I totally understand that. However, if you could accelerate a Falcon 9 to ~ 1000km/h without burning any of the carried fuel, then manage to ignite it at the point of emergence, would the cost of building the launch mechanism pay for itself?
In other words, it's the gain you make by providing the first 1000km/h of launch velocity without burning carried fuel. In theory this means that you can get the same amount into orbit for less [energy] cost, or put a larger payload in to orbit for the same cost.
I was just thinking about his portfolio of companies and how they could be integrated, that's all. I totally accept that we don't have the ability today, but then 100 years ago, Ford were just introducing the Model T... Just think what they've accomplished since then. If we can deliver even a fraction of those sorts of advances to space flight, then 100 years from now, we could have colonised a significant part of our solar system. We just have to want to do it badly enough, I guess.
... if this nasty little trick was unique to Apple, or if any of the other big handset manufacturers have been doing this. Has anyone seen any discussion of that?
This exact points was covered in the discussion thread to an earlier slashdot article which covered this story.
Someone posted the results of some speed tests they had performed and it indicated that the performance degradation is driven by a software check on the handset version, not the condition of the battery.
Apple have a tremendous opportunity to dig themselves out of this with some excellent PR - by issuing a new version of iOS which doesn't only remove this feature, but which includes an App that gives a detailed, accurate summary of battery performance, with a recommendation regarding replacement.
If they were to do this, they might be able to turn this PR disaster into a positive story. It's just shocking [criminally shocking] that they are doing this in the first place.
If we look at the various different market sectors that Elon Musk has developed businesses for, then with the possible exception of Tesla, all of them, potentially even The Boring Company and Hyperlook [granted he isn't directly investing in this now] would seem to have the potential to be integrated at some future time.
For example, if mankind were to use "Boring Company" technology to cut an access tunnel up to a point near the 5,980-metre peak of the mountain, then use Hyperloop technology to provide a platform on which a rocket could be placed, put a stack of Solar City panels in the vicinity [to power the super-conducting magnets used by the maglev technology and perhaps also to synethsise the Methylox fuel, then essentially he has most of the components needed for a launch system that grabs another order of magnitude of cost savings/efficiency gains - because potentially the vehicle itself could do away with a potentially significant amount of fuel.
I took a quick look at the most recent launch, CRS-13, in which at 6km of altitude, the vehicle had achieved a speed of 938km/h, a little shy of MaxQ. I would have to concede that we are still a long way short, engineering-wise, of being able to achieve that even with a maglev track in an evacuated hyperloop tunnel. But Musk is all about continual, iterative improvement.
I would be the first to concede that all I've done here is borrow ideas postulated by science fiction writers for many years now: but if you go back to the 1950s and 1960s and look at the writing of Heinlein-era sci-fi writers, rockets that landed on their tails and took off again were a staple fare. It took real life 60-70 years to catch up, but SpaceX did it. With our rate of development increasing, what I outline here could be as little as 20-30 years away.
Which I guess leads to a question - which would be the most cost-effective solution: Falcon Heavy or a ballistic launcher? FH has massively lower development costs, but the operating expenses will be higher. A launcher will cost several metric f@ktons of money to develop, but, once done, should be significantly cheaper to operate.
br?
Which would you go for?
I was in an Apple store in the UK this week to have my Mac Mini un-fcsked after the High Sierra update screwed it up. An Apple employee was trying a very hard sell on a customer who had a problem with their iPhone 6. The Apple employee said that the battery could be replaced for 70 pounds and that it would take an hour or so. They pushed hard on an up-sell though.
Degrading the handset performance in an attempt to promote a sale - I.e. failing to detect a new battery and instead keeping performance degraded - would fall foul of The Sale of Goods and Services Act in the UK...
Literally just got back from a 45-mile round-trip to my nearest Apple Store where I had an appointment to cure a failure of my Mac Mini. It turned out that the High Sierra update "doesn't play well with HDDs" according to the Apple Genius who attended my machine. The "fix" was to wipe the entire machine and perform a clean installation of *Sierra*, with the instruction to me, "Don't upgrade yet..."
It is absolutely inconceivable that Jobs-era Apple would have allowed this to happen: had he still been with us, the roll-out would have been cancelled before it had even started.
It is self-evident that Apple's quality control has deteriorated markedly since Steve passed away.
The big problem for Apple is that with most hardware manufacturers significantly raising their game on producing gear at least as good as Cupertino's, the only unique differentiator they had up until now was the bullet-proof reliability derived from having both hardware and software built in-house. But with software quality reduced to a steaming pile of poo, all that's left is some stupidly over-priced hardware.
This won't be sustainable. Apple need to get their quality mojo back, or here starts the slide to oblivion...
I think you are incorrect to argue that the ability to indefinitely increase the supply of a currency is a good thing.
Robert Mugabe tried that in Zimbabwe - his solution to not having enough cash to pay for basic services was to simply print more money - in practical terms precisely what you argue for here.
What Zimbabwe have ended up with is hyper-inflation, in which most people in the country have ignored their own currency and now run their lives using the US dollar or the Euro, with some very old and extremely tatty bank notes changing hands. Indeed, I would go so far as to say your first and second points are potentially mutually exclusive: you can't have a stable economy whilst you have the ability to produce unlimited supply.
Your third and fourth points are potentially valid in that I don't think governments will cede control of their *national currency* to crypto-coins. But having said that, you completely ignore reality: in the western world, most people don't use "cash" anyway: we use digital numbers kept in databases on computers. Our control point is a small plastic card or a smartphone... But, far more importantly, I don't think anyone is suggesting that the world will suddenly replace fiat currencies with crypto currency. That is clearly nonsense. What might happen, however, is that crypto-currency could become an ideal vehicle for international trade and deals between two or more fiat currencies. At the moment the biggest banks have "currency conversion" sewn up pretty tight - and they make **billions** of dollars in fees from converting between currencies for clients. Using a low-cost alternative [your last point, which is crucial] to replace fiat currencies for this could absolutely be made to work, if only the middle-men weren't so greedy.
