Until the paper-exercise Falcon Heavy with its kludgey fuel-transfer-in-flight mode flies
I'd call it "brilliant" and "elegant" not "kludgey", but I guess such things are in the eye of the beholder. Just keep in mind that a) it significantly improves the mass fraction of the Falcon 9 Heavy (which rather than the Falcon Heavy, is the true Arianespace 5 competitor) at moderate complexity increase, and b) uses existing components, three copies of the Falcon 9 "core" (the first stage), greatly reducing production costs.
And as for calling it a "paper exercise", they've already demonstrated the rocket engines and launched the basic Falcon 9 core. It's not been tested as a whole, but the components are far from "paper".
Of course the Falcon Heavy's main projected use is manned missions to the Moon and Mars but that assumes substantial and sustained funding for such a project in the trillion dollar range
Cheaper launch vehicle means cheaper missions. And NASA is notorious for making things one to two orders of magnitude more expensive than they need to be. I think once the Falcon Heavy flies, we'll be in funding range of private manned space exploration of both the surface of the Moon and Mars.
EU legislation can make the market for Space X very limited and increase the cost per launch due to reduced launch frequency of Space X.
ESA != EU. They still have to get non-EU players, Norway and Switzerland to go along. If that means that their space industry is precluded from using the best competitor in the field, then it's going to hurt the EU in the long term.
If you have a large group of people chanting racists slogans, very quickly people around them , onlookers, can find themselves chanting along, and believing those slogans and not asking themselves why.
Perhaps you could give an example? I've never seen this alleged effect myself.
The cronulla riot in australia left many people who had joined in the racist violent asking themselves "What the hell did I just do? I dont understand it? I was just in cronulla for shopping and next thing I'm in a crowd of people bashing lebanese shopkeepers".
There's this behavior called the "lie". There's also this substance called "alcohol". The combination leads to stories like what you heard. In other words, I don't believe the story at all. It's just an excuse made up after the fact for what the person did, probably in an attempt to weasel out of some vandalism charges.
Also, didn't this protest have the opposite effect of what you claimed? It publicly embarrassed the anti-"Lebanon shopkeeper" crowd, especially when no evidence for the alleged racist attacks which provoked the riot could be found (there was no change in the incident of racist attacks, just a change in the perception of those attacks).
Also, it's my view that free speech addresses the other "social factors" you referred to. The "spiral of silence" is addressed simply by people being allowed to say unpopular opinions. When those opinions aren't shared, nothing happens. But when they are, it breaks the spiral of silence.
Finally there is a large part of the population that research shows find themselves attracted to angry conservative type opinions and actually become MORE attracted to the opinion when evidence of its incorrectness is presented.
"Conservative type" opinions? I think this is the result of half-assed arguments. When you use a bunch of crude and poorly thought out "ad hominem" attacks (such as labels like "angry conservative type"), you increase the audience's sympathy for the target. A really high profile and incompetent foe can be more valuable than a rhetorically skilled advocate. It is a perverse sociological factor, but not what you thought it was.
The cost of launch is almost (probably always) a tiny part of the total cost of designing, building and launching something.
It's the same "tiny" fraction of the total cost of the payload, roughly 10-20%. The only exceptions are really expensive payloads (say multibillion dollar US DOD/NRO satellties) or really cheap ones (such as test payloads for new launch systems).
So it's reasonable to expect as launch costs go down, new engineered systems, designed to go up on the cheaper launches, will also drop in cost.
And when the Falcon 9 has 50 successful launches, what's going to be the argument then? Now is the time for Arianespace to move on this, not when its platform has been rendered firmly obsolete and overpriced for any sort of launch.
It's $2.50 per leg of a trip and the flying public already pays it. Any high speed rail would be paying those sorts of costs as well. I don't know why people think that terrorists are never going to target trains, especially when they've had great success at doing so in the recent past.Seems awful weak to assume trains will remain safe merely because the fad is blowing up airplanes at the moment.
Nor do I see a rationalization for why security would be any cheaper per passenger for a train station than it would be for an airport.
