Other than the fact that the test track is currently under construction and test vehicles are also being built by a dozen different teams including a couple of commercial enterprises that plan on installing them in the not too distant future. It isn't as if there is a lack of effort in trying to figure out how to build the capsules themselves.
You can't just move the launches to California. The reason why the launches are happening in Florida is because there aren't people to the east of the launch site for hundreds of miles. If the launch was done instead at Vandenberg, the flight path would take the rocket over Santa Barbara and potentially Los Angeles, where not very many people would be happy if pieces of the rocket like what happened during the CRS-7 flight started to fall on their homes.
Moving the launch site to perhaps the Mojave Airport (which is even licensed by the FAA as a proper spaceport for some spaceflight activities) would still have this rocket arcing over Las Vegas and Phoenix and eventually over the whole south-eastern USA.
Russia gets away with launching their rockets in the middle of Asia in part because the flight path is similarly over almost completely unpopulated parts of the world (mostly Siberia and the steppe of Kazakhstan)... and the Soviet Union (when the launch site was built) didn't worry about pesky details like lawsuits from its citizens. The Russian government still doesn't care, and by the time rockets from Russia are heading over Alaska it isn't too big of a worry as the rockets are already in orbit.
In short, a flat plain or desert in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean would be nice, particularly if it had no people. Unfortunately that land without people doesn't exist.
about the only question I might be asking would be how much are they spending to develop this technology and how much money do they think they'll save--in short, what is the ROI for something like this?
Some hard numbers to throw around on something like this:
The current "price" of a Falcon 9 is about $70 million USD. This is how much you would be asked to pay for a standard Falcon 9 if you made a serious inquiry to sales @ spacex.com for a real quote, but that comes before special one time engineering charges or extra features and special handling. That price gets you a rocket, the basic range fees for an ordinary simple LEO payload delivery, and engineering data for a standard SpaceX payload connector. Most payloads usually require some special engineering considerations, so the price usually goes up from there.
The "cost" of a Falcon 9, in terms of raw labor and manufacturing costs to get that vehicle actually manufactured is definitely less than that figure, where I've heard the price is speculated to possibly in the very roughly $20-$30 million range to build that rocket, with most of that cost concentrated in the construction of the lower (1st) stage of the Falcon 9.... let's say about $15-$20 million for actual labor & manufacturing costs of the lower stage. That is a huge profit margin, which one of the reasons why Steve Jurvetson (a member of the SpaceX board of directors) is publicly quoted as saying the SpaceX financials are "financial porn".
Elon Musk also suggested that the fuel costs for a typical Falcon 9 flight are well less than $1 million per flight, more along the line of about $250,000 per flight to give a general ball park figure.
You can use that as a range of figures to try and figure out what the ROI of performing multiple failures and how many times you need to recover the lower stage before it becomes profitable. Also of note, this particular launch of the SES-9 vehicle likely would have been to purchase the full vehicle and not really involve any bonus for lower stage recovery where the expectation is that the stage would not have been recovered. It should also be of significant note that purely for R&D purposes that have nothing to do with reflying the lower stage, obtaining the physical equipment for engineering review is incredibly valuable where actual rocket engines used to delivery payloads into space and then put on a test stand for additional performance testing can help to significantly improve reliability. Just using a borescope to peek inside of the engine parts to see how they held up under actual flight conditions is alone worth the price of that stage if it means fewer disasters like the CRS-7 flight.
In short, I think you could likely make a case that even recovering one in three or more likely every other launch for that lower stage would more than pay for this whole recovery program effort from a strict cost accounting basis. I'd love to see what the engineering costs for this recovery development have been,but compared to the costs of developing the Merlin engines or the costs of developing the Dragon spacecraft, I suspect it is minor and almost incidental. A single successful recovery is worth at a minimum of $10-$15 million cash in hand, and that even includes the costs of the barge operations.
To show where SpaceX is looking from their own caculations, they intend to drop the price of the Falcon 9 to about $30 million with the regular recovery of the Falcon 9 lower stage, and if they can ever get the upper stage to the point of being recovered as well, that price goes down to a mere $7 million per launch that they intend to charge their customers. SpaceX has also announced their intention to perform payload faring recovery and reuse, just to show the extent of their reuse plans.
You are 100% correct on every point above, at least based on stuff I have heard about from SpaceX from a variety of sources.
Switching to an internal TCP/IP network for the rocket also saved a tremendous amount of mass for sensor cabling too, which matters a whole ton more when you are talking about the rocket equation.
"His jump off the Empire State Building was successful, but his secondary goal of landing safely was a disaster."
