Those are the only thee countries that *HAVE* shot down satellites. In practice, there are others that have the capability. There are other nations with ICBMs and orbital launch capability... and some of those countries are enemies of the US.
Errm, it's not short-sighted if the economics will NEVER be feasible. Launch prices will never be low enough that it will be cheaper to put solar panels in orbit and transmit power back to earth, rather than just putting more solar panels (and batteries) on earth in the first place. To do that today, you'd need launch prices that are something like $10 per pound. Even SpaceX is only selling at about $1000 per pound, and even their pie-in-the-sky figures for fully reusable vehicles in the distant future only have them going down to $100 per pound. On top of that, solar panels will continue to get cheaper, meaning that the breakeven point on launch prices will keep dropping (far faster than the prices themselves will drop).
Spending money on orbital power (today OR tomorrow) is basically like saying we should replace power transmission lines with people carrying AA batteries walking hundreds of kilometres by foot because it would be cheaper if only hourly wages would drop low enough.
It doesn't matter. Even if you could argue that you'd get more energy from an orbital installation, it's still orders of magnitude more expensive than just building more panels on the ground and sticking batteries under them.
You can buy a 1kw solar panel for about $800. It'll weigh about 40 lbs. You can put that same solar panel in orbit, where it will produce twice as much power, for only $48,800. 2x the power for 60x the cost. And that completely ignores the cost of transmitting that power back to earth, and receiving it there, and the losses from that process, which would probably push the cost difference way over two orders of magnitude.
This is why orbital solar doesn't make sense, and probably never will.
DC-X started landing from zero kilometres per hour at a maximum altitude of ~3km without ever having to re-light the engines. A Falcon 9 first stage starts landing from 11,000 kilometers per hour (mach 10) at 80km and has to re-light the engines twice (retro burn and landing burn). There's an enormous difference.
DC-X is more comparable to Grasshopper, not an actual orbital Falcon 9 rocket.
You seem to have completely missed the point of Photonic's post, which was to take a comment on Tesla's problems with dealerships, and swap Tesla/SpaceX, Dealers/Air Force, and Cars/Rockets.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, except that I'll point out that the roaming issue (on wifi) is a purely software one. As soon as you have any sort of Internet connectivity, any other problems (like roaming) are just a matter of configuration, in that there's nothing stopping you from using an IP tunnel with a very low timeout and auto-retries to ensure that your mobile device is always has (or is NATted through) the same IP, and is always discoverable to the Internet. In fact, many mobile services are already designed to do this at a higher level to survive the rapid topology changes that mobile devices can present. Skype might find itself randomly switched between the cell network and random different wifi networks, but I can receive Skype calls regardless.
I'll sort of repeat what I said above: Rogers has 170 MHz of spectrum, so 1000 customers in a single cell would still not be a problem. And if it was... you can shrink the cells. These are rural areas we're talking about here, not dense installations, and even dense installations can usually still shrink cells. We're nowhere near the point where we don't have enough spectrum to fuel growth.
These companies are using LTE to deliver service to rural areas with low population densities, and they have massive amounts of spectrum. Rogers has 170MHz of spectrum, for example, enough to deliver ~2.5 Gbps to fixed wireless to a single cell with LTE. Obviously they're not going to dedicate that much spectrum to fixed wireless, but in rural areas they could afford to spend most of it.
When you're done with the 3D printed item, and have gathered a few such discards up, toss them in the Filabot Reclaimer (basically a hand-crank grinder) and then toss the ground plastic into the Filabot. It then spits out plastic filament to use in your 3D printer. It can also be used to recycle, say, lego.
And while you might be able to use the 3D printer to replace the remote battery cover, you couldn't use it to replace the remote.
That's the thing that confuses me. Enthusiasts are saying that 3D printing is going to be super ubiquitous, and everybody is going to have 3D printers, but... to do what? Nearly all the examples they give are stuff that only hobbyists will want to do. When I think of items that I use on a day-to-day basis that could be entirely produced using a 3D printer, about the only thing I can think of is maybe a plastic spoon... and I can buy tons of those at the dollar store very cheaply.
