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Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 167

by drerwk (#40154455) Attached to: Intelsat Signs Launch Contract With SpaceX

Would you be willing to take a commercial air flight if the failure rate was 25%? 15%? 5%? How many pilots would fly with those failure rates? How many companies would send expensive cargoes with those failure rates?

Would I pay to take a 1/20 risk of death for no benefit other than getting from one place to another? No. Would I take a 1/20 risk for a sufficient reward, sure.

Read about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush
About 100,000 people went, 30,000 to 40,000 arrived, 15,000 to 20,000 became prospectors, and no more than 4,000 became rich. The article estimates that it cost about $1,000 to attempt to reach the Klondike, which for 100,000 people represents more money than was extracted in gold in the years of the rush.

Comment Re:Insane (Score 1) 125

by drerwk (#40032405) Attached to: DreamHammer Wants To Corner the Drone OS Market
It is a little more complicated. The services tend not to build from scratch each time they buy something, and they want to pay as little as possible. So they might buy a tank from Big D Contracting, and Big D say we have this motor that would work great in your tank, but we designed it on our dime, so we will build them for you and service them, but we own the design and maybe some patents on the motor it is so great. It is much cheaper to buy a tank with the Big D motor that than to pay for a new motor design.

Now consider cheep and quick turn around software, and maybe a custom drone. Sure you could add requirements that the drone interface with other drone systems, but that jacks up your dev, test, and integration test costs and pushes your schedule back. The services rarely want to pay in cost or schedule for interoperability and it does not come for free - ask any SW dev.

Comment Re:Not related (Score 1) 430

by drerwk (#40010289) Attached to: Mac Clone Maker Saga Ends As SCOTUS Denies Appeal
If Colecovision was emulating off the shelf parts with software it wrote, and then making it possible for the owner of the atari 2600 rom cart to run software they had purchased then it is different. If at the sale of the rom cart, the cart was licensed only to run on atari HW then maybe it would be the same, but I do not recall haveing to read any license on a cart package from those days.
Psystar has the problem that OS X is licensed only to run on Apple HW.
Now, they might have had a business selling HW guaranteed to be Hakintosh compatible, but I never understood where they thought that they would be making money. People who even know what a Hakintosh is are able to buy the necessary cheap HW without Psystar's help.

Comment Re:On the flip side (Score 2) 463

by drerwk (#39944417) Attached to: The Rise of Chemophobia In the News
Do you mean element?

chemical
noun - a compound or substance that has been purified or prepared, esp. artificially: never mix disinfectant with other chemicals | controversy arose over treatment of apples with this chemical.

Point is that the common usage of the word, and the definition in my dictionary means especially artificially produced.

Comment Re:The United States wouldn't care (Score 1) 675

But they are not a military force, in fact they never were except during WW-II.

This view is about 500 years short of complete. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(history) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Polish_War_(1654%E2%80%931667).

A Polish soldier was confronted by a charging German soldier and a charging Russian soldier.
Which did he shoot first, and why?
He shot the German first--business before pleasure.

These points of view are serious to a country that was not its own country twice in the last 100 years.

Comment Re:Will black hole devour dark matter, anti-matter (Score 1) 127

by drerwk (#39877549) Attached to: Astronomers See Another Star Torn Apart By a Black Hole
Dark matter, like any mass is affected by gravity, so there is likely great gobs of the stuff in orbit around galactic black holes. The issue with pulling in dark matter is the problem that dark matter does not interact strongly with anything, including itself. So there is no mechanism for the DM to loose angular momentum which would have to happen for it to fall in. So the only dark matter that gets eaten is the stuff that is on a trajectory that intersects the event horizon area of the BH. The reason that BHs can eat normal matter is because normal matter collides with itself shedding angular momentum; an accretion disc turns out to be an efficient way to shed that momentum and therefore an efficient way to feed a black hole.

I suppose that DM will eventually shed angular momentum because it will emit gravity waves as it orbits the BH, but that seems like a pretty slow way to do so.

Comment Re:Will black hole devour dark matter, anti-matter (Score 2) 127

by drerwk (#39877461) Attached to: Astronomers See Another Star Torn Apart By a Black Hole
No. Black holes like the one being talked about do not loose much energy to gravitational waves. In order to dissipate energy via gravitational waves the mass must accelerate. So a pair of masses orbiting each other will shed gravitational energy, a galactic black hole sitting in the center of the galaxy does not move much and so does not emit gravity waves.
Regarding Hawing radiation dissipation, the temperature of the Hawking radiation is greater as the mass of the BH is smaller. In order to loose net mass, this temperature has to be larger than the CMB, which is only true for I think smaller than stellar size BHs.

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