And no, not the fact that there isn't much in the way of "high-pressure air" at the outermost fringes of our atmosphere...
The part which seems a little odd is to suggest that altering the apparent pressure [i.e. by the velocity of entry] can in some way "force" air into the cracks within a meteorite/meteorid to induce some form of break-up.
Isn't it much more likely to be induced by the coefficient of expansion of the material concerned? If you take a meteorite and then flash-heat the outer surface very, very, very quickly - like for example by slamming it into an atmosphere at several thousand kph - then the outer layer will become very, very hot very quickly - and start to expand. The interior, meanwhile, simply won't have had time to warm up and thus will remain space-cold... As the outer layer warms, it expands. This would easily be enough to cause cracks in the material [think of the way that you can split a rock by pouring water into a crack and then waiting for the water to freeze...].
It's been a while since I studied CFD [computational fluid dynamics - which is the science that would show how atmospheric gases would "flow" around an meteorite as it entered the atmosphere - but I think it's fair to say that a "boundary layer" would form that might in fact make it ridiculously difficult for "high pressure air" to be "forced" into tiny cracks in the surface.
So... very interesting theory, but I think we might find that things like the irregular shape and density of the material [which causes non-uniform stress on the material] coupled with very high speed heating, might be significant factors too...
This is the Corporate equivalent of Darwin in Action.
There have been so many indicators of a shift away from fossil fuels that no company operating in that market sector - and certainly not a company as large or well established as GE, can have any excuse for not being aware of this fact.
The failure of GE to anticipate this market shift and adjust their corporate strategy to accommodate it would be the responsibility of John Flannery's predecessor, Jeff Immelt and the board of Directors that he led. Whilst unforgivable, it is certainly not the first time that we've witnessed such corporate hubris. Look at what happened to Kodak as a result of the "digital revolution" for example.
The most egregious aspect of this story is the one that doesn't seem to be explored properly: the fact that 12,000 people have lost their jobs because of utterly incompetent management. And what happens to those incompetent managers? In the case of Immelt, at 61 he stepped down from the CEO role and planned to continue as Chairman to the end of this year, but got pushed out of that by Flannery on October 2nd. Not a moment too soon, looking at this mess. So Immelt will cruise into retirement with a massive 401k, not to mention all the stock options he's had over the years. A shame that 12,000 families are now going to pay the price for his incompetence.
I'm sure that they are different at a detail level, but at a *scale* level there have to be parallels between the manufacture of turbine blades used in fossil fuel power generation and the technologies used for wind or hydro power generation. Why didn't GE begin a ramp-up into those emerging technologies when they had the time and revenue to carry it? This article headline should have read, "Over the last 18 months, GE have switched 12,000 Jobs from Fossil Fuel to Renewable Energy Technologies".
The fact that it doesn't should herald a managerial bloodbath, and the installation of a competent board of directors. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth...
I stumbled across their channel whilst looking for information on how to set up for a DIY circumnavigation. I would be the first to admit that their content can be a bit erratic - you might get a mostly-serious video showing some amazing underwater scenery and fabulous diving... or you might get a recording of a beach party with the crew literally running around naked [and the use of a great deal of per-frame "fuzzing" to get past the YouTube censors.
But over the course of the last few years I've watched them hone their craft, use the Patreon revenue to buy [much] better video equipment, invite guests on board who have a lot of film-making and video experience... and as a result the quality of their productions has massively improved with time. If you like their tone and their occasionally juvenile outlook on life doesn't bother you, they have an excellent formula.
Their Patreon numbers certainly suggest it's an effective one. Your point about how they started and got traction is a good one. They started when Brian Trautman [older brother] bought the Amels yacht after cashing in his 401K early and deciding to sail the world. Eight years later they are going stronger than ever. When they started they did not have the plan to produce anything as popular or well-developed as the current videos - it was much more a case of a video diary/vlog. What has happened as been entirely organic as they have learned the skills and garnered the feedback.
Perhaps most interesting of all, there is as much to learn there about vlogging as a way of living as there is about the art of blue water sailing. And maybe that's the secret ingredient?
As you say this isn't clear - but, having read around what they are attempting to do in this case, I think the answer will be, "They are attempting whichever version of this will give them the most income".
Sailing SV Delos is an adventure/sailing/diving channel that follows the antics of two brothers (Brian and Brady Trautman), Brian's girlfriend Karin, plus an assortment of [very!] colourful characters as they make their way around the world aboard Delos, a 53' Amel Super Maramu.
Delos currently has Patreon sponsorship to the tune of $13,433 *per video*, and they have uploaded 5 videos in the last 3 weeks. So that's what, $67,000 in 3 weeks?
Does that count as not making money on Patreon?
Oh, and their videos are excellent fun - 4K, lots of good sailing, lots of diving, lots of fun...
No, I have no affiliation, but I am interested in quitting my job and buying a boat and circumnavigating... So this is an informative and entertaining channel from my point of view...
... of reading the OP and concluding that the presiding Judge is in any way biased against the plaintiffs (the three female Google employees).
If anything, the exact opposite could be true.
The Judge will know that this case is going to be ferociously defended by Google, that it will garner a very great deal of public interest and scrutiny and that, if it gets as far as substantive rulings, could very well set a precedent and become case law that is cited in future disputes. In other words, the Judge simply can't afford to allow even a small chink or gap or flaw in the prosecution's argument, because to do so would be to invite the defendants to demand that the case be tossed.
Nor should you read the above statement and conclude that I believe the Judge to be inclined towards the plaintiffs in this case. The Judge will equally demand that the defendants are thorough and reasoned in their arguments.
This case has all the hallmarks of something that will be super-significant. The Court is simply making sure that both parties put their best legal foot forward.
I *think* there may be a fundamental error with the article linked by the OP. The author of that article, Eric Holthaus, argues that because the value of Bitcoins is increasing due to speculation, so of course more and more people will jump in to the task of mining new Bitcoins.
