srdev

Any proof of that?

Cooling is not easily available in space actually. Its a pretty difficult problem. There's no air to convect away heat so you rely only on radiative cooling which can't move a lot of heat easily.

He sold shares to Russ Hanneman and Reviga bought those shares off of Hanneman.

No, hostility in the context of playing the game is fine. Its a PvP game so that wouldn't be a tenable policy. You can go and kill the other team all you want. Poor behavior in the in-game chat or metagame is whats at issue here: sending other people messages to insult them, throwing matches on purpose to "get back" at your team, being a poor sport, etc.

Edit: Here's an analogy. Consider if you were playing a basketball game and one of the players slapped the ball out of his teammate's hand and started screaming in his face about how he s a terrible player and should have been aborted. That's the sort of behavior we're talking about.

> Are there any best practices guides on this?

I'm not aware of any, but we did have quite a lot of procedures meant to mitigate this sort of things when I worked in banking. For one, none of the developers had any sort of access to production machines.

Well, thats very disappointing.

Are you aware of Escape Dynamics? You might want to see what they're trying to do with beamed energy thermal rockets.

In scientific discussion, absence of evidence means that we accept the null hypothesis until such time that evidence is found.

No more bitcoins, miners get funded by fees instead of the newly-minted coins.

Its really understandable why that would piss them off and I sympathize. At the same time, it seems like the only solutions are for me to quit my job and "fuck off", or to live in the suburbs and suck up a > 1 hr commute. People deserve to live a good life and improve their station, and that includes techies who are well off, in addition to the poor and middle class.

> But does your comment mean that sites who make a concerted effort to have as few ads as possible will be fruitless in their efforts?

To be totally honest? Probably.

I'd be inclined to whitelist sites that curate their ads or ad networks such that

1) Ads are small and delivered fast 2) Ads do not track users 3) Ads never deliver malware ever. 4) Content is not split or otherwise organized to enhance ad views over readability. 5) Ads do not popup, popover, popunder. 6) No door-in-face to advertise your iOS/Android app.

and so on and so forth.

The issue here is that you first have to establish that you won't do these things, then I have to trust that you actually keep your word and will continue to avoid bad ads indefinitely into the future. That is, you won't change your mind when revenue decreases. Then I have to extend that same trust to your ad network. I have to trust that they won't "slip up" while you're not watching.

And now I have to do that for all the sites that I visit that I may want to whitelist.

Thats not really tractable. That trust requires a lot of research on my part or blind faith. And the ad network thing is also a sticking point, because ad networks that have seemingly worked in good faith in the past have become user-hostile when they became larger or had to compete (i.e. Google).

I take it as a point that these probably impact behavior just as much as traditional ads. Let me raise a counter-point though.

These things have already been done for a while. Is there any evidence that banner ads were preventing this sort of advertising from being even more prevalent than it already is? I am skeptical that advertisers are holding back on these avenues -- in fact its pretty obvious that they're heavily into this space already.

My experience is that the blockers have done a very good job of keeping up with these tactics, so I'm not particularly worried on this front. There is still viral marketing and paid PR pieces disguised as legitimate content, however, but not much can be done about that and it doesn't impact me as much as traditional advertising.

From my perspective as a user, it doesn't matter. If the ad networks and their customers are unable to enforce standards on their advertisers, then I have no choice but to block them. Making it my responsibility is not an option.

Its not possible to enforce compliance with some sort of ethical standards industry-wide, but it is possible to at least encourage it, especially if you are a large player like Facebook or Google. From my perspective, they don't even appear to be trying.

> I guess you could argue that Google and Facebook controlled enough of the market that if they acted in concert, they could have prevented the current situation, but they certainly would have faced strident accusations from advertisers of anti-competitive behavior and would have attracted the interest of regulators. (And if that is your argument, you should say so.)

Its not clear to me that this is the case. Simply enforcing standards on ads is not the same as limiting competition. Its an issue of a corporation deciding to not carry your content because it does not pass some presumably published and neutral guidelines. At the very least, it is not as clear-cut as you are making it sound.

> Once the adblocker is installed, once web-ads have been poisoned by years of bad practices, ads aren’t coming back.

That's really the crux of the matter. Advertisers and the sites using them had a chance to show us that they could do this in a responsible manner that took user experience into consideration. They demonstrated that they would engage in as much user-hostile advertising as they could get away with. So my ad-blocker went from having a carefully curated whitelist to a blanket banning with no exceptions. They had their chance and they blew it.

I read the article and I don't think they answered one of my biggest questions: is there a causative link from artistic endeavors to improvement in scienctific endeavors? Learning a musical instrument has been on my todo list for a while and I can't help but wonder in light of articles such as these if it would have other ancillary benefits to my cognition.