What people are saying is that considering the massive imbalance in passenger rail vs. air, it's probably time to expand rail some.
Why should there be balance? My view is that until someone drops the cost of the rail infrastructure itself, say to around $10 million per mile in current dollars, it will never make sense economically to balance rail and air.
Why isn't it a wake up call? Here, is a novel means for funding the creation of games (and plenty of other activities). It raises significant money too without a lot of strings attached, but with a bit of publicity. That's huge value for game creators who don't already have a well established business funding their efforts. I think we're looking at the future of how games will be created.
If Neil Armstrong's feet were responsible for say, Neil Armstrong walking on the Moon, then they'd be very interesting to observe. Instead, it was the massive engineering effort of the Apollo program that was responsible for Armstrong walking on the Moon. For Einstein, it was his brain responsible which was responsible for his intelligence and his research efforts.
I still think that relativity, is relative
Hence, the name.
* Holographic information storage in two dimensions and multi-dimensional folding, yada yada yada
Now, if you could show that this holographic information storage stores in two dimensions in any number of dimensions, then you'd have something. Otherwise it's just a peculiar initial condition of our universe.
As for Newton, odds are good that he wasn't that special either. He had the founder advantage. There was a lot of new data to explain and not much in the way of competition for doing the explaining.
How? All Obama had to do was move people out of Guantanamo and it wouldn't matter what laws the Republican minority managed to pass (which would have been zilch). I just see it as another campaign promise that Obama reneged on when he no longer had to promise anything in order to get elected.
I can stop right there. I personally can evaluate that statement [...] I've read their written laws. They exist.
Huh, looks like you can't evaluate that statement. Earlier in the thread, I referred to the Chinese constitution. I know there's stuff written down. But they aren't laws, if you don't have to follow them.
And in your reply to that, you claim "They follow their own rules, but the rules aren't the ones written down." So you readily admit that the laws aren't true laws. As I see it, they're just a bit of theater.
I seem to have the impression that you confuse your opinion with fact and will lie to support an incorrect opinion, rather than absorb a new fact, as facts make you think, and your wolrd-view is solved and new information is inconvenient.
Sorry, but this adolescent view that you should be able to say and do anything you like on the internet with no concern for real world laws is just...adolescent.
Well, what sort of speech should be curbed? Calling a police horse gay?
"This is poisonous for children," Janaki Rajan of the Faculty of Education at Jamia Millia University in Delhi told the BBC.
"The government has the power to take action, but they are washing their hands of it," she said.
And that's the appropriate solution. Instead of getting upset that there's an offensive book out there, the activists should be using this as an opportunity to find out where the nutcases are in their educational system. It's bigotry bait.
The thing is, we have millennia of evidence that the rule of law works.
The powerful do not need you "enabling" them. They'll help themselves to commit whatever acts their power allows. Don't like it? Become powerful enough yourself to change things.
When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.
The whole point of law from the very beginning was to curb power and wickedness. When you don't do that, when you allow evil to fester and the powerful to exercise their will freely, rather than constrain it in a fair and lawful manner, then sure you are in your euphemism, taking a "risk". That's the same sort of risk someone who tries to commit suicide takes.
You are asserting that your ignorance of the unwritten rules is proof they don't exist. I do not accept that as a valid argument.
No, I'm merely noting the obvious. There's no law in China, just fiat. And fiat can and does change on a whim.
legally are no different from a cop making up law on the spot to arrest someone.
Which happens to be illegal in the US and other developed world countries.
As to "free speech" zones, these can be and are contested in the court system and there's a legitimate case for them.
You sound like the soccer coach I talked to that was training his players to injure opposing players.
I get the impression your head is shoved way up your ass. How does prevent protesters from shutting down a city center compare to deliberately injuring other players in a game (just don't draw a red card!)? It doesn't.
If the US passes laws that are struck down, then it does not have rule of law
How is US law struck down? Only by processes spelled out in the US Constitution. Not an example.
