This guy got hired on as one of Jimmy Wales picks. There are two members of the board who are picked by the community, but unfortunately Jimmy Wales set up the foundation in such a way that he could still control the board and do whatever he wanted to see happen. The end result is that the board can incestually (meaning being accountable from nobody but themselves) select new board members upon their own whim. That is precisely what happened here with this board appointment.
There is the right to fork as is the case with all open source projects, but that is really the only real power that the Wikipedia editors have in this situation other than to complain to the two community board members and see that their one limited voice can be heard on the next election for those positions. The Spanish Language Wikipedia did fork several years ago due to some disputes with the top leadership of Wikipedia (particularly the top admins in that language edition of Wikipedia), but that is far enough in the past that the root causes and resolution have nothing to do with the current situation.
I nearly forked one of the sister projects a few years ago (with widespread support in that sister project), and in hindsight perhaps I should have followed through with the effort too. The really odd thing is how Jimmy Wales offered web space for the fork too. I suppose it just matters how the Wikimedia Board deals with this situation to see if enough editors are finally going to be so completely fed up with the current leadership direction to create that fork or just roll with the punches. Stuff like the Libre Office fork of Open Office is a good example of how such a fork can be successful.
BTW, do we know what his salary at that "non-profit" company is?
Just that the Wikimedia Foundation is swimming in more money than they can spend. Part of that is due to really stupid non-profit laws that prevent setting up a trust account (which can be done by donors... just not the non-profit) to save the money for a rainy day, but also because they get a whole bunch of money flowing their direction too.
As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation has a whole bunch of make-work projects to ensure that they remain "non-profit", but that just bloats their staff size too. As can be seen, I'm not too impressed with how the money is being spent as well since I think better uses of that money could be used.
Blockchains can have lag times of up to about 10 minutes per data exchange or longer, and building chains on separated nodes that on independent networks or computers only makes a difference when one has a longer chain than another... and the longer chain wins anyway. That is just for mining. You need zero syn/ack packets at all in that situation as they aren't needed to synch one block chain miner to another.
As for transaction data, you can pass data around on something like Fidonet... which may have a "router" look up table software so far as passing messages, doesn't really need a dedicated router either.
Seriously, this isn't like IP over avian carrier, I'm saying that TCP/IP is irrelevant to the concept of a blockchain or any other lower level protocol. It helps to automate the process no doubt and adds convenience, but I'm pointing out that it is unnecessary and you can definitely connect locations that are on separate networks for whatever reason that may be or even off-grid entirely for the purposes of a block chain concept. It is also a practical solution in those more unusual situations where network access is limited.
Block chains don't need routers to exist, although it certainly is a useful feature. You can easily (or with modest difficulty) run a block chain network strictly through a sneaker network (aka with just thumb drives/floppy discs (yes... they still exist)/optical storage/etc.) moving data physically from one computer to the next. That is also true of sending transactions for cryptocurrency as well, although at some point you need to get those transactions folded into the primary block chain.
I would agree with your sentiment on the relative importance of the two ideas though, where the idea of a router is definitely something which impacts far more lives and is far more basic to modern computing than a block chain.
It isn't so much a way to store data, which can be done with any peer to peer network like a TOR network, and is in fact where the concept of "cloud storage" comes from. What a block chain does is to timestamp and certify that the data integrity is maintained in such a peer to peer data network.
It is a time stamp so far as you can also demonstrate a chronological sequence between each block and point to one block and certify that it came before another block. You can also establish "ownership" of a chunk of data so far as to authenticate who created that data in the first place. That is also one directional so far as it is hard to prove any one person specifically created that data if they want to stay anonymous, but it is easy for somebody deliberately wanting to claim a piece of data to certify that it is in fact "their" data.
I could see it being used as a way to stamp patent applications, to give another example not typically used.
> In CA the electron prices are straight pass thru from the powerplants.
The first time I read that, I thought you said "In CA, the election prices area straight pass thru..."
as if somehow government bribery has taken on a whole new level of weirdness. I have no doubt that lobbying money from energy producers plays a huge role in this too.
How have the older components in your system held up over the years? The largest concern I've had so far with installing a solar power system at my house is a worry that by the time I get a payback from installing the system, the equipment will be ready for replacement.
