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User: cheesybagel

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  1. Re:maybe on Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat · · Score: 1

    Yeah. I think Dennis Tito paid $20 million, Guy Laliberté paid $35 million. If this is true then the price just went up and all those people saying the Russians were gouging NASA will be proven wrong. It's still a lot cheaper than a Shuttle seat was. >$50 million per passenger means a lot of other launch vehicles become useable. I mean for that price you can probably pay the Soyuz flight and still carry an additional passenger in addition to the pilot.

  2. Re:More important... on Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat · · Score: 1

    If the US never invested on their segment the Russians would be flying Mir-2.

  3. Re:More important... on Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat · · Score: 1

    They have since like forever. The Soyuz is based on the same rocket family that put Gagarin and Leonov in space and they all use LOX/Kerosene propellants.

  4. Re:More important... on Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat · · Score: 2

    Well had NASA wanted to build a more reasonable smaller station using more automation it could be done with a couple of Delta IV Heavy launches. The Russians launched their segments with Proton and that rocket has slightly less payload capacity than the Delta.

  5. Re:More important... on Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat · · Score: 1

    It's a limited market and demand vastly outstrips supply, so why should it have a fixed price? It's not like people die if they don't go to the ISS. If the Russians had more money they could build better systems to put more people into space. It may be only a couple of tens of million dollars but that is a lot of rubles.

  6. Re:More important... on Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat · · Score: 2

    Actually CCDev could be done sooner if the safety requirements were relaxed somewhat. The SpaceX Dragon capsule is mostly finished and only lacks life support. Assuming there aren't any teething issues, and since the first flight was successful, the US could send someone to the ISS using it in months. This is not done because the safety requirements mandate the use of a launch escape system, something Shuttle did not have, in the new vehicles. That needs to be build and tested.

  7. Re:More important... on Singer Reportedly Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat · · Score: 1
    That's not quite right since the "Russian Freighter" docks in the Russian side of the ISS and paying passengers typically are restricted to the Russian segment of the ISS. The fact is those Russian modules originally were built for Mir-2, which would have gone up anyway, but they ended up being re purposed for the ISS with the agreement to built a joint station. The US was originally supposed to do Shuttle flights or similar to help support a 6 man crew to the ISS. The Shuttle was supposed to have been replaced by the Space Launch Initiative, then by OSP, then by CEV, now by CCDev. In typical American fashion it was replaced by nothing and it was itself canceled. In fact I suspect that were the Russians not part of the project the ISS would have ended up in the drink already much like Skylab did.

    The thing is the Russians think of space as a strategic long term investment and they keep funding it even if their economy is doing less well. The US does not.

  8. Re:HP doesn't need a long-term vision on HP Plans To Cut Product Lines; Company Turnaround In 2016 · · Score: 1

    I'll take the magical 8-ball. You can keep the MBA.

  9. Re:OK, seriously ... on 82-Year-Old Nun Breaks Into Nuclear Facility, Contractors Blamed · · Score: 2

    I agree. Going on your own against a group of people without notifying anyone first is just plain stupid. First you notify someone else, then you go. He even went before the others arrived. So he didn't shoot anyone, just held them there until they were arrested. Well that is what he is supposed to do. You don't usually shoot trespassers just for the heck of it. Not unless you have a bloody good reason for doing it like being in danger yourself.

  10. Re:How desperate is the EU? on EU Says Apple's Warranty Advertisements Are Unacceptable · · Score: 2

    That's very interesting. However the Android devices come with a 2 year warranty and are cheaper. Yes even the Taiwanese devices.

  11. Re:Not honouring the warranty on EU Says Apple's Warranty Advertisements Are Unacceptable · · Score: 1
    There are more native apps for Linux than for the Mac. The Android store is going to have more apps than the Apple store in the next year.

    I will be interested to see if you Apple apologists will still think the number of apps is important then.

  12. Re:Why would you return old milk? on EU Says Apple's Warranty Advertisements Are Unacceptable · · Score: 1

    There also used to be an issue with Spanish chocolate which didn't have enough percentage of cocoa or cocoa solids to qualify as chocolate. I heard you have similar problems in the US with Hershey products.

  13. Re:Question for economics wonks on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1

    Loans have existed for a long time. Heck the Knights Templar provided secure money transfer between distant lands and loans back in the Middle Ages. Before the Knights Templar started doing this job other people did it as well even if this happened on a smaller scale. Thinking that the present issues are solved by eliminating the "evil" that is banking is misguided. Banking needs to be regulated in order to restrict loans to people who can actually afford them and central banks need to realize near zero interest rates don't work. Governments need to stop subsidizing people buying houses with income tax deductions. In the end the market only increased the price of a house to the maximum level of debt consumers could have which was to be expected. Then there is the whole sham of buying insurance for the failure of something you don't actually own. Or the sham of saying a bundle of toxic assets is worth as much as the best asset in the bundle. Or the sham of advising your clients to buy something you know is worthless, and are divesting from, in order to milk their money. Those people should have been put into jail and their companies should have gone bankrupt but instead they got rewarded and the taxpayers foot the bill.