Rule of law doesn't apply when there are multiple sets of conflicting written rules
I see we're just being silly here. No, that's not how it works. Rule of law doesn't preclude contradictory law. Instead, it's the principle that government and people make a best effort to follow that law.
That's the risk all civilizations must take if they want to advance. You MIGHT run out of civilization. But if you don't take that risk, then you will FOR SURE run out of civilization. The saying is you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
I see you choose to continue with this foolishness. I will forgive them after they've been judged in a court of law. That is how genuine civilization works. Not by enabling the powerful to commit acts of harm.
...I don't understand why you think that's a fair return on investment at all. One terminal costs 9 billion dollars, which they can make up in...60 years? Of course, by then, they will have had another three giant construction projects to pay off.
Because it is a positive return on investment. While with high speed rail projects, we spend larger sums of money to eventually get a money sink in a couple of decades.
Now, Hartsfield is a good investment, simply because the city makes a hell of a lot of money from visitors, hopefully more than it spends.
I didn't recall "hope" being a good investment strategy. Point is that they'll turn a profit even without that boost from visitors, property values, etc. While with high speed rail, one hopes that the income that these governments get from these sources will more than counter the revenue gap and the money lost from road systems, airports, and associated property which are somewhat less used now.
Except the airport expansion only handled, as you pointed out, 30 million more people. For $9 billion. A new airport for handling 120 million people would have been, even under the most _ideal_ estimations, $27 billion.
That's still less than half the cost of HSR...except that's half for _one airport_ and _no airplanes_ compared to the entire California HSR system, with multiple stations(1), and presumably the cost of actually buying trains included in the HSR estimate, whereas the airport expansion did not buy any new planes.
Another advantage of airports, you don't need to buy or maintain the planes in order to have a working airport. It's just another hub on a vast network. And as I note, you could have built several major airports serving most of the urban areas rather than a couple larger than the current world record.
Like I said, for some reason we've all just decided to _ignore_ the amount of money we're pouring into airports. Whereas pouring basically the same, or even less, into any sort of rail is a horrible idea...Amtrak has gotten approximately one billion dollars worth of subsidies in the entire 40 years it has existed. Republicans in Congress apparently thinks this is way too much.
Amtrak received a billion dollars in subsidies last fiscal year. And per passenger-mile, it's subsidies are an order of magnitude larger than they are for air travel.
Except when it isn't a fallacy. Here is a case where the slippery slope is a valid argument. There is always creep when someone is given power and can use that in turn to get more power
As an aside, I do forgive those who commit crimes by "paying their debt" to society with a court decided sentence. If Fast and Furious participants had gone to court, then I'd abide by the sentence. That is reasonable in my view, but the administration has instead protected those involved.
It is precisely because people are willing to forgive and look beyond their own petty moral values that lets civilization progress.
That's a remarkably bullshit rationalization for appeasement. With Fast and Furious, we have a crime that harms that civilization by tainting with blood the relationship between two long time friendly neighbors. We also have a large number of people dying for no particular reason except it protects some cartel turf. And because the operation allowed considerable weapons smuggling for a single cartel, it also provided an unwarranted boon to an unseemly side in a nasty war.
No, we have civilization because we have rules and generally follow those rules. That includes punishment for not following the rules, such as brazenly occurred with Fast and Furious. Forgiveness is fine, if you can afford it. But forgive too much (especially without doing anything to keep the people responsible from doing more acts that require "forgiveness") and you run out of civilization.
The effect of our doing will hit our children children.
And they might even be modestly inconvenienced by it. There seems to be a general opinion that AGW is going to be really bad for our descendants. Unfortunately, no one seems to given enough thought to the problem to have come up with a reason for why that'll be the case.
The claims I've seen are for modest sea level rise, slight changes in rainfall precipitation, and acidification of the oceans. Over centuries.
Many other effects, such as flood insurance issues, massive desertification of arable land, and the inability of certain countries to get (or even to try to get) a handle on any of their problems, seems often to be confused with AGW.
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That sounds really weak to me. It's not like calculus or the laws of motion could have been different, if someone else had discovered them.