Then again, I live in a colder climate city with not so much sunshine so there are a few other variables including the need to have a system that can handle temperature extremes from 40 C to - 40 C along with snow and ice removal issues too. It is still something I'm considering.
The largest problem with mass adoption of solar power is not the stuff happening with a few solar panels but what happens when you have whole neighborhoods with that infrastructure? There are some neighborhoods now in California with so many solar panels that the back flow from the neighborhoods is going into the larger grid... sometimes in ways that the grid was simply not equipped to handle in the first place. In other words.... that substation will need to be upgraded regardless in part because of the solar panels.
Another huge problem with both solar and wind is that they also don't deal with base load issues. Solar is nice for peak demand, but you still need that base load availability when all else isn't available like in the evenings or in calm weather. Battery farms and generating hydrogen can partially solve that problem, but definitely at a loss of energy and significantly added cost to the utilities. Other crazy ideas including pumping water into tanks or reservoirs as an energy storage system in its own right.
Nuclear & coal power are particularly attractive precisely because they can provide that base load power which can be running all of the time even with other sources are not available. Hydro power is on the other hand really useful in peak load situations as turbines can be opened up and generating electricity on demand or turned off with the energy represented in the water behind the dam stored for when it is needed. Most of the renewable energy sources don't have either of those benefits and sort of fall between with solar power having a slight advantage in areas with a whole lot of air conditioning.... as they generate electricity at high amounts precisely when power consumption is needed the most.... sort of.
My point is that solar power connections definitely have cost which goes far beyond just the immediate residential connections to the power grid, and it is overly simplistic to think that large scale adoption of solar power can be done for little additional cost to the utility. If it happens on a very small and localized level with a very low percentage of the customers using solar power.... your assumption is correct. On the other hand, what good is that solar power generation if only a couple homes out of hundreds are solar powered? All that does is make a couple of snotty people with egos feel good about themselves and in some ways makes things worse if you really do care about the environment.
Having lived in 1981 with a memory of the events of that era, I can say you are clueless about what ordinary Americans thought about such things. It certainly wasn't the "height of the Cold War", which could best be used to describe the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis some twenty years earlier. The Vietnam War was over. The Soviet Union was going through "Perestroika" and frankly was even seen as somewhat hopeful that perhaps the Soviet states would actually get some much needed freedoms they lacked in the past. There were also SALT talks where some real progress about the use of nuclear weapons were finally being discussed on a global level, and for the most part the Soviet Union was a dead horse in terms of trying to rally Americans to fight against it.
Yes, there was conflict going on in Afghanistan (Russia invaded around 1981), but the big evil country that got people all riled up in redneck country was Iran and their capture of the U.S. embassy. Libya was also seen as something useful to see drop into the sea and drown.
There certainly were super conservative groups that talked about the Soviet Union and Russia in particular as an "evil empire", and perhaps some of these FBI agents were caught up into that too. The major conflicts between the Soviet Union and the USA were largely done by 1981 and certainly didn't even remotely approach the levels of what happened in Vietnam or Korea.
With NASA's budget, we could feed every hungry child in this country.
Which is already being done (or at least attempted) with food stamps, school lunch programs, and even direct subsidies and tax breaks to food banks. There is no reason for a child to be hungry in America, and it certainly isn't for a lack of effort on the part of the government.
What should be remarkable is that more money is spent on lipstick than on spaceflight. Get your priorities down.
Of course Ames was an old U.S. Navy base where airships were warehoused and moored before it was transferred to NASA. The old airship hanger is still there, along with the runway which serviced the air wing which used to be based there too.
It should be noted that while they did contract out a majority of the design and construction they operated those systems themselves after their completion and had a heavy hand in developing most of them.
What you are describing is how NASA did stuff prior to the 1980's. Since then, even the operations have been handled by other contractors like United Space Alliance, who prepared and launched the Space Shuttle starting during the Ronald Reagan administration.
What makes this commercial cargo contract different is that in the past companies like Boeing and Rockwell International would sign a "cost-plus" contract where the government took the financial risk for what happened. The government agreed that they would pay all legitimate costs in the development and construction of the spacecraft, and in exchange the companies would be guaranteed a certain amount of profit (aka the "plus" of "cost-plus") for doing the project. What is happening with this commercial cargo contract is that NASA is paying a fixed amount of money per flight (plus some initial up front fees that are also a fixed amount) and it is up to the company to make sure they don't go over budget. Then again, any time that company can come up with a way to make it cheaper to meet the contract.... they can keep the profits. It places the financial risk on the companies making and launching these vehicle, not the government.