The Al-Qaeda terrorist successfully jumped off the Empire State Building, fired the RPG into Trump Tower killing Donald Trump, and failed to land successfully into the recovery net at the bottom when he knew he was going to be a martyr anyway.
Yeah, talking about moving goal posts to the level of stupidity.
The purpose of the flight was to deliver a communications satellite to geo-synchronous orbit. Your analogy here is sort of suggesting that actual objective wasn't accomplished.
they had already demonstrated low-altitude VTVL with their rockets back in 2013, and they didn't see the value of going higher short of actually launching to orbit.
To be fair, SpaceX lost their test vehicle that they were planning on making those higher altitude test with. Also, SpaceX didn't have the clearance from the FAA to launch rockets any higher at their Texas test facility (being under major airline flight paths sort of makes that a problem), which is why SpaceX was going to be moving the testing to New Mexico instead.
It was just pointless for SpaceX to build another test vehicle when they had already been quite close at recovering a core used for revenue service, where reflights would actually make a whole lot more sense.
I couldn't have said it any better, other than landing on that pogo stick on a raft in the middle of a swimming pool.
Besides, it was SpaceX that made the first attempts on that concept too. Blue Origin just took an easier to accomplish task (aka the sub-orbital) and did it earlier.
Or if you want to give credit where it is due, the thanks goes to the DC-X team who was successful in landing a suborbital flight like that.
It is in a thread that started out talking about Marco Rubio and then comparing Elon Musk to that same Presidential candidate.
I happen to agree with you though that is one of the most inane and intentionally ignorant posts I've ever read this month and will likely read too. Only the Moon landing deniers can possibly top this for sheer stupidity.
Well, I think part of his argument is that they aren't doing it. How many successful landings have they had on their barge?
How many successful landings has anybody had from landing a 5 story tall launch vehicle above the Karman Line (aka what is commonly thought of as actually outer space) and then landing that rocket on a barge in the ocean?
I think the level of expectation here is just a tad bit high, where even the notion of calling this a failure is simply absurd.
Very useful engineering data was obtained on this flight, including in the landing. For a rocket that wasn't expected to be recovered at all in this particular case, SpaceX did a pretty good job at trying to recover it, and got some pieces anyway as it actually did land on the barge.... just not as slowly as necessary to get it in one piece.
I don't think it was "almost." That describes the landing when the first stage touched down then tipped over.
There wasn't really much of an expectation it would be successful anyway. The largest problem was that there was very little reserve fuel left in the rocket due to the fact that nearly all of the fuel needed to get the payload delivered to GEO (also due to the heavier payload itself) that it wasn't really thought that the rocket could land.
SpaceX basically made an attempt anyway. Close in this case is that the rocket ran out of fuel when it was close (in proportion) to hovering velocity, but 1%-2% of the original velocity when it was in space was still going way too fast to land gently.
If they (NASA) tried to land boosters and had the same fail rate they'd be accused of being a total waste with calls of how they should get back to expendable rockets because God forbid they should innovate and maybe fail.
If NASA was operating rockets that had the flight success of SpaceX, I doubt they would be accused of total waste like you are stating. This launch was a friggin success that got the payload to the intended destination for crying out loud. What the hell are you talking about?
The failure of the recovery of the lower stage just means an experimental concept using reserve fuel for a stage that otherwise would have just been tossed in the ocean if it wasn't built up for recovery has yet another data point that can be used to refine the recovery concepts.... concepts that many of "those in the 40s, 50s, and 60s who actually laid out how to do this stuff" said couldn't be done in the first place.... yet here is SpaceX actually doing it.
Calling a huge resounding success as an abject failure is just somebody who delights in the misery of others when there is no call for misery in the first place.
If that is a fuckup, I think he deserves to continue receiving money for many more similar fuckups.
Seriously, what possible standard are you seeking here? The payload got delivered to the proper orbit and the customer themselves were so impressed that they want to send another payload with SpaceX.
What amazes me about Tetris is that it wasn't developed much earlier. You are correct that it is a simple game, but it originally came out at a time when computer graphics permitted far more complex games, thus it was even then seen as something of a throwback to earlier video game concepts.
The "Brick-out" or "Break-out" game, on the other hand, is an example of the very early games. As a matter of fact, the Apple I computer was originally designed with the specific goal of being able to write Brick-out in BASIC, but be flexible enough to do other things as well. That even influenced the design of the Apple Integer BASIC, which was also designed specifically to make that one game.
