When the President and two thirds of the Senate concur that a treaty can invalidate some sections of US Code, that code is toast, unless the treaty tried to override the amendments 1 thru 8 which specifically limit federal power.
So treaties that override other amendments like the 19th Amendment are just fine and constitutional?
I'm sure that would go over real well. Besides, since when has Congress felt limited by any part of the constitution? They pretty much treat it as a mere guideline any more.
Yes, SpaceX wants to sell its products to as many people as it can. Funny thing is that ULA didn't need this kind of certification process when they tried to get the Atlas & Delta rockets certified for carrying USAF payloads. Yes, that is some time in the past, but they even had the federal government pay for early failures too. I find it all that more ironic that SpaceX has been able to build up its reputation and certify its rocket in spite of almost no subsidies to make that happen.
ULA must just be crapping in its shorts right now as any attempt to build a next generation rocket is going to be met at the Pentagon with "why don't you finance that vehicle like SpaceX has done"? In other words, they have real competition now.
As a side note: how many commercial satellite launches has ULA been able to send up this past year? I thought so and sort of proves the direction of the launch industry.
The main deal about 1st stage recovery is to simply make it cheaper to refurbish the vehicle as opposed to rebuilding it brand new. Any additional savings by performing such refurbishment is just additional profit or substantial cost savings.
Regardless, I'm still not convinced that a reduction of price to 10% of typical prices before SpaceX formed in the launcher market, at least over the relatively near term (aka 10-20 years), is going to result in 10x or more launches happening. I've looked over potential markets for launches, potential business opportunities in space, and while certainly the SpaceX approach is going to open up business opportunities, the launch market from an economic perspective is a very inelastic market.
In other words, the number of launches available in the global launch market isn't really impacted that strongly by the price of launches. At least it hasn't in the past.. For most of the satellites that have been flown in the past couple decades, the launch cost has been a marginal expense compared to the cost of actually building the vehicles. Of course it could be argued that the cost of those vehicles (like multi-billion dollar GEO satellites) are driven in part by the high cost of the launch too, but it is a factor to consider.
There is also the substantial and growing problem of stuff in LEO, where there may very well be a limit to how much "stuff" can be tossed into that orbital realm. That is also a huge problem at the moment with GEO satellites as well, as nearly every "slot" around the Earth is occupied and certainly is occupied at ideal locations for North America, Europe, and east Asia. SES-8 is in fact moving to a location above India. I could definitely see some international treaties (which already exist for GEO slots) which would limit LEO activity and cause at least a short term reduction in cubesats in particular.
I'm not all doom and gloom here, as I do think some tremendous opportunities have opened up to do some really neat things thanks to Elon Musk, but you also need to be a little bit sober about the future too. That is in particular with LEO (or even mid-altitude orbits) constellations where promises were made in the past and not followed through. There were some huge constellations that were built (Iridium is one of them) which opened a promise of dozens of launches and a real space launch industry with a strong incentive to drive down costs... and the bottom fell out of that industry once it got started back in the 1990's. In fact, it was the growth of the internet that drove a much older technology, underwater cable laying ships, which ended up undoing the commercial space launch market as it shut down the need for having those extensive satellite constellations. Yes, you could say that the high cost of launches drove people to send a physical cable (and now fiber optic lines) across the bottom of oceans to remote locations around the world instead of using satellites for point to point communication, but it also shows there is competition in competing ideas too.
I'm not specifically picking on Saab, as they really do make some outstanding vehicles. But you can't compare the network of Ford or GM service centers to anything Saab has. I'm simply suggesting that Tesla is right now at a similar level of service coverage (to Saab), and even that is pretty remarkable in terms of how old Tesla is as a company. All of these other companies have had decades to try and establish their service networks and for private shops to become familiar with their products.
Because of the heavy use of electronics, a technician working on a Tesla vehicle is going to need some decidedly specialized training more akin to a computer repair technician as opposed to an automotive technician though. There are some definite shortcomings to how Tesla is doing this, but at the same time Tesla shouldn't be sold short and saying that you need to ship the vehicle back to the factory in California is just being ignorant of what the company has been doing.
I'm sure SpaceX can find places to spend money, but the trick is to spend it in a way that doesn't just toss it down a fiscal black hole and throw it into the wind.
What debt? The time when it was extremely critical for SpaceX to make money was during the Falcon 1 flights, where Elon Musk openly admitted that he was about two weeks away from throwing in the towel and declaring chapter 13 bankruptcy. Had Falcon 1 Flight 4 not been able to get into orbit, SpaceX would have been toast as a company.
At this point, SpaceX is clearing its manifest, collecting so many customers that its manifest is continuing to grow with an ever longer back log of waiting time for new customers, and at this point plans to launch 15 rockets (according to their manifest) next year. Admittedly SpaceX claims that is only 15 rockets that will be delivered to the launch pads before January 2015, but that is incredibly ambitious. That is manufacturing over 150 new Merlin engines, or about 3-4 engines per week that need to be completed. In other words, a very real assembly line and mass production scales of efficiency.
