Speaking as someone who's neither a citizen or resident of the US, but would no doubt will still be affected to some extent by the results of your elections. Whether the electoral college system has more or less merit than a simple popular majority seems to be the least of your problems. The founding fathers came up with a pretty good system, no doubt, but it seems to me to have a fundamental flaw in that it reaches an equilibrium with only two viable parties. Does it seem reasonable that the opinions of 325 million people are divided into two nearly equal halves (to within less than a percentage point), votes for the smaller parties are functionally equivalent to liking someone's post on Facebook, and the party in power just flips over to the other one once people get bored with the one that's in the spotlight, or because the other party managed to spend a few more million on advertising and managed to get marginally better brand recognition? Does it seem reasonable to sum up all your values and make a binary choice based on which side of the threshold you land on? Well, the answer to those questions doesn't really matter, because you're fucked regardless, your political system has a fundamental flaw, and through the processes that turn a novel upstart concept into a baroque series of rituals observed out of habit, anyone who has any hypothetical power to change it is formed by it and reliant on it to keep their place and win their little victories within its framework.
How about when it informs me that it scheduled an update in an hour and I'm not at the computer, so I don't get to see the popup and I lose my open documents?
How about when I want to reboot because my Wacom driver has stopped working and I don't have 40 minutes to sit through an update install I wasn't aware of because I'm in the middle of actually trying to do some work?
How about when I've delayed the update install a couple of times and now Windows decided I don't get a choice when to reboot and just shuts off?
So now I have the update service disabled and I'm not getting any updates installed instead of installing them at a convenient time like I do on 7.
I'm quite fond of the feature where the OS doesn't decide to reboot at arbitrary times without asking permission after installing an update I didn't approve.
They are working on a different engine and different architecture for their Mars plans, and it's quite reasonable to assume they'll scale that down for commercial use as well.
As it stands, the Merlin engine is pretty damned good, they're just constrained by the size of rocket they can move by road and are therefore squeezing out some extra efficiency by resorting to methods that don't have as long a history of use and the edge cases have not been discovered.
They could probably go back to using warmer propellants at the cost of running production of multiple variants of the rocket and extra launch site infrastructure. Or just continue with the current setup and hope that the technology proves itself safe enough on the unmanned launches.
The current iteration of Falcon 9 is designed for very cold propellants. If the rocket sits on the pad too long the propellants warm up from the environment and expand, which necessitates venting them out so the tanks are not overpressured. The engines are also, presumably, tuned for a certain rate of flow at a certain density, so if the propellant is at a different density, it would reduce efficiency and might cause trouble.
Any particular reason you neglected to mention that the ban on the RD-180s relates to national security launches, while the RD-181 purchased by Orbital ATK are used for civilian and commercials launches? What's that? Because it helps your personal political narrative? Yeah, thought so.
I don't think his character survived the first one, something to do with the main plot.
Seriously though, he's great and all, and I'm sure they could have come up with some excuse that they had a bunch of copies of the Roy Batty model and they actually had a life extension procedure for him or they aged him for some purpose, but I'd rather they didn't do a rehash of all the same characters just for the sake of nostalgia.
Hey I have an idea, maybe Gosling is Deckard's son in this one, and he kills and drops him into some deep chasm because he has daddy issues.
They don't have any rockets. Even if he's considering ULA's rockets being nominally Boeing's, they're shutting down production of the Delta IV family, the Atlas V is on shaky ground with its Russian engines, and is supposed to be discontinued when the Vulcan starts flying, the development of which they are underfunding and as it stands, even when it's done, would probably not even be competitive with SpaceX's current Falcon 9.
Or are they planning to buy out LockMart's half of ULA, or compete with their own subsidiary with an undisclosed rocket design?