They had been kicking around for thirty years by the time of Einstein's discovery of special relativity. I guess I'll just have to disagree.
Until the paper-exercise Falcon Heavy with its kludgey fuel-transfer-in-flight mode flies
I'd call it "brilliant" and "elegant" not "kludgey", but I guess such things are in the eye of the beholder. Just keep in mind that a) it significantly improves the mass fraction of the Falcon 9 Heavy (which rather than the Falcon Heavy, is the true Arianespace 5 competitor) at moderate complexity increase, and b) uses existing components, three copies of the Falcon 9 "core" (the first stage), greatly reducing production costs.
And as for calling it a "paper exercise", they've already demonstrated the rocket engines and launched the basic Falcon 9 core. It's not been tested as a whole, but the components are far from "paper".
Of course the Falcon Heavy's main projected use is manned missions to the Moon and Mars but that assumes substantial and sustained funding for such a project in the trillion dollar range
Cheaper launch vehicle means cheaper missions. And NASA is notorious for making things one to two orders of magnitude more expensive than they need to be. I think once the Falcon Heavy flies, we'll be in funding range of private manned space exploration of both the surface of the Moon and Mars.
EU legislation can make the market for Space X very limited and increase the cost per launch due to reduced launch frequency of Space X.
ESA != EU. They still have to get non-EU players, Norway and Switzerland to go along. If that means that their space industry is precluded from using the best competitor in the field, then it's going to hurt the EU in the long term.
If you have a large group of people chanting racists slogans, very quickly people around them , onlookers, can find themselves chanting along, and believing those slogans and not asking themselves why.
Perhaps you could give an example? I've never seen this alleged effect myself.
The cronulla riot in australia left many people who had joined in the racist violent asking themselves "What the hell did I just do? I dont understand it? I was just in cronulla for shopping and next thing I'm in a crowd of people bashing lebanese shopkeepers".
There's this behavior called the "lie". There's also this substance called "alcohol". The combination leads to stories like what you heard. In other words, I don't believe the story at all. It's just an excuse made up after the fact for what the person did, probably in an attempt to weasel out of some vandalism charges.
Also, didn't this protest have the opposite effect of what you claimed? It publicly embarrassed the anti-"Lebanon shopkeeper" crowd, especially when no evidence for the alleged racist attacks which provoked the riot could be found (there was no change in the incident of racist attacks, just a change in the perception of those attacks).
Also, it's my view that free speech addresses the other "social factors" you referred to. The "spiral of silence" is addressed simply by people being allowed to say unpopular opinions. When those opinions aren't shared, nothing happens. But when they are, it breaks the spiral of silence.
Finally there is a large part of the population that research shows find themselves attracted to angry conservative type opinions and actually become MORE attracted to the opinion when evidence of its incorrectness is presented.
"Conservative type" opinions? I think this is the result of half-assed arguments. When you use a bunch of crude and poorly thought out "ad hominem" attacks (such as labels like "angry conservative type"), you increase the audience's sympathy for the target. A really high profile and incompetent foe can be more valuable than a rhetorically skilled advocate. It is a perverse sociological factor, but not what you thought it was.
The cost of launch is almost (probably always) a tiny part of the total cost of designing, building and launching something.
It's the same "tiny" fraction of the total cost of the payload, roughly 10-20%. The only exceptions are really expensive payloads (say multibillion dollar US DOD/NRO satellties) or really cheap ones (such as test payloads for new launch systems).
So it's reasonable to expect as launch costs go down, new engineered systems, designed to go up on the cheaper launches, will also drop in cost.
And when the Falcon 9 has 50 successful launches, what's going to be the argument then? Now is the time for Arianespace to move on this, not when its platform has been rendered firmly obsolete and overpriced for any sort of launch.
Assuming that security costs at least $2 a person
It's $2.50 per leg of a trip and the flying public already pays it. Any high speed rail would be paying those sorts of costs as well. I don't know why people think that terrorists are never going to target trains, especially when they've had great success at doing so in the recent past.Seems awful weak to assume trains will remain safe merely because the fad is blowing up airplanes at the moment.