Then again, my hat is off to a guy that designed his own motherboard and hand assembled a BASIC interpreter simply to play one silly video game.
said that the high volume of bad games killed the video game industry
Which is utter BS on the most basic level. You might be able to argue that it was the high volume of overly hyped bad games from a bunch of vendors who didn't know what a good game was... in part because very few of the salesmen of those games and definitely the retail store purchasers of those games at the time never bothered to actually play any of the games themselves. If you have piles of games sitting on shelves of stores that are all terrible and a purchasing manager who is clueless about what even makes a game tolerable thus buys even more garbage, no wonder the game industry died. A mother or father going to buy something for their kids heads to a store trying to buy the latest cool game for a birthday and comes back with that terrible game... making those same stores buy even more of those terrible games.
And it didn't help that the few really good games were gone from those same retail store shelves, giving rise to the idea that the terrible games were all that was left.
The revival happened because finally there was a group of salesmen and department store purchasing agents who had a clue what made even a mediocre game instead of something utterly terrible.
The DMCA was written to make it extremely easy to have a take down order, and very burdensome to overturn such an order.
No, the DMCA was written to make it clear how to object to content that might be in violation of copyright laws. It also provided a legal procedure that the content hosts (aka YouTube) must follow to put that content back up, and they are supposed to do so in a "timely manner" (meaning no more than a few days up to a month.... yeah I know that sucks but it still happens).
Content providers can submit a counter-claim, but doing so puts the legal burden on the person submitting that counter-claim where you are personally vulnerable to a copyright lawsuit for making that counter-claim. You also must provide legal contact information (aka an address where a court summons can be served) to make such a counter-claim... which means that maintaining anonymity is not an option if you insist upon content being restored. That is the "very burdensome task" you are arguing about. In other words, you need to have the balls to stand up to somebody like Sony and be willing to stake your personal worth on the line that the content is in fact legal.
Neither individual nor corporations can be punished for having a false claim, so the issue of corporate personhoood is irrelevant in this case.
This is not true either. Individuals and corporations can indeed be punished for a false claim.
Note first: The restoration process does take some work on your part. You need to be active in your efforts to get the content restored instead of simply ranting about it like some victim of bullying that does nothing afterward. Most of the time, the content gets restored, you get the "black marks" removed from your YouTube account (which YouTube is legally obligated to do BTW), and life goes on. You might have missed some subscribers, but life sucks.
On the other hand, if the copyright claimant continues to press the issue and it actually goes to a courtroom before a judge, they start to enter the realm of barratry. In other words, if they are making false claims the lawyers could end up in prison themselves. Grey areas like fair use won't end up with such problems, but at that point you have a real legal case that might even establish legal precedence. Most of the time, these companies just don't want to be bothered with such a thing as it cost them a whole lot of money and time.
Where the complaint legitimately ought to be focused though is toward YouTube with their automation system and false positive reports. Those legitimately ought to be punished in some way when clear false positives happen, just like accounts which post copyright infringements ought to get a huge slap down for posting stuff they really didn't do. That has nothing to do with court orders or the DMCA, just shitty company policies that Google could change at any time.
Another thing that YouTube could be a little more decent about is to point to the information that the EFF posted that I put in the above link. You aren't helpless, but you do need to take specific legal steps if you want the content restored.
The internet was designed around DEcentralization. Too bad we have thrown that concept away.
The concept still isn't gone, and you can still route around centralization if you care do go that route with a group of people who share similar interests to your own.
While YouTube is useful, along with other centralized servers, it isn't the only possible video distribution site to use... or for that matter create your own server to host videos. That is how YouTube got started in the first place, before it became part of Google.
In those circumstances 20k libertarian activists should be able to totally revolutionize the state's politics, which will in turn mean that the national political scene has to deal with libertarian ideas in a much more serious way then otherwise.
It should be noted that the major political parties in New Hampshire are already upset that the Libertarians are bumping into their turf and engaged in a backlash against the Libertarians. If a mass immigration of Libertarians actually happens, I would expect that pushback to only get worse with even funds from national committees to get dumped into the state politics.
It is funny to hear candidates complain about the "damn Free Staters" and how their cushy re-election campaigns are thwarted.
Gold and Silver have a number of flaws, not the least of which is that they can be devalued by new sources of those commodities. The other huge issue is that they have considerable bulk when trying to engage in high value transactions, thus engaging significant costs when trying to execute those kind of transactions. Indeed it was that issue of transferring gold & silver which resulted in the concept of bank notes in the first place where certificates of possession of gold were exchanged instead of the actual gold itself.
It is the spread of those certifications of a deposit of gold that also causes a whole bunch of the games being played in the global monetary system, particularly if the depositing authority (whoever that might be) decides to issues more certificates than they actually have of that commodity.