Except of course that can't happen forever, thanks to the design of Bitcoin. As this page explains quite nicely...
there is actually a finite limit to the number of Bitcoins that will ever be created. To quote the explainer,
"Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is adjusted every 2016 blocks to aim for a constant two week adjustment period (equivalent to 6 per hour.) The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence is not expected to exceed 21 million.[2] Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value "21 million" are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number."
So, in other words, although in theory the folks who mine new blocks are going to continue to get paid in Bitcoins, the value they receive will dimish to tiny fractions. Eventually we should get to the point where we continue to need new blocks to host transactions, but miners will receive virtually nothing for their efforts - certainly far less in value terms than the cost of the electricity required to solve the math problems.
That may be why we're seeing a peak in activity now - i.e. whilst the cost-benefit favours mining. The moment that balance tips the other way, we're likely to see significant changes in both mining activity and the perceived value of Bitcoins.
And for those unwilling to open the link, the analysis predicts [with reasonable give-or-take accuracy] that Bitcoin will hit the limit by 2024, when miners will be paid approx 6.5 Bitcoins per block.
As at today, miners are paid 12.5 Bitcoins per mined block. This is set to halve come 2021 [down to 6.25 per block] so we might see negative pressure on Bitcoin value when that happens.
But, based on what I've read, the linked article might be missing a few key points...
Um... did you happen to read the notes on the page you link to?
The bit where it clearly states that the images in the sequence for the eclipse were "as seen from the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter"?
[As in: most emphatically not the International Space Station]
Although I've seen that set of images before [I happen to have a framed print hanging on the wall in my study] I don't have specifics as to the reason for the shading. However, I will hazard a guess [since that's often a good way to get corrected by someone who knows the actual details!] and say that it's likely because of the way that the light from the sun gets refracted by the Earth's atmosphere.
For example, we know that the reason that our sky appears blue is because water vapour in the atmosphere refracts away some of the light... So if it's refracted away, perhaps the red wavelengths make it to the moon, which is why that shot appears that colour? The reason you're seeing refraction is because we're seeing the edge of the shadow, cast by light refracted through Earth's atmosphere...
Curiously, the OP fails to mention that the original intended use for what we now know as Texts or SMS Messages was in fact as a means to aid troubleshooting around the cellular network.
The mobile operators were in the process of switching over from the older, poorer quality but better-understood analogue mobile phone network, shifting to an all-digital future. The "SMS Message" came about - along with defining characteristics such as the limited message size - because that was the available "space" in the protocols which support the infrastructure.
In essence, Text Messages were a tool for engineers to help them diagnose problems with the new network.
The decision to actually sell them as a product was quite separate - and, as history has shown, a stroke of genius.
The first is that it is a lot harder for you to change your face than it is to change a password. Like any truly effective biometric, it is tied to you, permanently. So the moment someone comes up with the means to defeat a biometric-based authentication scheme, the entire scheme is effectively useless, not just a single implementation for a single user. [ I concede the point that security through obscurity is no security at all - in other words if your biometric facial recognition system is vulnerable if the back-end data leaks, then it's not really secure ].
The second is that it would make it an order of magnitude easier for a despotic government to obtain that data and then use it to track citizens. Except, of course, it would now be possible to make an explicit connection between a face and a smartphone - which means in theory it would also be possible to detect when smartphones are being shared among small groups of people].
But perhaps the most compelling argument would be to categorize the data being collected as being part of your medical record. It relates to your personal physiology, after all - and is unique to you. Would it be acceptable for your doctor [or a company you deal with] to take part of your medical record and simply share it or sell it if they wanted to? Without your knowledge or consent?
This is a disturbing development from a company that has recently made a big play for being a champion of personal privacy. Question is: is this an overlooked mistake that will be corrected, or in fact Apple's true colours?
OK, maybe I *completely* misunderstand the theory of Labour in Action [and do please correct me if I get this wrong] but I thought that was the theory that said that if you took a labourer and had them perform a unit of work [for example, a factory worker produces a product with a cash sale value] then, through the theory, we can take the productivity of the worker, equate it to the cash/currency/barter value of the goods produced, and thus equate the labour of the factory worker to a cash value and hourly rate...
Now I have a nasty feeling that you're going to correct me and tell me that I'm wrong... ?
Technically there is only one correct answer to your question, "What is it backed by?"
As you know the distributed ledger and transaction mechanisms that provide the blockchain that underpins Bitcoin are derived from compute-intensive functions and are created through the process commonly known as "mining". When Bitcoin was originally introduced, the 'value' of a Bitcoin was set in such a way that it was worth slightly less than the cost of the electricity it would take to "mine the coin". [This was entirely intentional - had this not been done Bitcoin would have immediately suffered run-away "inflation"... ]
However, Bitcoin also has a built-in scarcity model, in which the value given out for mining is being progressively reduced [in fact halved] as more coins are mined. Originally this was set to take place approximately once every four years or so, although with the amount of purpose-built ASICs now operating vast mining farms, it is entirely possible that the four year value has shortened somewhat. Each time the milestone is passed, the value of Bitcoins paid halves. I am not sure if this was done to forestall the effect that Moore's Law would have on mining or done specifically to provide a built-in scarcity value for the coins being mined.
So, in an attempt to answer your question, the "value" backing a coin was originated as the cost of producing it...
What has happened since then is that a raft of different speculators have piled in to Bitcoin and are now treating it like a commodity, not a currency. In other words, different rules apply. Now the driver of "value" to Bitcoin is driven by the perceived scarcity. In this sense the discussions relating to Bitcoin being a bubble are much closer to the market reaction in years past to treating classic cars or rare works of art in the same way. [ In those cases, the thinking was that since it simply wasn't possible to create "more" classic cars, so their scarcity value made them a trade-worthy commodity. This idea may well last for a time with Bitcoin, but - in exactly the same way was true for classic cars and works of art - if the "market" decides that it no longer has an interest in cryptocurrency, then the value will crash.
