Anybody knows how the new commercial space launchers do in comparison?

Don't know about the current crop. But back in the late '80s AMROC controlled their launches without the classic room-full-of-custom-consoles. Instead they hacked up their "consoles" as a GUI on one instance of the state-of-the-art windowing interface computer of the time - a Macintosh (what they'd now call a "Macintosh Classic").

I hear that, when they showed up at Goddard for their test shot, the usual control room crew was standing around with their jaws dropped as the whole thing was run from the little screen on the little box on the single desk. B-)

If you never heard of AMROC: They were the ones that were working with the hybrid rocket: Solid fuel (synthetic tire rubber), liquid oxidizer (liquid oxygen). Controllability of a liquid fuel, complexity halfway between solid and liquid fuel (only ONE set of plumbing, not too that must be synchronized), safety better than either (turn off the LOX and the fuel just smolders and goes out.

They lost their mover-and-shaker founding-team member days before their first flight attempt. Then, though the engines had many successful tests, the actual flight attempt failed in about the worst possible failure modes for a hybrid: The LOX valve iced up (due to ambient moisture) and stuck at about 30% open: Not enough thrust to get off the pad, but enough slow burn energy to destroy much of the rocket and pad equipment, and they couldn't either launch or shut down. Then they went bankrupt, so there wasn't a second shot. (Their tech was sold and some of it is used in space ship one.)

Now I can record even more TV that I'll never get around to watching. Technology is great and progress is divine.

Ha ha, but seriously....

Letting the automation pull the the needles out of the hundreds-of-channels vast wasteland haystack is a classic example of using automation to do the drudgery, leaving you to do the interesting stuff.

There's two hundred channels of crud and 20 minutes per day of stuff of interest? Let the computer watch the junk sieve out the jems for you. That way you don't need to be rich enough to hire an army of interns to do the same.

Or better yet, once in court and under questioning invoke the 5th Amendment. It does work once there. It cannot be used to trump a subpoena and skip out on testifying as a witness.

Until they give you a grant of immunity. Then it doesn't work anymore.

There are two kinds of immunity: Transactional immunity (witness can not ever be prosecuted for crimes related to his testimony) and Use immunity (they can't use your testimony, or any evidence they gather based on its information, against you - but if they find other evidence you're fair game.)

Unfortunately the Supreme Court has ruled that Use Immunity is enough to extinguish the 5th Amendment right and federal prosecutors rarely offer Transactional. Some states have more stringent laws, constitutions, or constitutional interpretations and Transactional immunity must be offered before their courts may compel testimony.

Of course prosecution is not the only life risk for a witness. I know of at least one person, here in the disarmed-citizen utopia of California who has stated an intent to "not have seen anything" unless granted a perpetual concealed carry license.

Quite some time back the people administering the low-income (and gang-ridden) housing projects in south Chicago decided to search all the units for guns. The NRA and the ACLU sued (successfully) to block this unwarranted search of the residents' homes.

they all start with some common underlying mamallian hearing genes and then they tweak them to develop echolocation.

Actually, a lot of animals that aren't credited with using echolocation actually use a variation of it: Sounds from their own motion (such as footsteps) create echoes, which their hearing system processes into a map of nearby objects.

People, for instance, do this. That's why you can "feel" the nearness of walls and objects in the room (especially those near or immediately behind you) without looking, when you're moving.

There's at least one recorded instance of a totally blind child who learned to ride a bicycle and avoid objects, by making clicking sounds with his mouth to provide excitation for this system.

(The hearing system of things like mammals is evolved from the lateral line of fish - which both detects other nearby fish by direction-finding on the sound from their muscle twitches and other sound-reflecting objects by detecting the echoes of muscle twitches of the fish doing the listening. (A flat surface, for instance, would produce an acoustic mirror image of the fish every time it twitched, identifying the return as an echo of the fish itself.) It would not surprise me if the processing for echolocation in other animals is just a revival or slight remapping of this same mechanism.)

please, please ... pass on this advice to a Progressive

While you're at it, point out that a lot of their prescriptions INCREASE risk while purporting to reduce it. It's doubly annoying when they work so hard, throwing money, effort, and restrictive laws into trying to solve a problem when the effort and sacrifice actually makes it worse, in a positive feedback loop.

Progressives have no monopoly on this, either. Neocons, consdrvatives, and even Libertarians do it as well. It's easy for all to do things to attack a problem and not see that the indirect effects of the effort cause more harm (even in terms of the problem being attacked) than the first-order effects help.

Some examples:

  - Gun control: Private ownership and carrying of guns REDUCES crime, violence, victimization, and death, while citizen disarmament increases them.

