Ugh this.

Everyone is trying to get in on the market place action, including stores I likes using specifically because they were not market places. Also FFS why can they not seem to let me order by "actually in stock in the shop", and "available for next day collection or delivery" when that information is available. That would remove basically all the market place listings and it's also why I use the shop in the first place.

Rapid Accelerated Disassembly?

Rapid Anomalous Disassembly?

Or did you mean R.U.D. (Rapid Unscheduled/Unplanned Disassembly)?

Starship burns methane, not RP1.

Between SuperHeavy and Starship, a fully-loaded stack needs 3500 tons of LOX and 1000 tons of CH4. So what do those cost?

Well, oxygen is easy to get from the atmosphere, so the cost of LOX is really just some equipment (which isn't terribly expensive to buy and maintain) plus electricity, and the cost ends up being dominated by the cost of electricity. It takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton. There are some other costs to handle and store it, so let's say $100/ton.

CH4 can be created many ways. The cheapest is probably to purify natural gas, which costs about $190 per ton (that site shows ~$5 per 1000 ft^3, and a ton is 38k ft^3). Add some costs for purification and cooling, so call it $250/ton.

3500 tons LOX * $100/ton + 1000 tons CH4 * 250/ton = $600k. Musk usually calls it $1M, which seems pretty reasonable, since they're probably not separating/purifiying it themselves and there transportation costs. 150 tons of payload to LEO with $1M worth of fuel means the fuel-only cost is $6.67/kg.

Nonsense. Our only experience with reusable orbital rockets is the space shuttle, which was an unsustainably-expensive and complex beast that was more refurbishable than reusable and had a payload one fifth of what Starship is designed for. It's all of the differences that aim to make Starship both reusable and cheap that make it hard. It's possible that it's just too ambitious, that we don't yet have the technology to make a cheap, fully-reusable (not refurbishable, reusable) orbital rocket with massive capacity. No one else has done it... no one else is even trying, that's how hard it is.

Failure is expected. If they managed to launch and land both Starship and SuperHeavy in less than a dozen test flights, that would be the surprise.

I'm talking about the IBM Simon from 1994(!), which apparently ran Datalight ROM-DOS on a NEC V20 CPU.

We all want to hear more about this.

It's incredible. You think of the evolution of evolution of smartphones from dumb ones through to clunky things with keyboards and weird limited, tiny apps, and so on and so forth.

No, the first smartphone was a slab (with concessions to the tech of the day with worse speakers and microphones and the need for an antenna) with featured a large touchscreen, with a grid-of-icons home screen, and hardware volume up/down buttons on the side and a lock slider.

Look up the IBM Simon. Loads of excellent links, consider yourself nerd sniped. The iPhone ripped it off 13 years later with state of the art (actually novel in some ways) 2007 era manufacturing tech rather than 1994 era tech, except the first release of the iPhone couldn't really be considered a smartphone until Cydia introduced their app store, since it didn't really have loadable apps, unlike the Simon.

ED: Looks like it's 24(!) hives per beehome, and they charge $2k delivery ($83/hive) plus $400/mo ($400/hive/yr) for maintenance.

Clearly not something of use to amateurs, and I'm not sure whether you can make that economics work out for professionals, either. I guess it depends on how truly independent it is, vs. your local labour costs.

There is little correlation between "presence or absence of pollution" (what a general term to begin with...) and CCD. There is a strong correlation with the presence / absence of varroa. And this system treats varroa.

I've been thinking about getting into beekeeping (I first need to increase the accessibility of my ravine where they'd be), and had been thinking about a sort of high tech solution, with electric blankets, heat-exchanging baffles, a flow hive, and maybe some mass and/or noise sensors for monitoring colony health. But this is WAY more high-tech than I envisioned, and honestly I'm scared to even look up the price ;)

The best correlation between the presence and absence of CCD is varroa. CCD is probably not single cause, but if you had to pick only one, varroa is that one.

And glyphosate is probably WAY down on the list. At least pick an insecticide as your culprit.

Most men still have a PC simply for gaming

[citation needed]

Women don't give a shit about gaming.

[citation needed]

My wife has a nice laptop that she barely touches.

Cool story bro. My wife has a nice laptop running Linux which she uses for almost everything, and our shared desktop for anything that needs real grunt.

The smartphone was the perfect product for females.

There's nothing wrong with referring to women as females it's just you sound like a Ferengi when you do it.

Um did you forget Microsoft Office exists?

Also Azure which is in number 2 position a bit behind AWS, but not that far.

Funny thing is Microsoft runs a lot of Linux these days.

The idiots tried to turn a workstation OS into a hybrid mobile/workstation OS instead.

As opposed to Apple who turned Unix(tm) into a mobile OS and er Android which turned Linux (basically a unix clone) into a mobile OS.

Still better than the first smartphone which ran an MS-DOS clone.

Not with far-UV (~222nm) you didn't.

Leaders aren't there out there e.g. building the rockets or doing the vast majority of the engineering. Musk doesn't get credit for that. But they do set the culture and direction for their companies. And in this regard, the "build quickly, launch quickly, fail quickly, learn quickly, and iterate quickly" culture developed for SpaceX happens to be very effective. Musk gets credit for instilling that. Another thing he should get credit for is the broad design strokes such as "focus on designs that are cheap enough that they can be mass produced, gaining you economies of scale and the ability to iterate quickly during testing, but are still capable of being reused" (this differs from the two previous predominant paradigms, either super-expensive low-volume reusables, or cheap high-volume disposables).

I don't like the guy, but absolutely, credit where it's due.

Except that Musk is allowed to show up at work or not whenever he feels like it, so he's a giant hypocrite who forces everyone else to do that which he himself is not willing to do.