Almost anything that I, as a non-hobbyist consumer, might want to 3D print, has embedded electronics and microcontrollers that probably won't be 3D printable for a very long time, if ever (you might 3D print circuits, but how about a capacitor? Or a resistor? Or a controller? Or a battery?).
Even for completely non-electronic stuff that would require absolutely no extra components/parts (because you're not printing a metal spring or rubber grip with your one-click consumer 3D printer), 3D printing it would require a bunch of assembly and most people don't want to bother with that.
I can see a distant future, in many decades (or centuries), where 3D printers might be versatile enough to be useful to a general consumer... but that's so far off that they won't bear much resemblance to the 3D printers of today, any more than a 1950s videophone bears any resemblance to an iPhone.
There's no technical reason that good LTE coverage isn't going to give you a broadband experience. I've got 50/10 meg VDSL2, and three-bar LTE coverage provides similar downstream and way more upstream.
The problem, then, isn't the technology itself. The problem is the 1GB data cap and $15/GB overage fees. My VDSL2 connection comes with 300GB of data, on an LTE connection that'd cost me $4,500 a month. At those prices, even if LTE is capable of acting as broadband, you can't use it as such.
There are low-latency USB audio interfaces that do better than 10-15ms, and it has more than enough throughput for 40 audio channels, although obviously the latency is still not as low as a PCIe device over thunderbolt can go.
While I agree that thunderbolt is primarily being adopted by the professional or pro-sumer market (the only thunderbolt devices that I've ever used apart from some of Apple's very affordable gigabit ethernet adapter is pro video gear), I think that's primarily because Intel is charging too much for the controllers going into the cables and devices.
TB2 has the same aggregate throughput of TB1, it just combines the existing channels. That's great if you're only connecting one device, but not so great if you're daisy chaining. TB1/2 don't lack power, they supply 10 watts, far more than the cable itself requires. That's already double what USB provides over data connections, and you shouldn't be drawing much more than that from a notebook anyhow. The vast majority of systems sold with TB support today are notebooks (mainly because the vast majority are Macs, which are overwhelmingly notebooks).
Corning owns Gorilla Glass, though, so that wouldn't help Apple increase their vertical integration. TFA does mention that there is work in that direction going on, though.
From TFA, Gorilla Glass reportedly costs about $10 per display when Apple first started using it (on the original iPhone), with prices eventually dropping to about $3 today. Sapphire is expected to cost about $20 after all is said and done. It'll come down, certainly, but it's definitely not cheaper.
As for being tougher, my understanding is that it's far more scratch resistant than gorilla glass, but not necessarily as shatter resistant.
And yet they're adding support for running USB 3.0 over Thunderbolt with the new standard; this new standard was the perfect opportunity to unify the two standards, but they stopped short of supporting the latest version of USB or using a compatible connector.
Is Intel *TRYING* to kill off Thunderbolt? They can't make up their mind if they want USB 3.X or Thunderbolt to be their next-gen connection, and now (despite extremely low Thunderbolt adoption), they're going to change the connector?
USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt are redundant. At this point, they even both support uncompressed video. Pick one, drop (or deprecate) support for the other, and the industry will migrate.
Tesla has plans to add automated battery-swap stations to some of their superchargers. They've already demonstrated the swaps in a controlled environment (they put a battery swap station under a stage, drove a car on stage, swapped the battery, drove it off, drove another on, swapped it, drove it off), although it may have just been taking the battery off and putting the same one back on. All sedans they've sold to date are designed for battery swaps, and they plan to cost it out as an equivalent to what gasoline costs in the local market.
In terms of reducing peak loads on the grid, they do have plans to combine grid storage with solar panels (how convenient, Musk has SolarCity building solar deployments and Tesla building battery factories), with the goal of having the superchargers produce more power than they consume.