Nor do I see a rationalization for why security would be any cheaper per passenger for a train station than it would be for an airport.
What people are saying is that considering the massive imbalance in passenger rail vs. air, it's probably time to expand rail some.
Why should there be balance? My view is that until someone drops the cost of the rail infrastructure itself, say to around $10 million per mile in current dollars, it will never make sense economically to balance rail and air.
Why isn't it a wake up call? Here, is a novel means for funding the creation of games (and plenty of other activities). It raises significant money too without a lot of strings attached, but with a bit of publicity. That's huge value for game creators who don't already have a well established business funding their efforts. I think we're looking at the future of how games will be created.
I still think that relativity, is relative
Hence, the name.
* Holographic information storage in two dimensions and multi-dimensional folding, yada yada yada
Now, if you could show that this holographic information storage stores in two dimensions in any number of dimensions, then you'd have something. Otherwise it's just a peculiar initial condition of our universe.
General relativity follows fairly straightforward from special relativity and the Reimannian structure on manifolds (it's basically the very similar Minkowski structure and an optimization problem on that manifold). It may take a "very select few" to grok that, but that still ends being a lot of people.
As for Newton, odds are good that he wasn't that special either. He had the founder advantage. There was a lot of new data to explain and not much in the way of competition for doing the explaining.
How? All Obama had to do was move people out of Guantanamo and it wouldn't matter what laws the Republican minority managed to pass (which would have been zilch). I just see it as another campaign promise that Obama reneged on when he no longer had to promise anything in order to get elected.
I can stop right there. I personally can evaluate that statement [...] I've read their written laws. They exist.
Huh, looks like you can't evaluate that statement. Earlier in the thread, I referred to the Chinese constitution. I know there's stuff written down. But they aren't laws, if you don't have to follow them.
And in your reply to that, you claim "They follow their own rules, but the rules aren't the ones written down." So you readily admit that the laws aren't true laws. As I see it, they're just a bit of theater.
I seem to have the impression that you confuse your opinion with fact and will lie to support an incorrect opinion, rather than absorb a new fact, as facts make you think, and your wolrd-view is solved and new information is inconvenient.
Why? Is that what you would do?
That's 3 strikes. You're out.
Indeed. The internet police will be over to take away his posting license.
Sorry, but this adolescent view that you should be able to say and do anything you like on the internet with no concern for real world laws is just...adolescent.
Well, what sort of speech should be curbed? Calling a police horse gay?
Unfortunately that's followed by the proviso
Huh, not so special then.
"This is poisonous for children," Janaki Rajan of the Faculty of Education at Jamia Millia University in Delhi told the BBC.
"The government has the power to take action, but they are washing their hands of it," she said.
And that's the appropriate solution. Instead of getting upset that there's an offensive book out there, the activists should be using this as an opportunity to find out where the nutcases are in their educational system. It's bigotry bait.
The powerful do not need you "enabling" them. They'll help themselves to commit whatever acts their power allows. Don't like it? Become powerful enough yourself to change things.
From the very first code of law:
When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.
The whole point of law from the very beginning was to curb power and wickedness. When you don't do that, when you allow evil to fester and the powerful to exercise their will freely, rather than constrain it in a fair and lawful manner, then sure you are in your euphemism, taking a "risk". That's the same sort of risk someone who tries to commit suicide takes.
You are asserting that your ignorance of the unwritten rules is proof they don't exist. I do not accept that as a valid argument.
No, I'm merely noting the obvious. There's no law in China, just fiat. And fiat can and does change on a whim.
legally are no different from a cop making up law on the spot to arrest someone.
Which happens to be illegal in the US and other developed world countries.
As to "free speech" zones, these can be and are contested in the court system and there's a legitimate case for them.
You sound like the soccer coach I talked to that was training his players to injure opposing players.
I get the impression your head is shoved way up your ass. How does prevent protesters from shutting down a city center compare to deliberately injuring other players in a game (just don't draw a red card!)? It doesn't.
If the US passes laws that are struck down, then it does not have rule of law
How is US law struck down? Only by processes spelled out in the US Constitution. Not an example.
