It was never about Tesla. The SEC is going after his ass because of SpaceX being a threat to the political class that's in bed with all those government contractors (his competitors).
There is a constituency of businesses disrupted by Musk who don't mind using social engineering to attack all things Musk and pollute the mindspace with their propaganda, or buying Congressmen to oppose his efforts. As we learned from the Manafort drama, such work has highly paid experts eager to receive that deposit into their offshore accounts.
But this is Musk's game too. He has skills in this regard or such FUD would have killed his prospects already years ago. He's taking on Boeing, Ford, GM, Fossil fuels (Saudi, BP, Exxon), nuclear power, etc. And all the nations with launch business (Russia, China, India, etc). His enemies list is pretty much the Fortune 500 and every country on Earth. If he goes missing the police are going to have a harder time finding non-suspects than suspects.
And he's fine with that. It's all going to plan. He knew when he set out to save his species from extinction that his works were not going to be popular, or they would not be necessary. We are more 100x more predisposed to extinction than the dinosaurs were, as they made it 100 million years and we seem unlikely to crack the million years mark.
What's remarkable to me is how much he seems to be enjoying making fools of them all. Stoking their ire and poking the bear as if building a self sustaining colony on another planet was insufficiently challenging and he wanted to inspire the opposition to step up their game.
I don't know why he has a problem with the short sellers. A short sale is a gamble that his stock will go down, which cannot possibly exist unless there is a counter party willing to take the other side of that bet and put their money on his stock going up. Many people who believe he cannot possibly fail buy stock in his companies and then rent out their shares to his naysayers and use the money they earn in that way to buy more shares. The long and short interest in Musk stocks is a self-reinforcing commitment to volatility against a predictable trend. Long and short sellers are gambling on whether they can predict the direction of motion and attracted because he is generating a lot of motion (volatility). They are drawn like moths to his flame for no other reason than that he is succeeding in being disruptive and controversial - which are primary goals of his. It's probably an ego thing he hasn't considered: for every stupid person willing to offer their money to bet against him there is a smart person willing to take that bet, and so there is balance in the bets that moves money from the stupid to the smart and he is the conveyor belt.
Hubris is a sin and he's guilty it. I can hope there is no human living who can make him do penance for this sin because that would be the end of Mankind. If he fails to deliver an interplanetary human species there will be no other, more capable human to repeat the attempt. And that means that eventually the last of my offsprings' heirs will die without issue, my genome will become dust as yours will, all the history struggles art and works of Men throughout all time will come to nought as the passage of time erases all evidence that we ever did exist.
/My first/. post in 4 years. Things have changed around here, so be gentle.
They know what they are doing - for the first time in many years. Windows devices are currently 14% of global computing devices sales. Their 1.5 billion unit installed base is already less than Android's 2 billion plus and its advantage is eroding at a billion units a year. It is incredibly fragmented, with only 15% of their own users on version 8+ able to access the latest version of their browser. They must consolidate their base if they hope to leverage it into a credible entry into the mobile space. And they are out of time. If this fails, by the time a "next version" is ready they will be in Blackberry share land because between them Android and iOS will be moving 2 billion units a year, their installed base will be greater than 4 billion, and there are only 7 billion humans - many of whom are too young, one, poor to count at all.
Reboot. * Install all updates. Reboot three times. * Uninstall all third party software and start over. * Reinstall the OS and drivers, all service packs, all patches. * Uninstall all third party hardware and start over. * Still a problem? Contact the PC manufacturer.
* Check for proper function.
There. Paste that to a file. You have Microsoft OS support forever.
If Musk gets his reusable rockets going, he should be able to lift enough fuel to fully refuel a rocket in orbit with its ground launch capacity of fuel, for about as much money as it costs to launch a disposable rocket now. That ought to scoot out to Mars quite promptly. Like Heinlein said once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere.
We started our youngest two on computers at 12 months. They moved on to tablets not long after. They were reading at a sixth grade level before preschool. Our very youngest has been accepted to and attending a school for the gifted, as she reads at a college level now and is also good at math. She publishes how-to articles online and is working on a serial drama in the fan-fiction genre that has fans among her peers - without prompting or assistance. She's eight. She lies on the forms to get around the TOS. She has gotten her older brother interested in authorship as well. Their littler nephew was showing me the other day how to modify the network settings on my Android tablet to join his Minecraft server. He is six.
The reason I chose that particular model is that is when the platform became "good enough" for general purpose computing. More is always better but this is the level of sufficiency necessary for ubiquity. Now the price has moved within reach for almost everybody, so ubiquitous it will be. People with premium needs will buy premium products, but folks who can only afford these will be delighted and amazed. The software available for them is more than enough already, and growing every day. The next issue is global connectivity, and that is being worked on.
NASA money is just the kickstarter for the entrepreneurs who will own the asteroids, moons and eventually the stars. The entire Earth is but a grain of sand on an endless shore.
