I keep hearing this said, but that wasn't my impression nor does it seem especially fair after ONE episode.

The genre it seems to belong to has a pretty low bar for entry -- Fringe was like 5 seasons, and having begun watching it recently I'm already kind of tired of it. It follows such a set formula I feel like *I* could write episodes for it -- new fringey event, nutty professor solves puzzle with application of physics, medicine and biology with a little help from moody Fed Boss and ActionGirl, last 3 minutes of show, ambiguously advance "conspiracy".

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Really, The After couldn't have been so much worse than this, Revolution, Falling Skies, etc etc.

Transparent won a couple of Golden Globes, but "Bosch" hasn't started streaming yet and Chris Carter's "The After" mysteriously got cancelled almost a year after it was a winner in the same pilot voting "election" as Bosch.

I think someone trying to reinvent the "system" of creating filmed content is laudable and worthwhile, I'm just curious if Amazon really has put more thought into this than "vertical integration" and assuming that whatever insight they have into package delivery logistics and cloud computing is somehow universally applicable to something like film/tv production. They wouldn't be the first "geniuses" to take hubris to a new level only to discover that doing A well means nothing when it comes to doing B well. We see plenty of that when A and B aren't all that different.

I think faster (and more complete) turnaround of announced content would definitely help, I also wonder if it would make sense to rethink some of the streaming assumptions -- like, why straightjacket yourself into the one hour episode format? Why not two hour episodes, but fewer of them? Does the entire series have to available all at once, or could faster release cycles from pilots to episodes be accomplished by releasing a group of episodes every 60-90 days to allow for simultaneous shooting and releases?

  Should they dilute their resources producing a bunch of one-hour pilots, or should they be a little more discriminating and look at a pilot instead as a more complete story arc and make 3 episodes? That way even failures that didn't become series could at least be watchable, self-contained miniseries adding value to the catalog instead of just becoming trivial ephemera? Maybe the desire to make more typical "movies" is part of this.

Even in modern countries there are holes. I live in Iceland and we have one of the best rates of broadband connectivity and fiber deployment in the world. But my land is in a sparsely populated valley so it hasn't paid off to run a line out there, most people just use their cell phones for a net connection. If satellite could beat that (and wouldn't be too blocked by mountains), even in highly connected countries there's a real potential market here.

Heck, there's a lot of people who would get it if the price and stats were right even if they had ground-based broadband. Everyone here has bandwidth caps on international net traffic, only domestic is unlimited. So people who want to do a lot of downloads of foreign content might well choose that instead of or inaddition to regular broadband.

If technology had jumped directly from the 1979 Impala to the 2014 Honda Accord, yes, that would have been really f*ing amazing and a huge technological innovation, and the company that did it worthy of every bit of praise thrown at it for doing so.

Yeah, I had written a section about this but must have messed up my tags and Slashdot ate it.. Delta clipper highest achieved altitude: 1 kilometer. Falcon 9 first stage alone highest achieved altitude: 130km. Delta clipper furthest flown from the landing pad before landing: 300 meters. Falcon 9 first stage alone, furthest flown from the landing pad before landing: 300km. Delta clipper mass ratio, 2,5. Falcon 9 first stage alone, mass ratio 20 (and the boosters on the Falcon Heavy have a mass ratio of 30). And on and on and on. Not to mention that they're built utterly differently.

Aww, Slashdot ate my whole paragraph comparing Falcon 9 to the Delta Clipper, that was the best one.... must have messed up my tagging :(

It's a gamble between two opposing forces of insurance:

1) On one hand, insurance companies are bureaucracies and handling claims is a bureaucratic process with a certain amount of inertia, where obvious fraud needs to be caught but time/people/resources don't exist to fine-grain protect against all possible marginal fraud, otherwise the system would grind to a halt. A tracking device with a minor deviation from observed damaged may just get written off as the strangeness of physicals or the brittleness of plastic cars -- I mean, we have the data, right?

2) On the other hand, IMHO, the insurance company is almost in the primary business not of supplying insurance or processing claims, but in DENYING claims. Insurance fraud is a huge risk, the more claims they can deny the more money they make and they have deep and long-term investments in actuarial data and statistics. They may already have enough tracking device data in their databases to *know* that your physical damage doesn't align with the tracking data.

Internet satellite thingy - almost identical to Teledesic

Teledesic: Launched on Pegasus rockets which cost your firstborn child. SpaceX: Launched on Falcon rockets which are cheaper than the Russians and Chinese even without reuse. Teledescic: 90s computer and communications tech (this was the era where playing the original Doom game took a high end computer and nerds envied those with ISDN connections). SpaceX: 10 iterations of Moore's Law later. Teledescic: Communcation sats have to be large objects with heavy hydrazine thrusters for stationkeeping. SpaceX: Much smaller satellites available (all the way down to cubesats), with a wide variety of ion thrusters for stationkeeping available.

Yeah, totally the same situation.

