla, one could see the obvious activities of these powers in seeding bad news about the Prius.

    Then there's the fact that Tesla does not advertise. Given the queue of Model 3 reservations, Tesla already has all of the sales they need for their next three years of their factory's production, before they might have any economic reason to advertise. This can't be comfortable for the press, and no doubt makes them more willing to carry stories seeded by those who would harm Tesla.

  11. So, we've created a monster on America's Teens Are Choosing YouTube Over Facebook (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Back when we were looking fondly toward the future where normal people would be on the Internet, we didn't really think of participants so tremendous that more than a 10th of traffic might go their way. Just as there wasn't only one telephone number that everyone called. But that's what we got. We thought the internet would be a tool for democracy. We we ever f**king wrong.

    Over time, it might turn out that the market flattens out or that distributed social networking really does catch on. I hope. Just reading about the internet as the fiefdom of a dozen companies makes me ill.

  12. Re:Measure twice, cut once on FDA Halts One of the First Human CRISPR Studies Before it Begins (technologyreview.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't know if you actually know you're doing it, but this is a classical fascist tactic. Immediately attack the questioner that they are incompetent to assess the issue. State that only specialists can do it, and the involvement of the interested public is inappropriate. This is of course used to protect a medical technique that may combine extreme risk with low efficacy. It will make someone a ton of money, potentially at the cost of some number of poor people being killed or having their health made worse.

    The FDA's job is to protect us from quack medical techniques and practitioners. THEY ARE NOT DOING IT. Most doctors, that is MOST, prescribe off-list medicines, those which are not FDA-recommended for the disease in question. This should be illegal. No one person, regardless of their medical education, should have the power to make that sort of decision.

    Many quack practitioners practice with state or federal licenses on the borderlines of medicine with no scientific backing for their efficacy, like chiropractic, osteopathy, aromatherapy, etc. We also have nostrums for sale like oscillococinium actually for sale in pharmacies. And there is no regulation of supplements.

    So, now people are going to get to hack the human genone with minimal or monitoring of the individual case by anyone but the doctor in charge. What could go wrong with that?

  13. Re:Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Well, I seem to be really sensitive to vitamin B. Blood pressure, palpitations, all from a few sports drinks or that vitamin C powder stuff. And it turns out that all vitamin C is made in China. So yeah, that's the ticket, definitely the Chinese are to blame.

  14. Re: Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Building wiring causing EM that effects people seems really unlikely. And this is easy to measure so would not go undetected.

  15. Re:Millions of Android devices ... on Edge Beats Chrome in Battery Test, Says Microsoft (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    Android is only a Linux kernel. The entire run-time environment is Google's own. And since it spends most of its time providing an architecture-independent interface to processors that don't need it, because they are mostly 32 or 64 bit versions of ARM, I feel doubly disinclined to claim responsibility for it.

  16. Re:Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    Before anyone made an infrared motion detector based on an IC, intrusion alarms were based on sonar. They would detect the doppler from any moving object, which would be a difference from the fundamental frequency. Ultrasonic ones had the advantage that they did not make audible noise. At least most of the time. There were audible ones too. These ran around 10 kHz, I think using the same speaker for the alarm siren and for the sonar emitter.

  17. I don't understand on Edge Beats Chrome in Battery Test, Says Microsoft (zdnet.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What's the point of Edge if it doesn't run on any good, professional operating system?

  18. It's a pairing attack, and most locks by design pair over a short distance - so you have to take them off the door and hold them near the controller. IMO this is not a viable attack for an outsider to mount and you should not panic. If this attack worked at any time other than pairing, there would be more reason to worry.

  19. The locks in question pair over short distances - by design - and generally have to be taken off of the door and held need the controller to pair. Having an outsider cause a downgrade attack at that one critical time would be extremely unlikely. Once paired, there is no path to attack.

    Sure, I would have locks reflashed if the manufacturer offered it inexpensively. But there's no reason to panic.

  20. Re: Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    The difference would be audible at 5 kHz. Modulation of one signal with another? Remember the inverse square law. The strongest combination of the two signals is between them, not at the transducers. Where sum (too high to be audible) and difference would be the strongest signals after the fundamentals (also too high to be audible). Air and the ear are sufficiently nonlinear.

  21. Re:Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Being diplomatic staff in Cuba was never an ordinary job. I don't know what all of the arrangements and rules are regarding staff housing, but I am sure they have 24-hour security, bug sweeps, and monitoring for various forms of attack.

  22. Re:Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    Whoa! You totally misread me. I wrote that the Dutch did not have any reason to blame Russia if they didn't think Russia actually did it. I certainly believe them when they say that Russia did it.

  23. Re:Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 2

    A sonic attack from space may sound far-fetched but they have been doing very creative things with lasers and microwaves these days.

    Obviously there isn't going to be a sonic attack from someplace with no atmosphere.

    Lasers actually do spread, one from space is going to end up being larger than someone's house, and easy enough to detect. Microwaves will never get that narrow a beamwidth and are easy to receive.

  24. Re:Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Tell that to the Dutch. Then duck!

    While the economic and military weight of those large nations is obvious, the Dutch are nobody's puppets. Just spend some time there. And especially today, when they (and most Europeans) find Trump possibly more repulsive than Putin.

  25. Re:Still need to take this with skepticism on First Cuba, Now China? A Worker In US Embassy In China Experienced 'Abnormal' Sounds, Brain Damage (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry about your acquaintances. But my comment meant that the Dutch didn't have a reason to blame the Russians if they didn't think the Russians were responsible.