Detractors point to this and declare that this automatically means that Bitcoin is a fraud. However, it is important to note that we could say the same thing about a $100 bill, or a £100 note if you had one in your pocket. There is no way that the paper/polymers/ink/plastic that comprise the bill or note are worth the currency printed on them. The only reason they have that "value" is because an entire system - propped up by governments and banks - is willing to support them.
It hasn't happened for a long time - perhaps since the end of the Second World War - when we saw a total collapse in a major national economy. [ Although look at the currency in Zimbabwe for an example]. However, in the closing days of WWII, currencies such as the Chinese Yuan devalued so quickly that more money was being printed on recycled newspaper, and it took a wheelbarrow of currency [by volume] to buy a few vegetables. In this regard it would be ignorant and dangerous to argue that there are major differences between Bitcoin and other major fiat currencies.
Bit of a long-winded answer - sorry for that - but in essence the summary is: your question is irrelevant.
There is a weird statement in the original coverage from Ars. Having initially explained that the reason for the failure was due to an incorrect configuration setting, the quote then goes on to show where Ars states, "As the country's heritage rockets and upper stages continue to age, the concern is that the failure rate will increase."
But the nature of this specific failure mode has absolutely nothing to do with the age of the rockets or stages, but was due instead to one or more lapses in pre-flight checks of the configuration parameters for the launch. We don't even know for sure if the part which failed (the Fregat Upper Stage) was set by the launch agency directly, or the satellite manufacturer.
In a similar way, the comments also imply that the vehicles themselves age in some way - despite the fact that the cost and complexity of them means that they are literally custom-made for each launch. They are certainly not left languishing "on the shelf" for months or years before use.
Don't get me wrong, any launch failure is unwanted and to be avoided at all costs - regardless of the nationality or company involved. But in this case, I'm not sure the coverage reflects reality.
I agree with your observation regarding static test firing. That is certainly going to help.
One question occurred to me though: although it's been a while since I studied Physics, each force applied to the vehicle structure [i.e. thrust from the rockets] will act around a moment [a point at a determinable, perpendicular distance from the point on which the force [thrust] acts]. So in essence, as the "width" of the vehicle is extended by scaling from a single, circular cross-section, to essentially, a beam, so we introduce the potential for the moment to scale into significance.
Now, what we don't know for our speculation concerns the specific performance characteristics of each Merlin engine. In other words, what are the manufacturing tolerances and performance variations observed across individual units that SpaceX manufactures? How consistent [uniform] is the thrust? How easy is it to calibrate the throttles?
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that variations are actually pretty minimal, mainly because if there were a variation of more than a handful of percent then the job of balancing on even a single F9 launch becomes more of a headache. And of course, SpaceX have been making Merlins for a while now - plenty of time to iron out kinks in manufacture.
Also factor in that when NASA went to the Moon in the 1960s, the Saturn computers had to be able to re-compute and adjust thrusts 50 times a second [and think about how much further we have advanced with our computing and sensor technology since the 1950s-era design freeze for the Apollo program] and nothing you suggest is beyond SpaceX today.
Having said all that, my original observation stands. Musk wants [and perhaps needs] to do this - in order to maintain the forward momentum that SpaceX has generated and in order to stay ahead of Blue Origin and ULA. But he needs this to be as successful as he can reasonably hope for. He'll be asking his people for a chance of success that is [my guess] 70% or better... He'd like 80 but he might even fly on 60.
I don't underestimate the scale of the challenge, but I think that come launch day, Musk will be far more confident than he is letting on...
Agree with your analysis, but would add that "the cost of getting methane from natural gas" has to include the environmental impact...
And as for the cost of synthesizing methane using carbon dioxide and electricity, well, Musk does just happen to have another couple of companies, one of which produces solar panels and another which produces huge storage batteries...
When you think about that, you realise that he's thinking seriously long-term, because he's actually hedging against the inevitable increase in the cost of natural gas with time - i.e. as it becomes more and more scarce.
As Elon stated in the quoted comment, the complexity of this launch is pretty significant. Although it must be possible to measure the respective thrust output from 27 different rockets simultaneously [i.e. torsion gauges across your rocket superstructure], translating that in to real-time simulation that balances thrusts for both trajectory and vehicle integrity are going to be hard.
Whilst this launch is certainly experimental, SpaceX will want to get the maximum possible return on that investment - it's their USP after all - and that means having a good degree of confidence that it will work. Something that blows up on the pad after giving half a second of telemetry isn't much use to anyone except the afternoon news shows and YouTube. Well, and ULA.
This is all about balancing the need to test [in order to get data] with the need to test successfully [in order to get data]. And although the cost of an F9 Heavy launch [to SpaceX] certainly won't be three times the cost of a regular F9 launch, it won't be cheap, either. If regular F9 launches are $60MM, then the cost of F9H must be at least in the order of $120MM or so.
Worth taking the time to give it a reasonable chance of success.
I've not programmed in Ada, but I did come across a couple of guys - in fact when I was attending a COBOL course - who were converting. They both loved it.
They told me that it was [in the mid-late 80s] still quite popular among defence contractors and within Western militaries]. Their assertion was that although it was not the easiest language to program in, once you had something compiled, you could pretty much guarantee that it would work as expected, because the compiler was ruthless when it came to rooting out bugs.
I honestly don't know if any of that is true - it just stuck in my memory from a 30-year-old conversation. But if it is true, then it helps to show how a language designed to have the right features, for the right reasons, can be a real benefit to the user community. Let's be honest - would we feel safe flying in an aircraft with avionics written in some dodgy, scruffy programming language that had been invented a couple of month's previously? No. Aviation goes to excruciating lengths to ensure that "flying code" is robust and safe - they need languages that make that task if not easy then at least transparent.
My concern with the non-stop flood of languages that we see coming to market today is that the authors may not have done as much diligence on the use cases as they have done with ensuring that the syntax-checking code is working. That makes me nervous...
Slashdot Mirror
I totally understand that. However, if you could accelerate a Falcon 9 to ~ 1000km/h without burning any of the carried fuel, then manage to ignite it at the point of emergence, would the cost of building the launch mechanism pay for itself?