Tesla also plans to have cars in multiple price ranges; it sounds like they plan to have three within the next few years (the Model S, the Model E, and the Model X, and yes I realize the pun they built into the model names, they also trademarked "Model Y"). One of them, the Model E, is going to target that $30k price point (at least after rebates), although the reports are that the range will be in the 200-250 mile range rather than the 300-350 that their current top-end cars get.
In terms of increasing the range, that should improve gradually over time as the cost of battery cells go down. That was the point of the $5 billion dollar GigaFactory that they're building, to reduce the cost of lithium ion cells. The primary goal of that is to reduce the cost enough to hit the Model E's price target, but it also has the benefit of enabling higher ranges in the luxury cars where they can spend more money on the battery, albeit at the expense of weight. I know that they're working on longer-term solutions to improve range. They got some patents recently that relate to combining metal air batteries with lithium ion batteries in a hybrid power solution designed to circumvent some of the limitations of metal air batteries (they have the potential for higher densities, but have poor cycle life), although that stuff is a rather long way off.
In terms of ubiquitous fueling stops, they're working in that direction. They're hitting a steady pace building new stations, and by the end of 2015 should have most use cases covered between home-charging overnight and superchargers for distance drives. Automated battery swaps may help too.
Their success isn't a sure thing, but they're definitely making progress towards solving the problems.
Musk has personally guaranteed the resale value of the Model S against any comparable luxury sedan. The "personally" part meaning that if Tesla goes out of business, he will still honour that guarantee. I presume that means if you sell it and are unable to get the guaranteed value, he'll make up the difference. As a result, if Tesla were to go bankrupt, you could avoid the liability by immediately selling your Tesla car and relying on the guarantee to avoid losing money on the deal. Of course, if ALL of his companies go under, you could still be in a fix, but this isn't 2008, and he's not strapped for cash.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are the only thee countries that *HAVE* shot down satellites. In practice, there are others that have the capability. There are other nations with ICBMs and orbital launch capability... and some of those countries are enemies of the US.
Errm, it's not short-sighted if the economics will NEVER be feasible. Launch prices will never be low enough that it will be cheaper to put solar panels in orbit and transmit power back to earth, rather than just putting more solar panels (and batteries) on earth in the first place. To do that today, you'd need launch prices that are something like $10 per pound. Even SpaceX is only selling at about $1000 per pound, and even their pie-in-the-sky figures for fully reusable vehicles in the distant future only have them going down to $100 per pound. On top of that, solar panels will continue to get cheaper, meaning that the breakeven point on launch prices will keep dropping (far faster than the prices themselves will drop).
Spending money on orbital power (today OR tomorrow) is basically like saying we should replace power transmission lines with people carrying AA batteries walking hundreds of kilometres by foot because it would be cheaper if only hourly wages would drop low enough.
It doesn't matter. Even if you could argue that you'd get more energy from an orbital installation, it's still orders of magnitude more expensive than just building more panels on the ground and sticking batteries under them.
You can buy a 1kw solar panel for about $800. It'll weigh about 40 lbs. You can put that same solar panel in orbit, where it will produce twice as much power, for only $48,800. 2x the power for 60x the cost. And that completely ignores the cost of transmitting that power back to earth, and receiving it there, and the losses from that process, which would probably push the cost difference way over two orders of magnitude.
This is why orbital solar doesn't make sense, and probably never will.
DC-X started landing from zero kilometres per hour at a maximum altitude of ~3km without ever having to re-light the engines. A Falcon 9 first stage starts landing from 11,000 kilometers per hour (mach 10) at 80km and has to re-light the engines twice (retro burn and landing burn). There's an enormous difference.
DC-X is more comparable to Grasshopper, not an actual orbital Falcon 9 rocket.