Furthermore, gold is still traceable in a variety of methods, not the least of which is having a serial number stamped on the gold bars or coins. Generally that is useful so far as having is already assayed as having a certain purity from some certifying authority (often a government of some sort). Modern technique of performing isotopic analysis can also go so far as determining which specific mine that some gold might have even come from in the first place and be used to trace the gold from specific individuals as well. That isn't perfect, but I wouldn't guarantee that any given briefcase full of gold coins is untraceable either, where melting down that gold to anonymize the gold isn't always an option.
You make it sounds like it was so black and white and an easy decision, but like everything of that nature it was a whole lot more nuanced and got into project politics. The part I understood was that I would personally have needed to at least temporarily take on the financial burden of running the website if I had done a fork, even if it was likely that other community members were going to help contribute both with money and in other ways. Getting that organized and staying on top of that while working full time myself and raising a family also played a major part in that decision and realizing it would likely become a full time job with little pay if the fork was successful.
The licensing was easy... it was the GFDL (now CC-by-SA). I don't even see how you could think it was at all complicated or why I would misunderstand what that implied.
If you want to get into the nuanced USC 501(c)3 non-profit laws, be my guest. Also pay attention to what I said: donors can send donations into a trust, which is precisely what the link said is happening too. That the fundraising could be referred instead to the trust instead of the core organization is just a bit of legal game play that sometimes happens too, but you need to keep a strong legal firewall between the trust and the non-profit corporation as well. Let's just say it gets very complicated.
The fact is, Wikimedia could have easily funded an endowment long ago that would keep Wikipedia on-line forever without requiring another dollar in fundraising.
I think it should have happened a long time ago frankly, and it is sad that it has taken them this long to get such an endowment going at all. The Wikimedia Foundation used to be an incredibly lean organization with a very minimal staff and an annual budget of right around $3 million. The public outreach and frankly many of the ways that the money is being spent is diverting focus away from the core projects. The reason for aggressive year after year fundraising goals is simply because the trustees want to aggressively grow the organization and do more stuff because they can.
I believe it is ground for valid criticism of the organization precisely because they really don't need that money.
That could change at any time based on board decision.
Not really. The decisions are made by the community except when specific legal issues have shown up which might shut the project down. One such example was the license change, and another was the specific policy requirement that each sub-project adopt a policy with regards to fair-use content or the lack thereof. Even in those cases, it was the community which made the final call with a whole lot of deliberation.
If they arbitrarily tried to change editorial policies on a whim, Wikipedia would simply die. The governing authority started with the volunteers and the board is something that was sort of grafted in later.
Yes there is
I suppose that is a matter of opinion on that position. She is in charge of the non-technical staff (the technical guys really do fit in a different category although I wouldn't want to cross this lady if I was one of the IT guys). It gets a whole lot more nuanced when you get into the gritty details and she definitely does not have any authority at all over any of the specific projects.
Yes. this is what boards do.
I suppose I'm saying that the board usurped authority that previously didn't exist and has gone above and beyond their original mandate for when they were created. The board members were never supposed to have the all power authority you are asserting here that they have and I suppose defacto is authority they possess.
It still doesn't stop the right to fork as exists in all open source projects though.
In this case, the primary power of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors is really to administer the funds needed to operate the servers and to hire and fire the staff that runs those servers. There is a whole bunch of other staff doing what I think to be mostly make work projects to spend their donation money.
They gave unto themselves the authority to run roughshod over the editors and to arbitrarily change user privileges as well as to arbitrarily (at their discretion or due to a lawsuit) remove content from the Wikimedia projects (it wasn't even really approved by the community) and they also set up general policies for all of the various projects collectively. Running the server farm sort of helps give them an edge to be able to decide what goes onto those servers, so I suppose their power should be a given in that situation.
Editorial policies on the other hand are usually decided by community consensus and not by the board with often significant pushback when major changes happen without consulting the community. Since they don't hire and fire the actual administration and cleanup of the various wikiprojects or even deal with individual communities in a massive self-destruct mode (it happens from time to time.... that is the job of the stewards and those guys are elected by the community) they really don't deal too much with the actual content nor is there really any CEO like you might find even with other non-profit groups. The various units of Wikipedia report directly to the board, although the chair of the board usually acts in an executive capacity on a more day to day basis if needed.
The board could start locking the servers from write access or do other really stupid things, but that would just fork the projects and send the volunteers elsewhere. It is a sort of uneasy truce between the volunteer leadership and the board with regards to the real power of the board with a general presumption that the board is going to be doing the right thing most of the time even if on occasion they may screw up. In this situation though, the board members really govern a pretty small organization on the whole consisting of just the paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation and not much else. It is rather prestigious due to the large number of volunteers who contribute to the projects though.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than the fact that the test track is currently under construction and test vehicles are also being built by a dozen different teams including a couple of commercial enterprises that plan on installing them in the not too distant future. It isn't as if there is a lack of effort in trying to figure out how to build the capsules themselves.