  14. Re:Question for economics wonks on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1

    Your argument makes no sense. No wonder you didn't understand my explanations of why the computer market has the economics it does or why bitcoins are not the same as physical devices.

  15. Re:OK, so where is there an Apple with ATI graphic on EU Says Apple's Warranty Advertisements Are Unacceptable · · Score: 1

    Sure you get your higher resolution screen with more power consumption and lower refresh rate. You can't buy it from anywhere else because Apple bought up the available supply. Guess what Apple does not manufacture these displays so you will eventually see them available from other manufacturers. The question is if they are worth it or not.

  16. Re:Apple needs to think a bit more... on EU Says Apple's Warranty Advertisements Are Unacceptable · · Score: 2
    "Easily run Windows 7" is not a feature, it is a bug. Windows is as good of an operating system as a pile of donkey shit on the bottom of the ocean. If you want to run Windows, you don't need Apple hardware, you simply need to kill yourself. And if you want to run Linux, then you are a rockstar who doesn't need to pay for Apple hardware to have a good computer experience. For the rest of people, they pay the cost to run the best consumer-oriented OS.

    You certainly picked a good username Myopic.

  17. Re:Apple needs to think a bit more... on EU Says Apple's Warranty Advertisements Are Unacceptable · · Score: 2

    When was the last time you used Windows? Windows 7 is certainly not a "steaming pile of shit" like you say.

  18. Re:Question for economics wonks on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1

    Yeah but gold can actually be used to make stuff. It has value by itself.

  19. Re:Question for economics wonks on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1
    It's also the main reason why the banks have the whole world by the balls. That's how things end when everybody is forced to park the money in banks or else watch the wealth evaporate fast thanks to inflation tax.

    Yeah and this way the money stored in the banks can be loaned so someone else who will invest it in machines tools building on their property, or whatever. What a failure this is!

  20. Re:Great but on WTFM: Write the Freaking Manual · · Score: 1

    Fine. Phone Apple and tell them you will supply the paper (recycled of course) and toner for the manual and you want a copy. I'll await their response with baited breath.

  21. Re:Question for economics wonks on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1

    Every new plant's machine tools costs around twice as much as the old ones however since you can manufacture twice the amount of transistors per wafer area in the new plant the costs per transistor didn't get worse. Yet they did not get better either. This is a problem and it is why the industry keeps changing to ever increasing wafer sizes so the cost per transistor goes down with the same amount of tools rather than staying the same. Your new computer is faster otherwise you wouldn't upgrade it. You pay because you want more capabilities. Your new bitcoin is worth the same as your old bitcoin but the new one cost more to generate.

  22. Re:Question for economics wonks on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1

    Actually there are more reasons than this. You might want to move elsewhere but you don't have the money to buy the new plot without selling your old one. Bitcoins do not have the same trait where you might prefer one bitcoin to another since all are worth the same. You also certainly want your currency to be able to support quicker transactions than having to hope someone dies so you can buy today's lettuce or something like that.

  23. Re:Question for economics wonks on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1
    Dollars are used as a medium of exchange. Hence if there is more production of goods and services there should be more dollars in order not to hamper the flow of transactions in the economy. The printing press uses low resources to generate this medium of exchange where bitcoins are by design made to geometrically increase the cost of generating a bitcoin. This is an advantage of paper currency not an issue.

    The value of an award for a block is halved every 4 years. Due to Moore's law computers double in performance in slightly less than two years. This means that for the same number of users with computers you should expect a geometrical increase of the amount of bitcoins produced: half the rate of Moore's law. However Moore's law does not mean you get this extra computing performance for free. The amount of energy required to generate a single bitcoin will keep increasing barring other algorithmic or hardware innovations. The additional limits to decrease the rate of production of bitcoins only mean the cost of generating a bitcoin will be even higher than this. I suspect the attempt to limit bitcoin generation to a block every ten minutes will eventually be removed or the system will fail.

    It is fine to reward early adopters. However it is not fine for a bitcoin to require a million times more computing effort in three years. This is why some people call it a Ponzi scheme.

    Fractioning the currency does not fix things. The system will still suffer from deflation with all the side effects of this: hoarding, stagnation. In the end deflation is even more pernicious than inflation.

  24. Re:Question for economics wonks on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1

    The dollar used to be based on silver and gold. Today it is not but at least the current method makes more sense than bitcoins. If you have more expenses because you bought more things, which needed to be produced, then you print more dollars. Hence dollars increase more or less as GDP increases. Bitcoins are not actually generated by doing useful work and even worse the system is made to reward disproportionately the early adopters of the system. Eventually it will grind to a halt and stall. Look at their predicted number of bitcoins in the system to figure it out yourself.

  25. Re:Not sure I follow... on BitCoin Gets a Futures Market · · Score: 1

    So can you buy food and clothes with Bitcoins or not?