The military has a huge budget that has to feed and entire ecosystem of contractors and subcontractors. Of course such a system is wasteful, and the scale of military spending is such that it's almost certainly true that the military wastes millions on peanut butter, on underpants, on shampoo, on frying pans and on snake bite kits. Name all the items in your junk drawer, and I bet that the military wastes millions on each of those kinds of things. Wasting millions on satellite capacity doesn't even sound that stupid in comparison. The real shocker would be to find something on which the military actually gets a good deal.

Oh, I thought you were talking about, "soap box, ballot box, jury box and ammo box. Please use in that order."

I take it the point is to use the materials in space to first build something. Only once it's built will people actually come. The reason why our space programs are stuck in first gear is that we don't know how to build things in space from materials that are there. This will change soon, because many of the lessons of automated production techniques on Earth can be applied (with modifications) in space. The problem will be one of sourcing the raw materials from which to manufacture something useful. So that demand is perfectly predictable, and asteroid mining companies are now taking the baby steps they need to take to eventually satisfy that demand.

If you're wondering about what's worth making in space, there are many great ideas. Here is just one: A truly gigantic telescope mirror. It might actually be easy to do, because the factors that make mirror production on Earth so hard are not a problem in space. There is no need to worry about sagging, stress and all these other gravity-related issues. Space-built telescopes could get pretty darn big, The question is: what will they be made of? And the most plausible answer is: materials from asteroids. Like I said, that's just one example.

The UK is legislating itself into irrelevance. People leave, people die prematurely on NHS when they get expensive, many people don't even bother to breed there anymore and they have to import incompatible replacements.

Thankfully my last UK ancestors left there over 100 years ago.

The US still has guns. Lots of guns.

Seems to me a certain House Representative back in the 1950s pioneered this method.

From the "Second Amendment" point of view- if the government has drones that can fire missiles, why shouldn't we have drones that can fire handguns?

Still, I dislike the engineering method of this. I think there's a far better way to do it, there is no need for a grip or trigger on a mounted gun, that's just extra weight.

"Enlightenment" is just another name for blowing your mind out on drugs until you can't tell the difference between right and wrong and can't remember history.

The "might makes right" crowd is on your side of "progress"- that's why they keep killing children in the womb and selling their body parts online.

https://www.danmurphys.com.au/...

Personally its a bit like VB but a little less B.

Still not as good as Coopers home brew or coopers retail.

Rabbit ears have way more than 2gbs/sec download but zero upload. You can easilyt watch 100 HD digital TV channels simultanously ig you have 100 rabbit ears, 100 Tv sets, and live in a city with 100 broadcast channels.

After a two weeks of trying to get comcast to fix my lack of connection I switched to DSL. I'm getting the advertised DSL speeds. What I'm wondering is why the hell is the upload speed of ADSL pegged at such a crappy ratio to the download speed. Cable has about a 2:1 ratio but ADSL is about 30:1. My upload speed is 0.8Mbs on a 20Mbs download line. Why? what's the physical limit on DSL that cable doesn't have on the asymmetric division? It used to be that this wasn't a big deal since relatively few people upload much. But these days uploading for common people is ubiquitous: your phone by default wants to push every photo to the cloud, your backups go to the cloud, and it's not uncommon to want to e-mail a 20Mb word document. So upload speed has become an issue.

It becomes a major issue when a long duration upload (say a backup) chokes off even the modest handshaking upload that other download streams require and your Amazon prime fire TV stops working smoothly.

Are the DSL companies doomed by physics or their market price point if they can't increase this without raising prices dramatically? Why would this be costly? I'd gladly trade a megabit of download for another megabit of upload.

Comcast seems to have incentivized its india based outsourced customer service to optimally work against comcasts own interests. namely they first employ an incompetent first-line who cannot reason logically what the problem is and make you follow the script even after five previous calls (which apparently are not incentivized to make notes). thus they make their money from answering calls and getting you to just give up. then the next technique is to flat out lie("we will have technical call you in 30 minutes sir, this I promise to you. Now being such a good customer I have an upgrade deal to offer you"_) and finally even in the middle of the nightmare non-performing service they take the time to offer you additional costly upgrades. This only makes sense if you consider what the service center makes its profit on as opposed to comcast (retaining customers).

The DSL company also seems confused at well but at least they make as many errors in my favor as they do against it that it can't be a deliberate strategy.

That doesn't sound like progress to me. That sounds like regression to where we were circa 8000 BCE.

"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."- Justice Kennedy in PPvCasey, 1992, explaining why his future self would push for gay marriage.

Seems like "Progress" is rather primitive to me- it's just the right to live out a fantasy in defiance of objective reality.

0 GOOGLE
1 GOGGLE
2 GIGGLE
3 JIGGLE
4 JINGLE
5 JUNGLE
6 BUNGLE
7 BUNGEE
8 BUNGED
9 BUNKED
10 BANKED
11 BACKED
12 PACKED
13 PICKED
14 WICKED