You seem to have completely missed the point of Photonic's post, which was to take a comment on Tesla's problems with dealerships, and swap Tesla/SpaceX, Dealers/Air Force, and Cars/Rockets.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, except that I'll point out that the roaming issue (on wifi) is a purely software one. As soon as you have any sort of Internet connectivity, any other problems (like roaming) are just a matter of configuration, in that there's nothing stopping you from using an IP tunnel with a very low timeout and auto-retries to ensure that your mobile device is always has (or is NATted through) the same IP, and is always discoverable to the Internet. In fact, many mobile services are already designed to do this at a higher level to survive the rapid topology changes that mobile devices can present. Skype might find itself randomly switched between the cell network and random different wifi networks, but I can receive Skype calls regardless.
I'll sort of repeat what I said above: Rogers has 170 MHz of spectrum, so 1000 customers in a single cell would still not be a problem. And if it was... you can shrink the cells. These are rural areas we're talking about here, not dense installations, and even dense installations can usually still shrink cells. We're nowhere near the point where we don't have enough spectrum to fuel growth.
These companies are using LTE to deliver service to rural areas with low population densities, and they have massive amounts of spectrum. Rogers has 170MHz of spectrum, for example, enough to deliver ~2.5 Gbps to fixed wireless to a single cell with LTE. Obviously they're not going to dedicate that much spectrum to fixed wireless, but in rural areas they could afford to spend most of it.
You can. Just buy a Filabot:
http://www.filabot.com/
When you're done with the 3D printed item, and have gathered a few such discards up, toss them in the Filabot Reclaimer (basically a hand-crank grinder) and then toss the ground plastic into the Filabot. It then spits out plastic filament to use in your 3D printer. It can also be used to recycle, say, lego.
And while you might be able to use the 3D printer to replace the remote battery cover, you couldn't use it to replace the remote.
That's the thing that confuses me. Enthusiasts are saying that 3D printing is going to be super ubiquitous, and everybody is going to have 3D printers, but... to do what? Nearly all the examples they give are stuff that only hobbyists will want to do. When I think of items that I use on a day-to-day basis that could be entirely produced using a 3D printer, about the only thing I can think of is maybe a plastic spoon... and I can buy tons of those at the dollar store very cheaply.
Almost anything that I, as a non-hobbyist consumer, might want to 3D print, has embedded electronics and microcontrollers that probably won't be 3D printable for a very long time, if ever (you might 3D print circuits, but how about a capacitor? Or a resistor? Or a controller? Or a battery?).
Even for completely non-electronic stuff that would require absolutely no extra components/parts (because you're not printing a metal spring or rubber grip with your one-click consumer 3D printer), 3D printing it would require a bunch of assembly and most people don't want to bother with that.
I can see a distant future, in many decades (or centuries), where 3D printers might be versatile enough to be useful to a general consumer... but that's so far off that they won't bear much resemblance to the 3D printers of today, any more than a 1950s videophone bears any resemblance to an iPhone.
There's no technical reason that good LTE coverage isn't going to give you a broadband experience. I've got 50/10 meg VDSL2, and three-bar LTE coverage provides similar downstream and way more upstream.
The problem, then, isn't the technology itself. The problem is the 1GB data cap and $15/GB overage fees. My VDSL2 connection comes with 300GB of data, on an LTE connection that'd cost me $4,500 a month. At those prices, even if LTE is capable of acting as broadband, you can't use it as such.
There are low-latency USB audio interfaces that do better than 10-15ms, and it has more than enough throughput for 40 audio channels, although obviously the latency is still not as low as a PCIe device over thunderbolt can go.
While I agree that thunderbolt is primarily being adopted by the professional or pro-sumer market (the only thunderbolt devices that I've ever used apart from some of Apple's very affordable gigabit ethernet adapter is pro video gear), I think that's primarily because Intel is charging too much for the controllers going into the cables and devices.
Belkin's "doodad" costs $200, which is insanely expensive if you want a USB 3 adapter.
TB2 has the same aggregate throughput of TB1, it just combines the existing channels. That's great if you're only connecting one device, but not so great if you're daisy chaining. TB1/2 don't lack power, they supply 10 watts, far more than the cable itself requires. That's already double what USB provides over data connections, and you shouldn't be drawing much more than that from a notebook anyhow. The vast majority of systems sold with TB support today are notebooks (mainly because the vast majority are Macs, which are overwhelmingly notebooks).
