Uh, dude, anyone could have patented this at any time. Blue Origin aren't actually landing anything on barges, they're just patenting it so no-one else can. SpaceX are the only ones who can actually do it, but the Patent Office says 'no, you can't be allowed to do that, someone else filled in the paperwork first'.
Personally, I was wondering what SpaceX were going to do about this patent when they first suggested a test landing on a barge.
Yes. Aside from delivering all their primary payloads, and only being unable to deliver one secondary payload because NASA said they weren't allowed to, SpaceX has been a complete failure!
Just imagine the missions you could fly by having NASA park a mars transit vehicle in orbit and SpaceX dock a massive fuelled Earth departure stage to it, perhaps with the crew flying up to it aboard a DreamChaser launched on an Atlas (Maximizing the non-crew related weight the heavies could loft).
Now imagine the missions you could fly by taking the billions of dollars that SLS launch will cost and flying dozens of Falcon Heavies instead.
If your goal is to explore and colonize the solar system, there is no rational case for SLS if Falcon Heavy works. It will launch a similar, or larger, payload for vastly less money, so launching anything on SLS is just burning cash that could have been spent on something useful.
Yes, they've consistently delivered their primary payload, and even the secondary payload would have been delivered to the correct orbit if NASA had let them.
But that's clearly a string of failures in Anti-SpaceX Nutter World.
Even a small percentage increase in fuel efficiency results in a significant increase in the payload that can be boosted.
Which, as I said elsewhere, is irrelevant if that 'small percentage increase' doubles the cost of the engines. It's like putting a Lamborghini engine in a truck so you can pull more cargo.
Fast forward to 21st century and progress made by SpaceX and others is result of wealth inequality.
But wealth inequality is bad and stuff. The government should steal all Musk's money and give it to people on welfare so they can buy bigger TVs and stimulate the Chinese economy.
Remember, this is the organization that needed half a billion dollars to put a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launch it into the ocean. There was a very brief period when NASA did cheap unmanned missions under the 'cheaper, faster, better' slogan, but that was long ago now.
You're replying to the Anti-SpaceX Nutter, who really appears to believe that every one of their launches was a failure. I'm guessing he thinks those satellites SpaceX launched are just faked in the Arizona desert.
Efficiency is irrelevant when fuel makes up about 1% of the cost of a launch and bigger tanks are cheap. When you're throwing engines away every time, and they make up a large fraction of the cost of a launch, a low-cost engine that burns 10% more fuel can be a massive win.
Government rocket engineers have been fixated on efficiency because they rarely have to worry about cost. They can just steal more money from taxpayers.
Because there will obviously be an infinite number of cars driving around just waiting for you to call one.
In the real world, rather than Self-Driving Cars Are Magic! Utopia, if you have enough cars to handle all requests at peak times without making customers wait, you have a metric fsck-ton of cars that will be doing nothing the rest of the day.
The thing is, if you come up with a good ruleset, theres no need to improvise.
So, who's going to write the rule that tells it what to do if faced with a choice between running over a baby, or swerving and running over an old granny? On an icy road. In a snow storm. With a crowd of screaming schoolkids that it will run over if it miscalculates and goes out of control on the ice?
Neither of those two matter; the vehicle would ensure that it was at a speed it could stop if whatever it was began to dart into the road, and if it DID, the car could stop much faster than a person.
So you're saying that self-driving cars will slow to 10mph any time there's a pedestrian on the sidewalk?
If you ask google.com for a certificate and it sends you one that's not for google.com, your browser will already warn you.
But...if the government of Mitmistan signs a certificate that claims to be google.com, your browser will accept that, even though it's actually being used by the government to hijack your browser session.
The whole CA thing worked OK when there were only a few CAs, but it's a disaster today when there are about a bazillion of them and any of them can sign a certificate pretending to be any site in the world.
Soooo... You suggest keeping people or businesses in areas at gunpoint to milk them economically when the denizens of the area become incredibly hostile to them politically and socially?