It turns out going fast is an energy problem, not a mass problem, except in as much a mass is a form of energy. Fusion converts mass to energy, so Lockheed Martin says they might have this figured out. Naked fusion propulsion in the gigawatt range (million horsepower) in a form factor that would fit in the back of a pickup truck. A few of those in parallel, a few gallons of water and it's off to the stars at 1G. Being in the exhaust would suck though - wear your SPF 5 billion because it's going to be hot.
These suns have already been this close to our sun thousands of times in the last 4 billion years that our solar system has been thoroughly polluted with life. We have exchanged many megatons of material with them. As some of these suns are 8 billion years older than our sun it is far more likely life came here from there than the other way around.
Anyway, the article neglects that these suns probably have Oort clouds of their own, and a different ecliptic plane, which means theircomets would be coming at an angle Jupiter doesn't protect us from, and potentially at an exceptionally high rate of speed. What with our own comet adventures with Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Siding Spring, Earth interaction with a comet may be more likely than previously thought.
It is an acknowledged fact that the operating systems we use cannot be made secure even without end user interaction. They are just too complex. And yet we must trust them to do business. Even without the acknowledgement the proof comes weekly. Despite this we still use them, and worse - old versions of them that are a parody of secure code and known to be exploited.
We spend the end user's trust too readily. And we let them spend it greedily.
If I were the man I was five years ago, I'd take a FLAMETHROWER to this place! *
I don't post here much any more.
The problem with firewalls and antivirus is they all locking the door after the cattle are fled.
This is actually the same keyboard, made in the same factory by the same people. The molds are the same. This is the Model M. Sadly, no Bluetooth version though.
Seven days ago he started becoming ill in a home with 4-5 school age children. Those children could become symptomatic (contagious) within 2 days, infecting their schools. The students in those schools could start being contagious about the time he was admitted to hospital. This could blow up very quickly. It probably won't, but it could. If it does, there is no way to lock down the city. That will be it. Last week we could have shut down flights out of West Africa and not faced this prospect.
It is a proven fact that people with Ebola infect other people. Even doctors. Doctors even infect their own families. Joe Sixpack is going to do a lot of damage.
Slashdot Mirror
It was never about Tesla. The SEC is going after his ass because of SpaceX being a threat to the political class that's in bed with all those government contractors (his competitors).
There is a constituency of businesses disrupted by Musk who don't mind using social engineering to attack all things Musk and pollute the mindspace with their propaganda, or buying Congressmen to oppose his efforts. As we learned from the Manafort drama, such work has highly paid experts eager to receive that deposit into their offshore accounts.
But this is Musk's game too. He has skills in this regard or such FUD would have killed his prospects already years ago. He's taking on Boeing, Ford, GM, Fossil fuels (Saudi, BP, Exxon), nuclear power, etc. And all the nations with launch business (Russia, China, India, etc). His enemies list is pretty much the Fortune 500 and every country on Earth. If he goes missing the police are going to have a harder time finding non-suspects than suspects.
And he's fine with that. It's all going to plan. He knew when he set out to save his species from extinction that his works were not going to be popular, or they would not be necessary. We are more 100x more predisposed to extinction than the dinosaurs were, as they made it 100 million years and we seem unlikely to crack the million years mark.
What's remarkable to me is how much he seems to be enjoying making fools of them all. Stoking their ire and poking the bear as if building a self sustaining colony on another planet was insufficiently challenging and he wanted to inspire the opposition to step up their game.
I don't know why he has a problem with the short sellers. A short sale is a gamble that his stock will go down, which cannot possibly exist unless there is a counter party willing to take the other side of that bet and put their money on his stock going up. Many people who believe he cannot possibly fail buy stock in his companies and then rent out their shares to his naysayers and use the money they earn in that way to buy more shares. The long and short interest in Musk stocks is a self-reinforcing commitment to volatility against a predictable trend. Long and short sellers are gambling on whether they can predict the direction of motion and attracted because he is generating a lot of motion (volatility). They are drawn like moths to his flame for no other reason than that he is succeeding in being disruptive and controversial - which are primary goals of his. It's probably an ego thing he hasn't considered: for every stupid person willing to offer their money to bet against him there is a smart person willing to take that bet, and so there is balance in the bets that moves money from the stupid to the smart and he is the conveyor belt.
Hubris is a sin and he's guilty it. I can hope there is no human living who can make him do penance for this sin because that would be the end of Mankind. If he fails to deliver an interplanetary human species there will be no other, more capable human to repeat the attempt. And that means that eventually the last of my offsprings' heirs will die without issue, my genome will become dust as yours will, all the history struggles art and works of Men throughout all time will come to nought as the passage of time erases all evidence that we ever did exist.
/My first /. post in 4 years. Things have changed around here, so be gentle.