Except for a whole bunch of satellites they've built for other customers and components they've built for other spacecraft builders. Sierra Nevada Corporation isn't exactly new to spaceflight, but they are new to this kind of vehicle.
The Dream Chaser in particular was originally developed for the Commercial Crew program at NASA and very nearly won that contract too. If anything, this cargo resupply is likely a much better fit if you think they are not quite so ready for flying crews up to the ISS. It is going to be launched on the Atlas V, so the real challenge they are facing as far as the contract is concerned is simply if they can maneuver safely to the ISS once the spacecraft gets into orbit. The ability to perform atmospheric re-entry is merely a cost-savings scheme where they hope to be able to refurbish & fly these vehicles again for other customers.
The delivery deadline really isn't going to be all that hard for them to meet as long as Congress doesn't screw around with this contract and pull funding... again.
Do you think I give a shit about the Playstation at all?
Besides, what I'm talking about is specifically the application as a sort of legal maneuver and trademarking the term as applied to its consoles, not the technical ability of getting it accomplished. What does Sony currently call their live streaming feature? Yes.... oh enlightened one.... do you know and can explain such things to us ordinary plebes?
Make sure you get the mark correctly here. This isn't a copyright, it is a trademark issue and something that is decidedly very different. It is really silly to confuse intellectual property as if it is all one and the same.
Then again, I've seen even supposedly competent lawyers screw the terms up and even misapply one kind of law with another.
It all depends on what Sony plans on doing with the phrase that will determine just how silly or useful the trademark will become. If Sony is doing to be adding hooks into their consoles to encourage YouTubers to make videos of games on those consoles as some sort of special console feature.... I'd be very supportive of the idea. The one click hooks that Mojang put into Minecraft (to give an example) that allows content to be streamed directly to Twitch could be expanded upon and simply installed by default into the next upgrade of the PlayStation line for all games played on that console. Calling that the Sony Let's Play service would be a really good idea and a real selling point in the console industry.
Using it to shut down other more inventive Let's Play content developers on the other hand is likely not going to work out so well.
With any thought at all, you can see that even a small delay, less than a tenth of a second even, will put your aim off when firing.
On this one point, I think it isn't nearly so big of a deal like you are saying. It is a problem for somebody who picks up the gun and isn't really used to it, but somebody who practices extensively with a gun that is at least consistent in how it works will eventually compensate for minor delays like you are talking about here. That is true of almost any other switch to guns for real pros who really should be using the same or similar guns for regular practice.
There are plenty of reasons to be critical of smart guns, but this slight delay is not one of them. Also, the ad hominem attacks by Rei above are also downright silly and really need to be ignored as simply a trollish post.
I agree that the problem of a bullet misfiring (it happens) are minor compared to a gun that doesn't work when you try to pull the trigger.
There is also the deal where government busy bodies and others (let's just call them "hackers" but it can even be criminal groups) who decide to jam or send a signal that turns off "smart guns" except for the ones they want to keep active. This is certainly a vector for political control by elite groups (however you define the term) over ordinary serfs and plebs.
A really interesting thing to look at is to note when the last time that a Hohmann Transfer Orbit to Mars from the Earth has been empty? I think at this point you can reliably state that it will always have something enroute to Mars for at least as long as mankind is going to be in space at all and is a permanent activity of mankind to be sending something there when the window of opportunity opens up.
Even more remarkable is how countries other than the USA and Russia are now sending stuff to Mars. That to me is quite exciting, and shows just how widespread the interest is with doing stuff there. Even the politics of the U.S. Congress and Russian Duma are no longer relevant to the exploration of the planets anymore. And even Europe is starting to get serious about making their own vehicles as a part of that quest for knowledge.
If anything, I think the same may be said about Jupiter in the next decade or so, where such transfer orbits will constantly be used in the future as well.
And western culture didn't need to leave Greece either to study how the universe worked. That at least was a major philosophy a couple thousand years ago where deductive logic was thought to be able to tell us everything we needed to know.