If the president had to go through congress to do everything, nothing would get done.
That's...exactly... the... point.
The US government was designed to prevent things being done, because it was supposed to do very little. Probably 90% of the things the Federal government do are unconstitutional.
Ukrainians are a modern, western, civilized people. Arming them is quite different than arming religious fanatics looking to recreate the middle ages.
Tell that to the passengers on MH17.
Regardless of which group of Ukrainians shot them down, those passengers would be alive if that side didn't have high-performance anti-aircraft missiles.
Is this a real invasion this time, or just another made-up fake invasion, like last time?
Last I heard, it sounded like the "Ukrainian separatist's" (why is that in quotes?) had the remnants of the Ukrainian army on the run, so it's probably a good time for another propaganda wave.
No-one's going to willingly pay for it because it's retarded. Any system that relies on external communication will be spoofed and abused.
Whereas pretty much every auto manufacturer is now offering optional collision avoidance systems based on cameras and/or radar, which are relatively hard to spoof and improving all the time. Clearly no-one needs to mandate broadcast systems which aren't needed and are inherently unsafe.
That just means you need a receiver every few hundred metres to track everyone. That's not particularly expensive, at least in cities or along major highways.
The 3TB WD drives in my home RAID have 25,000 and 39,000 power-on hours and no problems so far. I'd been thinking of replacing them with 6TB drives, so hopefully this means the price will be coming down.
I've only had one 1TB+ drive fail out of about a dozen here, and that just got a bad block, so I was still able to copy almost everything off (hence the 14,000 hour difference between the two drives above).
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Uh, dude, anyone could have patented this at any time. Blue Origin aren't actually landing anything on barges, they're just patenting it so no-one else can. SpaceX are the only ones who can actually do it, but the Patent Office says 'no, you can't be allowed to do that, someone else filled in the paperwork first'.
Personally, I was wondering what SpaceX were going to do about this patent when they first suggested a test landing on a barge.
Yes. Aside from delivering all their primary payloads, and only being unable to deliver one secondary payload because NASA said they weren't allowed to, SpaceX has been a complete failure!
Just imagine the missions you could fly by having NASA park a mars transit vehicle in orbit and SpaceX dock a massive fuelled Earth departure stage to it, perhaps with the crew flying up to it aboard a DreamChaser launched on an Atlas (Maximizing the non-crew related weight the heavies could loft).
Now imagine the missions you could fly by taking the billions of dollars that SLS launch will cost and flying dozens of Falcon Heavies instead.
If your goal is to explore and colonize the solar system, there is no rational case for SLS if Falcon Heavy works. It will launch a similar, or larger, payload for vastly less money, so launching anything on SLS is just burning cash that could have been spent on something useful.
They have had a string of failures.
Yes, they've consistently delivered their primary payload, and even the secondary payload would have been delivered to the correct orbit if NASA had let them.
But that's clearly a string of failures in Anti-SpaceX Nutter World.
Even a small percentage increase in fuel efficiency results in a significant increase in the payload that can be boosted.
Which, as I said elsewhere, is irrelevant if that 'small percentage increase' doubles the cost of the engines. It's like putting a Lamborghini engine in a truck so you can pull more cargo.
Fast forward to 21st century and progress made by SpaceX and others is result of wealth inequality.
But wealth inequality is bad and stuff. The government should steal all Musk's money and give it to people on welfare so they can buy bigger TVs and stimulate the Chinese economy.
NASA went from the first suborbital manned flight to putting men on the freaking Moon in eight years. They were pretty agile back then.
Now they're spending longer than that just building a rocket that largely uses existing hardware, and has no funded missions that would require it.
Remember, this is the organization that needed half a billion dollars to put a dummy upper stage on top of a shuttle SRB and launch it into the ocean. There was a very brief period when NASA did cheap unmanned missions under the 'cheaper, faster, better' slogan, but that was long ago now.
