angstrom

Yes, this is what I was referring to. Though there's probably another percentage that makes most rocket fuel also insufficient for anything more than LEO.

Having played several hundred hours of KSP I can confirm you shouldn't underestimate momentum. It's amazing that it's even possible. I think the number I've heard is if the earth's gravity was something like 10% stronger this wouldn't be feasible.

Right, you might call these people manipulative, but on a level where they can camouflage their behavior.

Bill Cosby for instance could possibly be considered one. His also seems more methodical. What's worse: 60 possible rapes spanning decades or 60 possible rapes spanning a year?

High functioning sociopaths. A person can be an asshole and not know it. A sociopath knows they're not acting within acceptable social norms and hides it. These investors are sociopaths. An asshole will make a comment and not deny it. A sociopath will try to twist it into a seemingly logical action ie "I was just trying to get rid of her because I didn't like her idea." By that logic who knows how many Jehovah's witnesses this person groped and/or fucked.

I like that you mentioned the cost to replace. This is something heavily ignored right now for the fossil fuels. The cost to find and develop new wells is so prohibitive due to either the risk or the technical challenges that securing finance to invest is not as easy as it was the past 50 years. It's becoming a Sisyphean task to replace and grow existing production.

That's just a formality. The implementation is trivial and left to the reader of any good DARPA project as an exercise.

Yeah, they missed including a pie chart and a gantt chart for good measure.

Not sure if sarcastic or sincere. You can damn near predict what will be the future tech 10 years down the line based on what DARPA is doing to make killing more efficient.

Right, noone is acknowledging SolarCity's pre-existing relationships with homebuilders. http://www.solarcity.com/commercial/homebuilders

This gave me cold chills about all too many academic projects which led me to question my understanding. Much older and wiser I realize it was the horrid projects that were largely to blame for imposing such horrid implementations as 'learning material'.

As far as I'm concerned these gravity assisted landings are technologically superior voodoo magic. The combination of materials, software and physics to accomplish the improbable.

Wouldn't be surprised if it's similar to the coatings placed on the launch pad stabilizers. The paint is meant to char because it acts similar to a ceramic preventing damage to the underlying metal. There's a good youtube video of this on the moon launches where the tail fin hold downs char, but don't warp.

I'm still not convinced it's not an act. The guy would have to be unusually dense to govern with ignorance of both a priori and a posteriori knowledge. The greenhouse effect was discovered over 100 years ago, not placed on a napkin as a hunch in a bar 10 years ago.

Thought that was cargo cult. Going through the steps of what was successful in a given situation without understanding the logic behind those steps at the time they were applied or perhaps the reason they worked in the first place assuming luck was not a factor.

I've looked at people's commit history at work and been astonished to see maybe 12 or so commits in the last year. They are maybe 4th or 5th year tenure with the company, but I guarantee pulling more than 200K. Think about that...

I would lean towards both being correct depending on how they looked at the data. If you did purely education level, degree field and years of experience related to position then I would expect minimal deviation. However, you can go further tweaking how you look at each of those variables.

There's also a fitting debate about blindly follow GS.

Some people get off on tomb-stoning large amounts of data. Let him have his moment. Tweets are equivalent to taking a dandelion that's seeded and blowing it into the wind.

Right, except in the hard tech areas. I suspect it will becomes a bigger differentiation when setting the standard. Focusing on chrome would be a waste of immediate effort. It makes more sense to work on the commonalities of the energy infrastructure that augment the existing landscape than on what chrome goes best with the seat's heated-leather-ass-warmer. The luxury brands won't have the energy generation and storage solution to match. The competition has an enormous supply chain problem that's just getting worse unless they jump on board with Tesla's charging standard.

I don't know there's any laws, but if there were I'd think Oregon and New Jersey would require it since they already do that for pumping gasoline.

Drive-thu pickup exists, but it's not widespread. Where I grew up in Ohio there's a chain that has had grocery loading since at least the 80s. You drive up, give them a number and they put the groceries in your trunk.

Right, most people have seen this trick performed with a broom handle or maybe even done it themselves. This is the same trick done from edge of space to sea level with a much smaller margin for error and a gravity well.

To me it's fucking awesome. To everyone else it's just a large broomstick.

And someone in AWS gets the 2AM pager wake up call.

Kindle. Fire. I'll see myself out.

Marketing is like makeup. This is why "putting lipstick on a pig" won't make the bacon better, but it might make you think the pig needs a wig and push-up bra to match the competition.

This is my view exactly. The NSA/CIA/Pentagon are not new to the game. This is what it looks like when it's done to everyday people, the kind of thing Snowden was concerned about:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/world/europe/vladimir-puti...

And it looks like the people working in our US intelligence agencies also get toyed with from time to time. Either that or there is a bigger pedophile ring in the intelligence agencies than the Vatican:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6W8H5Z0XAc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bf5T1lFyaL4

The spoken word has so many nuances. Cadence, inflexion, tone, and then the facial performances are never captured by pure text to speech. You'd almost have to be able to set boundaries for seriousness, playfulness, innuendo, indifference, sarcasm etc because none of that is conveyed in the literal text without additional descriptions or contextual analysis of the conversation.

More interesting are the shopping patterns like purchase frequency, the time periods between them, the kinds of flavors you like and other products you've not considered. Less insidious. More along streamlining your purchase process and identifying similar behaviors and tastes. Much of which any store with a rewards program should already know.

No, the interstates are a bigger joke. You'll see nothing, but make great time. What I've seen as someone originally from Ohio that's lived in NYC and Seattle the last 10 years is much of the culture is diluted because people move around and communities receive more outside influence than they did pre-WW2. I've seen too much to list here. The rural areas like where I grew up and the farm I was raised on are familiar. It's the faces of people and culture are familiar to me. And people do cling to religion and sometimes guns.

I've also lived in the wealthiest zip code on the upper east side and listened in on elitist ramblings as people discuss international finance in the corner Starbucks. Oblivious of the wider social impacts such topics have.

My day today is spent working in a technocracy that unfortunately over estimates merits and the ability of anyone to simply advance beyond their circumstance.

The culture exists, but it has Americanized over the years. Polish, Irish, German, Swiss, etc it all gets diluted from the European versions after 5 or 6 generations.

I've driven across the US three times. American culture is largely gone, coopted by cookie cutter homes, strip malls and wal-marts. It's a beautiful country though.

Right, I don't think that's dishonest. These were vehicles essentially already paid for by Tesla in previous quarters. The fact that they could still sell them is a good sign.