You think having the part designed to handle five times the load it actually experienced to not be "with sufficient margin"? How much of a margin do you want them to put, 100x?

RTFA. They were doing statistical-sampling quality control testing of struts. The problem was that most of them were just fine, but there were a very small number which were totally defective and broke at a tiny fraction of their rated value. And no, SpaceX did not make the parts, it was an outside supplier. And yes, SpaceX A) will now be testing 100% of them, and B) is ditching the supplier.

It's not just about the cost of a failed launch, there's also a huge cost to a company's reputation if a rocket fails. And to their schedule.

Out of curiosity, is there any lightweight way to sense how close a part is to failure *in use*? I mean, finding defects on the ground is great, no question. But what if something would doom a mission not due to a part having a manufacturing defect, but due to an oversight somewhere in the rocket design process, or assembly, or transportation, or launch setup, or unexpected weather conditions, or whatnot? It seems to me it could be a massive boost to launch reliability if one knew that a part was about to fail - for example, in this case, the computers could automatically have throttled back to the rocket to reduce stresses, at the cost of expending more propellant, and possibly been able to salvage the mission. And then the problem could be remedied for future missions, without having to have a launch failure first.

To pick a random, for example, would there potentially be a change in resistance or capacitance or other electrical properties when a strut nears its breaking point?

Obviously, though, if adding sensing hardware would add a high weight or cost penalty, that would be unrealistic.

Funny ;) But the main point is that its surface is high radiation and very oxidizing; and as far as we know there's no liquids anywhere on Mars except for possible transients or extremely perchlorate-rich brines (aka, something you'd use to sterilize a rock of life).

On the other hand, subsurface water oceans are common elsewhere in the solar system, and colder bodies are known and/or theorized to have a wide range of alternative liquids.

Also, maybe it's just because I've never worked in that industry before, maybe it's common practice in rocketry, but is anyone else impressed with the use of sound triangulation to figure out which part broke? I've never heard of that being done before.

Sad that the Falcon Heavy won't be launched until next spring, I've been really looking forward to that. Oh well...

Elon is surely really fuming about this one, as I know from past interviews with him that he really doesn't like having to source hardware from outside suppliers. He has the old "robber baron" mindset of wanting to get the whole production chain start-to-finish in house, and it's one of the things that really frustrated him when he started Tesla: at the time of the last interview I read on the subject (something like 3 or 4 years ago), he had gotten SpaceX up to 80% in-house, but Tesla was only up to 20% in-house. Car manufacture has long been all about sourcing parts from a wide range of outside suppliers.

But even at 80% in-house at SpaceX, looks like that remaining 20% still bit them : Seriously, failing at 1/5th the rated failure value? The vendor might as well have given them a cardboard cutout with the word "strut" written on it in sharpie.

I think it's all about barriers to entry (no pun intended).

Ie, some woman you think is attractive enough to warrant sexual interest, has an interest in you for same, doesn't care you're married, you're able to engage in this without your wife or anyone else who might bust you suspecting anything.

I think if the barrier to entry was low, a lot more men would be tempted. But what's probably holding them back isn't so much their morals, but their own unwillingness to have sex with a less attractive woman or take many risks.

All the married men I know seem to be happily married and we've ALL had what-if conversations about affairs. Usually it seems to boil down to which set of totally unrealistic circumstances might arise and at which point the regret of not doing it is greater than doing it.

Like, I'm trapped in a hotel during a blizzard and by sheer chance so are two super hot movie stars and after killing time drinking they both decide they want me.

Short of that, other opportunities just seem unlikely or destined for serious nightmares.

The speed of light also comes into play in the Fermi Paradox. It's quite possible that for a billion years there's been a vast galactic scale civilization in the universe emitting copious amounts of readily-identifiable radiation. But if that galaxy is more than a billion light years away, it would be physically impossible for us to see them.

There's lots of things about the universe that would make it hard for advanced lifeforms to spot each other unless they're close.

And I fully agree about our own solar system (although I personally think Mars is a terrible place to look and Europa is overrated). There's so many "worlds" in our solar system with fluids (including water, although I wouldn't be so bold as to say that it's a requirement for all life) and energy sources to harness. Organic chemicals seem very common too, even complex ones.

Of all of the bodies in the solar system, I think Enceladus has the best potential payoff in terms of "dollars vs. chance of finding evidence of life". Namely because you don't even have to land on it to do a sample return (but if you do want to land on it for better sample collection, it takes little energy to take off again). And because it emits its internal sea straight up into space. And its internal sea has interesting properties - namely, it's a hyperbasic sea caused by serpentinization of its rocky core, which is a process that also releases hydrogen, giving a potential fuel source to hydrogen-metabolizing life.

That said, my dream mission is still a Titan sample collection/return mission using an RTG-powered rotary nacelle craft to fly in hops all across the planet over the course of a year, recharging its flight batteries overnight on the surface and taking small samples from every potential terrain - dune fields, rivers, the various seas, cryovolcanoes, etc. It would then re-dock with its ascent stage (single solid stage similar to a small Pegasus stage), lift the ascent stage out of the atmosphere (to reduce drag) and as fast as possible until it's drained its flight batteries (which would happen quickly with the added load), ditch all unneeded weight and fire the ascent stage to re-dock with the ion-powered orbiter that got it there. The orbiter, having spent the past year skimming the outer layers of Titan's atmosphere for return propellant that doubles as an atmospheric sample return, would then return to Earth, possibly skimming Enceladus's plumes and Saturn's atmosphere on the way for more sample returns.