You can't just move the launches to California. The reason why the launches are happening in Florida is because there aren't people to the east of the launch site for hundreds of miles. If the launch was done instead at Vandenberg, the flight path would take the rocket over Santa Barbara and potentially Los Angeles, where not very many people would be happy if pieces of the rocket like what happened during the CRS-7 flight started to fall on their homes.
Moving the launch site to perhaps the Mojave Airport (which is even licensed by the FAA as a proper spaceport for some spaceflight activities) would still have this rocket arcing over Las Vegas and Phoenix and eventually over the whole south-eastern USA.
Russia gets away with launching their rockets in the middle of Asia in part because the flight path is similarly over almost completely unpopulated parts of the world (mostly Siberia and the steppe of Kazakhstan)... and the Soviet Union (when the launch site was built) didn't worry about pesky details like lawsuits from its citizens. The Russian government still doesn't care, and by the time rockets from Russia are heading over Alaska it isn't too big of a worry as the rockets are already in orbit.
In short, a flat plain or desert in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean would be nice, particularly if it had no people. Unfortunately that land without people doesn't exist.
about the only question I might be asking would be how much are they spending to develop this technology and how much money do they think they'll save--in short, what is the ROI for something like this?
Some hard numbers to throw around on something like this:
The current "price" of a Falcon 9 is about $70 million USD. This is how much you would be asked to pay for a standard Falcon 9 if you made a serious inquiry to sales @ spacex.com for a real quote, but that comes before special one time engineering charges or extra features and special handling. That price gets you a rocket, the basic range fees for an ordinary simple LEO payload delivery, and engineering data for a standard SpaceX payload connector. Most payloads usually require some special engineering considerations, so the price usually goes up from there.
The "cost" of a Falcon 9, in terms of raw labor and manufacturing costs to get that vehicle actually manufactured is definitely less than that figure, where I've heard the price is speculated to possibly in the very roughly $20-$30 million range to build that rocket, with most of that cost concentrated in the construction of the lower (1st) stage of the Falcon 9.... let's say about $15-$20 million for actual labor & manufacturing costs of the lower stage. That is a huge profit margin, which one of the reasons why Steve Jurvetson (a member of the SpaceX board of directors) is publicly quoted as saying the SpaceX financials are "financial porn".
Elon Musk also suggested that the fuel costs for a typical Falcon 9 flight are well less than $1 million per flight, more along the line of about $250,000 per flight to give a general ball park figure.
You can use that as a range of figures to try and figure out what the ROI of performing multiple failures and how many times you need to recover the lower stage before it becomes profitable. Also of note, this particular launch of the SES-9 vehicle likely would have been to purchase the full vehicle and not really involve any bonus for lower stage recovery where the expectation is that the stage would not have been recovered. It should also be of significant note that purely for R&D purposes that have nothing to do with reflying the lower stage, obtaining the physical equipment for engineering review is incredibly valuable where actual rocket engines used to delivery payloads into space and then put on a test stand for additional performance testing can help to significantly improve reliability. Just using a borescope to peek inside of the engine parts to see how they held up under actual flight conditions is alone worth the price of that stage if it means fewer disasters like the CRS-7 flight.
In short, I think you could likely make a case that even recovering one in three or more likely every other launch for that lower stage would more than pay for this whole recovery program effort from a strict cost accounting basis. I'd love to see what the engineering costs for this recovery development have been,but compared to the costs of developing the Merlin engines or the costs of developing the Dragon spacecraft, I suspect it is minor and almost incidental. A single successful recovery is worth at a minimum of $10-$15 million cash in hand, and that even includes the costs of the barge operations.
To show where SpaceX is looking from their own caculations, they intend to drop the price of the Falcon 9 to about $30 million with the regular recovery of the Falcon 9 lower stage, and if they can ever get the upper stage to the point of being recovered as well, that price goes down to a mere $7 million per launch that they intend to charge their customers. SpaceX has also announced their intention to perform payload faring recovery and reuse, just to show the extent of their reuse plans.
An I confused?
Yup, but you still don't even have the most ignorant post on even this thread.
You are 100% correct on every point above, at least based on stuff I have heard about from SpaceX from a variety of sources.
Switching to an internal TCP/IP network for the rocket also saved a tremendous amount of mass for sensor cabling too, which matters a whole ton more when you are talking about the rocket equation.
"His jump off the Empire State Building was successful, but his secondary goal of landing safely was a disaster."
The Al-Qaeda terrorist successfully jumped off the Empire State Building, fired the RPG into Trump Tower killing Donald Trump, and failed to land successfully into the recovery net at the bottom when he knew he was going to be a martyr anyway.