Unfortunately, there are times you need to put those ideas into practice and get out of your mother's basement. There is a whole universe waiting for us, and hoping a bunch of robots are going to do all that work for you is just plain lazy.... and won't give you the necessary insights for understanding either. The robots are just the early explorers picking off the low hanging fruit as it were.
I have long stated that I feel like the entire patent system is just a useless waste of time and needs to be simply removed from the legal code of the USA in its entirety. The professed reason for why patents exist is to help small time inventors to be able to profit from their engineering efforts and to ensure that their ideas are protected for a limited time, as per the U.S. Constitution:
Article I, Section 8 Congress shall have power....
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Kahn Academy is not even trying to accomplish this goal themselves. It is merely a defensive patent to ensure they don't get screwed by a patent troll.
I have yet to see anybody I personally know that has earned a dime from a patent. I know a few people who are professional engineers who have had patents filed from work they've done professionally.... where the patent filing fees were paid by their employers and were also largely defensive patents as well. I also know several people who have indeed gone through the effort to file a patent and go through the legal hassle of trying to get a cool idea patented, only to have the fancy patent grant letter from the USPTO being the only real thing they ever got from all of that money and effort.
I contrast that to at least copyright, where I do know of a few authors who have written books and through copyright have been able to earn some money from their writings, software, or artwork of various kinds. Copyright at least sort of works as intended to protect authors to have an exclusive right to their work for a limited time (that is now perpetual.... but a separate legal issue not relevant to this point).
Patents simply don't work. Even famous inventors like Philo Farnsworth and the Wright Brothers, people who clearly invented incredibly novel ideas after spending substantial amounts of money perfecting the concepts they are associated with, basically got taken for a ride by the patent system and ended up with only a small pittance from all of the legal efforts they expended.... and still didn't stop others from developing products and making huge amounts of money from their supposedly patented ideas.
I didn't know that the Republican Party had any sort of significant influence upon the government of Sao Paulo. The "right wing" political party of Brazil is the PMDB, and has philosophies more or less along the lines of the U.S. Democratic Party.
PT (the "Worker's Party" or Partido dos Trabalhadores) might make such accusations about PMDB though.
The largest CRT display device I ever saw was about 30 feet by 20 feet high in a football stadium. Most people didn't know it was even a CRT display though, so it probably didn't matter. It was one of the huge electronic signs on a scoreboard, where the individual pixels were actually CRTs instead of light bulbs or LEDs like is done now. A heck of a lot of current went through that display to make it work though.... something like 2-3 Megawatts for just the one display if I remember the load numbers properly.
I think a couple of those old CRT-based displays may even still be in service, although they are getting pretty dated right now.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 is just a clone of a Nazi Germany's V-2 technology.
... derived from liquid fuel rocket research by an American, namely Robert Goddard, who developed his rockets originally in New Mexico (at a location not too far from where Spaceport America is now located at).
The funny thing is that SpaceX is even taking this rocket back to that same general testing area too, if you want to bring it full circle.
Not really, except in the most technical sense where you get real close comparing me to Goebble.
The thing about Nazi Germany is that it was a very advanced technological country who had some very brilliant scientists in the 1920's and 1930's that were the leaders of the world in so many areas and laid the foundation for many of the scientific ideas we use today. From country-spanning super highways (Autobahn) and computers (The Z3 made by Konrad Zuse) to even rockets capable of spaceflight (the V2.... which was copied by both the USA and the USSR for their respective space programs). Almost every advanced technology today has at least some roots in engineering and scientific developments that happened in Nazi Germany, even if you hate the racist bigotry and genocide that country also produced during the same time period.
Of course it is useful to point out that the rocket equation itself that made it possible for SpaceX to even land this rocket in the manner that happened was only possible because of the mathematical equation derived by a Russian, notably Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Together with Hermann Oberth (who even met Werner Von Braun and was one of Von Braun's early teachers & mentors) and Robert Goddard, those three men basically started modern concepts of rocketry.
Still, you come off as envious and jealous rather than being very serious when you start complaining about Americans displaying pride about things their fellow citizens have accomplished.
