I'm not saying he shouldn't have responded, but I've never taken a blow-by-blow quote and response session on a blog as making a particularly convincing case for anything. He should've stated it simply, and clearly: the Roadster performed inadequately because (for whatever reason the journalist cares to give) he ignored the car's range information and failed to adequately charge.
If it takes an hour to fully charge I could see roadside cafes, movie theatres, etc. lining up to get them. (Not meant to be cynical: if you have people who need an hour to kill and a business that lets them kill that hour they really need to get together. It'd be quite a cultural change to routinely stop in for lunch at a particular place because you can charge you car there, of course.)
Regardless, they should just let more and more people do test runs like this and whether the issue was bad Tesla advice, a total fluke or a malevolent con job, it'll get averaged away. Musk shouldn't have sunk into a he-said she-said pissing contest on the internet, he's a CEO not a slashdotter.
Even supposing there was a compensation scheme giving out free windows - and there isn't AFAIK - I'm not sure that most people would put up with having unheatable room in Russian in the winter for an indeterminate amount of time, just for the sake of a free pane of glass.
Starship design optimises for minimum mass (mass, material choice), maximum available space (size), and optimum use thereof (shape). With an asteroid you have no control over material, are bounded in size and shape, and the minimum mass is achieved by sculpting out the shape of a conventional starship.
Make no mistake, I'm all for a comprehensive sky survey and for interception of potentially dangerous objects, but you're glossing over a lot of things. It's not as simple as having more telescopes like those that spotted 2008 TC3; depending on what the chances of detecting an object of that size with that 'scope are (e.g. was it blindingly obvious with the 'scope pointed the right way, or a lucky observation) it might not scale up as easily as you'd like.
Supposing you successfully intercept the object, you do not know how it will fragment, much less how momentum will be partitioned between the fragments. What's the contingency plan if you turn a 60m object into one 50m object and one 10m object, and now have a reduced lead time (perhaps hours, depending on rocket prep time) to determine their new orbits? I'd much rather have a 60m object with a known landing ellipse (for want of the right term) we can respond to, than a 50m object on much less understood course.
I'm not sure how it follows from discovering a solitary asteroid with a twenty hour lead time that we can "trivially" perform a sky sweep with enough comprehensiveness and detail to give a "several days" lead time. Yes, we could do it, but it's not at all obvious that it would be easy.
Turning a single impactor with a known trajectory into an unknown number of impactors of unknown size and unknown trajectory does not strike me as a great response to detecting such an object either.
"anyone claiming to plan these things 37 years into the future is full of it", "Read some Ray Kurzweil books to get some perspective"
Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicts a technological singularity in 2045? But I'm not supposed to trust people who claim to be able to predict outcomes decades in the future?
That greatly discourages people from having the repair done, makes it costlier and more difficult to do, and probably leaves the battery and the body of the tablet in a completely unusable state.
It's not that they're specifically designed with preventing repair in mind; it's that they're not designed with repairs in mind at all. In the increased pursuit of miniaturisation Apple (and now MS) have completely removed repairability as a design consideration.
Nobody should have to apply heat to a lithium ion battery in order to replace it. That is insane. Every step past removing the kickstand seemed to require you to pry the glass cover and LCD off a rigid metal frame, also with liberal application of heat to the device.
No, it's still a lot better. We still have our great original content on the terrestrial channels and the good imported shows are available with only three times three-minute ad breaks.
Frankly I'm watching more stuff on-demand or with DVD rentals than live, though. TV is dead.
The same disadvantage affects the person trying to spoof the signal. He has to know what his radar reflection looks like before he can spoof it, and as an added complication he has to perform a transform on it so it looks convincing when it's coming from a different location.
Not even remotely accurate. 1G to 2G was a transition from analogue to digital cellular. You still only had a basic WAP modem function at best, and were charged per minute. At this point I had 56kbps dial up at home.
It wasn't until GPRS was added to that we even had a dedicated data channel and that was limited to sub-dial-up speeds, on a good day, but at least you were charged for the data you used and not how long your phone was online, so you could have an always-active data connection. At this point I had 512kbps broadband.
3G took that up to about 300kbps at launch - at least a tenfold improvement - and went as high as 2Mbps, before the arrival of HSDPA and related technologies that can get you up to about 50Mbps on the same spectrum. My phone was now as fast as - and often faster than - my home broadband.
Indeed, what he's describing is a pretty standard radar countermeasure. That the source is the radio broadcast background and not a special transmitter really doesn't make a difference. If anything, passive radar has the advantage that you could run a band pass filter to remove and ignore the jamming signal.
It's analogous to navigating a dark room by looking at the light coming from the TV set. Although the light from the TV is a signal carrier and is constantly changing, it is consistent enough in time and space that you can use the light reflected off nearby objects to navigate.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying he shouldn't have responded, but I've never taken a blow-by-blow quote and response session on a blog as making a particularly convincing case for anything. He should've stated it simply, and clearly: the Roadster performed inadequately because (for whatever reason the journalist cares to give) he ignored the car's range information and failed to adequately charge.
You think that the human race's only option for of survival is an off-world colony, and you think the other guy's the fantasist?