More importantly, assuming that SpaceX actually pulls this off, they will have more than a couple billion dollars of revenue next year and a healthy hunk of that will be profit. Far be it that SpaceX is going to be swimming in debt, I think they are more likely going to struggle in terms of finding legitimate ways to reinvest that money. Elon Musk also seems to be very frugal and wise with how that money is being spent too. At this point, the SpaceX budget is going to be likely larger than NASA's robotic exploration program.... the whole thing.
If for some reason SpaceX can't get the reusable Falcon 9 to work and there becomes a huge downturn in the global satellite launcher market, I would agree that the potential exists for SpaceX to go down in flames. SpaceX is gambling on the idea where substantially cheaper launch prices (they are aiming for less than $1000/kg to LEO) will increase the market demand for orbital launches and that this same rate of launching at least one rocket every month is going to continue indefinitely. The orbital launch market has seen crashes before, and OSC was one company in particular who was ramping up production precisely when that market crash happened.
Regardless, I fail to see where SpaceX is going to crash from debt alone. They are past the critical cash crunch period that new start-up companies all go through and there are numerous people (especially after today's launch) that would be willing to chip in some additional capital if it was needed.
I have no idea why the NSA/USAF requirements is such a big deal, as it really doesn't have much of anything to do with a private company (in this case SES... an operator of GEO telecommunications satellites) is spending its money on another private company (SpaceX) to accomplish an otherwise very public mission. People are going to be pointing their satellite dishes at this satellite for crying out loud and watching television coming from it. I don't know how more public you can make such a flight.
The USAF is simply throwing up some BS that SpaceX needs to fly a few more missions and prove it can deliver satellites into various kinds of orbits before they are able to tell Boeing and Lockheed-Martin lobbyists where to go when the next round of launch contracts come out. Those two companies (in the form of the United Launch Alliance... jointly owned by both companies) want to pretend they are the only people in America capable of launching anything into orbit at all.
The sad thing is that most voters in America (and apparently other countries too) are more influenced by fluff like counting how many political signs, how many campaign commercials, and how much money in general was dumped into a political campaign as opposed to actually getting to know the candidates and learning what they stand for before casting a vote.
Yes, it is possible for a politician to nuke himself politically (get caught in bed with a minor) or for a particularly strong candidate to not spend nearly so much money as an opponent and still win, but given two candidates of roughly the same qualifications, background, and political ideologies, the candidate who spends the most money will always win the election. Some campaigning tactics like getting a huge group of volunteers to do door to door canvassing and election day pick-ups (driving supporters to the voting booth) can be technically cheaper to do as well if you get that broad group of volunteers, but that is much harder to accomplish as well.
If voters actually took their franchise more seriously, money wouldn't have nearly so much of an impact on elections. Politicians can be bought precisely because voters can be bought too.
Actually, yes, Tesla does have "authorized local repair shops" (in this case company owned service centers) in both Texas and North Carolina. More than one in both of those states. I don't know specifically about Ohio, but apparently Tesla is investing in Ohio with some manufacturing jobs too, according to the article and they are planning on expanding their service centers and recharging station network to include Ohio.
While I will admit that Tesla doesn't have nearly as widespread and extensive network of dealers as well as 3rd party repair shops capable of servicing a Tesla vehicle compared to Ford, GM, or Chrysler, they have been slowly building up such a capability and plan on sticking around in the market. You certainly don't need to put your Tesla Model S on a flatbed truck and bring it to the SF Bay Area in order to get it serviced.
If you are complaining about service centers, try a brand like Saab, or even worse something like Isuzu (which isn't even being sold in America any more as a passenger vehicle). Parts and service are a real pain in the rump.
The only real way to confirm somebody is Satoshi is to log into the Bitcoin forums, use Satoshi's acccount, and "reveal" who they are. Then again, that might just be done by hacking into the forums (although the passwords are hash-encoded.... so it is a bit harder).
The main problem is that Satoshi has dropped off the radar and hasn't posted for a long, long time.... hence the speculation.
Otherwise, your claim is as good as mine and perhaps even stronger.
Poison pills? What the fuck are you talking about?
I'm talking about things deliberately put into the protocol designed to keep users from using the Bitcoin protocol and especially the computational blocks for things other than strictly monetary transactions. The protocol has changed over the years, and somethings were deliberately put into the protocol for reasons that I think detracted from the potential of Bitcoin as a network and may have even killed some potential money making opportunities.
In short, before you be such a jackass and thinking you know everything there is to Bitcoin, read up a little bit on its history and know that there is stuff hidden in the protocol that isn't so widely talked about either.
