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Comment Re:How about some news about toyota and bmw? (Score 5, Insightful) 318

by kellymcdonald78 (#49642481) Attached to: Tesla To Unveil Its $35,000 Model 3 In March 2016

Amazon doesn't survive due to selling "zero emissions" credits that it gets from the Californian government to other manufacturers. I'd like to see Tesla make a profit without all the cronyism and end user tax credits.

Tesla doesn't make a profit because it reinvests everything into R&D and the capital equipment it needs to scale. It would be a bad sign if they did make a profit, as it would mean that they don't have any ideas on where to spend money on growth.

Submission + - SpaceX Dragon launches successfully but no rocket recovery

Submitted by monkeyzoo
monkeyzoo writes: SpaceX has successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft en route to the International Space Station with supplies (including an Italian espresso machine). This was also the second attempt to recover the launch rocket aboard a ship, but that apparently was not successful. Elon Musk tweeted that the rocket landed on the recovery ship but too hard to be reused.

Submission + - Fifty Years of Moore's Law

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: IEEE is running a special report on "50 Years of Moore's Law" that considers "the gift that keeps on giving" from different points of view. Chris Mack begins by arguing that nothing about Moore’s Law was inevitable. "Instead, it’s a testament to hard work, human ingenuity, and the incentives of a free market. Moore’s prediction may have started out as a fairly simple observation of a young industry. But over time it became an expectation and self-fulfilling prophecy—an ongoing act of creation by engineers and companies that saw the benefits of Moore’s Law and did their best to keep it going, or else risk falling behind the competition."

Andrew Huang argues that Moore's Law is slowing and will someday stop but the death of Moore's Law will spur innovation. "Someday in the foreseeable future, you will not be able to buy a better computer next year," writes Huang. "Under such a regime, you’ll probably want to purchase things that are more nicely made to begin with. The idea of an “heirloom laptop” may sound preposterous today, but someday we may perceive our computers as cherished and useful looms to hand down to our children, much as some people today regard wristwatches or antique furniture."

Vaclav Smil writes about "Moore's Curse" and argues that there is a dark side to the revolution in electronics for it has had the unintended effect of raising expectations for technical progress. "We are assured that rapid progress will soon bring self-driving electric cars, hypersonic airplanes, individually tailored cancer cures, and instant three-dimensional printing of hearts and kidneys. We are even told it will pave the world’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies," writes Smil. "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least the production of food and energy and the transportation of people and goods."

Finally Cyrus Mody writes that it seems clear that Moore’s Law is not a law of nature in any commonly accepted sense but what kind of thing is Moore’s Law? "Moore’s Law is a human construct. As with legislation, though, most of us have little and only indirect say in its construction," writes Mody. "Everyone, both the producers and consumers of microelectronics, takes steps needed to maintain Moore’s Law, yet everyone’s experience is that they are subject to it."

Comment Re:The moon (Score 1) 74

by kellymcdonald78 (#49327811) Attached to: World's Largest Asteroid Impacts Found In Central Australia
Most of the Moon's craters formed during the Late Heavy Bombardment period (3.8-4.0 billion years ago). The Earth was likely similarly impacted during this time, however on the Earth, geologic processes have erased almost all evidence of these. Oceanic crust is recycled every 200 odd million years, and there wasn't much continental crust during that period. Any crust that remains has been weathered, eroded, uplifted, folded, compressed, a dozen times. The Moon being geologically dead, and lacking any weather, retains these scars

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