It takes more than a little math. I hang out in stock market chats that have a lot of programmer trying to do just this, and this comic is completely accurate: http://xkcd.com/1570

Have they said why your paint job is insufficient? Its hard to imagine that it would require a professional.

On the other hand, laptop is a 2011 model and I'm not allowed to upgrade until next year. My desktop has a "huge" 1 TB drive in it that I had to get my manager to approve, because Amazon apparently doesn't work with large datasets, and the desktop is just barely creaking along.

And I know what you're thinking. "Well your stuff is old, so you could obviously go in and get an upgrade!" Nope, went in the other day, literally, and was told I had to wait another year.

Frugality is absolutely widely misapplied at Amazon. Nearly every developer I've met that has been at Amazon for more than a year is dissatisfied with the hardware policy.

I'm ignorant of the actual law, so this is just a guess. Targeting the companies indexing the information is probably a more tractable problem then tracking down and eliminating all the sources. There's only a handful of really influential companies indexing this data compared to the numbers that produce and distribute it. If you remove the indexes and render the information difficult to find, its not that much different from removing the information altogether.

Comparing Bitcoin miners to any supercomputer or server farm is meaningless at best and deceiving at worst. Current Bitcoin miners cannot do anything other than one specific calculation.

Its only a feature if there is a sufficient amount of work one is interested in and a good chance that the recruiter can match you to a job. In my experience, there is a lot of garbage because recruiters throw a wide net without considering whether the job is a good fit.

It's kind of funny because "catch it with a helicopter" is ULA's plan, with the caveat that they're only catching the engines and not the whole rocket.

> Bringing the 1st stage nearly to a stop at some point mid-air should be way easier than landing it on the ground.

One thing to note about Falcon 9 is that it's impossible for it to hover since its thrust-to-weight ratio is greater than 1 at the time of recovery, even at minimum throttle. So you have to do a suicide burn such that you zero out velocity at your target.

Someone already pointed out the problem with helicopters capacity compared to the Falcon 9 weight. The idea is not without merit, However. ULA is considering a similar approach for the Vulcan. The big difference is that they plan to eject the engine core and catch only the engines with a helicopter. See http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/04/13/ula-unveils-its-future-...

The downside of this plan is increased complexity. Falcon 9's approach requires fins, some landing struTs and software. ULAs approach requires a system to eject the core, a shield for the cores re-entry, a parachute, a helicopter, and impeccable timing. I'm guessing that catching a parachute with a helicopter is an incredibly difficult problem just by itself.

I would suggest that you watch the Vulcan development to see how your thoughts play out.

Regarding the pool, I would assume that the issue would be finding an inert liquid, putting it in the middle of the ocean stably and enough quantities for a landing, and then getting the rocket into the liquid without damaging it. You'd likely still have all the same problems as just landing the rocket -- you have to zero horizontal elicits or the thing tips over and impacts the liquid too hard, and you have to zero verticle velocity or your impact is too hard. Ultimately you might as well just land the damn thing, which is also more versatile.

> I know there is a very good reason for this, but it seems like we're sending a lot of satellites to these moons and planets to perform VERY similar missions. Orbit around, take photos and readings.

I think you're overly abstracting the missions. It may seem similar at such a high level, but the actual readings being taken are likely very different and require very different hardware.

> Technologically this is no longer a tall order. We can stick a consumer video camera & phone in a lunchbox, attach it to a balloon, send it up to the stratosphere, and retrieve it afterwards for only hundreds of dollars, it's a middle-school project by now. I think that we could make a pretty decent camera probe that would take relatively high resolution pictures at a relatively low frame rate and last for at least a year for a marginal cost of $100,000, maybe quite a bit less.

Where are you getting the $100k from? I would guess that a control system, communication system, reaction control system, propellant, batteries, solar panels, and a camera would cost much more than that if you're designing it to withstand space. The Indian probe you mentioned was 15 kg and cost $24 million. If you normalize that down you're talking $1.6 million per kg for a mission notable for its low cost. The LRO cost $504 million total, and Atlas V costs around 230 million If we take $250 million to be conservative, then it cost $2.5 million per kg of scientific instruments.