Yeah, talking about moving goal posts to the level of stupidity.
The purpose of the flight was to deliver a communications satellite to geo-synchronous orbit. Your analogy here is sort of suggesting that actual objective wasn't accomplished.
they had already demonstrated low-altitude VTVL with their rockets back in 2013, and they didn't see the value of going higher short of actually launching to orbit.
To be fair, SpaceX lost their test vehicle that they were planning on making those higher altitude test with. Also, SpaceX didn't have the clearance from the FAA to launch rockets any higher at their Texas test facility (being under major airline flight paths sort of makes that a problem), which is why SpaceX was going to be moving the testing to New Mexico instead.
It was just pointless for SpaceX to build another test vehicle when they had already been quite close at recovering a core used for revenue service, where reflights would actually make a whole lot more sense.
I couldn't have said it any better, other than landing on that pogo stick on a raft in the middle of a swimming pool.
Besides, it was SpaceX that made the first attempts on that concept too. Blue Origin just took an easier to accomplish task (aka the sub-orbital) and did it earlier.
Or if you want to give credit where it is due, the thanks goes to the DC-X team who was successful in landing a suborbital flight like that.
It is in a thread that started out talking about Marco Rubio and then comparing Elon Musk to that same Presidential candidate.
I happen to agree with you though that is one of the most inane and intentionally ignorant posts I've ever read this month and will likely read too. Only the Moon landing deniers can possibly top this for sheer stupidity.
Well, I think part of his argument is that they aren't doing it. How many successful landings have they had on their barge?
How many successful landings has anybody had from landing a 5 story tall launch vehicle above the Karman Line (aka what is commonly thought of as actually outer space) and then landing that rocket on a barge in the ocean?
I think the level of expectation here is just a tad bit high, where even the notion of calling this a failure is simply absurd.
Very useful engineering data was obtained on this flight, including in the landing. For a rocket that wasn't expected to be recovered at all in this particular case, SpaceX did a pretty good job at trying to recover it, and got some pieces anyway as it actually did land on the barge.... just not as slowly as necessary to get it in one piece.
I don't think it was "almost." That describes the landing when the first stage touched down then tipped over.
There wasn't really much of an expectation it would be successful anyway. The largest problem was that there was very little reserve fuel left in the rocket due to the fact that nearly all of the fuel needed to get the payload delivered to GEO (also due to the heavier payload itself) that it wasn't really thought that the rocket could land.
SpaceX basically made an attempt anyway. Close in this case is that the rocket ran out of fuel when it was close (in proportion) to hovering velocity, but 1%-2% of the original velocity when it was in space was still going way too fast to land gently.
If they (NASA) tried to land boosters and had the same fail rate they'd be accused of being a total waste with calls of how they should get back to expendable rockets because God forbid they should innovate and maybe fail.
If NASA was operating rockets that had the flight success of SpaceX, I doubt they would be accused of total waste like you are stating. This launch was a friggin success that got the payload to the intended destination for crying out loud. What the hell are you talking about?
The failure of the recovery of the lower stage just means an experimental concept using reserve fuel for a stage that otherwise would have just been tossed in the ocean if it wasn't built up for recovery has yet another data point that can be used to refine the recovery concepts.... concepts that many of "those in the 40s, 50s, and 60s who actually laid out how to do this stuff" said couldn't be done in the first place.... yet here is SpaceX actually doing it.
Calling a huge resounding success as an abject failure is just somebody who delights in the misery of others when there is no call for misery in the first place.
Another elon musk fuckup
If that is a fuckup, I think he deserves to continue receiving money for many more similar fuckups.
Seriously, what possible standard are you seeking here? The payload got delivered to the proper orbit and the customer themselves were so impressed that they want to send another payload with SpaceX.
Geez, nobody can possibly be pleased.
What amazes me about Tetris is that it wasn't developed much earlier. You are correct that it is a simple game, but it originally came out at a time when computer graphics permitted far more complex games, thus it was even then seen as something of a throwback to earlier video game concepts.
The "Brick-out" or "Break-out" game, on the other hand, is an example of the very early games. As a matter of fact, the Apple I computer was originally designed with the specific goal of being able to write Brick-out in BASIC, but be flexible enough to do other things as well. That even influenced the design of the Apple Integer BASIC, which was also designed specifically to make that one game.