After several occasions where windows decided to update itself without giving me any other options, installing faulty drivers that required removing the driver and all settings for the device, wasting time and money, then proclaiming triumphantly that all my files are where I left them, as if not destroying all my files is some sort of fucking achievement and not the least you can fucking expect... No Microsoft, I'm not installing your fucking updates, hopefully disabling the update service will take care of that problem. And I'm definitely not using that piece of excrement OS for anything that actually matters.
I'd be more interested with what a company like Solar City can do on this front. I'm wondering if you could have some sort of distributed mesh-network power utility where each node has battery storage and solar panels, and sets its own input and output prices, with more traditional means of generation filling in the gaps.
Well, they did announce they are working on all the vehicles you've mentioned. Personally I'm more curious about Elon's Machine-that-builds-the-machine stuff, improvements in manufacturing density and efficiency. And I was wondering, even before the Solar City merger plans, if in fifteen years we'll even think of Tesla a mainly a car manufacturer.
That may be the point from your personal perspective but when I read news reports about people destroying research crops in the middle of the night, and calling for the banning of 'GMOs', people I've met who claim that it's unnatural and therefore wrong, or that modifying the genes of a carrot will give you cancer, they lose all credibility to me. From my experience that's the public face of the Anti-GMO movement. 'GMO' stands for Genetically Modified Organism, it doesn't stand for predatory patent practices or carcinogenic pesticides and if it's easier for some political movement to conflate all these things into one easy to name bogeyman at the expense of actual productive uses of the technology, they'll get no support from me.
They serve text and and video, and in exchange they take 5% of the money pledged to projects. I'm sure they have their servers and a team to maintain and keep their code and design current all covered. So what exactly do they need capital for? Do you expect them to branch into unrelated fields, build their own OS inside a browser, explore how 3D-printed IoT VR-goggles can be leveraged for crowdfunding just because they have some spare cash?
It was mandatory at an elementary school I went to for a year, I didn't even get to pick the instrument because I moved there at the start of the year and everyone was already assigned. I haven't played the instrument since and have very little memory of the whole thing, but I don't see any problem with the concept.
So how is programming different from any other subject a child learns at school? Or do you believe that a child should have had prior experience with writing or math or sports before they choose to have it taught to them at school?
This actually happens in orthodox Jewish communities. Married women are forbidden of having their hair seen by strangers or something of that sort, so they all walk around wearing wigs.
More like the first hint that some asshole decided to write a sensationalist headline and misrepresent anything that might have actually transpired, so at most I'd be willing to take from anything they wrote would be 'some people met to discuss genetics'
Well, Tory Bruno is claiming the ACES upper stage will be a sort of space tug, it will stay and get refueled on orbit and then will be able to reposition payloads launched to it.
They can also just remain a second option for 'Assured Access to Space' and collect whatever subsidies are required to keep them afloat until someone else like Blue Origin or Orbital ATK make them redundant.
I read pretty slowly, and even so I sometimes catch myself having read a few lines of text but haven't really fully processed them so I go back and reread them.
I've also noticed a certain change of the pace of my reading as the scene plays out in my mind, I might read faster if things are happening quickly from a character's point of view.
So I think I'd lose the nuances of both the meaning and pacing if I tried to read faster.
Also, it's quite possible to follow the plot of a movie while watching at 2X speed but I wouldn't consider doing that unless there was some sort of artificial time constraint that required me to know the plot rather than enjoy the experience.
I was thinking about when I read a recent story about BMW getting into driverless car research. I bet a lot of existing car companies, rather than start their research programs behind, having to each collect their own data, would jump at the opportunity to license the sensors, software, road data from Google while having them share the blame when something bad happens. And Google wouldn't have to spend any money on getting into manufacturing.
Boston Dynamics has been founded in 1992. If your definition of "a few years" is a quarter of a century, well, err, can I join your vampire coven please?
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who's neither a citizen or resident of the US, but would no doubt will still be affected to some extent by the results of your elections.
Whether the electoral college system has more or less merit than a simple popular majority seems to be the least of your problems.