That's not native. The new version of Thunderbolt does it natively.
Not unless they want to be stuck on the current version of Thunderbolt.
Corning owns Gorilla Glass, though, so that wouldn't help Apple increase their vertical integration. TFA does mention that there is work in that direction going on, though.
Errm, sapphire *IS* transparent aluminum. It's aluminum oxide (Al2O3).
From TFA, Gorilla Glass reportedly costs about $10 per display when Apple first started using it (on the original iPhone), with prices eventually dropping to about $3 today. Sapphire is expected to cost about $20 after all is said and done. It'll come down, certainly, but it's definitely not cheaper.
As for being tougher, my understanding is that it's far more scratch resistant than gorilla glass, but not necessarily as shatter resistant.
And yet they're adding support for running USB 3.0 over Thunderbolt with the new standard; this new standard was the perfect opportunity to unify the two standards, but they stopped short of supporting the latest version of USB or using a compatible connector.
What does Apple have to do with it? Intel manages Thunderbolt, not Apple.
Is Intel *TRYING* to kill off Thunderbolt? They can't make up their mind if they want USB 3.X or Thunderbolt to be their next-gen connection, and now (despite extremely low Thunderbolt adoption), they're going to change the connector?
USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt are redundant. At this point, they even both support uncompressed video. Pick one, drop (or deprecate) support for the other, and the industry will migrate.
Tesla has plans to add automated battery-swap stations to some of their superchargers. They've already demonstrated the swaps in a controlled environment (they put a battery swap station under a stage, drove a car on stage, swapped the battery, drove it off, drove another on, swapped it, drove it off), although it may have just been taking the battery off and putting the same one back on. All sedans they've sold to date are designed for battery swaps, and they plan to cost it out as an equivalent to what gasoline costs in the local market.
In terms of reducing peak loads on the grid, they do have plans to combine grid storage with solar panels (how convenient, Musk has SolarCity building solar deployments and Tesla building battery factories), with the goal of having the superchargers produce more power than they consume.
Tesla also plans to have cars in multiple price ranges; it sounds like they plan to have three within the next few years (the Model S, the Model E, and the Model X, and yes I realize the pun they built into the model names, they also trademarked "Model Y"). One of them, the Model E, is going to target that $30k price point (at least after rebates), although the reports are that the range will be in the 200-250 mile range rather than the 300-350 that their current top-end cars get.
In terms of increasing the range, that should improve gradually over time as the cost of battery cells go down. That was the point of the $5 billion dollar GigaFactory that they're building, to reduce the cost of lithium ion cells. The primary goal of that is to reduce the cost enough to hit the Model E's price target, but it also has the benefit of enabling higher ranges in the luxury cars where they can spend more money on the battery, albeit at the expense of weight. I know that they're working on longer-term solutions to improve range. They got some patents recently that relate to combining metal air batteries with lithium ion batteries in a hybrid power solution designed to circumvent some of the limitations of metal air batteries (they have the potential for higher densities, but have poor cycle life), although that stuff is a rather long way off.
In terms of ubiquitous fueling stops, they're working in that direction. They're hitting a steady pace building new stations, and by the end of 2015 should have most use cases covered between home-charging overnight and superchargers for distance drives. Automated battery swaps may help too.
Their success isn't a sure thing, but they're definitely making progress towards solving the problems.
Musk has personally guaranteed the resale value of the Model S against any comparable luxury sedan. The "personally" part meaning that if Tesla goes out of business, he will still honour that guarantee. I presume that means if you sell it and are unable to get the guaranteed value, he'll make up the difference. As a result, if Tesla were to go bankrupt, you could avoid the liability by immediately selling your Tesla car and relying on the guarantee to avoid losing money on the deal. Of course, if ALL of his companies go under, you could still be in a fix, but this isn't 2008, and he's not strapped for cash.