They know what they are doing - for the first time in many years. Windows devices are currently 14% of global computing devices sales. Their 1.5 billion unit installed base is already less than Android's 2 billion plus and its advantage is eroding at a billion units a year. It is incredibly fragmented, with only 15% of their own users on version 8+ able to access the latest version of their browser. They must consolidate their base if they hope to leverage it into a credible entry into the mobile space. And they are out of time. If this fails, by the time a "next version" is ready they will be in Blackberry share land because between them Android and iOS will be moving 2 billion units a year, their installed base will be greater than 4 billion, and there are only 7 billion humans - many of whom are too young, one, poor to count at all.
Reboot. * Install all updates. Reboot three times. * Uninstall all third party software and start over. * Reinstall the OS and drivers, all service packs, all patches. * Uninstall all third party hardware and start over. * Still a problem? Contact the PC manufacturer.
* Check for proper function.
There. Paste that to a file. You have Microsoft OS support forever.
Poe's law. They should unlock the landing achievement a week from tomorrow.
If Musk gets his reusable rockets going, he should be able to lift enough fuel to fully refuel a rocket in orbit with its ground launch capacity of fuel, for about as much money as it costs to launch a disposable rocket now. That ought to scoot out to Mars quite promptly. Like Heinlein said once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere.
Space nutters think you can land a rocket on its jets, like we were living in some sort of 1920's pulp fiction fantasy
We started our youngest two on computers at 12 months. They moved on to tablets not long after. They were reading at a sixth grade level before preschool. Our very youngest has been accepted to and attending a school for the gifted, as she reads at a college level now and is also good at math. She publishes how-to articles online and is working on a serial drama in the fan-fiction genre that has fans among her peers - without prompting or assistance. She's eight. She lies on the forms to get around the TOS. She has gotten her older brother interested in authorship as well. Their littler nephew was showing me the other day how to modify the network settings on my Android tablet to join his Minecraft server. He is six.
They are not going to circle back and touch second base either.
The reason I chose that particular model is that is when the platform became "good enough" for general purpose computing. More is always better but this is the level of sufficiency necessary for ubiquity. Now the price has moved within reach for almost everybody, so ubiquitous it will be. People with premium needs will buy premium products, but folks who can only afford these will be delighted and amazed. The software available for them is more than enough already, and growing every day. The next issue is global connectivity, and that is being worked on.
iPhone 4s was a $600 phone. Now you can get a much better device for under $50. This is the future.
Bringing the utility of ubiquitous pocket computing to over 1 billion new people who would not have had it is hardly "no value".
NASA money is just the kickstarter for the entrepreneurs who will own the asteroids, moons and eventually the stars. The entire Earth is but a grain of sand on an endless shore.
I would not be so sure of that.
If by random you mean cyclically recurring on a regular schedule. The other kind of random.
It turns out going fast is an energy problem, not a mass problem, except in as much a mass is a form of energy. Fusion converts mass to energy, so Lockheed Martin says they might have this figured out. Naked fusion propulsion in the gigawatt range (million horsepower) in a form factor that would fit in the back of a pickup truck. A few of those in parallel, a few gallons of water and it's off to the stars at 1G. Being in the exhaust would suck though - wear your SPF 5 billion because it's going to be hot.
Anyway, the article neglects that these suns probably have Oort clouds of their own, and a different ecliptic plane, which means theircomets would be coming at an angle Jupiter doesn't protect us from, and potentially at an exceptionally high rate of speed. What with our own comet adventures with Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Siding Spring, Earth interaction with a comet may be more likely than previously thought.
Slashdot Beta sucks.
It is an acknowledged fact that the operating systems we use cannot be made secure even without end user interaction. They are just too complex. And yet we must trust them to do business. Even without the acknowledgement the proof comes weekly. Despite this we still use them, and worse - old versions of them that are a parody of secure code and known to be exploited.
We spend the end user's trust too readily. And we let them spend it greedily.
If I were the man I was five years ago, I'd take a FLAMETHROWER to this place! *
I don't post here much any more.
The problem with firewalls and antivirus is they all locking the door after the cattle are fled.
Your data will never be secure.
*Scent of a woman Great movie.
This is actually the same keyboard, made in the same factory by the same people. The molds are the same. This is the Model M. Sadly, no Bluetooth version though.
Since 2/3rds of the workers will be dead from Ebola, it will even out.
And in the transition we lost the ability to move apps to SD, which sucked on limited devices.
This is a good place to point out that what to a Windows user is a successful OS life cycle isn't even close to what we would consider a good uptime.
Seven days ago he started becoming ill in a home with 4-5 school age children. Those children could become symptomatic (contagious) within 2 days, infecting their schools. The students in those schools could start being contagious about the time he was admitted to hospital. This could blow up very quickly. It probably won't, but it could. If it does, there is no way to lock down the city. That will be it. Last week we could have shut down flights out of West Africa and not faced this prospect.
Ebola doesn't need to be airborne to be the pandemic. Obviously we have planes to ferry it around.
It is more pragmatic than bulldozing the entire eastern seaboard into a common grave.
It is a proven fact that people with Ebola infect other people. Even doctors. Doctors even infect their own families. Joe Sixpack is going to do a lot of damage.