The founding fathers came up with a pretty good system, no doubt, but it seems to me to have a fundamental flaw in that it reaches an equilibrium with only two viable parties.
Does it seem reasonable that the opinions of 325 million people are divided into two nearly equal halves (to within less than a percentage point), votes for the smaller parties are functionally equivalent to liking someone's post on Facebook, and the party in power just flips over to the other one once people get bored with the one that's in the spotlight, or because the other party managed to spend a few more million on advertising and managed to get marginally better brand recognition?
Does it seem reasonable to sum up all your values and make a binary choice based on which side of the threshold you land on?
Well, the answer to those questions doesn't really matter, because you're fucked regardless, your political system has a fundamental flaw, and through the processes that turn a novel upstart concept into a baroque series of rituals observed out of habit, anyone who has any hypothetical power to change it is formed by it and reliant on it to keep their place and win their little victories within its framework.
How about when it informs me that it scheduled an update in an hour and I'm not at the computer, so I don't get to see the popup and I lose my open documents?
How about when I want to reboot because my Wacom driver has stopped working and I don't have 40 minutes to sit through an update install I wasn't aware of because I'm in the middle of actually trying to do some work?
How about when I've delayed the update install a couple of times and now Windows decided I don't get a choice when to reboot and just shuts off?
So now I have the update service disabled and I'm not getting any updates installed instead of installing them at a convenient time like I do on 7.
I'm quite fond of the feature where the OS doesn't decide to reboot at arbitrary times without asking permission after installing an update I didn't approve.
Can't be, surely.
I'm pretty sure Apple had deprecated optical media.
And Nero doesn't even have an OSX port.
They are working on a different engine and different architecture for their Mars plans, and it's quite reasonable to assume they'll scale that down for commercial use as well.
As it stands, the Merlin engine is pretty damned good, they're just constrained by the size of rocket they can move by road and are therefore squeezing out some extra efficiency by resorting to methods that don't have as long a history of use and the edge cases have not been discovered.
They could probably go back to using warmer propellants at the cost of running production of multiple variants of the rocket and extra launch site infrastructure.
Or just continue with the current setup and hope that the technology proves itself safe enough on the unmanned launches.
The current iteration of Falcon 9 is designed for very cold propellants.
If the rocket sits on the pad too long the propellants warm up from the environment and expand, which necessitates venting them out so the tanks are not overpressured.
The engines are also, presumably, tuned for a certain rate of flow at a certain density, so if the propellant is at a different density, it would reduce efficiency and might cause trouble.
Any particular reason you neglected to mention that the ban on the RD-180s relates to national security launches, while the RD-181 purchased by Orbital ATK are used for civilian and commercials launches?
What's that? Because it helps your personal political narrative? Yeah, thought so.
I don't think his character survived the first one, something to do with the main plot.
Seriously though, he's great and all, and I'm sure they could have come up with some excuse that they had a bunch of copies of the Roy Batty model and they actually had a life extension procedure for him or they aged him for some purpose, but I'd rather they didn't do a rehash of all the same characters just for the sake of nostalgia.
Hey I have an idea, maybe Gosling is Deckard's son in this one, and he kills and drops him into some deep chasm because he has daddy issues.
They don't have any rockets.
Even if he's considering ULA's rockets being nominally Boeing's, they're shutting down production of the Delta IV family, the Atlas V is on shaky ground with its Russian engines, and is supposed to be discontinued when the Vulcan starts flying, the development of which they are underfunding and as it stands, even when it's done, would probably not even be competitive with SpaceX's current Falcon 9.
Or are they planning to buy out LockMart's half of ULA, or compete with their own subsidiary with an undisclosed rocket design?
After several occasions where windows decided to update itself without giving me any other options, installing faulty drivers that required removing the driver and all settings for the device, wasting time and money, then proclaiming triumphantly that all my files are where I left them, as if not destroying all my files is some sort of fucking achievement and not the least you can fucking expect...
No Microsoft, I'm not installing your fucking updates, hopefully disabling the update service will take care of that problem.