  - Attempts to police the world produce "blowback", creating new and/or motivating existing enemies, increasing, rather than decreasing, the risk and costs to the US from war.

  - Drug prohibition creates more drug use and criminal enterprises, rather than reducing drug use, and harms the drug users more than the drugs do. Its component programs often have counterproductive pathologies of their own. One example is the D.A.R.E. program, which attempts to use peer pressure to encourage kids to ignore peer pressure, and has been shown to increase drug use.

  - Grabbing advances to any program, rather than considering whether achieving goals in the wrong order makes things worse rather than better. (A Libertarian example: They want both open borders and an end to government wealth distribution such as welfare programs. Unfortunately, opening the borders first leads to an influx of social program dependents, making the overall problem worse (and increasing the voting block to preserve and expand the programs), when fixing or eliminating the programs first would remove most of the downsides to opening the borders later.)

If we extrapolate this curve and assume everything else remains constant, DOOOOOOOOOM!!!!

Darned right. (The authors seem to think the battery makers won't respond to a market for more batteries by building more batteries. Duh!)

As I understand it there's NOTHING blocking production ramp-up for Li-Ion batteries except lack of customer demand, which the auto industry is now rectifying. There's nothing exotic or rare in their composition.

Pretty much ditto for NiMH (except maybe for the price of nickel).

Henry Ford built a bunch of infrastructure to supply his auto company with necessary materials - including building his own steel mills, power plants, and soybean warehousing and processing operations (for early plastics). Any bets on whether Elon Musk would build his own battery plants if the current industry doesn't make him enough (or gouges him on the prices)?

Sure it can. A process can generate a lot of some material which nobody currently needs. The manufacturer will then go and look for a market which can use this material and try to develop that market.

That was the case long ago for gasoline, it was a useless by-product for a long time there...it was actually thrown causing some environmental problems, till they could finally figure out a use for the stuff.

Other examples:
  - Plastics
  - Asphalt
  - "Coal-tar" dies.
  - Liquified Natural Gas from remote oil fields (like the Middle East).

One of my favorites: Stove Pellets: They're made of sawdust from lumber mills, which used to be disposed of by burning it on site. They can sell them very cheap and still be far ahead of spending money to get rid of them (especially after EPA regs made burning them pricey). As a result, my house heating (in a mild climate place where shipping raises their price substantially) costs me maybe $300-400/year, vs. several thousand if I were still using natural gas. (It's carbon-neutral, too.)

Ping time can geolocate? Within 10 feet. I'm about to piss on myself laughing. Ping is more determined by quality of network than distance, and varies according to the route each ping takes. You assumptions assume every route is the same, or is on a cell phone. They are not.

Go play network expert somewhere else, and get off my lawn.

Li-ons and TiGrs and BeArs? Oh my....

Jesus Christ, the signal to noise ratio has gone insane at /.

In the US, the law is dictated by where the call is generated. Some states allow recording, some states do not, some states allow for "single party consent" (as along as ONE of the parties know) and some require notification before the call starts or beeping tones every $x seconds.

He called from outside of the US, so US law is irrelevant here.

Citation needed. I can't even get most webpages to load that fast.

Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 1 to 2.5 millimeters (0.04 to 0.1 inches) per year since 1900.

Four to ten inches per century. Look out for the tidal wave.

Variation by a factor of 2.5? That's VERY noisy data to use for the extrapolation of rates. How few samples and what level of noise do they have that they can't come up with better error margins?

This rate may be increasing. Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry (the measurement of elevation or altitude) indicate a rate of rise of 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) per year.

And with noisy data you occasionally get an outlier on one end or the other. Of course if you want to produce panic you treat the biggest excursion as if it's the average, and extrapolate it out for a century. But even if you do that you're talking a whole 12 inches sea rise in a CENTURY.

It's been less than 2.4 centuries since the American Revolution, a little over five since Columbus made his famous trip. Don't you think that, if the sea level gradually rises by a foot per century the new construction will just be up the hills a little more and the companies will move?

And while we're at it, how OLD are these high-tek companies, and how long before they're replaced by a new generation? Do they actually expect to be in existence and in the same buildings after fifty or a hundred years? The mind boggles.

Start now by placing incentives in place.

Why?

If encroaching seawater is not adequate incentive to get the PHBs to act, they deserve to go bankrupt when their sites flood.

If it isn't profitable, the market can't do it. Not won't, can't.

Fifty-six years after Sputnik, there's profit to be found in building, launching and operating satellites. As a result, the market has built and sustains businesses that do that. Aside from the Russians pay-to-be-a-space-tourist gimmickry (which exists thanks to state-funded infrastructure) no one has built a business putting people into space.

If the market is going to send people out to explore the Solar System, someone will need to tell it how to turn a profit doing that.