The iPhone 6+ is in fact less bendable than the Samsung phones, and the Samsung phones have screens that will shatter instead of bending slightly...

But in fact the iPhone 6+ is easily good for more than a day of charge. So if you want an iPhone that you don't have to think about the battery, they already sell one.

AirBnB will reimburse up to $50k in loss or damage from a guest. Read that in a recent article about AirBnB...

But you mitigate that as a host by not taking every single offer that comes along.

The norm for big software companies seems to be: you have some number of open reqs for your team, and you're eager to fill them (both to get the work done, and because the might vanish). So you work your pipeline as best you can, interview anyone who passes a phone screen, and hire anyone who passes the interview. At most places I've worked, we end making an offer to about 1 in 20 people we phone screen (about 1 in 3 who we bring in); where I am now we make an offer to about 1 in 5 we bring in, and they don't always accept of course, so that's maybe 50 people who look good enough to phone screen to hire 1. You're much more likely to have too few qualified candidates than too many. Normally, if you end up with an extra guy you'd like to make an offer to, another team will be delighted to take him.

None of my games that came on floppies are still playable. About half the games I have bought on CD/DVD over the years are gone or don't work now (I seem to move every few years, and long-distance moves don't always go well).

Heck, I've bought MOO2 three times now, once on physical media, once from some now-gone download, and once from GOG. Now that it's on GOG I'm very happy. (The games I'm most frustrated with are Fantasy General and Space general, as my media doesn't seem to work and no one has them for download - GOG has some of the Panzer General games, but not these sequels).

Meanwhile, I've bought hundreds of games on Steam, and all but a handful still work (some depended too heavily on GameSpy). Maybe Steam will itself vanish one day, but the risk of that seems lower than the risk of a box being lost the next time I move, or simply no longer having an OS or emulator that I can get to work with older games.

That's certainly true, on both counts. Has nothing o do with physical media though - if the game is written to need a server even in single player mode it's crap no matter how you buy it. But fuck EA in any case.

Just imagine what happens if you lose or damage your physical media. That's happened to me about 20x as often as the download servers being unavailable - and the servers came back. Especially for older games, where I'm happy to pay again for someone to port it to a modern platform (GOG FTW).

Buying anything with "always on DRM" is foolish of course, but you get that with physical media as well.

1) The Dutch plan spreads that cost through the year 2100.

2) The Dutch plan is planning for a rise of 4.5 feet, way more than what will actually occur by that time (around foot) - so the funds allocated are vastly higher than what is required.

The current system, as is, could easily handle a sea level rise of a foot - the Dutch are just naturally over-cautious.

I'm pretty skeptical of that concept (for geopolitical reasons if nothing else), but yeah, it at least seems possible. Space elevators don't just require the unobtanium cable, but a counterweight made of pure handwavium to avoid energy stored as oscillations in the cable from building up to catastrophic levels over time.

But I do take the idea of robotic asteroid mining in high orbit seriously (at least for fuel, a nickel-iron asteroid is something else), as there's so much ongoing, related, high-budget research happening today for military, industrial, and commercial robotics.

And this doesn't happen by accident. Every component self-identifies in some way during POST, or during Windows plug-and-play scan. Driver INF files list the ID strings to match against. Building a knock-off that identifies itself as the "real" product to avoid driver certification is an old trick, but at least it's understandable why someone would do it. Deliberately building a component that identifies as an existing product, but needs your own drivers? The mind boggles.

That's a bizarre way of looking at the problem.

Sure, the fuel cost is a pretty trivial part of rocketry today, though it's more for high orbit. I believe LOX/Hydorgen fuel is about $10K/ton. That may be a NASA markup cost, I suspect it's rather cheaper for the Russians and Chinese, but still this stuff isn't like jet fuel - it's takes a considerable multiple of the energy of the fuel to make the fuel. It'll never be the sub-$1000/ton price of jet fuel.

You need about 60 tons of fuel to get 1 ton of payload into high orbit IIRC (if we're building anything interplanetary, you're paying that fuel cost one way or the other), so just the fuel costs alone (of lifting the "payload fuel") are about $600K/ton conservatively, but maybe half that cost on the cheap.

Current high orbit payload costs are about $18-36M/ton. SpaceX is shooting for 10% of that, and that certainly seems technically possible, but far into the land of diminishing returns. It seems quite fair to call $1M/ton "dirt cheap" (even if we somehow one day reach half that, it's not changing the game much).

So you're still looking at around $1B for each 1000 tons of fuel in high orbit.

Who said "colony"? Are a bunch of robots a "colony" now? Have we already "colonized" mars? The tech development from current vehicle automation and manufacturing automation to fully automated mining is of course non-trivial, but it's probably on the order of the several billion it would take to capture an asteroid and lift many tons of robots to high orbit, and there's certainly a market for fully automated mining here on Earth (and better autonomous vehicle programming, and better industrial automation in general).

Kerbal space program says you need a REALLY big rocket

The article itself mentions they are working on the BFR (nod to Doom, Big Fucking Rocket).

Presumably the actual rocket engineers at SpaceX can also run Kerbal...

Because that would require even more fuel and an even bigger rocket.

This should be commons sense but the longer you run the motor the more fuel it consumes.

Yes, I already mentioned that it's predicated on them having a massive amount of fuel.

You (and apparently a few others) see only the problems but you ignore that it would also get you somewhere faster (depending how you did it), so that balances out the extra fuel to some extent.

It also offsets the extra cost through a much simpler spaceship design, not having to have some complex rotating portion of the spaceship that cannot fail (or has to have redundancy built in).

You also only need to provide fuel for a one way trip, or if you plan on coming back don't worry about providing enough thrust for gravity on the return trip.

Sorry, it's just never going to be "cheap" to lift thousands of tons of fuel into orbit. Lifting bulk raw materials into high orbit is just silly - the bulk raw materials are already up there, and landing a payload on an asteroid isn't science fiction any more. The robotics would break new ground, but that's a 1-time research costs with immediate commercial benefits.

I don't think that's really the fastest way - the blocking problem seems to be radiation killing you on the journey. There are risks of the form "20% of the ships won't make it" that people might be willing to take, but barriers of the form "no one can make it alive, or at least not healthy enough to do anything once there" aren't about risk taking.

We need cheap fuel in orbit more than anything else. The ability to send very heavy payloads to Mars would go a long way towards the current blocking issues. I'm not sure "dirt cheap" rocket launches to orbit will ever be cheap enough for this scale. However, dragging a CHON asteroid into orbit and building a robotic fuel processor on it would make fuel quite cheap (and if we can solve the latter problem, the problem of how to move a CHON asteroid is solved too).

This is a low-tech "bigger hammer" solution for everything but the robotics aspect. Viewed as simply a robotics engineering problem, it doesn't seem that far-fetched: automatic mining of a soft surface, and repairs on a refinery that can make usable fuel from messy inputs (doesn't have to be great, high-purity fuel, as we'll have a remarkable quantity of it already in orbit).

You know, given how much of Holland is below sea level (26%) ... you can kind of see that they might give a damn about rising sea levels.

If anyone on earth doesn't give a damn what sea levels are, and can engineer to work around them - it is the Dutch. We are currently talking about around two feet over 200 years, hardly an issue for existing systems they have in place, much less whatever technology is to be had over 200 years time...