And I'm definitely not using that piece of excrement OS for anything that actually matters.
I'd be more interested with what a company like Solar City can do on this front.
I'm wondering if you could have some sort of distributed mesh-network power utility where each node has battery storage and solar panels, and sets its own input and output prices, with more traditional means of generation filling in the gaps.
Well, they did announce they are working on all the vehicles you've mentioned.
Personally I'm more curious about Elon's Machine-that-builds-the-machine stuff, improvements in manufacturing density and efficiency.
And I was wondering, even before the Solar City merger plans, if in fifteen years we'll even think of Tesla a mainly a car manufacturer.
If my side-view-camera isn't a full frame Hasselblad with a custom Zeiss lens, what's the point of even getting into the car?
That may be the point from your personal perspective but when I read news reports about people destroying research crops in the middle of the night, and calling for the banning of 'GMOs', people I've met who claim that it's unnatural and therefore wrong, or that modifying the genes of a carrot will give you cancer, they lose all credibility to me.
From my experience that's the public face of the Anti-GMO movement.
'GMO' stands for Genetically Modified Organism, it doesn't stand for predatory patent practices or carcinogenic pesticides and if it's easier for some political movement to conflate all these things into one easy to name bogeyman at the expense of actual productive uses of the technology, they'll get no support from me.
They serve text and and video, and in exchange they take 5% of the money pledged to projects.
I'm sure they have their servers and a team to maintain and keep their code and design current all covered.
So what exactly do they need capital for?
Do you expect them to branch into unrelated fields, build their own OS inside a browser, explore how 3D-printed IoT VR-goggles can be leveraged for crowdfunding just because they have some spare cash?
It was mandatory at an elementary school I went to for a year, I didn't even get to pick the instrument because I moved there at the start of the year and everyone was already assigned.
I haven't played the instrument since and have very little memory of the whole thing, but I don't see any problem with the concept.
So how is programming different from any other subject a child learns at school?
Or do you believe that a child should have had prior experience with writing or math or sports before they choose to have it taught to them at school?
This actually happens in orthodox Jewish communities.
Married women are forbidden of having their hair seen by strangers or something of that sort, so they all walk around wearing wigs.
More like the first hint that some asshole decided to write a sensationalist headline and misrepresent anything that might have actually transpired, so at most I'd be willing to take from anything they wrote would be 'some people met to discuss genetics'
...but I'd take the paper with lots of grains of salt.
You mean particulate Sodium Chloride that's been linked to heart attacks and strokes?
Well, Tory Bruno is claiming the ACES upper stage will be a sort of space tug, it will stay and get refueled on orbit and then will be able to reposition payloads launched to it.
They can also just remain a second option for 'Assured Access to Space' and collect whatever subsidies are required to keep them afloat until someone else like Blue Origin or Orbital ATK make them redundant.
I read pretty slowly, and even so I sometimes catch myself having read a few lines of text but haven't really fully processed them so I go back and reread them.
I've also noticed a certain change of the pace of my reading as the scene plays out in my mind, I might read faster if things are happening quickly from a character's point of view.
So I think I'd lose the nuances of both the meaning and pacing if I tried to read faster.
Also, it's quite possible to follow the plot of a movie while watching at 2X speed but I wouldn't consider doing that unless there was some sort of artificial time constraint that required me to know the plot rather than enjoy the experience.
Hopefully the crew situation will change next year with SpaceX, Boing and Sierra Nevada's offerings.
I was thinking about when I read a recent story about BMW getting into driverless car research.
I bet a lot of existing car companies, rather than start their research programs behind, having to each collect their own data, would jump at the opportunity to license the sensors, software, road data from Google while having them share the blame when something bad happens.
And Google wouldn't have to spend any money on getting into manufacturing.
Boston Dynamics has been founded in 1992.
If your definition of "a few years" is a quarter of a century, well, err, can I join your vampire coven please?