You're replying to the Anti-SpaceX Nutter, who really appears to believe that every one of their launches was a failure. I'm guessing he thinks those satellites SpaceX launched are just faked in the Arizona desert.
Efficiency is irrelevant when fuel makes up about 1% of the cost of a launch and bigger tanks are cheap. When you're throwing engines away every time, and they make up a large fraction of the cost of a launch, a low-cost engine that burns 10% more fuel can be a massive win.
Government rocket engineers have been fixated on efficiency because they rarely have to worry about cost. They can just steal more money from taxpayers.
Because there will obviously be an infinite number of cars driving around just waiting for you to call one.
In the real world, rather than Self-Driving Cars Are Magic! Utopia, if you have enough cars to handle all requests at peak times without making customers wait, you have a metric fsck-ton of cars that will be doing nothing the rest of the day.
The thing is, if you come up with a good ruleset, theres no need to improvise.
So, who's going to write the rule that tells it what to do if faced with a choice between running over a baby, or swerving and running over an old granny? On an icy road. In a snow storm. With a crowd of screaming schoolkids that it will run over if it miscalculates and goes out of control on the ice?
Neither of those two matter; the vehicle would ensure that it was at a speed it could stop if whatever it was began to dart into the road, and if it DID, the car could stop much faster than a person.
So you're saying that self-driving cars will slow to 10mph any time there's a pedestrian on the sidewalk?
If you ask google.com for a certificate and it sends you one that's not for google.com, your browser will already warn you.
But...if the government of Mitmistan signs a certificate that claims to be google.com, your browser will accept that, even though it's actually being used by the government to hijack your browser session.
The whole CA thing worked OK when there were only a few CAs, but it's a disaster today when there are about a bazillion of them and any of them can sign a certificate pretending to be any site in the world.
Then perhaps you should browse personal sites on your own dime, not the company network.
Then what's the problem? Mozilla will no longer let employees do that.
Soooo... You suggest keeping people or businesses in areas at gunpoint to milk them economically when the denizens of the area become incredibly hostile to them politically and socially?
Well, yes. That's the Democrat way.
When will CPU ever matter for gaming, unless your running some terribly-written Java game?
When consoles stop shipping with such crappy CPUs.
Yeah, which is why the judge is asking to be allowed to review the material for constitutionality in private.
Is there any possible way that a 'No Fly List' could be constitutional?
If the president had to go through congress to do everything, nothing would get done.
That's...exactly... the... point.
The US government was designed to prevent things being done, because it was supposed to do very little. Probably 90% of the things the Federal government do are unconstitutional.
Ukrainians are a modern, western, civilized people. Arming them is quite different than arming religious fanatics looking to recreate the middle ages.
Tell that to the passengers on MH17.
Regardless of which group of Ukrainians shot them down, those passengers would be alive if that side didn't have high-performance anti-aircraft missiles.
Is this a real invasion this time, or just another made-up fake invasion, like last time?
Last I heard, it sounded like the "Ukrainian separatist's" (why is that in quotes?) had the remnants of the Ukrainian army on the run, so it's probably a good time for another propaganda wave.
No-one's going to willingly pay for it because it's retarded. Any system that relies on external communication will be spoofed and abused.
Whereas pretty much every auto manufacturer is now offering optional collision avoidance systems based on cameras and/or radar, which are relatively hard to spoof and improving all the time. Clearly no-one needs to mandate broadcast systems which aren't needed and are inherently unsafe.
That just means you need a receiver every few hundred metres to track everyone. That's not particularly expensive, at least in cities or along major highways.
Well, duh. Once they have mandatory tracking of all vehicles, you really think they won't use it?
The 3TB WD drives in my home RAID have 25,000 and 39,000 power-on hours and no problems so far. I'd been thinking of replacing them with 6TB drives, so hopefully this means the price will be coming down.
I've only had one 1TB+ drive fail out of about a dozen here, and that just got a bad block, so I was still able to copy almost everything off (hence the 14,000 hour difference between the two drives above).