I read that as "landing *system* failure". If a plane's engines die it can glide; if its landing gear fails to deploy it can still perform a controlled belly landing; if it's approaching at a bad trajectory it can take another go-around.

Starship has redundant landing engines (at least one prototype landing test failure was because it wasn't prepared to *use* the redundant engines; lesson learned...), but unless they're keeping better ideas secret, the current backup plan if a trajectory goes bad is "fall in the ocean, tip over uncontrolled, and hope not to explode", and the backup plan if a tower catch fails (they're basically putting the landing gear on the *ground* rather than on the vehicle!) is "try again until a slim propellant margin runs dry, then fall onto concrete".

If Starship works at all, this shouldn't be a long-term problem, I think. They'll have loads of opportunities to iteratively improve the system once they're flying it unmanned every week. They may never get to 1-in-a-hundred-billion commercial aircraft risk levels, but they'll be under the 1-in-250 levels that astronauts tolerate in no time.

"I don't care about where they play, I just want people to have fun playing games because that's just better for the industry,"

sounds like it ought to mean

"We'll still support future Minecraft releases on Mac, Linux, and older Windows versions after all; sorry about the confusion at E3!"

but I'm guessing it actually means

"I'm lying. I'm lying right now. Isn't it fun that I can lie to your face, and you can't even call me on it or I'll just give someone else the "story"? Now type my lies for me, stenographer. Maybe tell your kids to take a few classes in economics rather than journalism, huh?"

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/1... ...AND BURN!

Lol. Sucka.

> Power: See above. Put on your tin foil hat, but this is one step in a wave to disrupt and control communication when a "state of emergency" or "martial law" is declared. Just wait.

As I understand it, the US discovered it is WAY easier to control people when they are sedentary (obese due to force feeding them subsidized surplus corn), uneducated (US ranks among the lowest in public education), and easily entertained (reality TV, 24-hour newscrap cycles).

With that in mind: failing to provide communication mechanisms cause panic. Panic is hard to manage. If I was a government intent on controlling the population, I wouldn't do things to disrupt their internet feed or make them feel like they need to "prep". I would keep them week and as dependent on infrastructure as possible. Not maintaining phone lines would work against that.

Plus, the government --already-- controls communication. Everything we transmit is capture, logged, mined and correlated. So there's really nothing to be had from the gov't angle in my mind. I agree with your Greed and Control 1e6% however. Its another way cell companies make billions in the US. Every country I've been to from Europe to SE Asia has better, cheaper, more reliable wireless.

I live deep in the woods in central Oregon. My phone line has ~35 repair tube things on it (big pringles-sized black cans) between the main pole and the 5 miles to my house. Falling trees break it almost every year. Verizon and AT&T provide land line access, and CenturyLink provides my 0.6MBps DSL (I know, ugh).

Who -owns- the line? And wouldn't switching to a cell access point fuck everyone's DSL? I know so little about phone lines....

I know, I heard all about how good Trump and his son Baron are at cyber. Very smart, his son. Very smart at cybers.

Remember in 2000 when Sam Donaldson was fired for claiming a deferment letter for Bush Jr was from the late 60's, but it was written in a proportional font?

This is the same thing:

"...it's highly unlikely that the foundation would name its own folder "Pay to Play.""

Bahahaha!

The durability of the booms, emptying of the booms, safety to wildlife, the ineffectiveness of the booms since the patch is so huge... all of these issues have pointed to the fact this can't work. Basically this kid is pitching Solar Freakin' Roadways, but somehow got lots of money and a international coverage anyway. I think its the culture of celebrity getting behind this, along with the: screw the problem, lets treat the symptom strategy deployed when the problem is simply too big to address.

HO.LY.SHIT.

I did not know that.

Assange lost all credibility when he played his partisan hand this session. He is no longer democratizing information, he is selectively choosing information to further his "side" because he has a grudge. He blew it. Someone else needs to take the helm.

Flashing LEDs that the public can program!?!? OOOOH! SCIENCY!!! /smashes face on desk/

There is no need to build a proof of concept when physics does not support the premise. The model has already been done on paper, building something that won't work just proves the builder lacks important knowledge or never consulted with any experts. That's what cracks me up about this: there is no engineering problem to solve, it simply will never work based on first-year thermodynamics. Unfortunately most of the people in the world are not engineers or scientists, so they don't have the knowledge to see through the scam.

"They are building the wright flyer"

That is the absolute wrong analogy.

Prior to the Wright brothers there were actual working examples of gliders and aerodynamic / fluid dynamic diff'eq had been around for a century. The physics and math backed up the Wright brothers' hunches, they were "simply" genius mechanical engineers that solved an engineering problem.

With this solar swindle, literally all of the math and physics rejects the premise. So there is no basis from which to even start from, there is no "engineering problem" to solve.

So let's all stop comparing to other famous engineers, m'kay?

No one is being "made" to pay for anything. Granted they may have been swindled, but that's not the same as extortion.

Yeah teams were WAY smaller prior to P6 (I didn't work on P5).

The design and validation teams were WAY smaller prior to Pentium. In 1992 I was a blue-badge employee and worked on the 486DX2. The design -and- validation team was about 20 people (granted it was mostly a frequency tweak so we didn't need many new tests), and validation was largely accomplished with random template generators (DART, with some directed tests that were written to match the arch specification) that worked on both AIX and SunOS. I had a SunOS box at my apartment so that I could check simulation coverage 24/7.

The 486 pipeline was very simple, and so was the bus interface. Once things went out-of-order on P6 it all just blew up like crazy. There were so many state machines... so.. many... i'm getting shivers...

Did you do validation? I think spending time in validation is some serious "earning your stripes" stuff compared to other groups I worked in.

When I popped in a few years ago, the tools were _way_ more advanced. They added distributed computing (netbatch) and used some pretty sophisticated formal verification software from Cadence. ....

Re: schools...

There was a weird split at my school, where CompSci 101 was taught with Pascal and Fortran on AIX boxes, and then Intro to C was taught in the IBM PS/2 lab and I remember Borland (not MSoft, my mistake) was the sponsored compiler and was sold at a heavy discount to students for years. Linux didn't show up until 4 years after I graduated, and from what I was told C/C++ remained on Windows until almost 2000. O_o

Thanks for giving me the chance to spew a bunch of `memberberry nostalgia... :)