If it takes an hour to fully charge I could see roadside cafes, movie theatres, etc. lining up to get them. (Not meant to be cynical: if you have people who need an hour to kill and a business that lets them kill that hour they really need to get together. It'd be quite a cultural change to routinely stop in for lunch at a particular place because you can charge you car there, of course.)
Regardless, they should just let more and more people do test runs like this and whether the issue was bad Tesla advice, a total fluke or a malevolent con job, it'll get averaged away. Musk shouldn't have sunk into a he-said she-said pissing contest on the internet, he's a CEO not a slashdotter.
Even supposing there was a compensation scheme giving out free windows - and there isn't AFAIK - I'm not sure that most people would put up with having unheatable room in Russian in the winter for an indeterminate amount of time, just for the sake of a free pane of glass.
Starship design optimises for minimum mass (mass, material choice), maximum available space (size), and optimum use thereof (shape). With an asteroid you have no control over material, are bounded in size and shape, and the minimum mass is achieved by sculpting out the shape of a conventional starship.
It's not like space is famously chock full of rocks or anything like that.
Make no mistake, I'm all for a comprehensive sky survey and for interception of potentially dangerous objects, but you're glossing over a lot of things. It's not as simple as having more telescopes like those that spotted 2008 TC3; depending on what the chances of detecting an object of that size with that 'scope are (e.g. was it blindingly obvious with the 'scope pointed the right way, or a lucky observation) it might not scale up as easily as you'd like.
Supposing you successfully intercept the object, you do not know how it will fragment, much less how momentum will be partitioned between the fragments. What's the contingency plan if you turn a 60m object into one 50m object and one 10m object, and now have a reduced lead time (perhaps hours, depending on rocket prep time) to determine their new orbits? I'd much rather have a 60m object with a known landing ellipse (for want of the right term) we can respond to, than a 50m object on much less understood course.
Nope. That's a burning natural gas deposit in Turkmenistan.
Meteors are not predominantly made of ice.
I'm not sure how it follows from discovering a solitary asteroid with a twenty hour lead time that we can "trivially" perform a sky sweep with enough comprehensiveness and detail to give a "several days" lead time. Yes, we could do it, but it's not at all obvious that it would be easy.
Turning a single impactor with a known trajectory into an unknown number of impactors of unknown size and unknown trajectory does not strike me as a great response to detecting such an object either.
I think you'd have a better chance of trying to swat down a fighter plane with a magazine.
Someone's going to have to help me out here:
"anyone claiming to plan these things 37 years into the future is full of it", "Read some Ray Kurzweil books to get some perspective"
Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicts a technological singularity in 2045? But I'm not supposed to trust people who claim to be able to predict outcomes decades in the future?
That greatly discourages people from having the repair done, makes it costlier and more difficult to do, and probably leaves the battery and the body of the tablet in a completely unusable state.
It's not that they're specifically designed with preventing repair in mind; it's that they're not designed with repairs in mind at all. In the increased pursuit of miniaturisation Apple (and now MS) have completely removed repairability as a design consideration.
Nobody should have to apply heat to a lithium ion battery in order to replace it. That is insane. Every step past removing the kickstand seemed to require you to pry the glass cover and LCD off a rigid metal frame, also with liberal application of heat to the device.
I am an imbecile.
No, it's still a lot better. We still have our great original content on the terrestrial channels and the good imported shows are available with only three times three-minute ad breaks.
Frankly I'm watching more stuff on-demand or with DVD rentals than live, though. TV is dead.
Switch to active-mode, seeing as there's nothing to cause interference with?
The same disadvantage affects the person trying to spoof the signal. He has to know what his radar reflection looks like before he can spoof it, and as an added complication he has to perform a transform on it so it looks convincing when it's coming from a different location.
Not even remotely accurate. 1G to 2G was a transition from analogue to digital cellular. You still only had a basic WAP modem function at best, and were charged per minute. At this point I had 56kbps dial up at home.
It wasn't until GPRS was added to that we even had a dedicated data channel and that was limited to sub-dial-up speeds, on a good day, but at least you were charged for the data you used and not how long your phone was online, so you could have an always-active data connection. At this point I had 512kbps broadband.
3G took that up to about 300kbps at launch - at least a tenfold improvement - and went as high as 2Mbps, before the arrival of HSDPA and related technologies that can get you up to about 50Mbps on the same spectrum. My phone was now as fast as - and often faster than - my home broadband.
1G - 0
2G - 0.05 - 0.1
3G - 0.5 - 50
4G - 50 - ?
Doesn't look like decreasing returns to me.
Indeed, what he's describing is a pretty standard radar countermeasure. That the source is the radio broadcast background and not a special transmitter really doesn't make a difference. If anything, passive radar has the advantage that you could run a band pass filter to remove and ignore the jamming signal.
It's analogous to navigating a dark room by looking at the light coming from the TV set. Although the light from the TV is a signal carrier and is constantly changing, it is consistent enough in time and space that you can use the light reflected off nearby objects to navigate.
That sounds about right for something that's meant to complement 5G cellular adoption, then.
It's almost as if the people who kept their cars clean and tidy didn't visit the car wash.