It looks interesting, and seems to solve some of my concerns about Bitcoin including some of the poison pills that Satoshi introduced into the protocol (and are now extremely hard to remove precisely because Satoshi put them in). I could go into some details, but the main gist is that Satoshi (whoever that might have been or still is if he ever decides to be active again) had a vision about Bitcoin and didn't like others messing with that vision. Once substantial and valid criticisms of his work started to pour in, he wasn't all that happy and sort of threw in a wrench to stop some potential innovation in the protocol that could have happened but didn't.
This is also one of the reasons why I think the current price bubble with Bitcoin can be something to worry about in terms of people making analogies to the tulip market. Bitcoin won't go away... at least not for decades (it is here to stay and will almost always have value), but it may not be the darling currency of the moment either. There are weaknesses in how it is put together, and a serious discussion of those weaknesses should continue to happen into the future.
Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?
Because POTS will work in some of the worst environmental conditions possible. It survived the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been through hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even meteor strikes and kept working. Yes, some parts of the system failed, but for those parts that were still connected as long as a local power source (often just a battery bank) supplied power the system kept working.
It was on the back of the POTS system that the internet was born, and has always been a backup to every computer network system... even if it wasn't perfect at least *something* would get through in terms of data.
You just described every society on the planet. Whether it's due to aristocratic privilege or good ol' money, that's how the world works.
You don't get around much, do you?
There are societies that have successfully thrown off aristocratic privileges, although I will admit they are very rare and often get taken over by the aristocrats eventually anyway in some fashion or another. They also tend to be small and relatively small societies as well.
Most hunter-gatherer societies tend to be merit-based in terms of privileges, but as a rule those tend to be also small groups (generally around 100 or so people before they start to split up). This is also the kind of society that mankind lived in for millions of years before a bunch of jerkish kings took over in a comparatively newfangled concept known as a monarchy.
It's not like Satoshi is controlling the system from the shadows or something - Bitcoin is open-source. You don't need to trust its creators.
The only thing that Satoshi controls in the protocol is a hash code which would allow somebody to insert a broadcast message to all "standard" clients. This was presumably done to broadcast something like "the Bitcoin client has been compromised... please upgrade to version x.x!"
Of course it could have any sort of message including publishing a URL, a political message, or even just "Satoshi lives!". Without the hashcode, clients (this isn't even miners) are not supposed to pass on the message in the network. The core group of developers supposedly received this hash code from Satoshi and is guarding its use for things deemed appropriate for all Bitcoin users.
The interesting thing is that this is a distributed network messaging protocol, so such a message could conceivably be inserted by any computer on the network and would in theory be untraceable as well. Other miscellaneous data could also conceivably be put into Bitcoin, but Satoshi deliberately put in some poison pills to keep that from happening in the protocol.
When oil is $500 per barrel, electricity is unlikely to remain at 12 cents per kilowatt hour.
If power from the wall is 60 cents a kilowatt hour and oil is $500 a barrel, what has changed?
That was sort of my point. It was more or less bringing up the issue of quantitative easing that has been policy of the Federal Reserve for the past couple of years and has really kicked into overdrive this past year. When the money supply is expanded by trillions of dollars, you should expect massive inflation to result.
Yes, this isn't going to be restricted to just oil purchases.
The other "shoe" to drop here too is a what-if possibility that the U.S. Dollar will no longer be the world reserve currency. There is no special status to the U.S. dollar, and a number of countries that are active (in particular China and India) in finding a "replacement currency" to dollars. If the U.S. Dollar loses that global reserve currency status, you will see the price of oil in particular skyrocket and become insanely expensive in comparison to other forms of energy for average consumers.
For those who suggest there is no inflation, assuming that the same standards for measuring inflation in 1980 were applied today, the current inflation rate would be hovering around 10% annually at the moment. Most ordinary Americans know in their gut this has been the case, even though official statistics substantially understate this inflation rate.
Hopefully there are some very smart people at the Federal Reserve that actually care about ordinary people and don't want to see the U.S. economy go down in flames. That is a whole bunch of religious-type of faith in people that don't exactly have a very good track record in deserving that kind of faith.
If Tesla can make an electric car that looks as nice and sexy as the Model S, why can't the other manufacturers? Perhaps, they don't want to or think it won't sell. Of course, if you make something that people want and at a reasonable price, it wouldn't be a problem.
In following the development of the Roadster and subsequently the Model S over the years, I've gained respect towards automobile companies and what they need to go through in terms of producing a production automobile (of any kind... Diesel, gasoline, or even electric). The government safety requirements alone are among many reasons why Tesla is the first genuinely new American automobile manufacturer to be remotely successful in the past hundred years. Otherwise, all you see is a serious of continual consolidation as the capital needed to produce an automobile and meet all of the legal requirements is huge.
The only previous company that even came close to duplicating that effort was Tucker Automobiles, and even that was a sort of financial disaster for a great many reasons including claims that the major automobile companies deliberately sabotaged them legally. Other companies started in other countries where they either had huge government support or at least became well established companies in other countries first (with presumably more lax standards) and then made specific automobiles which targeted the American market. An example of a company which simply gave up after trying was Isuzu, which used to sell automobiles in America but then didn't want to bother any more and has retreated to only selling in Japan (and some large commercial trucks, but nothing for consumers).