In other words, it's the gain you make by providing the first 1000km/h of launch velocity without burning carried fuel. In theory this means that you can get the same amount into orbit for less [energy] cost, or put a larger payload in to orbit for the same cost.
I was just thinking about his portfolio of companies and how they could be integrated, that's all. I totally accept that we don't have the ability today, but then 100 years ago, Ford were just introducing the Model T... Just think what they've accomplished since then. If we can deliver even a fraction of those sorts of advances to space flight, then 100 years from now, we could have colonised a significant part of our solar system. We just have to want to do it badly enough, I guess.
Bother... When I wrote "the mountain", I meant to say, Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa...]
... if this nasty little trick was unique to Apple, or if any of the other big handset manufacturers have been doing this. Has anyone seen any discussion of that?
This exact points was covered in the discussion thread to an earlier slashdot article which covered this story.
Someone posted the results of some speed tests they had performed and it indicated that the performance degradation is driven by a software check on the handset version, not the condition of the battery.
Apple have a tremendous opportunity to dig themselves out of this with some excellent PR - by issuing a new version of iOS which doesn't only remove this feature, but which includes an App that gives a detailed, accurate summary of battery performance, with a recommendation regarding replacement.
If they were to do this, they might be able to turn this PR disaster into a positive story. It's just shocking [criminally shocking] that they are doing this in the first place.
If we look at the various different market sectors that Elon Musk has developed businesses for, then with the possible exception of Tesla, all of them, potentially even The Boring Company and Hyperlook [granted he isn't directly investing in this now] would seem to have the potential to be integrated at some future time.
For example, if mankind were to use "Boring Company" technology to cut an access tunnel up to a point near the 5,980-metre peak of the mountain, then use Hyperloop technology to provide a platform on which a rocket could be placed, put a stack of Solar City panels in the vicinity [to power the super-conducting magnets used by the maglev technology and perhaps also to synethsise the Methylox fuel, then essentially he has most of the components needed for a launch system that grabs another order of magnitude of cost savings/efficiency gains - because potentially the vehicle itself could do away with a potentially significant amount of fuel.
I took a quick look at the most recent launch, CRS-13, in which at 6km of altitude, the vehicle had achieved a speed of 938km/h, a little shy of MaxQ. I would have to concede that we are still a long way short, engineering-wise, of being able to achieve that even with a maglev track in an evacuated hyperloop tunnel. But Musk is all about continual, iterative improvement.
I would be the first to concede that all I've done here is borrow ideas postulated by science fiction writers for many years now: but if you go back to the 1950s and 1960s and look at the writing of Heinlein-era sci-fi writers, rockets that landed on their tails and took off again were a staple fare. It took real life 60-70 years to catch up, but SpaceX did it. With our rate of development increasing, what I outline here could be as little as 20-30 years away.
Which I guess leads to a question - which would be the most cost-effective solution: Falcon Heavy or a ballistic launcher? FH has massively lower development costs, but the operating expenses will be higher. A launcher will cost several metric f@ktons of money to develop, but, once done, should be significantly cheaper to operate.
br? Which would you go for?
I was in an Apple store in the UK this week to have my Mac Mini un-fcsked after the High Sierra update screwed it up. An Apple employee was trying a very hard sell on a customer who had a problem with their iPhone 6. The Apple employee said that the battery could be replaced for 70 pounds and that it would take an hour or so. They pushed hard on an up-sell though.
Degrading the handset performance in an attempt to promote a sale - I.e. failing to detect a new battery and instead keeping performance degraded - would fall foul of The Sale of Goods and Services Act in the UK...
Literally just got back from a 45-mile round-trip to my nearest Apple Store where I had an appointment to cure a failure of my Mac Mini. It turned out that the High Sierra update "doesn't play well with HDDs" according to the Apple Genius who attended my machine. The "fix" was to wipe the entire machine and perform a clean installation of *Sierra*, with the instruction to me, "Don't upgrade yet..."
It is absolutely inconceivable that Jobs-era Apple would have allowed this to happen: had he still been with us, the roll-out would have been cancelled before it had even started.
It is self-evident that Apple's quality control has deteriorated markedly since Steve passed away.
The big problem for Apple is that with most hardware manufacturers significantly raising their game on producing gear at least as good as Cupertino's, the only unique differentiator they had up until now was the bullet-proof reliability derived from having both hardware and software built in-house. But with software quality reduced to a steaming pile of poo, all that's left is some stupidly over-priced hardware.
This won't be sustainable. Apple need to get their quality mojo back, or here starts the slide to oblivion...
I think you are incorrect to argue that the ability to indefinitely increase the supply of a currency is a good thing.
Robert Mugabe tried that in Zimbabwe - his solution to not having enough cash to pay for basic services was to simply print more money - in practical terms precisely what you argue for here.
What Zimbabwe have ended up with is hyper-inflation, in which most people in the country have ignored their own currency and now run their lives using the US dollar or the Euro, with some very old and extremely tatty bank notes changing hands. Indeed, I would go so far as to say your first and second points are potentially mutually exclusive: you can't have a stable economy whilst you have the ability to produce unlimited supply.
Your third and fourth points are potentially valid in that I don't think governments will cede control of their *national currency* to crypto-coins. But having said that, you completely ignore reality: in the western world, most people don't use "cash" anyway: we use digital numbers kept in databases on computers. Our control point is a small plastic card or a smartphone... But, far more importantly, I don't think anyone is suggesting that the world will suddenly replace fiat currencies with crypto currency. That is clearly nonsense. What might happen, however, is that crypto-currency could become an ideal vehicle for international trade and deals between two or more fiat currencies. At the moment the biggest banks have "currency conversion" sewn up pretty tight - and they make **billions** of dollars in fees from converting between currencies for clients. Using a low-cost alternative [your last point, which is crucial] to replace fiat currencies for this could absolutely be made to work, if only the middle-men weren't so greedy.
Something about the OP doesn't make sense.
And no, not the fact that there isn't much in the way of "high-pressure air" at the outermost fringes of our atmosphere...