Rule of law doesn't apply when there are multiple sets of conflicting written rules
I see we're just being silly here. No, that's not how it works. Rule of law doesn't preclude contradictory law. Instead, it's the principle that government and people make a best effort to follow that law.
That's the risk all civilizations must take if they want to advance. You MIGHT run out of civilization. But if you don't take that risk, then you will FOR SURE run out of civilization. The saying is you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
I see you choose to continue with this foolishness. I will forgive them after they've been judged in a court of law. That is how genuine civilization works. Not by enabling the powerful to commit acts of harm.
...I don't understand why you think that's a fair return on investment at all. One terminal costs 9 billion dollars, which they can make up in...60 years? Of course, by then, they will have had another three giant construction projects to pay off.
Because it is a positive return on investment. While with high speed rail projects, we spend larger sums of money to eventually get a money sink in a couple of decades.
Now, Hartsfield is a good investment, simply because the city makes a hell of a lot of money from visitors, hopefully more than it spends.
I didn't recall "hope" being a good investment strategy. Point is that they'll turn a profit even without that boost from visitors, property values, etc. While with high speed rail, one hopes that the income that these governments get from these sources will more than counter the revenue gap and the money lost from road systems, airports, and associated property which are somewhat less used now.
Except the airport expansion only handled, as you pointed out, 30 million more people. For $9 billion. A new airport for handling 120 million people would have been, even under the most _ideal_ estimations, $27 billion.
That's still less than half the cost of HSR...except that's half for _one airport_ and _no airplanes_ compared to the entire California HSR system, with multiple stations(1), and presumably the cost of actually buying trains included in the HSR estimate, whereas the airport expansion did not buy any new planes.
Another advantage of airports, you don't need to buy or maintain the planes in order to have a working airport. It's just another hub on a vast network. And as I note, you could have built several major airports serving most of the urban areas rather than a couple larger than the current world record.
Like I said, for some reason we've all just decided to _ignore_ the amount of money we're pouring into airports. Whereas pouring basically the same, or even less, into any sort of rail is a horrible idea...Amtrak has gotten approximately one billion dollars worth of subsidies in the entire 40 years it has existed. Republicans in Congress apparently thinks this is way too much.
Amtrak received a billion dollars in subsidies last fiscal year. And per passenger-mile, it's subsidies are an order of magnitude larger than they are for air travel.
Except when it isn't a fallacy. Here is a case where the slippery slope is a valid argument. There is always creep when someone is given power and can use that in turn to get more power
As an aside, I do forgive those who commit crimes by "paying their debt" to society with a court decided sentence. If Fast and Furious participants had gone to court, then I'd abide by the sentence. That is reasonable in my view, but the administration has instead protected those involved.
It is precisely because people are willing to forgive and look beyond their own petty moral values that lets civilization progress.
That's a remarkably bullshit rationalization for appeasement. With Fast and Furious, we have a crime that harms that civilization by tainting with blood the relationship between two long time friendly neighbors. We also have a large number of people dying for no particular reason except it protects some cartel turf. And because the operation allowed considerable weapons smuggling for a single cartel, it also provided an unwarranted boon to an unseemly side in a nasty war.
No, we have civilization because we have rules and generally follow those rules. That includes punishment for not following the rules, such as brazenly occurred with Fast and Furious. Forgiveness is fine, if you can afford it. But forgive too much (especially without doing anything to keep the people responsible from doing more acts that require "forgiveness") and you run out of civilization.
The effect of our doing will hit our children children.
And they might even be modestly inconvenienced by it. There seems to be a general opinion that AGW is going to be really bad for our descendants. Unfortunately, no one seems to given enough thought to the problem to have come up with a reason for why that'll be the case.
The claims I've seen are for modest sea level rise, slight changes in rainfall precipitation, and acidification of the oceans. Over centuries.
Many other effects, such as flood insurance issues, massive desertification of arable land, and the inability of certain countries to get (or even to try to get) a handle on any of their problems, seems often to be confused with AGW.