Then again, my hat is off to a guy that designed his own motherboard and hand assembled a BASIC interpreter simply to play one silly video game.
said that the high volume of bad games killed the video game industry
Which is utter BS on the most basic level. You might be able to argue that it was the high volume of overly hyped bad games from a bunch of vendors who didn't know what a good game was... in part because very few of the salesmen of those games and definitely the retail store purchasers of those games at the time never bothered to actually play any of the games themselves. If you have piles of games sitting on shelves of stores that are all terrible and a purchasing manager who is clueless about what even makes a game tolerable thus buys even more garbage, no wonder the game industry died. A mother or father going to buy something for their kids heads to a store trying to buy the latest cool game for a birthday and comes back with that terrible game... making those same stores buy even more of those terrible games.
And it didn't help that the few really good games were gone from those same retail store shelves, giving rise to the idea that the terrible games were all that was left.
The revival happened because finally there was a group of salesmen and department store purchasing agents who had a clue what made even a mediocre game instead of something utterly terrible.
The DMCA was written to make it extremely easy to have a take down order, and very burdensome to overturn such an order.
No, the DMCA was written to make it clear how to object to content that might be in violation of copyright laws. It also provided a legal procedure that the content hosts (aka YouTube) must follow to put that content back up, and they are supposed to do so in a "timely manner" (meaning no more than a few days up to a month.... yeah I know that sucks but it still happens).
Content providers can submit a counter-claim, but doing so puts the legal burden on the person submitting that counter-claim where you are personally vulnerable to a copyright lawsuit for making that counter-claim. You also must provide legal contact information (aka an address where a court summons can be served) to make such a counter-claim... which means that maintaining anonymity is not an option if you insist upon content being restored. That is the "very burdensome task" you are arguing about. In other words, you need to have the balls to stand up to somebody like Sony and be willing to stake your personal worth on the line that the content is in fact legal.
Neither individual nor corporations can be punished for having a false claim, so the issue of corporate personhoood is irrelevant in this case.
This is not true either. Individuals and corporations can indeed be punished for a false claim.
Note first: The restoration process does take some work on your part. You need to be active in your efforts to get the content restored instead of simply ranting about it like some victim of bullying that does nothing afterward. Most of the time, the content gets restored, you get the "black marks" removed from your YouTube account (which YouTube is legally obligated to do BTW), and life goes on. You might have missed some subscribers, but life sucks.
On the other hand, if the copyright claimant continues to press the issue and it actually goes to a courtroom before a judge, they start to enter the realm of barratry. In other words, if they are making false claims the lawyers could end up in prison themselves. Grey areas like fair use won't end up with such problems, but at that point you have a real legal case that might even establish legal precedence. Most of the time, these companies just don't want to be bothered with such a thing as it cost them a whole lot of money and time.
Where the complaint legitimately ought to be focused though is toward YouTube with their automation system and false positive reports. Those legitimately ought to be punished in some way when clear false positives happen, just like accounts which post copyright infringements ought to get a huge slap down for posting stuff they really didn't do. That has nothing to do with court orders or the DMCA, just shitty company policies that Google could change at any time.
Another thing that YouTube could be a little more decent about is to point to the information that the EFF posted that I put in the above link. You aren't helpless, but you do need to take specific legal steps if you want the content restored.
The internet was designed around DEcentralization. Too bad we have thrown that concept away.
The concept still isn't gone, and you can still route around centralization if you care do go that route with a group of people who share similar interests to your own.
While YouTube is useful, along with other centralized servers, it isn't the only possible video distribution site to use... or for that matter create your own server to host videos. That is how YouTube got started in the first place, before it became part of Google.
In those circumstances 20k libertarian activists should be able to totally revolutionize the state's politics, which will in turn mean that the national political scene has to deal with libertarian ideas in a much more serious way then otherwise.
It should be noted that the major political parties in New Hampshire are already upset that the Libertarians are bumping into their turf and engaged in a backlash against the Libertarians. If a mass immigration of Libertarians actually happens, I would expect that pushback to only get worse with even funds from national committees to get dumped into the state politics.
It is funny to hear candidates complain about the "damn Free Staters" and how their cushy re-election campaigns are thwarted.
Gold and Silver have a number of flaws, not the least of which is that they can be devalued by new sources of those commodities. The other huge issue is that they have considerable bulk when trying to engage in high value transactions, thus engaging significant costs when trying to execute those kind of transactions. Indeed it was that issue of transferring gold & silver which resulted in the concept of bank notes in the first place where certificates of possession of gold were exchanged instead of the actual gold itself.
It is the spread of those certifications of a deposit of gold that also causes a whole bunch of the games being played in the global monetary system, particularly if the depositing authority (whoever that might be) decides to issues more certificates than they actually have of that commodity.
