Didn't say it was. I just said NASA should abandon it to whomever wants to pay to keep it operating. Prettty sure its past its original end of life anyway which I think was 2010.
If Russia doesn't want to play nice, or pay to run it themselves, I doubt ESA, Canada or Japan will be able to keep it going if the U.S. pulls out.
> That's why Bitcoin needs regulation
Regulation doesn't stop scams, it merely makes them more creative. Let's regulate 'till only lawyers can own a business? Scams could be not prevented but undone, by total transparency and traceability, which is easier to implement than you think ("the books have no trace of transactions involving you and this thing? then you don't own it").
But, unfortunately, transparency would expose powerful people and their tricks, so the powerful people allow STASI-like spying and your children groped at the airport, so you rebel and seek comfort in privacy. Checkmate, you lose.
I am against BTC regulation because every time you earn something real or money, from bitcoin or whatever, you should put it in the tax form else you're being dishonest. BTC, like virtual game goodies, fall in this category IMHO.
Can you please explain? The "G" in "GCC" stands for "GNU," so isn't that "The Bazaar" by definition?
It's not a matter of having an "urge". I lived in an area with a lot of gang violence, and I had a lot of friends who weren't particularly good at standing up for themselves... hippies, ravers, skaters, theater folk, etc. When your friends can't stand up for themselves and there's an imminent threat, you step forward.
I was just a cowardly little nerd who skipped a grade and was younger and smaller than everyone else when I was young, and spent a lot of time running away. Then I hit puberty and my balls dropped, and I had an altercation where a teacher didn't show up for class and the students were running wild, a football player punched me in the back of the head and called my mother a whore, and I beat him half unconcious with tables, chairs and desks. I was standing over his prostrate body with a chair in my hand, and a third guy suplexed me on my head while I was paying attention to the guy who had infringed my honour. One second I was standing, the next I was on my head semiconscious. It all happened so fast, I wanted to understand how he did it, so I joined the team and for the first time in my life I was fighting guys my own size instead of guys who outweighed me by a hundred pounds, and I was undefeated in tournament.
Now, we're all adults, I'm not wandering around being dwarfed by everyone I meet, and I'm a tough guy who still surprises himself because part of me still thinks of myself as David and everyone else as Goliath. I enter every fight expecting my opponent to break me, hoping only to break him more than he breaks me, and I'm always startled at how slow and incompetent he is. I still get my bones broken sometimes, I've broken ribs, my nose, my face, my teeth... but I fight through the pain until, in the end, I'm standing over my helpless opponent and holding his life in my hands.
Truth is, I like it. When the violence comes, the adrenaline response I get is much higher than the average guy, to the point where I get chills and shiver and am completely dismissive of pain. It scares people, when it's in the aftermath and my teeth are chattering and I'm grinning like a madman and shaking like a leaf in a storm, wishing there was someone else to fight because I feel SOO fucking awesome. Based on conversations with doctors and martial arts instructors, only about 5% of the population has a physiological response like I do.
Training aside, I seem to be built for this type of thing... although it's possible it's a learned response from the violence I saw in my youth.
At any rate, I think about it and talk about it because I like it, I'm good at it, and when the shit hits the fan, the people close to me appreciate it, even if they find it unpleasant to hear about when we're all sitting and making small talk. It's nice to participate in a serious conversation about it.
I agree with the definition of pot as a gateway drug only because it is mostly harmless but illegal. Anyone taking it is already breaking the law, so why not do so with something else?
Having the law aligned with risk breaks the "gateway" argument; I agree with you that caffeine and alcohol etc. called gateways is ridiculous.
I actually totally get Amazon's logic on this one. If there's only a $10 extra profit on each drone delivery (something I'm sure tons of people in range of the service would pay for in order to get their item in half an hour), and if we assume each drone operational cycle takes one hour (delivery, return, charging), then that's $240 a day. Doesn't take a lot of days to justify the cost of a drone with a return like that.
Except that you have bought them; you just haven't realized it. Energy density of li-ion batteries has grown by about 50% in the past five years. Have you seriously not noticed how cell phone and laptop battery mah ratings keep growing while they keep making the volume available for the batteries smaller?
It's big news when a new tech happens in the lab. It's not big news when the cells first roll off a production line.
Most new lab techs don't make it to commercialization. But a lucky fraction of them do, and that's the reason that you're not walking around today with a cell phone with a battery the size of a small brick.
If everyone last person was going to be driving electric cars tomorrow, yes, that would be a problem.
Given that that's not the case, and for decades it's always going to be such that the people whose situation best suits an electric car are going to be the next ones in line to adopt them, then no, it's not a problem. You really think people can't build curbside/parking lot charging stations over the course of *decades* if there seems to be steadily growing interest in EVs?
As a side note, I don't know those exact neighborhoods in your pictures, but in my experience, most people who live in such places don't own *any* car.