While competition is certainly stiff, it is this difficulty of getting something to market in the first place that makes it harder for other companies to make something that doesn't suck. That and the fact most electric automobiles were mainly an adaptation of golf carts and looked like golf carts too.
Disagree, remind me his latest games? Nobody know about them except a few hardcore gamers (40++ y.o.). He doesn't like high-level development, has no new ideas about gaming.
Most of the work that John Carmack has been working on is in the low level game engines. Indeed I would dare say that most of what he has done in his career has been doing that, but note the core engine is what drives anything done on the high level you are talking about.
While you might not "notice" his passing from ID Software, his presence is definitely going to be missed by the company. You can't neglect the core technologies.
Yes, crappy design with outstanding technology is still a crappy game, but even the best design on a POS engine is still going to suck wind too.
Besides, the best use of John Carmack at any company is not extracting every ounce of creative energy he may have but rather having him help inspire the next generation of programmers and mentoring others to become better. That implies either being a senior programmer or being put into some management position... about what he has been doing and is continuing to do.
I would say that is largely a factor of the rarity of getting an electric automobile rental car (there has been a backlog of even getting cars from Tesla for awhile) and the fact that those who might be interested in renting such a vehicle is willing to pay a premium for such an experience. Furthermore, most rental car agencies have the infrastructure at their shops to deal with electric automobiles as that requires some capital outlays that are not needed for gasoline automobiles.
Simply said, while you are correct that electric automobiles cost more than gasoline automobiles from rental agencies, that is something which over time may change (no promise.... just that it might). I wouldn't expect rental car agencies to be leading the charge for adoption of electric automobiles, but they will be following market conditions and if ordinary consumers are adopting them in large numbers you will also see rental agencies similarly purchasing larger fleets of electric automobiles for largely the same economic reasons.
I could also see a kWh charge applied to the bill of any electric automobiles returned less than fully charged... and that bill to be insanely high too.
I'm driving a 14 year old pickup truck, and a 23 year old sports car, both purchased brand new. Ya know the most common replacement component in both? Batteries.
Yes, Lithium-Ion / Fe whatever is different from lead-acid. Do you hear any electric car company making a claim that their multi-thousand dollar battery packs are going to last anywhere near 14 years? How about 23?
I think this is a legitimate issue. Tesla battery packs are claimed to last about ten years before they need to be replaced (where they are expected to have about half of the charge capacity as a new battery pack). Tesla even wrote a blog post about the topic a little bit before they started to deliver the Roadster, and showed how they reprocessed the old batteries with almost a 100% recovery of the contents with recycling efforts (hence the environmental issues are almost moot). Still, when you are calculating the per mile cost of operating an electric automobile you do need to consider the cost of the battery pack replacement in the figure.
I haven't seen the actual figures from Tesla or other similar companies, but some "fans" have estimated a battery replacement cost of about $10k-$15k. Cheaper than buying a new car, but certainly a non-trivial cost.
The funny thing is how the Baker Electric automobiles had a battery technology that didn't need nearly so much maintenance, and in spite of the fact that those batteries are now over a century old many of those automobiles (largely in museums now... but still serviceable) still have the original factory installed batteries that have only needed minor refurbishment and some new chemicals put into the battery. The trade off is that they don't really hold that much charge.
Cold weather mainly limits range. Electric heaters are not a problem for driving in cold weather and only in extreme environments like Antarctica (which also has almost no infrastructure as well) will it be a major problem.
Otherwise driving an electric automobile might even be beneficial as you have the weight of the batteries distributed more evenly on the automobile than the bulk of the engine up in front of the car as well as how many electric automobiles have all wheel drive (aka power to all wheels and not just the rear). In other words, they have about the same problems as any other automobile has in that environment.
Note also that even for gasoline engines you have reduced performance in cold weather... for many of the same reasons. You can also mirror the same issues for hot weather too in terms of getting air conditioning going, and I think it is much easier to run an air conditioner off of batter power than to deal with the insane thing of trying to put an AC radiator in front of the engine immediately next to the coolant radiator of that engine. For myself, I find air conditioners in automobiles to be an amazing piece of technology that simply shouldn't work but does anyway.
It might be news if they had done it a few years ago with with a then-obscure game that everybody would now use to make all kinds of buildings...
It might even be something worth looking at if they provided the map file for that formerly obscure game and exported it to work on a Raspberry Pi for use in grade school classrooms. Heck, let's really make it news by having Natalie Portman giving a virutal tour of the building where an audio track recorded by her takes kids through the various parts of the building, which you can purchase for 0.01 BTC.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, not replacing it with a corporation, but if EVERYONE's the same country, it'd make it that bit trickier to go to war with yourself.
Yeah, that worked out real well for America. As if you even need countries to have bloody wars of hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side.
Treaties can and DO override US Law all the time.