Furthermore, gold is still traceable in a variety of methods, not the least of which is having a serial number stamped on the gold bars or coins. Generally that is useful so far as having is already assayed as having a certain purity from some certifying authority (often a government of some sort). Modern technique of performing isotopic analysis can also go so far as determining which specific mine that some gold might have even come from in the first place and be used to trace the gold from specific individuals as well. That isn't perfect, but I wouldn't guarantee that any given briefcase full of gold coins is untraceable either, where melting down that gold to anonymize the gold isn't always an option.
That is one of the reasons why the Bitcoin exchanges are treated as money laundering services.... because that is precisely what is going on there.
You make it sounds like it was so black and white and an easy decision, but like everything of that nature it was a whole lot more nuanced and got into project politics. The part I understood was that I would personally have needed to at least temporarily take on the financial burden of running the website if I had done a fork, even if it was likely that other community members were going to help contribute both with money and in other ways. Getting that organized and staying on top of that while working full time myself and raising a family also played a major part in that decision and realizing it would likely become a full time job with little pay if the fork was successful.
The licensing was easy... it was the GFDL (now CC-by-SA). I don't even see how you could think it was at all complicated or why I would misunderstand what that implied.
If you want to get into the nuanced USC 501(c)3 non-profit laws, be my guest. Also pay attention to what I said: donors can send donations into a trust, which is precisely what the link said is happening too. That the fundraising could be referred instead to the trust instead of the core organization is just a bit of legal game play that sometimes happens too, but you need to keep a strong legal firewall between the trust and the non-profit corporation as well. Let's just say it gets very complicated.
The fact is, Wikimedia could have easily funded an endowment long ago that would keep Wikipedia on-line forever without requiring another dollar in fundraising.
I think it should have happened a long time ago frankly, and it is sad that it has taken them this long to get such an endowment going at all. The Wikimedia Foundation used to be an incredibly lean organization with a very minimal staff and an annual budget of right around $3 million. The public outreach and frankly many of the ways that the money is being spent is diverting focus away from the core projects. The reason for aggressive year after year fundraising goals is simply because the trustees want to aggressively grow the organization and do more stuff because they can.
I believe it is ground for valid criticism of the organization precisely because they really don't need that money.
That could change at any time based on board decision.
Not really. The decisions are made by the community except when specific legal issues have shown up which might shut the project down. One such example was the license change, and another was the specific policy requirement that each sub-project adopt a policy with regards to fair-use content or the lack thereof. Even in those cases, it was the community which made the final call with a whole lot of deliberation.
If they arbitrarily tried to change editorial policies on a whim, Wikipedia would simply die. The governing authority started with the volunteers and the board is something that was sort of grafted in later.
Yes there is
I suppose that is a matter of opinion on that position. She is in charge of the non-technical staff (the technical guys really do fit in a different category although I wouldn't want to cross this lady if I was one of the IT guys). It gets a whole lot more nuanced when you get into the gritty details and she definitely does not have any authority at all over any of the specific projects.
Yes. this is what boards do.
I suppose I'm saying that the board usurped authority that previously didn't exist and has gone above and beyond their original mandate for when they were created. The board members were never supposed to have the all power authority you are asserting here that they have and I suppose defacto is authority they possess.
It still doesn't stop the right to fork as exists in all open source projects though.
How is it wrong?
In this case, the primary power of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors is really to administer the funds needed to operate the servers and to hire and fire the staff that runs those servers. There is a whole bunch of other staff doing what I think to be mostly make work projects to spend their donation money.
They gave unto themselves the authority to run roughshod over the editors and to arbitrarily change user privileges as well as to arbitrarily (at their discretion or due to a lawsuit) remove content from the Wikimedia projects (it wasn't even really approved by the community) and they also set up general policies for all of the various projects collectively. Running the server farm sort of helps give them an edge to be able to decide what goes onto those servers, so I suppose their power should be a given in that situation.
Editorial policies on the other hand are usually decided by community consensus and not by the board with often significant pushback when major changes happen without consulting the community. Since they don't hire and fire the actual administration and cleanup of the various wikiprojects or even deal with individual communities in a massive self-destruct mode (it happens from time to time.... that is the job of the stewards and those guys are elected by the community) they really don't deal too much with the actual content nor is there really any CEO like you might find even with other non-profit groups. The various units of Wikipedia report directly to the board, although the chair of the board usually acts in an executive capacity on a more day to day basis if needed.
The board could start locking the servers from write access or do other really stupid things, but that would just fork the projects and send the volunteers elsewhere. It is a sort of uneasy truce between the volunteer leadership and the board with regards to the real power of the board with a general presumption that the board is going to be doing the right thing most of the time even if on occasion they may screw up. In this situation though, the board members really govern a pretty small organization on the whole consisting of just the paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation and not much else. It is rather prestigious due to the large number of volunteers who contribute to the projects though.