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This guy got hired on as one of Jimmy Wales picks. There are two members of the board who are picked by the community, but unfortunately Jimmy Wales set up the foundation in such a way that he could still control the board and do whatever he wanted to see happen. The end result is that the board can incestually (meaning being accountable from nobody but themselves) select new board members upon their own whim. That is precisely what happened here with this board appointment.
There is the right to fork as is the case with all open source projects, but that is really the only real power that the Wikipedia editors have in this situation other than to complain to the two community board members and see that their one limited voice can be heard on the next election for those positions. The Spanish Language Wikipedia did fork several years ago due to some disputes with the top leadership of Wikipedia (particularly the top admins in that language edition of Wikipedia), but that is far enough in the past that the root causes and resolution have nothing to do with the current situation.
I nearly forked one of the sister projects a few years ago (with widespread support in that sister project), and in hindsight perhaps I should have followed through with the effort too. The really odd thing is how Jimmy Wales offered web space for the fork too. I suppose it just matters how the Wikimedia Board deals with this situation to see if enough editors are finally going to be so completely fed up with the current leadership direction to create that fork or just roll with the punches. Stuff like the Libre Office fork of Open Office is a good example of how such a fork can be successful.
BTW, do we know what his salary at that "non-profit" company is?
Just that the Wikimedia Foundation is swimming in more money than they can spend. Part of that is due to really stupid non-profit laws that prevent setting up a trust account (which can be done by donors... just not the non-profit) to save the money for a rainy day, but also because they get a whole bunch of money flowing their direction too.
As a result, the Wikimedia Foundation has a whole bunch of make-work projects to ensure that they remain "non-profit", but that just bloats their staff size too. As can be seen, I'm not too impressed with how the money is being spent as well since I think better uses of that money could be used.
Blockchains can have lag times of up to about 10 minutes per data exchange or longer, and building chains on separated nodes that on independent networks or computers only makes a difference when one has a longer chain than another... and the longer chain wins anyway. That is just for mining. You need zero syn/ack packets at all in that situation as they aren't needed to synch one block chain miner to another.
As for transaction data, you can pass data around on something like Fidonet... which may have a "router" look up table software so far as passing messages, doesn't really need a dedicated router either.
Seriously, this isn't like IP over avian carrier, I'm saying that TCP/IP is irrelevant to the concept of a blockchain or any other lower level protocol. It helps to automate the process no doubt and adds convenience, but I'm pointing out that it is unnecessary and you can definitely connect locations that are on separate networks for whatever reason that may be or even off-grid entirely for the purposes of a block chain concept. It is also a practical solution in those more unusual situations where network access is limited.
Block chains don't need routers to exist, although it certainly is a useful feature. You can easily (or with modest difficulty) run a block chain network strictly through a sneaker network (aka with just thumb drives/floppy discs (yes... they still exist)/optical storage/etc.) moving data physically from one computer to the next. That is also true of sending transactions for cryptocurrency as well, although at some point you need to get those transactions folded into the primary block chain.
I would agree with your sentiment on the relative importance of the two ideas though, where the idea of a router is definitely something which impacts far more lives and is far more basic to modern computing than a block chain.
It isn't so much a way to store data, which can be done with any peer to peer network like a TOR network, and is in fact where the concept of "cloud storage" comes from. What a block chain does is to timestamp and certify that the data integrity is maintained in such a peer to peer data network.
It is a time stamp so far as you can also demonstrate a chronological sequence between each block and point to one block and certify that it came before another block. You can also establish "ownership" of a chunk of data so far as to authenticate who created that data in the first place. That is also one directional so far as it is hard to prove any one person specifically created that data if they want to stay anonymous, but it is easy for somebody deliberately wanting to claim a piece of data to certify that it is in fact "their" data.
I could see it being used as a way to stamp patent applications, to give another example not typically used.
> In CA the electron prices are straight pass thru from the powerplants.
The first time I read that, I thought you said "In CA, the election prices area straight pass thru..."
as if somehow government bribery has taken on a whole new level of weirdness. I have no doubt that lobbying money from energy producers plays a huge role in this too.
How have the older components in your system held up over the years? The largest concern I've had so far with installing a solar power system at my house is a worry that by the time I get a payback from installing the system, the equipment will be ready for replacement.