The part which seems a little odd is to suggest that altering the apparent pressure [i.e. by the velocity of entry] can in some way "force" air into the cracks within a meteorite/meteorid to induce some form of break-up.
Isn't it much more likely to be induced by the coefficient of expansion of the material concerned? If you take a meteorite and then flash-heat the outer surface very, very, very quickly - like for example by slamming it into an atmosphere at several thousand kph - then the outer layer will become very, very hot very quickly - and start to expand. The interior, meanwhile, simply won't have had time to warm up and thus will remain space-cold... As the outer layer warms, it expands. This would easily be enough to cause cracks in the material [think of the way that you can split a rock by pouring water into a crack and then waiting for the water to freeze...].
It's been a while since I studied CFD [computational fluid dynamics - which is the science that would show how atmospheric gases would "flow" around an meteorite as it entered the atmosphere - but I think it's fair to say that a "boundary layer" would form that might in fact make it ridiculously difficult for "high pressure air" to be "forced" into tiny cracks in the surface.
So... very interesting theory, but I think we might find that things like the irregular shape and density of the material [which causes non-uniform stress on the material] coupled with very high speed heating, might be significant factors too...
This is the Corporate equivalent of Darwin in Action.
There have been so many indicators of a shift away from fossil fuels that no company operating in that market sector - and certainly not a company as large or well established as GE, can have any excuse for not being aware of this fact.
The failure of GE to anticipate this market shift and adjust their corporate strategy to accommodate it would be the responsibility of John Flannery's predecessor, Jeff Immelt and the board of Directors that he led. Whilst unforgivable, it is certainly not the first time that we've witnessed such corporate hubris. Look at what happened to Kodak as a result of the "digital revolution" for example.
The most egregious aspect of this story is the one that doesn't seem to be explored properly: the fact that 12,000 people have lost their jobs because of utterly incompetent management. And what happens to those incompetent managers? In the case of Immelt, at 61 he stepped down from the CEO role and planned to continue as Chairman to the end of this year, but got pushed out of that by Flannery on October 2nd. Not a moment too soon, looking at this mess. So Immelt will cruise into retirement with a massive 401k, not to mention all the stock options he's had over the years. A shame that 12,000 families are now going to pay the price for his incompetence.
I'm sure that they are different at a detail level, but at a *scale* level there have to be parallels between the manufacture of turbine blades used in fossil fuel power generation and the technologies used for wind or hydro power generation. Why didn't GE begin a ramp-up into those emerging technologies when they had the time and revenue to carry it? This article headline should have read, "Over the last 18 months, GE have switched 12,000 Jobs from Fossil Fuel to Renewable Energy Technologies".
The fact that it doesn't should herald a managerial bloodbath, and the installation of a competent board of directors. Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth...
I stumbled across their channel whilst looking for information on how to set up for a DIY circumnavigation. I would be the first to admit that their content can be a bit erratic - you might get a mostly-serious video showing some amazing underwater scenery and fabulous diving... or you might get a recording of a beach party with the crew literally running around naked [and the use of a great deal of per-frame "fuzzing" to get past the YouTube censors.
But over the course of the last few years I've watched them hone their craft, use the Patreon revenue to buy [much] better video equipment, invite guests on board who have a lot of film-making and video experience... and as a result the quality of their productions has massively improved with time. If you like their tone and their occasionally juvenile outlook on life doesn't bother you, they have an excellent formula.
Their Patreon numbers certainly suggest it's an effective one. Your point about how they started and got traction is a good one. They started when Brian Trautman [older brother] bought the Amels yacht after cashing in his 401K early and deciding to sail the world. Eight years later they are going stronger than ever. When they started they did not have the plan to produce anything as popular or well-developed as the current videos - it was much more a case of a video diary/vlog. What has happened as been entirely organic as they have learned the skills and garnered the feedback.
Perhaps most interesting of all, there is as much to learn there about vlogging as a way of living as there is about the art of blue water sailing. And maybe that's the secret ingredient?
As you say this isn't clear - but, having read around what they are attempting to do in this case, I think the answer will be, "They are attempting whichever version of this will give them the most income".
... that breaks the rule?
Sailing SV Delos is an adventure/sailing/diving channel that follows the antics of two brothers (Brian and Brady Trautman), Brian's girlfriend Karin, plus an assortment of [very!] colourful characters as they make their way around the world aboard Delos, a 53' Amel Super Maramu.
Delos currently has Patreon sponsorship to the tune of $13,433 *per video*, and they have uploaded 5 videos in the last 3 weeks. So that's what, $67,000 in 3 weeks?
Does that count as not making money on Patreon?
Oh, and their videos are excellent fun - 4K, lots of good sailing, lots of diving, lots of fun...
https://www.patreon.com/svdelo...
https://www.youtube.com/user/b...
No, I have no affiliation, but I am interested in quitting my job and buying a boat and circumnavigating... So this is an informative and entertaining channel from my point of view...
... of reading the OP and concluding that the presiding Judge is in any way biased against the plaintiffs (the three female Google employees).
If anything, the exact opposite could be true.
The Judge will know that this case is going to be ferociously defended by Google, that it will garner a very great deal of public interest and scrutiny and that, if it gets as far as substantive rulings, could very well set a precedent and become case law that is cited in future disputes. In other words, the Judge simply can't afford to allow even a small chink or gap or flaw in the prosecution's argument, because to do so would be to invite the defendants to demand that the case be tossed.
Nor should you read the above statement and conclude that I believe the Judge to be inclined towards the plaintiffs in this case. The Judge will equally demand that the defendants are thorough and reasoned in their arguments.
This case has all the hallmarks of something that will be super-significant. The Court is simply making sure that both parties put their best legal foot forward.
I *think* there may be a fundamental error with the article linked by the OP. The author of that article, Eric Holthaus, argues that because the value of Bitcoins is increasing due to speculation, so of course more and more people will jump in to the task of mining new Bitcoins.
Except of course that can't happen forever, thanks to the design of Bitcoin. As this page explains quite nicely...