When the President and two thirds of the Senate concur that a treaty can invalidate some sections of US Code, that code is toast, unless the treaty tried to override the amendments 1 thru 8 which specifically limit federal power.
So treaties that override other amendments like the 19th Amendment are just fine and constitutional?
I'm sure that would go over real well. Besides, since when has Congress felt limited by any part of the constitution? They pretty much treat it as a mere guideline any more.
More customers.
Yes, SpaceX wants to sell its products to as many people as it can. Funny thing is that ULA didn't need this kind of certification process when they tried to get the Atlas & Delta rockets certified for carrying USAF payloads. Yes, that is some time in the past, but they even had the federal government pay for early failures too. I find it all that more ironic that SpaceX has been able to build up its reputation and certify its rocket in spite of almost no subsidies to make that happen.
ULA must just be crapping in its shorts right now as any attempt to build a next generation rocket is going to be met at the Pentagon with "why don't you finance that vehicle like SpaceX has done"? In other words, they have real competition now.
As a side note: how many commercial satellite launches has ULA been able to send up this past year? I thought so and sort of proves the direction of the launch industry.
The main deal about 1st stage recovery is to simply make it cheaper to refurbish the vehicle as opposed to rebuilding it brand new. Any additional savings by performing such refurbishment is just additional profit or substantial cost savings.
Regardless, I'm still not convinced that a reduction of price to 10% of typical prices before SpaceX formed in the launcher market, at least over the relatively near term (aka 10-20 years), is going to result in 10x or more launches happening. I've looked over potential markets for launches, potential business opportunities in space, and while certainly the SpaceX approach is going to open up business opportunities, the launch market from an economic perspective is a very inelastic market.
In other words, the number of launches available in the global launch market isn't really impacted that strongly by the price of launches. At least it hasn't in the past.. For most of the satellites that have been flown in the past couple decades, the launch cost has been a marginal expense compared to the cost of actually building the vehicles. Of course it could be argued that the cost of those vehicles (like multi-billion dollar GEO satellites) are driven in part by the high cost of the launch too, but it is a factor to consider.
There is also the substantial and growing problem of stuff in LEO, where there may very well be a limit to how much "stuff" can be tossed into that orbital realm. That is also a huge problem at the moment with GEO satellites as well, as nearly every "slot" around the Earth is occupied and certainly is occupied at ideal locations for North America, Europe, and east Asia. SES-8 is in fact moving to a location above India. I could definitely see some international treaties (which already exist for GEO slots) which would limit LEO activity and cause at least a short term reduction in cubesats in particular.
I'm not all doom and gloom here, as I do think some tremendous opportunities have opened up to do some really neat things thanks to Elon Musk, but you also need to be a little bit sober about the future too. That is in particular with LEO (or even mid-altitude orbits) constellations where promises were made in the past and not followed through. There were some huge constellations that were built (Iridium is one of them) which opened a promise of dozens of launches and a real space launch industry with a strong incentive to drive down costs... and the bottom fell out of that industry once it got started back in the 1990's. In fact, it was the growth of the internet that drove a much older technology, underwater cable laying ships, which ended up undoing the commercial space launch market as it shut down the need for having those extensive satellite constellations. Yes, you could say that the high cost of launches drove people to send a physical cable (and now fiber optic lines) across the bottom of oceans to remote locations around the world instead of using satellites for point to point communication, but it also shows there is competition in competing ideas too.
I'm not specifically picking on Saab, as they really do make some outstanding vehicles. But you can't compare the network of Ford or GM service centers to anything Saab has. I'm simply suggesting that Tesla is right now at a similar level of service coverage (to Saab), and even that is pretty remarkable in terms of how old Tesla is as a company. All of these other companies have had decades to try and establish their service networks and for private shops to become familiar with their products.
Because of the heavy use of electronics, a technician working on a Tesla vehicle is going to need some decidedly specialized training more akin to a computer repair technician as opposed to an automotive technician though. There are some definite shortcomings to how Tesla is doing this, but at the same time Tesla shouldn't be sold short and saying that you need to ship the vehicle back to the factory in California is just being ignorant of what the company has been doing.
I'm sure SpaceX can find places to spend money, but the trick is to spend it in a way that doesn't just toss it down a fiscal black hole and throw it into the wind.
What debt? The time when it was extremely critical for SpaceX to make money was during the Falcon 1 flights, where Elon Musk openly admitted that he was about two weeks away from throwing in the towel and declaring chapter 13 bankruptcy. Had Falcon 1 Flight 4 not been able to get into orbit, SpaceX would have been toast as a company.
At this point, SpaceX is clearing its manifest, collecting so many customers that its manifest is continuing to grow with an ever longer back log of waiting time for new customers, and at this point plans to launch 15 rockets (according to their manifest) next year. Admittedly SpaceX claims that is only 15 rockets that will be delivered to the launch pads before January 2015, but that is incredibly ambitious. That is manufacturing over 150 new Merlin engines, or about 3-4 engines per week that need to be completed. In other words, a very real assembly line and mass production scales of efficiency.