Then again, I live in a colder climate city with not so much sunshine so there are a few other variables including the need to have a system that can handle temperature extremes from 40 C to - 40 C along with snow and ice removal issues too. It is still something I'm considering.
The largest problem with mass adoption of solar power is not the stuff happening with a few solar panels but what happens when you have whole neighborhoods with that infrastructure? There are some neighborhoods now in California with so many solar panels that the back flow from the neighborhoods is going into the larger grid... sometimes in ways that the grid was simply not equipped to handle in the first place. In other words.... that substation will need to be upgraded regardless in part because of the solar panels.
Another huge problem with both solar and wind is that they also don't deal with base load issues. Solar is nice for peak demand, but you still need that base load availability when all else isn't available like in the evenings or in calm weather. Battery farms and generating hydrogen can partially solve that problem, but definitely at a loss of energy and significantly added cost to the utilities. Other crazy ideas including pumping water into tanks or reservoirs as an energy storage system in its own right.
Nuclear & coal power are particularly attractive precisely because they can provide that base load power which can be running all of the time even with other sources are not available. Hydro power is on the other hand really useful in peak load situations as turbines can be opened up and generating electricity on demand or turned off with the energy represented in the water behind the dam stored for when it is needed. Most of the renewable energy sources don't have either of those benefits and sort of fall between with solar power having a slight advantage in areas with a whole lot of air conditioning.... as they generate electricity at high amounts precisely when power consumption is needed the most.... sort of.
My point is that solar power connections definitely have cost which goes far beyond just the immediate residential connections to the power grid, and it is overly simplistic to think that large scale adoption of solar power can be done for little additional cost to the utility. If it happens on a very small and localized level with a very low percentage of the customers using solar power.... your assumption is correct. On the other hand, what good is that solar power generation if only a couple homes out of hundreds are solar powered? All that does is make a couple of snotty people with egos feel good about themselves and in some ways makes things worse if you really do care about the environment.
Having lived in 1981 with a memory of the events of that era, I can say you are clueless about what ordinary Americans thought about such things. It certainly wasn't the "height of the Cold War", which could best be used to describe the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis some twenty years earlier. The Vietnam War was over. The Soviet Union was going through "Perestroika" and frankly was even seen as somewhat hopeful that perhaps the Soviet states would actually get some much needed freedoms they lacked in the past. There were also SALT talks where some real progress about the use of nuclear weapons were finally being discussed on a global level, and for the most part the Soviet Union was a dead horse in terms of trying to rally Americans to fight against it.
Yes, there was conflict going on in Afghanistan (Russia invaded around 1981), but the big evil country that got people all riled up in redneck country was Iran and their capture of the U.S. embassy. Libya was also seen as something useful to see drop into the sea and drown.
There certainly were super conservative groups that talked about the Soviet Union and Russia in particular as an "evil empire", and perhaps some of these FBI agents were caught up into that too. The major conflicts between the Soviet Union and the USA were largely done by 1981 and certainly didn't even remotely approach the levels of what happened in Vietnam or Korea.
With NASA's budget, we could feed every hungry child in this country.
Which is already being done (or at least attempted) with food stamps, school lunch programs, and even direct subsidies and tax breaks to food banks. There is no reason for a child to be hungry in America, and it certainly isn't for a lack of effort on the part of the government.
What should be remarkable is that more money is spent on lipstick than on spaceflight. Get your priorities down.
Of course Ames was an old U.S. Navy base where airships were warehoused and moored before it was transferred to NASA. The old airship hanger is still there, along with the runway which serviced the air wing which used to be based there too.
It should be noted that while they did contract out a majority of the design and construction they operated those systems themselves after their completion and had a heavy hand in developing most of them.
What you are describing is how NASA did stuff prior to the 1980's. Since then, even the operations have been handled by other contractors like United Space Alliance, who prepared and launched the Space Shuttle starting during the Ronald Reagan administration.
What makes this commercial cargo contract different is that in the past companies like Boeing and Rockwell International would sign a "cost-plus" contract where the government took the financial risk for what happened. The government agreed that they would pay all legitimate costs in the development and construction of the spacecraft, and in exchange the companies would be guaranteed a certain amount of profit (aka the "plus" of "cost-plus") for doing the project. What is happening with this commercial cargo contract is that NASA is paying a fixed amount of money per flight (plus some initial up front fees that are also a fixed amount) and it is up to the company to make sure they don't go over budget. Then again, any time that company can come up with a way to make it cheaper to meet the contract.... they can keep the profits. It places the financial risk on the companies making and launching these vehicle, not the government.