Actually, 800 is quite a sensible number. At an average speed of 60 miles per hour (aka, factoring in driving / bathroom / meal breaks), that's 13 1/2 hours of driving - a good day's drive. Throw in a few more hours driving time / a couple hundred miles more range if you charge while you're taking your breaks. Once you get that sort of range, charge speed becomes virtually irrelevant because it happens while you're sleeping (and getting ready for bed / getting up in the morning). A regular Tesla home charger could handle that sort of load.
I agree with you that a half hour charge isn't actually that onerous, but it definitely will scare off people who are used to filling up faster. And charge stations that can do half hour charges on 300 miles range (150kW+ for an efficient car, more like 250kW for a light truck) are exceedingly rare as it stands. A charger that powerful isn't some aren't some little wall box with a cord hanging off of it, it's the size of a couple soda machines put together (bigger if you add a battery buffer so that you don't need a huge power feed) that feeds so much power that its cable has to be liquid cooled and which costs around $100k installed. Ten minute charges are, of course, around three times that size. I've only ever come across mention of *one* charger in the ballpark of the required 750kW to charge a 300 mile light truck in 10 minutes - an 800kW device custom made a couple years back for the US Army Tank Command. I have no clue what it cost, but I'm guessing "Very Expensive".
I'm not saying that the problem is intractable, by any stretch, I totally believe that we're going to transition over to EVs. I just question the sort of time scales that a lot of people envision. The average car on US roads is 10 years old. Implying an average 20 year lifespan. And many cars don't get scrapped then, they just go to the third world. Even if you suddenly switch all new car manufacturing over to EVs, you're talking decades to replace them. But of course you can't just switch over like that - even if everyone was right now sold on the concept of EVs with current tech, you're talking at least a decade, possibly more, to tool up to that level of production. But of course, not everyone is right now sold on the concept of EVs with current tech.
Realistically, you're looking at maybe a 40 year transition. I hate to say that, because I love EVs, but I'm not going to just pretend that the reality is other than it is.
I'll also add that while fast chargers are big and expensive, the size and cost actually are comparable to building a gas station on a per-pump basis, and the economic argument works out for making them even if there's only a reasonable (50% or less) surcharge on the electricity sold and if they're only selling electricity a couple percent of the time. But you need to get a couple percent of the time usage to economically justify them - one person stopping for 10 minutes every few days just isn't going to cut it. And not every EV is going to stop at every charger even if they're driving on the same route - if your chargers are that far apart, then that means you're pushing people's range so much that they're not going to be comfortable driving that route. All together, this means that if you want to have fast charging infrastructure economically justifiable in an area you need high EV penetration, where several dozen EVs driving long distances will be going by each charger every day - even out in the boonies. And when you're talking at prices on the order of $100k per unit, you're no longer talking about a range where peoples' goodwill toward EVs or interest in having a loss leader outside is going to pay for them.
Basically, while busy interstate routes on the coasts and the like can economically justify them with a small fraction of a percent of people driving EVs, out in the boonies, they're going to be stuck with smaller, cheaper, slower chargers for a good while. Unless people are willing to pay a big surcharge on the electricity sold, that is (500% surcharge instead of 50% = 1/10th as many vehicles needed).
Probably one of the best things NASA could do at this point is abandon ISS, stop paying for it, and tell the Russians its all theirs. There is a fair chance they would fly Americans to it for free rather than get saddled with that boat anchor.
If the Russians don't want it either its time to deorbit it. It would free up a LOT of money for more useful endeavors. Its never been good for much of anything, certainly nothing to justify the staggering price tag
SpaceX will have the ability to put astronauts in to LEO in a few years. Its not like its a crisis, there is very little for people to do in LEO at the moment other than to be lab rats for zero G physiology studies. You would think they would have done most of that work by now.
About the only point in putting people in space at all is as colonists, persumably on Mars. You can do just about everything else way better and cheaper with robots.
So until you are ready to fly people to Mars to stay, stop getting your panties in a bunch about getting them to LEO.
I used to wrestle in school, took it pretty seriously and won gold in several provincial tournaments. I found that my body would be operating automatically when I did my moves, just like the article describes, and that the conscious part of my mind would be "watching" as though I was removed from the fight and was being an outside observer. Except that it wasn't that simple, because the tactile is huge in wrestling, when you can't see the guy and you're rolling and flipping and flying through the air, your contact with your opponent gives you an "eyes in the back of your head" sense, and that gets merged into what you're "watching" without removing the outside observer feeling. In street fights, which is more like a team sport than wrestling, it lets me use my conscious mind to keep a "map" of where people are, which is full of estimates based on where they were and the direction they were moving when I saw them out of the corner of my eye while absorbed in an exchange with the guy in front of me. But it's still not like you're thinking. You're being conscious without making an effort to be creative, and you do what the situation tells you is obvious. All the mental effort is in holding the model together effectively.
Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them. -- Booth Tarkington