More importantly, assuming that SpaceX actually pulls this off, they will have more than a couple billion dollars of revenue next year and a healthy hunk of that will be profit. Far be it that SpaceX is going to be swimming in debt, I think they are more likely going to struggle in terms of finding legitimate ways to reinvest that money. Elon Musk also seems to be very frugal and wise with how that money is being spent too. At this point, the SpaceX budget is going to be likely larger than NASA's robotic exploration program.... the whole thing.
If for some reason SpaceX can't get the reusable Falcon 9 to work and there becomes a huge downturn in the global satellite launcher market, I would agree that the potential exists for SpaceX to go down in flames. SpaceX is gambling on the idea where substantially cheaper launch prices (they are aiming for less than $1000/kg to LEO) will increase the market demand for orbital launches and that this same rate of launching at least one rocket every month is going to continue indefinitely. The orbital launch market has seen crashes before, and OSC was one company in particular who was ramping up production precisely when that market crash happened.
Regardless, I fail to see where SpaceX is going to crash from debt alone. They are past the critical cash crunch period that new start-up companies all go through and there are numerous people (especially after today's launch) that would be willing to chip in some additional capital if it was needed.
I have no idea why the NSA/USAF requirements is such a big deal, as it really doesn't have much of anything to do with a private company (in this case SES... an operator of GEO telecommunications satellites) is spending its money on another private company (SpaceX) to accomplish an otherwise very public mission. People are going to be pointing their satellite dishes at this satellite for crying out loud and watching television coming from it. I don't know how more public you can make such a flight.
The USAF is simply throwing up some BS that SpaceX needs to fly a few more missions and prove it can deliver satellites into various kinds of orbits before they are able to tell Boeing and Lockheed-Martin lobbyists where to go when the next round of launch contracts come out. Those two companies (in the form of the United Launch Alliance... jointly owned by both companies) want to pretend they are the only people in America capable of launching anything into orbit at all.
The sad thing is that most voters in America (and apparently other countries too) are more influenced by fluff like counting how many political signs, how many campaign commercials, and how much money in general was dumped into a political campaign as opposed to actually getting to know the candidates and learning what they stand for before casting a vote.
Yes, it is possible for a politician to nuke himself politically (get caught in bed with a minor) or for a particularly strong candidate to not spend nearly so much money as an opponent and still win, but given two candidates of roughly the same qualifications, background, and political ideologies, the candidate who spends the most money will always win the election. Some campaigning tactics like getting a huge group of volunteers to do door to door canvassing and election day pick-ups (driving supporters to the voting booth) can be technically cheaper to do as well if you get that broad group of volunteers, but that is much harder to accomplish as well.
If voters actually took their franchise more seriously, money wouldn't have nearly so much of an impact on elections. Politicians can be bought precisely because voters can be bought too.
Actually, yes, Tesla does have "authorized local repair shops" (in this case company owned service centers) in both Texas and North Carolina. More than one in both of those states. I don't know specifically about Ohio, but apparently Tesla is investing in Ohio with some manufacturing jobs too, according to the article and they are planning on expanding their service centers and recharging station network to include Ohio.
While I will admit that Tesla doesn't have nearly as widespread and extensive network of dealers as well as 3rd party repair shops capable of servicing a Tesla vehicle compared to Ford, GM, or Chrysler, they have been slowly building up such a capability and plan on sticking around in the market. You certainly don't need to put your Tesla Model S on a flatbed truck and bring it to the SF Bay Area in order to get it serviced.
If you are complaining about service centers, try a brand like Saab, or even worse something like Isuzu (which isn't even being sold in America any more as a passenger vehicle). Parts and service are a real pain in the rump.
The only real way to confirm somebody is Satoshi is to log into the Bitcoin forums, use Satoshi's acccount, and "reveal" who they are. Then again, that might just be done by hacking into the forums (although the passwords are hash-encoded.... so it is a bit harder).
The main problem is that Satoshi has dropped off the radar and hasn't posted for a long, long time.... hence the speculation.
Otherwise, your claim is as good as mine and perhaps even stronger.
Poison pills? What the fuck are you talking about?
I'm talking about things deliberately put into the protocol designed to keep users from using the Bitcoin protocol and especially the computational blocks for things other than strictly monetary transactions. The protocol has changed over the years, and somethings were deliberately put into the protocol for reasons that I think detracted from the potential of Bitcoin as a network and may have even killed some potential money making opportunities.
In short, before you be such a jackass and thinking you know everything there is to Bitcoin, read up a little bit on its history and know that there is stuff hidden in the protocol that isn't so widely talked about either.