They've never flown a vehicle
Except for a whole bunch of satellites they've built for other customers and components they've built for other spacecraft builders. Sierra Nevada Corporation isn't exactly new to spaceflight, but they are new to this kind of vehicle.
The Dream Chaser in particular was originally developed for the Commercial Crew program at NASA and very nearly won that contract too. If anything, this cargo resupply is likely a much better fit if you think they are not quite so ready for flying crews up to the ISS. It is going to be launched on the Atlas V, so the real challenge they are facing as far as the contract is concerned is simply if they can maneuver safely to the ISS once the spacecraft gets into orbit. The ability to perform atmospheric re-entry is merely a cost-savings scheme where they hope to be able to refurbish & fly these vehicles again for other customers.
The delivery deadline really isn't going to be all that hard for them to meet as long as Congress doesn't screw around with this contract and pull funding... again.
Do you think I give a shit about the Playstation at all?
Besides, what I'm talking about is specifically the application as a sort of legal maneuver and trademarking the term as applied to its consoles, not the technical ability of getting it accomplished. What does Sony currently call their live streaming feature? Yes.... oh enlightened one.... do you know and can explain such things to us ordinary plebes?
Make sure you get the mark correctly here. This isn't a copyright, it is a trademark issue and something that is decidedly very different. It is really silly to confuse intellectual property as if it is all one and the same.
Then again, I've seen even supposedly competent lawyers screw the terms up and even misapply one kind of law with another.
It all depends on what Sony plans on doing with the phrase that will determine just how silly or useful the trademark will become. If Sony is doing to be adding hooks into their consoles to encourage YouTubers to make videos of games on those consoles as some sort of special console feature.... I'd be very supportive of the idea. The one click hooks that Mojang put into Minecraft (to give an example) that allows content to be streamed directly to Twitch could be expanded upon and simply installed by default into the next upgrade of the PlayStation line for all games played on that console. Calling that the Sony Let's Play service would be a really good idea and a real selling point in the console industry.
Using it to shut down other more inventive Let's Play content developers on the other hand is likely not going to work out so well.
With any thought at all, you can see that even a small delay, less than a tenth of a second even, will put your aim off when firing.
On this one point, I think it isn't nearly so big of a deal like you are saying. It is a problem for somebody who picks up the gun and isn't really used to it, but somebody who practices extensively with a gun that is at least consistent in how it works will eventually compensate for minor delays like you are talking about here. That is true of almost any other switch to guns for real pros who really should be using the same or similar guns for regular practice.
There are plenty of reasons to be critical of smart guns, but this slight delay is not one of them. Also, the ad hominem attacks by Rei above are also downright silly and really need to be ignored as simply a trollish post.
I agree that the problem of a bullet misfiring (it happens) are minor compared to a gun that doesn't work when you try to pull the trigger.
There is also the deal where government busy bodies and others (let's just call them "hackers" but it can even be criminal groups) who decide to jam or send a signal that turns off "smart guns" except for the ones they want to keep active. This is certainly a vector for political control by elite groups (however you define the term) over ordinary serfs and plebs.
A really interesting thing to look at is to note when the last time that a Hohmann Transfer Orbit to Mars from the Earth has been empty? I think at this point you can reliably state that it will always have something enroute to Mars for at least as long as mankind is going to be in space at all and is a permanent activity of mankind to be sending something there when the window of opportunity opens up.
Even more remarkable is how countries other than the USA and Russia are now sending stuff to Mars. That to me is quite exciting, and shows just how widespread the interest is with doing stuff there. Even the politics of the U.S. Congress and Russian Duma are no longer relevant to the exploration of the planets anymore. And even Europe is starting to get serious about making their own vehicles as a part of that quest for knowledge.
If anything, I think the same may be said about Jupiter in the next decade or so, where such transfer orbits will constantly be used in the future as well.
And western culture didn't need to leave Greece either to study how the universe worked. That at least was a major philosophy a couple thousand years ago where deductive logic was thought to be able to tell us everything we needed to know.