Note that the Indian orbiter had a dry mass of 500 kg and a launch mass of 1,337 kg to support that payload. The LRO has a dry mass of 1,018 kg and a launch mass of 1,916 kg. So the LRO had 10 kg of supporting dry mass for every 1 kg of science, and the indian orbiter had about 30 kg of supporting dry mass for 1 kg of science. Lets add Kaguya as another data point that had 1,984 kg dry mass, 2,914 kg launch mass, and the mission payload seemed to be around 300 kg, for a ratio of 6 kg weight for 1 kg of science. In other words, as your satellite gets smaller, the weight of all the other stuff required to keep your satellite ticking and pointing in the right direction becomes dominant. That means that one satellite with 100 kg payload will likely have less total weight than 50 satellites with a 2 kg payload. That increased total weight will come from installing redundant systems on all your satellites. So we're talking higher launch costs and higher part costs. Its certainly going to be difficult to improve upon costs by a literal order of magnitude.

So then the question becomes, what science can we accomplish with 50 satellites that we can't with 1? Is there a benefit to all this added cost and complexity?

You're ignoring the lifting costs. The cost of lifting a payload into space and putting it into orbit is non-trivial compared to the cost of developing the probe. Can you imagine the cost of trying to put 50 probes into Julian orbit? Or even Lunar orbit? It would be cost-prohibitive. It gets worse if you use a bunch of mass-produced designs because you'd have a bunch of instruments of marginal value to the mission increasing lifting costs.

I also think you're assuming its possible to reduce to a general set of equipment that can answer the scientific questions that we're trying to answer. If you consider, for example, the difference between the things that Philae, Curiosity, New Horizons, Dawn, and this Europa probe are testing and the conditions that they are testing them in, then its hard to arrive at a common design that can handle all these conditions.

Edit: Another thing to consider is launch windows. You typically don't want to just regularly launch stuff to put near Mars or Jupiter whenever. You time your launches such that you can get them there within a certain amount of dV budget, otherwise you're dramatically increasing your deployment costs. This means that you only have a short window in which you can send out your shotgun probes -- you can't send them out constantly even if the lifting costs were feasible.

> If we trust the system that pulls the wool over our eyes, should we really trust it?

Blanket statements don't really help to determine if a given set of regulation is useful or not. The system has a lot of bad parts and regulatory capture is a thing, but that does not imply that literally all regulation is poor and need to be ignored. If one wants to make a statement with regards to any set of regulation, it needs to be specific and fact-based; simply issuing blanket statements is useless at best and dishonest at worst.

> A transparent financial blockchain is the core difference in philosophy between backroom decisions made on our behalf supposedly with our best intentions in mind by non-elected appointed people and a mathematical equation that we can all see and test. Math we can all trust because it is true at it's core, can we do the same for people?

This is pretty much nonsense. The statements you are making here are so abstract and broad that they defy any sort of reasonable analysis.

You can consider the Bitcoin algorithm as a mathmatical equation, but that says nothing about whether you can trust the individual entities utilizing Bitcoin. You can't reduce all interactions between people to algorithms, so at some point you're going to have to have rules and norms in place, which will ultimately be decided on by people in some manner. Furthermore, whether the system is encoded as an algorithm (what you're calling math here) is orthogonal to whether it is doing the correct or optimal thing.

The "trust in math" line espoused by Bitcoin advocates does not have the effect they think; it simply makes them appear dogmatic and cultish. Saying that something is math and therefor trustable and unassailable is rather short-sighted.

> Yes some payment processors can be shady, but so can some fed officials who are incharge with our entire financial system.

The existence of shady fed officials has no bearing whatsoever on whether a specific set of rules are good or necessary from a societal standpoint. Its a completely separate discussion. On the other hand, the fact that some payment processors are shady is relevant to the discussion of whether the rules are necessary.

Ultimately, your entire argument is an emotional appeal here. You'd do better to set aside the rhetoric.

> I'm not going waste my time weighing in on whether we were clever hackers or bozos -- the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.

No, it doesn't always. The truth is not in the middle here; you guys were being breathtakingly clueless. Trying to pass it off as cleverness is just self-delusion, and none of the excuses your team has written are justifiable. You should probably do some honest introspection before taking your next pass on starting up a business. Not doing so is a disservice to yourself.

Intent absolutely matters, yes. Silk Road was promoted by the staff as primarily a drug marketplace. Ross grew mushrooms to sell on the marketplace. It had links to drugs on its sidebar. They had a doctor to give advice to drug users. It was designed specifically not to comply with the law. These are all factors when determining criminality. If a site like Amazon accidentally sold child porn (as an example) via self publishing features, then they wouldn't be liable because Amazon was designed and promoted as a way to sell legal things that follow the law, and they would action the removal of those items when brought to their attention. These would make a strong case that there was no criminal intent on Amazon's part and that the fault was with a third party and so nothing would come from it.

It is extremely obtuse to act as if this sets a scary precedent By reducing the situation to absurd levels. Context has always mattered and will continue to matter.