It looks interesting, and seems to solve some of my concerns about Bitcoin including some of the poison pills that Satoshi introduced into the protocol (and are now extremely hard to remove precisely because Satoshi put them in). I could go into some details, but the main gist is that Satoshi (whoever that might have been or still is if he ever decides to be active again) had a vision about Bitcoin and didn't like others messing with that vision. Once substantial and valid criticisms of his work started to pour in, he wasn't all that happy and sort of threw in a wrench to stop some potential innovation in the protocol that could have happened but didn't.
This is also one of the reasons why I think the current price bubble with Bitcoin can be something to worry about in terms of people making analogies to the tulip market. Bitcoin won't go away... at least not for decades (it is here to stay and will almost always have value), but it may not be the darling currency of the moment either. There are weaknesses in how it is put together, and a serious discussion of those weaknesses should continue to happen into the future.
Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?
Because POTS will work in some of the worst environmental conditions possible. It survived the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been through hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even meteor strikes and kept working. Yes, some parts of the system failed, but for those parts that were still connected as long as a local power source (often just a battery bank) supplied power the system kept working.
It was on the back of the POTS system that the internet was born, and has always been a backup to every computer network system... even if it wasn't perfect at least *something* would get through in terms of data.
You just described every society on the planet. Whether it's due to aristocratic privilege or good ol' money, that's how the world works.
You don't get around much, do you?
There are societies that have successfully thrown off aristocratic privileges, although I will admit they are very rare and often get taken over by the aristocrats eventually anyway in some fashion or another. They also tend to be small and relatively small societies as well.
Most hunter-gatherer societies tend to be merit-based in terms of privileges, but as a rule those tend to be also small groups (generally around 100 or so people before they start to split up). This is also the kind of society that mankind lived in for millions of years before a bunch of jerkish kings took over in a comparatively newfangled concept known as a monarchy.
It's not like Satoshi is controlling the system from the shadows or something - Bitcoin is open-source. You don't need to trust its creators.
The only thing that Satoshi controls in the protocol is a hash code which would allow somebody to insert a broadcast message to all "standard" clients. This was presumably done to broadcast something like "the Bitcoin client has been compromised... please upgrade to version x.x!"
Of course it could have any sort of message including publishing a URL, a political message, or even just "Satoshi lives!". Without the hashcode, clients (this isn't even miners) are not supposed to pass on the message in the network. The core group of developers supposedly received this hash code from Satoshi and is guarding its use for things deemed appropriate for all Bitcoin users.
The interesting thing is that this is a distributed network messaging protocol, so such a message could conceivably be inserted by any computer on the network and would in theory be untraceable as well. Other miscellaneous data could also conceivably be put into Bitcoin, but Satoshi deliberately put in some poison pills to keep that from happening in the protocol.
When oil is $500 per barrel, electricity is unlikely to remain at 12 cents per kilowatt hour.
If power from the wall is 60 cents a kilowatt hour and oil is $500 a barrel, what has changed?
That was sort of my point. It was more or less bringing up the issue of quantitative easing that has been policy of the Federal Reserve for the past couple of years and has really kicked into overdrive this past year. When the money supply is expanded by trillions of dollars, you should expect massive inflation to result.
Yes, this isn't going to be restricted to just oil purchases.
The other "shoe" to drop here too is a what-if possibility that the U.S. Dollar will no longer be the world reserve currency. There is no special status to the U.S. dollar, and a number of countries that are active (in particular China and India) in finding a "replacement currency" to dollars. If the U.S. Dollar loses that global reserve currency status, you will see the price of oil in particular skyrocket and become insanely expensive in comparison to other forms of energy for average consumers.
For those who suggest there is no inflation, assuming that the same standards for measuring inflation in 1980 were applied today, the current inflation rate would be hovering around 10% annually at the moment. Most ordinary Americans know in their gut this has been the case, even though official statistics substantially understate this inflation rate.
Hopefully there are some very smart people at the Federal Reserve that actually care about ordinary people and don't want to see the U.S. economy go down in flames. That is a whole bunch of religious-type of faith in people that don't exactly have a very good track record in deserving that kind of faith.
If Tesla can make an electric car that looks as nice and sexy as the Model S, why can't the other manufacturers?
Perhaps, they don't want to or think it won't sell.
Of course, if you make something that people want and at a reasonable price, it wouldn't be a problem.
In following the development of the Roadster and subsequently the Model S over the years, I've gained respect towards automobile companies and what they need to go through in terms of producing a production automobile (of any kind... Diesel, gasoline, or even electric). The government safety requirements alone are among many reasons why Tesla is the first genuinely new American automobile manufacturer to be remotely successful in the past hundred years. Otherwise, all you see is a serious of continual consolidation as the capital needed to produce an automobile and meet all of the legal requirements is huge.
The only previous company that even came close to duplicating that effort was Tucker Automobiles, and even that was a sort of financial disaster for a great many reasons including claims that the major automobile companies deliberately sabotaged them legally. Other companies started in other countries where they either had huge government support or at least became well established companies in other countries first (with presumably more lax standards) and then made specific automobiles which targeted the American market. An example of a company which simply gave up after trying was Isuzu, which used to sell automobiles in America but then didn't want to bother any more and has retreated to only selling in Japan (and some large commercial trucks, but nothing for consumers).