Hyperloop - first theorised by Robert Goddard nearly a century ago and a staple of SF for decades

Goddard and sci-fi: vaccuum tube. Hyperloop: tube full of thin air. Goddard and sci-fi: maglev. Hyperloop: ground-effect aerofoils. Compressor on each craft. Goddard and sci-fi: massive trains holding huge numbers of passengers. Hyperloop: small computer-timed trains to spread out the load on the track and thus reduce construction costs. Goddard and sci-fi: Trains implausibly deep underground. Hyperloop: built like a monorail. Goddard and sci-fi: tubes take the shortest route to their destination. Hyperloop: Trains go primarily over already-built and permitted infrastructure to reduce right of way and environmental costs / challenges.

Yeah, totally the same situation.

Falcon 9 - It can land vertically, like errr, the lunar module or the Delta Clipper

Tesla - Okay, they're quite nice but electric cars aren't exactly a new idea

Aww, you didn't give me an example to compare it to! Let's just go with the EV-1, since that was probably the most modern commercially-produced EV before Tesla EV-1, range 60 miles (older version) to 100 miles (newer version). Tesla Roadster, range 230 miles, and Model S, up to 300. EV-1, 0-60=8 seconds. Tesla Roadster and Model S Performance, 4 seconds. EV-1 production: about 1100. Tesla: produces that many cars in *1 1/2 weeks*. EV-1: Loved by owners but panned by critics. Tesla Model S: not only loved by owners but has been getting some of the highest ratings for any kind of car period.

Your "analogies" are akin to saying "So what if he won the Indy 500 - I raced my go-cart down the street the other day and beat a soap-box racer!"

Regardless of the reason (Amazon's missteps or typical TV timelines), it's kind of problematic. A year turnaround kind of kills momentum and interest, although given the thin creme at the top of the shitpile that is a streaming content catalog, maybe it won't matter because streamers will watch almost anything even if its not that good.

It could also be a limitation of the "instant binge" model where the entire series is available at once versus a weekly release that allows them to actuallly shoot the series as it runs.

Maybe they could do some kind of combination, shooting 3 episodes of every series they ballot and then actually starting production on the rest of the series immediately after the voting window ends. In theory, a 60 day delay between the end of balloting and the "start" of the series should allow them time to shoot an additional two episodes, and the whole thing could be setup to be released in 4 episode batches every 90 days.

They'd end up shooting episdes they don't need, but pehaps they could structure the 3 episode narratives in a way that made them more or less complete even if they didn't get voted for a season. A three-episode triptych could become some kind of new streaming-only format and maybe it would serve as some kind of an incubator for new talent or genre fiction.

And the Chris Carter sort of post-apoc sci fi thing, too, Which will probably suck and be like everything else, with predictable, formulaic episode structures where *tiny* amounts of the bigger conspiracy are revealed, stringing viewers along forever and then never really having a point, like "Lost".

Anyway, the pilot at least held my interest and binging without commercials makes it somehow less annoying. And the Bosch series looks good, too. The books are above everage mysteries and Welliver is pretty perfect for Bosch.

I don't understand Amazon's long window between pilot and series, though. It seems that traditionally when a pilot was aired if new episodes were to be aired, they aired fairly closely. Maybe traditional pilots and series' had long windows, too, you just didn't know about them because only TV suits saw the pilots and Amazon had that voting scheme.

Or maybe this is tech industry hubris, where they think beause they have a handle on cloud computing and fulfillment logistics that they can just step into making TV shows, too, and then find out that everything they think they know is worthless.

I kind of hope it's the latter; not for the comeuppance, but maybe there's some slim chance that an application of money and disconnection from traditional media can kind of reinvent the process for making filmed entertainment.

And while I'm ranting on the topic, I wonder why they stick with the traditional 60 minute episode. If people can binge watch it anyway, why not 7 two hour episodes instead of 13 hour episodes?

"Cruising speed" is otherwise known as "terminal velocity" and is hundreds of meters per second. And I'll reiterate: the *point* is to go slow. Drag is a *good thing* on the way back down.

Other corrections: It's false that there's no part of the rocket that reliably faces a given angle - it doesn't tumble, it maintains an orientation generally between 0 and 15 degrees relative to the direction of travel. And the concept that bloody air is going to kill a pneumatic piston in a matter of minutes is the height of absurdity. .

Apart from actually launching a rocket to space and then having it descend and attempt to land, what's your proposed method to determine how much the fins have to move during a real-world descent and thus how much hydraulic fluid they'll consume? (beyond the simulations, which SpaceX uses extensively; they're invaluable but don't correspond 100% to real-world flight scenarios)

Yeah, it's kind of funny, but with this "failure" SpaceX will still end up recovering more of their first stage than is recovered for 99% of first stages launched in the history of man. Not like any of it will likely be of any use except for analysis and then scrap, but still...

I believe what they're saying is instead of any hydraulic system at all, which would be a simplification, no? And I have no idea what you mean by "efficiency leeching ramscoop", the whole point is to slow down.

I'm sure that SpaceX had reasons for not going with such a design. One that comes to mind for example would be during hover/low speeds - no ram air. But you don't need to be mean to the GP for suggesting that.

Yep. From 1300 meters per second to maybe 3 meters per second, with a CEP that would make military ballistics engineers salivate. So, so close.