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Comment Re:So there is a problem... (Score 1) 174

What kind of cars do they sell in UK, for crying out loud? I'd expect anything from a major manufacturer and not from Detroit to be pretty much worn-in at the 100k mark, and ready to go another 200k at least without needing a new engine nor a new transmission. Heck, I'd expect a manual transmission to easily outlast any automatic (yes, the clutch is a maintenance item).

Comment Re:As a private pilot... (Score 1) 66

No. The guy was a lunatic. Sure, he came up with a bunch of useful stuff, but the wireless charging we have now has nothing to do whatsoever with what Tesla envisioned. It is very unfortunate that the two are denoted using the similar words, because they are far from the same. The wireless charging we have now works like an air gap in a transformer core. That effect was known well before Tesla. OTOH, his wireless energy transfer ideas would have only worked in some alternative universe with different laws of Nature. It was total lunacy.

Comment Re:Not So Fast... (Score 1) 393

Look, if you want so desperately to do something to the payload as long as it's done on time, I'll just go and bash the shit out of it for $1M per paylod, mmkay? I can even use a $50k hammer to do it. What a steal. Cost plus of course.

Now, in the real world, is the "reasonable level of performance" you speak of the same performance USA (United Space Alliance, ULA precursor) had with getting the Shuttles into orbit? Because that was, lest we forget, a major farcical opus every time it didn't happen. But so is space flight, and SpaceX is going in exactly the right direction to change it.

Anyway, so far we don't care about lack of insurance. The damn things get whey they are supposed to. Never mind that I'd like a citation for that lack of insurance of public payloads.

Comment Re:Not So Fast... (Score 4, Insightful) 393

I keep hearing this nonsense, and I can't help but imagine that it's coming straight from the ULA puppets. Nobody is given any free passes. They are contracted to deliver stuff to orbit, not to build rockets for the government. The safety and reliability standards are of not much use if you're being paid (or not) for service. The only ones hurting if a Falcon blows up are SpaceX and cargo insurers: the former won't get paid, the latter will have to pay up. That's all there's to it.

So far, Falcon 9 hasn't blown up once. You're just repeating the stupid ULA nonsense. Stop it.

Comment This gave me a chuckle (Score 5, Informative) 393

"an epidemic of anomalies" ha ha, good one. Falcon 9 had 11/11 primary mission successes on the first 11 flights. That sort of a track record is very, very rare. Space Shuttle did it. What other launcher had the same record? Never mind the overall cost of achieving it. If one adjusts for successes per dollar of development costs, Falcon 9 will have everyone beat for a long, long time, if they keep at it.

Comment Re:Might cause a re-thinking of the F-35 (Score 4, Informative) 275

TL;DR: F-35 would have been picked up by British radars that came into use towards the end of World War II. So much for stealth. The funniest thing? Everybody who knows about radars has known it since day one. All stealth planes suffer from this problem. Once the wavelength approaches the facet size, the fact that the facet is smooth and "points elsewhere" doesn't matter. It produces what amounts to specular highlights.

Comment Re:No towers in range? (Score 4, Informative) 127

Usually, a terrestrial phone doesn't need to do anything much to "look" for a tower, besides keeping its receiver turned on. Towers emit beacons, and if you don't hear the beacon, there's no point in you sending anything - you won't receive a reply because you don't even hear the tower's beacon.

Comment Re:Wonderful (Score 1) 138

The black boxes measure physical acceleration. Sure, they can log the throttle angle, but those two things aren't in a linear relationship, and you can't infer much from the throttle angle other than determining what the driver was trying to do at the time of the crash (WOT, idle, in-between). At the very least the acceleration is a function of RPM and mass air flow. How the latter relates to throttle angle is very engine dependent.

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