Comment Re:Missing Option (Score 0) 157
Party on, Wayne!
Comment Missing Option (Score 1) 157
Whichever serves the best booze!!
Comment Re:In other words, you just revert to personal att (Score 1) 111
Sure smells like appeal from authority logical fallacy in here.
Comment Re:This is no Space Shuttle, its better. (Score 1) 111
Getting the remains of things to orbit is not getting things to orbit. There is a difference in pointing out valid problems with the premise of cost as the only issue, and trolling.
Comment Re:This is no Space Shuttle, its better. (Score 1) 111
It is all about cost. How inexpensively can you get people and cargo to orbit? That is the only question I'm concerned with.
Comment Re:This is no Space Shuttle, its better. (Score 1) 111
The space shuttle was ultimately a vehicle for delivering crew and cargo to orbit.
This task is accomplished for less money by the falcon rockets.
Granted, If you put a ping pong table on the shuttle, its ping pong capabilities would be incomparable to the falcon rockets.
This task is accomplished for less money by the falcon rockets.
Granted, If you put a ping pong table on the shuttle, its ping pong capabilities would be incomparable to the falcon rockets.
Comment Re:This is no Space Shuttle, its better. (Score 1) 111
The Falcon Heavy has two side boosters, which detach after liftoff, presumably grasshopper gear will be fitted to these, and they will each vertically land, while the main body of the falcon heavy continues on.
Comment This is no Space Shuttle, its better. (Score 5, Informative) 111
Space Shuttle:
Payload to GTO: ~3000 kg.
Average cost per flight: 1.5 billion (cost of shuttle program / number of launches)
Falcon 9 rocket:
Payload to GTO:~2000 kg
Average cost per flight: 50m (cost of expendable rocket)
Falcon 9 rocket with grasshopper gear:
Payload to GTO:~1000 kg (rough estimate)
Average cost per flight: ~200,000 (expected figure for fuel + incidentals)
You can do the math to figure out why this is a big deal.
Payload to GTO: ~3000 kg.
Average cost per flight: 1.5 billion (cost of shuttle program / number of launches)
Falcon 9 rocket:
Payload to GTO:~2000 kg
Average cost per flight: 50m (cost of expendable rocket)
Falcon 9 rocket with grasshopper gear:
Payload to GTO:~1000 kg (rough estimate)
Average cost per flight: ~200,000 (expected figure for fuel + incidentals)
You can do the math to figure out why this is a big deal.
Comment Re:Whats the advantage of this tech? (Score 1) 111
I don't see the point of reusing 747s all the time? Why don't we just make new ones for every flight? Everyone knows that its much more fun to fly in a brand new plane.
Comment Re:YAY !! 1952 ALL OVER AGAIN !! (Score 4, Insightful) 111
They haven't had any failures since the advent of the falcon 9 rocket. The first three falcon launches failed, and if the fourth hadn't worked, spaceX would've folded.
Luckily, the fourth did work, and they learned a lot from it. (mostly that 9 > 1)
Users Abandon Ship If Online Video Quality Is Not Up To Snuff, Says Study 155
An anonymous reader writes "The first large scientific study of how people respond to poor video quality on the Internet paints a picture of ever rising user expectations and the willingness to abandon ship if those expectations are not met (PDF). Some nuggets: 1) Some users are willing to wait for no more than 2 seconds for a video to start playing, with each additional second adding 6% to the abandonment rate. 2) Users with good broadband connectivity expect faster video load times and are even more impatient than ones on mobile devices. 3) Users who experience video freezing watch fewer minutes of the video than someone who does not experience freezing. If a video freezes for 1% of its total play time, 5% less of its total play time is watched, on average. 4) Users who experience failures when they try to play videos are less likely to return to the same website in the future. Big data was analyzed (260+ million minutes of video) and some cool new data analysis techniques used."
Comment Re:Death becomes acceptable, doesn't it? (Score 1) 170
You beat me to the enders game reference, you sonofabitch.
Comment Copypasta (Score 1) 34
This has been done before, many, many times. Every time the story breaks as if its some new technology to control things with your mind, when it really isn't anymore.
Comment Fisker Karma has always been Second Rate (Score 2) 414
Fisker does not represent what electric vehicles are capable of- they represent what you get when you combine lots of money with shotty engineering.
So who does it better? Well, if you haven't heard of them- Tesla motors is making a lot of headway.
Comment Engineer Tools (Score 1) 712
I think that every engineer on planet earth should have
-A mechanical pencil
-A Protractor
-An engineer's scale ( those three sided rulers)
-Calipers
- TI83/84
I'm not one of those old school flannel wearing engineers, I do most everything on a computer, but there is a lot of value in having a traditional drafting desk with tools like this, regardless of what type of engineering you do.