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Con...
there is actually a finite limit to the number of Bitcoins that will ever be created. To quote the explainer,
"Bitcoins are created each time a user discovers a new block. The rate of block creation is adjusted every 2016 blocks to aim for a constant two week adjustment period (equivalent to 6 per hour.) The number of bitcoins generated per block is set to decrease geometrically, with a 50% reduction every 210,000 blocks, or approximately four years. The result is that the number of bitcoins in existence is not expected to exceed 21 million.[2] Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value "21 million" are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number."
So, in other words, although in theory the folks who mine new blocks are going to continue to get paid in Bitcoins, the value they receive will dimish to tiny fractions. Eventually we should get to the point where we continue to need new blocks to host transactions, but miners will receive virtually nothing for their efforts - certainly far less in value terms than the cost of the electricity required to solve the math problems.
That may be why we're seeing a peak in activity now - i.e. whilst the cost-benefit favours mining. The moment that balance tips the other way, we're likely to see significant changes in both mining activity and the perceived value of Bitcoins.
And for those unwilling to open the link, the analysis predicts [with reasonable give-or-take accuracy] that Bitcoin will hit the limit by 2024, when miners will be paid approx 6.5 Bitcoins per block.
As at today, miners are paid 12.5 Bitcoins per mined block. This is set to halve come 2021 [down to 6.25 per block] so we might see negative pressure on Bitcoin value when that happens.
But, based on what I've read, the linked article might be missing a few key points...
Um... did you happen to read the notes on the page you link to?
The bit where it clearly states that the images in the sequence for the eclipse were "as seen from the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter"? [As in: most emphatically not the International Space Station]
Although I've seen that set of images before [I happen to have a framed print hanging on the wall in my study] I don't have specifics as to the reason for the shading. However, I will hazard a guess [since that's often a good way to get corrected by someone who knows the actual details!] and say that it's likely because of the way that the light from the sun gets refracted by the Earth's atmosphere.
For example, we know that the reason that our sky appears blue is because water vapour in the atmosphere refracts away some of the light... So if it's refracted away, perhaps the red wavelengths make it to the moon, which is why that shot appears that colour? The reason you're seeing refraction is because we're seeing the edge of the shadow, cast by light refracted through Earth's atmosphere...
This is just a poorly-educated guess, mind.
Curiously, the OP fails to mention that the original intended use for what we now know as Texts or SMS Messages was in fact as a means to aid troubleshooting around the cellular network.
The mobile operators were in the process of switching over from the older, poorer quality but better-understood analogue mobile phone network, shifting to an all-digital future. The "SMS Message" came about - along with defining characteristics such as the limited message size - because that was the available "space" in the protocols which support the infrastructure.
In essence, Text Messages were a tool for engineers to help them diagnose problems with the new network.
The decision to actually sell them as a product was quite separate - and, as history has shown, a stroke of genius.
There are two critical problems here...
The first is that it is a lot harder for you to change your face than it is to change a password. Like any truly effective biometric, it is tied to you, permanently. So the moment someone comes up with the means to defeat a biometric-based authentication scheme, the entire scheme is effectively useless, not just a single implementation for a single user. [ I concede the point that security through obscurity is no security at all - in other words if your biometric facial recognition system is vulnerable if the back-end data leaks, then it's not really secure ].
The second is that it would make it an order of magnitude easier for a despotic government to obtain that data and then use it to track citizens. Except, of course, it would now be possible to make an explicit connection between a face and a smartphone - which means in theory it would also be possible to detect when smartphones are being shared among small groups of people].
But perhaps the most compelling argument would be to categorize the data being collected as being part of your medical record. It relates to your personal physiology, after all - and is unique to you. Would it be acceptable for your doctor [or a company you deal with] to take part of your medical record and simply share it or sell it if they wanted to? Without your knowledge or consent?
This is a disturbing development from a company that has recently made a big play for being a champion of personal privacy. Question is: is this an overlooked mistake that will be corrected, or in fact Apple's true colours?
OK, maybe I *completely* misunderstand the theory of Labour in Action [and do please correct me if I get this wrong] but I thought that was the theory that said that if you took a labourer and had them perform a unit of work [for example, a factory worker produces a product with a cash sale value] then, through the theory, we can take the productivity of the worker, equate it to the cash/currency/barter value of the goods produced, and thus equate the labour of the factory worker to a cash value and hourly rate...
Now I have a nasty feeling that you're going to correct me and tell me that I'm wrong... ?
Technically there is only one correct answer to your question, "What is it backed by?"
... ]
As you know the distributed ledger and transaction mechanisms that provide the blockchain that underpins Bitcoin are derived from compute-intensive functions and are created through the process commonly known as "mining". When Bitcoin was originally introduced, the 'value' of a Bitcoin was set in such a way that it was worth slightly less than the cost of the electricity it would take to "mine the coin". [This was entirely intentional - had this not been done Bitcoin would have immediately suffered run-away "inflation"
However, Bitcoin also has a built-in scarcity model, in which the value given out for mining is being progressively reduced [in fact halved] as more coins are mined. Originally this was set to take place approximately once every four years or so, although with the amount of purpose-built ASICs now operating vast mining farms, it is entirely possible that the four year value has shortened somewhat. Each time the milestone is passed, the value of Bitcoins paid halves. I am not sure if this was done to forestall the effect that Moore's Law would have on mining or done specifically to provide a built-in scarcity value for the coins being mined.
So, in an attempt to answer your question, the "value" backing a coin was originated as the cost of producing it...
What has happened since then is that a raft of different speculators have piled in to Bitcoin and are now treating it like a commodity, not a currency. In other words, different rules apply. Now the driver of "value" to Bitcoin is driven by the perceived scarcity. In this sense the discussions relating to Bitcoin being a bubble are much closer to the market reaction in years past to treating classic cars or rare works of art in the same way. [ In those cases, the thinking was that since it simply wasn't possible to create "more" classic cars, so their scarcity value made them a trade-worthy commodity. This idea may well last for a time with Bitcoin, but - in exactly the same way was true for classic cars and works of art - if the "market" decides that it no longer has an interest in cryptocurrency, then the value will crash.
