As DSI and PR get up to speed, we're going to have an avalanche of data to process. As long as they're willing to give back, I'm happy to donate some CPU time to their efforts.

But there's a whole 'nuther layer of potential... having amateur astronomers net-link their instruments to the overall effort... what kind of pinpoints could we arrive at by crunching the numbers from thousands of points on our globe?

LOL!! The Fed may be independent of gov't but it's not independent of corporate plutocracy. Indeed, this is the crucial struggle of our times, wresting control of our politics and our economy from these fat-cat SOBs.

Get thee hence to Wolf-PAC.com and pitch in to help save our democracy from these blood-suckers.

At about 10m15s in this press conference, Elon calls hydrogen a "pernicious molecule" while fielding a question about fuel cells. He also mentions some other drawbacks, such as its being odorless and invisible (so you can't smell when it's leaking), and it's extremely flammable... and burns with an invisible flame.

Hydrogen is very efficient as a rocket fuel, which is why it's used. But liquid methane is pretty good too, and has a lot fewer "issues" to deal with.

And the Fed's so-called "quantitative easing" is different from that... how?

It appears that the debt-backed money system we've been using since 1971 (when Nixon closed the gold window) has run itself out to its logical conclusion: an exponential explosion of debt as we approach the vertical asymptote.

I'm not arguing for a gold standard; a fiat system can work just fine as long as the quantity is controlled sensibly, as you imply. But I don't think that ceding the "issuing power" to private banks is a good solution either. For example, the Bank of North Dakota strikes a good balance. It doesn't issue currency per se, but it does handle all the state's revenues, and makes loans (which is essentially the same thing as issuing currency) to local banks and some other institutional borrowers. And the interest on those loans goes into ND's coffers instead of being paid to, say, Goldman Sachs.

So, contrary to what the GP said, ND is in fact "making a profit" from all this, which is a distinct benefit to all its citizens.

The gov't could at least lose less money if it issued its own currency (beyond just coins) instead of borrowing its money supply from privately owned banks.

If the population of hard-to-spot brown dwarf stars turns out to be higher than previously thought, would the increased mass be enough to account for dark matter?

You can't be serious. Of COURSE there will be a "free hardware" movement. It's already beginning to happen...

Hm... well, I got myself all het-up to rant, but seem to have blown it in the first line of text. That pretty much covers it.

G'night...

Moon-Ex CEO Bob Richards was on a panel at the International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) last October. He didn't break any "news" there, but gave a welcome update on the latest developments. Very interesting talk, worth a look.

To welcome our new Killer Robot overlords.

Thanks for sharing, that's the first time I've seen a somewhat thoughtful and serious (if not rigorous) attempt to debunk Savory's claims. Unfortunately, it disappoints on several fronts. First it gets some key facts wrong. For example, Holistic Management is not a "livestock management system" it is applicable to any context, not just agriculture. The livestock management system used by Savory is called Managed Intensive Rotational Grazing (MIRG) or just "rotational grazing" for short. A minor distinction, perhaps, but one that Savory takes pains to make clear in numerous lectures. So, right out of the gate, it tells me that this author might not know as much as he thinks he does about Savory's methods.

In general, the entire piece is long on "common sense" or "everybody knows that..." claims, and short on actual scientific citations. (I counted zero throughout... maybe I missed one?) It also has some contradictions and logical failings. For example, "Most arid grasslands have low productivity, thus low ability to store new sources of carbon." This ignores the whole point of MIRG, which is to improve the health and productivity of marginal lands, thus increasing their ability to sequester carbon. I could go on, but I don't have all day.

Yes, before and after photos may just be "anecdotal" evidence, but at least they are evidence. I didn't see much in the way of superior or more-rigorous evidence in this article.

Meanwhile, folks like Joel Salatin and thousands of others continue to enjoy success with MIRG on 6 out of 7 continents, in virtually every type of climate where grazing is possible.

Those time-traveling immortals should have taken a detour via 2013 to hear Allan Savory's TED Talk: Allan Savory: How to green the world's deserts and reverse climate change. The action is all in the soil, not up in the sky.

Erm... whaa....? I'm not sure... was there a verb in your second sentence there?

Imagine for a sec that I'm not high on cocaine... how would you explain your point now?

Hm.. well... you pretty-much validate my point here. If you are buying TSLA as a "hot stock" investment, then you deserve to take your short-term loss. But if you instead had the "vision" to see this as a long-term opportunity, you might understand why we are still YEARS away from knowing how the TSLA gamble will play out. And you would not be perturbed by random fluctuations in the market.

And peddling too... ;-)

Seriously, we've heard this gripe before, and gotten over it just fine. They used to complain that it couldn't be done. Then the Roadster proved them wrong. Then they said it couldn't be repackaged for the "mainstream" luxury market, until Tesla started shipping the Model S. Then they said Tesla would never be able to ramp up Model S production to meet demand, until... well, they're still trying to catch up with the backlog of orders, but they are making progress.

And simultaneously they are also (finally) bringing the Model X to market and investing heavily in the Giga Factory to enable high-volume production of ALL electric vehicles, especially their own Model 3.

FTFA: "Tesla has lost its luster, he said, and could soon lose credibility."

Any investor who is so short-sighted as to sell off Tesla shares based on the incidental losses last quarter had no business buying those shares in the first place. Elon has been crystal clear about his plans for Tesla's development right from the beginning. If you're freaked out about strict GAAP losses at such an early stage of growth, then you don't have a realistic understanding of how such large (huge) capital-intensive enterprises bootstrap themselves. Such investors were just looking for a short-term capital gain, and wet their pants at the first sign of slow-down in Tesla's meteoric rise. Good riddance to them.

Bottom line: Tesla has a multi-thousand-customer waiting list for the Model S, and 20K reservations for the Model X... If you do the math, that's a couple BILLION in pent-up demand for a product that only Tesla currently provides. And lucky for them, they haven't even built those factories yet. So unlike the "major players" in the market, they don't have to "re-tool"... they're building from scratch, which gives them an advantage at least as big as the disadvantage you claim.

Either way, when you factor in the cost of fuel, the TCO still works out to be competitive with an average mid-range family sedan, even at the current low price of gas. This advantage is bound to grow over time as the price of oil inevitably rebounds.