If you listen to his talks what he says is that a lot of countries cooked their books to get into the Eurozone. He says Greece simply borrowed the same creative accounting technique Italy used to get in the Eurozone so by the same metric Italy shouldn't have been in either. He also stated that Germany also used creative accounting by counting the gold they had in their treasury as income in order to erase the debt of their federal states.

Typical German bullshit. German working week is 35 hours and Greek working week is 40 hours.

http://www.theguardian.com/new...

He basically wants Eurozone banks to have a single rescue fund, for the ECB to issue bonds, and the EIB to invest into the periphery economies to get out of the crisis.

There's just one problem. Even if they make sense none of those things can be done by Greece alone. I hope he has a Plan B.

You can see him explain his views on the current economic crisis in this video.

For all you know these launches have no insurance.

Outside of governments everyone gets launch insurance unless they are out of their mind. A failed launch can easily cause a commercial company to go bankrupt. A government can afford to chance it but not anyone else.

Ever seen century eggs?

Most people don't dispute that the original USAF EELV contest was done appropriately. It included more than one launch services provider and was an open competition. But since then Boeing and Lockheed Martin joined their launch operations under the ULA monopoly and stepped up their prices by a large margin. At the same time we have SpaceX as a viable launch operator now. The USAF needed to buy launches this last year and they decided to do a single-source block buy contract with ULA for the next several years. That's the problem.

ULA didn't even exist 50 years ago. Boeing bought their launchers division from Douglas. Atlas was originally built by Convair. People die and institutional knowledge dies with them. Then again Delta IV and Atlas V have little to do with the original rockets. For example they use isogrid manufacturing methods which weren't in common use at the time.

Also you can get a pretty good ideas of the reliability of a rocket with ten launches. Even 3 launches can be good enough for most purposes. Most accidents with a rocket happen in the initial batch of launches and once you get past that hump the rocket is usually pretty reliable.

There are models for this. Given Falcon 9's past launch record it probably has a reliability rate of 90% or more.

If their reliability rate was poor the insurance rate for the satellites they launch would go though the roof and no comsat operator would use them regardless of how cheap the launch price was. But it seems their launch manifest is quite full with orders so it seems the insurance companies disagree with your perspective.

'Impeccable' except for the first Delta IV Heavy launch which put the dummy payload in the wrong orbit. Still did not stop the DoD from launching a really expensive satellite on it right on the next flight. Of course if your name is SpaceX instead of Boeing then you need to conduct dozens of continuous successful launches before being accepted. Fact is Falcon 9 also has an 'impeccable' launch record.

Also there are more companies working on the launch services market like Blue Origin which may eventually enter the market. There are other companies which could launch the US satellites but they're foreign companies so for US national security reasons they can't be used. Even if the company is run by US allies like Arianespace.

A lot of satellites launched by the USAF aren't that large to begin with and were launched on Delta II rockets until quite recently. One example is the GPS constellation satellites. As for the payload capacity problem you talk about once Falcon 9 Heavy is available, possibly this year, SpaceX will be able to launch bigger and heavier payloads than the largest EELV namely Delta IV Heavy.

As for having a proven track record most of the claims spouted by ULA apologists are plain bullshit. The Delta family had a spotty track record regarding new rocket development. The Delta III program was a disaster and the initial Delta IV Heavy launch didn't go along that well either. Atlas V has a solid launch record and it is cheaper than the Delta IV but it uses Russian engines.

Despite the first Delta IV Heavy launch failure the DoD still chanced it and used it to launch a really expensive earth reconnaissance satellite right on the next flight. But because SpaceX isn't Lockheed Martin or Boeing they can't get the same privilege.

Troll uh? Slashdot keeps getting dumber every month. C++ apologists, Apple apologists, NVIDIA apologists. Are you all dumbasses or has this turned into a cesspool of astroturfers and sycophants?

NVIDIA has removed OpenCL support from the debugger, has not updated their OpenCL from version 1.1 for years unlike either AMD or Intel which have had 1.2 and 2.0 releases since then. They removed OpenCL support from their standard Linux dev kit and it has to be installed separately. They want to push everyone into CUDA. They have someone from NVIDIA chairing the OpenCL Khronos committee but then again Microsoft also used to have a big presence in the HTML committee while delivering the worst standard compliant browser in the market.

newer hardware features (such as intra-warp shuffle and floating-point atomics) are not accessible

You can use inline PTX inside OpenCL code on a NVIDIA card. I use it for the popcnt instruction, which is named popc in PTX, since NVIDIA is too lame to implement OpenCL 1.2 support on their driver which would have that as standard even if the hardware has the instruction support for it.

If you're fine with being stuck with OpenCL 1.1 while AMD has OpenCL 2.0 support sure. NVIDIA treats OpenCL like a bastard stepchild.

The 'stealing' is basically industrial espionage. It is similar to what the Japanese used to do several decades back. Except the Chinese do it for military technology as well and unlike what the Japanese used to do, which was mostly reverse engineering, the Chinese actually steal design documents and other things like that as well.

This guy is one example.

Uh. Just ask around how happy people were when Italy designed the VEGA rocket. A solid rocket launcher which can launch satellites to orbit. That's basically military grade technology. The Italians had an ambition to have their own SLBMs in the 1970s called Alfa. Now I am not saying they will use the technology for nukes but if they want to do them in the future the technology will be there.

On a robotic space mission propulsion technology is less likely to be exchanged. But things like autonomous flight software and precision flight which would be quite adaptable to drone technology may end up being exchanged.

Then again the Chinese are almost as advanced as the EU in drone technology now so it probably doesn't matter.

You do know when you get a loan that you owe the lender the price of the house + his profit right?

If you sell your house to buy some other house you will have to buy a cheaper house. Assuming you manage to sell it for the same price you bought it. If you sell it for a lower price. Well I don't need to spell it out for you.

What's likely. Nice joke. Do you think all those excess houses they build have been sold by now? They haven't. Neither are they going to crumble any time soon. Houses are usually designed to last around 20 years without major repairs. Maybe in 5 years they'll be gone.

There has been some uptick in construction but it has mostly been restricted to expensive city centers and other places like that. Houses for the rich not for the middle class.