Unfortunately, there are times you need to put those ideas into practice and get out of your mother's basement. There is a whole universe waiting for us, and hoping a bunch of robots are going to do all that work for you is just plain lazy.... and won't give you the necessary insights for understanding either. The robots are just the early explorers picking off the low hanging fruit as it were.
I have long stated that I feel like the entire patent system is just a useless waste of time and needs to be simply removed from the legal code of the USA in its entirety. The professed reason for why patents exist is to help small time inventors to be able to profit from their engineering efforts and to ensure that their ideas are protected for a limited time, as per the U.S. Constitution:
Article I, Section 8
Congress shall have power....
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
Kahn Academy is not even trying to accomplish this goal themselves. It is merely a defensive patent to ensure they don't get screwed by a patent troll.
I have yet to see anybody I personally know that has earned a dime from a patent. I know a few people who are professional engineers who have had patents filed from work they've done professionally.... where the patent filing fees were paid by their employers and were also largely defensive patents as well. I also know several people who have indeed gone through the effort to file a patent and go through the legal hassle of trying to get a cool idea patented, only to have the fancy patent grant letter from the USPTO being the only real thing they ever got from all of that money and effort.
I contrast that to at least copyright, where I do know of a few authors who have written books and through copyright have been able to earn some money from their writings, software, or artwork of various kinds. Copyright at least sort of works as intended to protect authors to have an exclusive right to their work for a limited time (that is now perpetual.... but a separate legal issue not relevant to this point).
Patents simply don't work. Even famous inventors like Philo Farnsworth and the Wright Brothers, people who clearly invented incredibly novel ideas after spending substantial amounts of money perfecting the concepts they are associated with, basically got taken for a ride by the patent system and ended up with only a small pittance from all of the legal efforts they expended.... and still didn't stop others from developing products and making huge amounts of money from their supposedly patented ideas.
after the war.
After what war? The war between Brazil and Bolivia?
I didn't know that the Republican Party had any sort of significant influence upon the government of Sao Paulo. The "right wing" political party of Brazil is the PMDB, and has philosophies more or less along the lines of the U.S. Democratic Party.
PT (the "Worker's Party" or Partido dos Trabalhadores) might make such accusations about PMDB though.
The largest CRT display device I ever saw was about 30 feet by 20 feet high in a football stadium. Most people didn't know it was even a CRT display though, so it probably didn't matter. It was one of the huge electronic signs on a scoreboard, where the individual pixels were actually CRTs instead of light bulbs or LEDs like is done now. A heck of a lot of current went through that display to make it work though.... something like 2-3 Megawatts for just the one display if I remember the load numbers properly.
I think a couple of those old CRT-based displays may even still be in service, although they are getting pretty dated right now.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 is just a clone of a Nazi Germany's V-2 technology.
... derived from liquid fuel rocket research by an American, namely Robert Goddard, who developed his rockets originally in New Mexico (at a location not too far from where Spaceport America is now located at).
The funny thing is that SpaceX is even taking this rocket back to that same general testing area too, if you want to bring it full circle.
(Did I side-step Godwin's law?)
Not really, except in the most technical sense where you get real close comparing me to Goebble.
The thing about Nazi Germany is that it was a very advanced technological country who had some very brilliant scientists in the 1920's and 1930's that were the leaders of the world in so many areas and laid the foundation for many of the scientific ideas we use today. From country-spanning super highways (Autobahn) and computers (The Z3 made by Konrad Zuse) to even rockets capable of spaceflight (the V2.... which was copied by both the USA and the USSR for their respective space programs). Almost every advanced technology today has at least some roots in engineering and scientific developments that happened in Nazi Germany, even if you hate the racist bigotry and genocide that country also produced during the same time period.
Of course it is useful to point out that the rocket equation itself that made it possible for SpaceX to even land this rocket in the manner that happened was only possible because of the mathematical equation derived by a Russian, notably Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Together with Hermann Oberth (who even met Werner Von Braun and was one of Von Braun's early teachers & mentors) and Robert Goddard, those three men basically started modern concepts of rocketry.
Still, you come off as envious and jealous rather than being very serious when you start complaining about Americans displaying pride about things their fellow citizens have accomplished.