No question that would be a flagship mission, though, requiring two RTGs and three stages. An Enceladus-only return could probably be done on Discovery or New Frontiers budget (probably the latter).

It's a serious point. Our own radio signals are probably indistinguishable from background noise from Alpha Centauri, and they're actually reducing with time, not increasing.

Rather than than looking for "stray radio communication" (you really think an advanced society is going to lose lots of energy to stray communications?), we should either be striving for extreme optical / UV resolution (satellite-based interferometer telescope) so that we can spatially resolve surface spectra on extrasolar planets in our area to look for signs of life; and in general look for signs of energy release that might be associated with interstellar travel, such as antimatter annihilation, directed thrust, solar sail reflection, etc.

IMHO.

It reminds me of something I read about when MBAs buy apartment buildings. They said if your building has a full roster of tenants, you're not charging enough in rent. You should be raising rents frequently enough that you always have 1-2 empty places that result from people who can't afford the rent increase.

It sure seems like it's a not entirely nuanced attempt to claim that Silicon Valley is struggling to suppress its desire to be willfully racist, conspiring with venture capitalists to ensure that black entrepeneurs are deliberately kept ot of Silicon Vallley and relying on discriminatory, elite colleges to make sure their "pipelines" are kept full of priviledged white people. Really?

I also can't help but ponder the contradiction in the institutional bias narratives. On one hand, institutional bias has kept the vast majority of blacks segregated, in desperate poverty, grossly uneducated and running through a revolving door of police harassment, arrest, and prison.

Yet in spite of this narrative (which I think is probably more true than false), the black community is still creating legions of talented professionals and entrepeneurs, so many that only discrimination can account for their inability to be represented proportional to their overall population among the ranks of Silicon Valley or corporate America as a whole.

Which is it? Either the black community is so healthy and well served that it's capable of producing all these entrepeneurs, IT experts, and other sundry well-educated professionals for corporate America to discriminate against. Or, the black community is shattered and oppressed by a system that can't give them a secondary school education and wants to keep them imprisoned. It can't be both.

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I kind of want to agree with you that stopping it would be difficult due to market forces, but then why hasn't Eastern Europe become the new home of Google, Microsoft, et al?

They have a large and pretty well established educational system with lots of trained people from high quality educational systems that are not terribly unlike the US and have overall technical accomplishments similar to the US in terms of general engineering and science. They're physically close to Western Europe where so many of these companies already have significant business presences. The physical infrastructure is on par with the US (roads, electricity, housing, etc).

You might even argue that culturally they're more compatible, or at least less different, which could make for better social and organizational interfaces with US organizations.

The blog post was pretty content free about what exactly went wrong.

I would have guessed they would have the functional ability to either restore a storage snapshot to get back an entire LUN or a VM from a VM-based backup, and maybe they did.

You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.

Wrong. You're conflating authors with their works. The only sure way an author could prevent Alexandrians from copying their works was to not create works in the first place.

If they created works, even if they were not written down, nothing stopped someone else from writing it down. (For example, Socrates never wrote anything; what we know of him comes primarily from the writings of his student, Plato; Another example is from the days of Elizabethan theater, when printers would have people dictate the scripts to plays, sometimes actors who had memorized the lines, sometimes just people with good memories who had been in the audience)

If works were created, written down, and shared with anyone, there was absolutely nothing that could keep the scrolls from getting copied or moved. Consider Virgil, who wrote fanfic (The Aneid) based on the epic poems of Homer (The Illiad and The Odyssey), but wanted all the copies burned; this was ignored, and the world is better off for it.

Fundamentally, it's the same issue with secrets, or any other information. The only way to control the spread of it is to either convince other people to respect your wishes (which they may or may not do according to their own self interest, and other factors), or to never tell anyone.

I don't think we can credit copyright with the increase in the number of works in existence in recent history, as compared with ages past. The real credit is probably owed to increases in literacy, improved artificial lighting, the development of printing (as well as improved paper and ink to support it), greater leisure time available due to a variety of technological and social advances, increases in the internal stability of much of the world (hard to sell books when bandits rob every wagon, or war ravages the country), etc. Copyright can be nice, but it gets way more credit than it deserves.

Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control. Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment. If they can't do that, they have to have other jobs that take time away from creating. Potentially, those jobs take away all their time from creating, so they don't create. It's rare as hell to find someone who is interested in creating works, has the financial means to do so without having to worry about the cost (and opportunity cost), yet refuses because they're a control freak. I'm confident that the sorts of authors you've identified are so rare as to not be worth concerning ourselves with.

As for the purpose of modern, authorial copyright (as opposed to the old stationers' copyright), you're almost entirely right: I'd only say that mere access is not enough. Rather, copyright is intended to provide an overall benefit to society by increasing the number of works which are created and published, while imposing the fewest and shortest restrictions on the public. It operates by providing some temporary benefits (whose actual value is determined by the market) to authors, but this is merely a means to an end, not an end in itself. If copyright were actually meant to benefit authors, it's clear that it has never done a good job of it at all. The stereotype of the starving author exists for a reason.

Personally, I would drop terms to a year, with numerous opportunities for renewal, but with overall maximum lengths that were still quite short (probably no more than 20 years or so, and less in the case of some types of works, such as computer software). The reason is that when we had renewal terms, many rights holders failed to renew, evidencing a lack of desire for longer copyright on their part, and getting works into the public domain faster through their inaction. Since everyone winds up as happy as they wanted to be in that scenario, I see no reason not to return to it.

Regarding maximum lengths, you may be interested to read the following paper on the subject: http://rufuspollock.org/papers...