Detractors point to this and declare that this automatically means that Bitcoin is a fraud. However, it is important to note that we could say the same thing about a $100 bill, or a £100 note if you had one in your pocket. There is no way that the paper/polymers/ink/plastic that comprise the bill or note are worth the currency printed on them. The only reason they have that "value" is because an entire system - propped up by governments and banks - is willing to support them.
It hasn't happened for a long time - perhaps since the end of the Second World War - when we saw a total collapse in a major national economy. [ Although look at the currency in Zimbabwe for an example]. However, in the closing days of WWII, currencies such as the Chinese Yuan devalued so quickly that more money was being printed on recycled newspaper, and it took a wheelbarrow of currency [by volume] to buy a few vegetables. In this regard it would be ignorant and dangerous to argue that there are major differences between Bitcoin and other major fiat currencies.
Bit of a long-winded answer - sorry for that - but in essence the summary is: your question is irrelevant.
There is a weird statement in the original coverage from Ars. Having initially explained that the reason for the failure was due to an incorrect configuration setting, the quote then goes on to show where Ars states, "As the country's heritage rockets and upper stages continue to age, the concern is that the failure rate will increase."
But the nature of this specific failure mode has absolutely nothing to do with the age of the rockets or stages, but was due instead to one or more lapses in pre-flight checks of the configuration parameters for the launch. We don't even know for sure if the part which failed (the Fregat Upper Stage) was set by the launch agency directly, or the satellite manufacturer.
In a similar way, the comments also imply that the vehicles themselves age in some way - despite the fact that the cost and complexity of them means that they are literally custom-made for each launch. They are certainly not left languishing "on the shelf" for months or years before use.
Don't get me wrong, any launch failure is unwanted and to be avoided at all costs - regardless of the nationality or company involved. But in this case, I'm not sure the coverage reflects reality.
I agree with your observation regarding static test firing. That is certainly going to help.
One question occurred to me though: although it's been a while since I studied Physics, each force applied to the vehicle structure [i.e. thrust from the rockets] will act around a moment [a point at a determinable, perpendicular distance from the point on which the force [thrust] acts]. So in essence, as the "width" of the vehicle is extended by scaling from a single, circular cross-section, to essentially, a beam, so we introduce the potential for the moment to scale into significance.
Now, what we don't know for our speculation concerns the specific performance characteristics of each Merlin engine. In other words, what are the manufacturing tolerances and performance variations observed across individual units that SpaceX manufactures? How consistent [uniform] is the thrust? How easy is it to calibrate the throttles?
I'll go out on a limb here and suggest that variations are actually pretty minimal, mainly because if there were a variation of more than a handful of percent then the job of balancing on even a single F9 launch becomes more of a headache. And of course, SpaceX have been making Merlins for a while now - plenty of time to iron out kinks in manufacture.
Also factor in that when NASA went to the Moon in the 1960s, the Saturn computers had to be able to re-compute and adjust thrusts 50 times a second [and think about how much further we have advanced with our computing and sensor technology since the 1950s-era design freeze for the Apollo program] and nothing you suggest is beyond SpaceX today.
Having said all that, my original observation stands. Musk wants [and perhaps needs] to do this - in order to maintain the forward momentum that SpaceX has generated and in order to stay ahead of Blue Origin and ULA. But he needs this to be as successful as he can reasonably hope for. He'll be asking his people for a chance of success that is [my guess] 70% or better... He'd like 80 but he might even fly on 60.
I don't underestimate the scale of the challenge, but I think that come launch day, Musk will be far more confident than he is letting on...
Agree with your analysis, but would add that "the cost of getting methane from natural gas" has to include the environmental impact...
And as for the cost of synthesizing methane using carbon dioxide and electricity, well, Musk does just happen to have another couple of companies, one of which produces solar panels and another which produces huge storage batteries...
When you think about that, you realise that he's thinking seriously long-term, because he's actually hedging against the inevitable increase in the cost of natural gas with time - i.e. as it becomes more and more scarce.
As Elon stated in the quoted comment, the complexity of this launch is pretty significant. Although it must be possible to measure the respective thrust output from 27 different rockets simultaneously [i.e. torsion gauges across your rocket superstructure], translating that in to real-time simulation that balances thrusts for both trajectory and vehicle integrity are going to be hard.
Whilst this launch is certainly experimental, SpaceX will want to get the maximum possible return on that investment - it's their USP after all - and that means having a good degree of confidence that it will work. Something that blows up on the pad after giving half a second of telemetry isn't much use to anyone except the afternoon news shows and YouTube. Well, and ULA.
This is all about balancing the need to test [in order to get data] with the need to test successfully [in order to get data]. And although the cost of an F9 Heavy launch [to SpaceX] certainly won't be three times the cost of a regular F9 launch, it won't be cheap, either. If regular F9 launches are $60MM, then the cost of F9H must be at least in the order of $120MM or so.
Worth taking the time to give it a reasonable chance of success.
I've not programmed in Ada, but I did come across a couple of guys - in fact when I was attending a COBOL course - who were converting. They both loved it.
They told me that it was [in the mid-late 80s] still quite popular among defence contractors and within Western militaries]. Their assertion was that although it was not the easiest language to program in, once you had something compiled, you could pretty much guarantee that it would work as expected, because the compiler was ruthless when it came to rooting out bugs.
I honestly don't know if any of that is true - it just stuck in my memory from a 30-year-old conversation. But if it is true, then it helps to show how a language designed to have the right features, for the right reasons, can be a real benefit to the user community. Let's be honest - would we feel safe flying in an aircraft with avionics written in some dodgy, scruffy programming language that had been invented a couple of month's previously? No. Aviation goes to excruciating lengths to ensure that "flying code" is robust and safe - they need languages that make that task if not easy then at least transparent.
My concern with the non-stop flood of languages that we see coming to market today is that the authors may not have done as much diligence on the use cases as they have done with ensuring that the syntax-checking code is working. That makes me nervous...