While competition is certainly stiff, it is this difficulty of getting something to market in the first place that makes it harder for other companies to make something that doesn't suck. That and the fact most electric automobiles were mainly an adaptation of golf carts and looked like golf carts too.
Disagree, remind me his latest games? Nobody know about them except a few hardcore gamers (40++ y.o.). He doesn't like high-level development, has no new ideas about gaming.
Most of the work that John Carmack has been working on is in the low level game engines. Indeed I would dare say that most of what he has done in his career has been doing that, but note the core engine is what drives anything done on the high level you are talking about.
While you might not "notice" his passing from ID Software, his presence is definitely going to be missed by the company. You can't neglect the core technologies.
Yes, crappy design with outstanding technology is still a crappy game, but even the best design on a POS engine is still going to suck wind too.
Besides, the best use of John Carmack at any company is not extracting every ounce of creative energy he may have but rather having him help inspire the next generation of programmers and mentoring others to become better. That implies either being a senior programmer or being put into some management position... about what he has been doing and is continuing to do.
Come back when oil is $500
That will be some time in the next couple of years when a loaf of bread costs $50. It is just a matter of time.
I would say that is largely a factor of the rarity of getting an electric automobile rental car (there has been a backlog of even getting cars from Tesla for awhile) and the fact that those who might be interested in renting such a vehicle is willing to pay a premium for such an experience. Furthermore, most rental car agencies have the infrastructure at their shops to deal with electric automobiles as that requires some capital outlays that are not needed for gasoline automobiles.
Simply said, while you are correct that electric automobiles cost more than gasoline automobiles from rental agencies, that is something which over time may change (no promise.... just that it might). I wouldn't expect rental car agencies to be leading the charge for adoption of electric automobiles, but they will be following market conditions and if ordinary consumers are adopting them in large numbers you will also see rental agencies similarly purchasing larger fleets of electric automobiles for largely the same economic reasons.
I could also see a kWh charge applied to the bill of any electric automobiles returned less than fully charged... and that bill to be insanely high too.
One big issue I have is battery life.
I'm driving a 14 year old pickup truck, and a 23 year old sports car, both purchased brand new. Ya know the most common replacement component in both? Batteries.
Yes, Lithium-Ion / Fe whatever is different from lead-acid. Do you hear any electric car company making a claim that their multi-thousand dollar battery packs are going to last anywhere near 14 years? How about 23?
I think this is a legitimate issue. Tesla battery packs are claimed to last about ten years before they need to be replaced (where they are expected to have about half of the charge capacity as a new battery pack). Tesla even wrote a blog post about the topic a little bit before they started to deliver the Roadster, and showed how they reprocessed the old batteries with almost a 100% recovery of the contents with recycling efforts (hence the environmental issues are almost moot). Still, when you are calculating the per mile cost of operating an electric automobile you do need to consider the cost of the battery pack replacement in the figure.
I haven't seen the actual figures from Tesla or other similar companies, but some "fans" have estimated a battery replacement cost of about $10k-$15k. Cheaper than buying a new car, but certainly a non-trivial cost.
The funny thing is how the Baker Electric automobiles had a battery technology that didn't need nearly so much maintenance, and in spite of the fact that those batteries are now over a century old many of those automobiles (largely in museums now... but still serviceable) still have the original factory installed batteries that have only needed minor refurbishment and some new chemicals put into the battery. The trade off is that they don't really hold that much charge.
Cold weather mainly limits range. Electric heaters are not a problem for driving in cold weather and only in extreme environments like Antarctica (which also has almost no infrastructure as well) will it be a major problem.
Otherwise driving an electric automobile might even be beneficial as you have the weight of the batteries distributed more evenly on the automobile than the bulk of the engine up in front of the car as well as how many electric automobiles have all wheel drive (aka power to all wheels and not just the rear). In other words, they have about the same problems as any other automobile has in that environment.
Note also that even for gasoline engines you have reduced performance in cold weather... for many of the same reasons. You can also mirror the same issues for hot weather too in terms of getting air conditioning going, and I think it is much easier to run an air conditioner off of batter power than to deal with the insane thing of trying to put an AC radiator in front of the engine immediately next to the coolant radiator of that engine. For myself, I find air conditioners in automobiles to be an amazing piece of technology that simply shouldn't work but does anyway.
I cannot see where the Hot Grits are in your post
Inside of the Beowolf cluster, of course!
It might be news if they had done it a few years ago with with a then-obscure game that everybody would now use to make all kinds of buildings...
It might even be something worth looking at if they provided the map file for that formerly obscure game and exported it to work on a Raspberry Pi for use in grade school classrooms. Heck, let's really make it news by having Natalie Portman giving a virutal tour of the building where an audio track recorded by her takes kids through the various parts of the building, which you can purchase for 0.01 BTC.