The capsules holding astronauts obviously have to land intact at some point, unless you thought we sent all astronauts prior to the Shuttle up to their deaths. The Shuttle's uncontrollable SRBs have been jettisoned and recovered after every flight.
Reusability is of no ground-safety consequence. By basic physical law, these devices will be very nearly empty of fuel by the time they reach the ground -- in fact almost all fuel will have been expended within minutes of liftoff.
The first stage of a Falcon 9 has a dry mass less than a 14-seat Gulfstream V business jet, the Dragon capsule is less than 1/3rd that.
If you trust thousands of planes to fly through the air over and into major cities every day without killing thousands of people on the ground, you should trust spacecraft far, far more.
> Up until now, space operations have always been nonpartisan, co-operative, and peaceful.
Oh please. Space operations grew directly out of unbridled Cold War militarism, and have been pure political football at least since the approval of the absolutely insane space shuttle program.
I want high taxes, I want big government, I want single-payer health care, I want a welfare and social security system that makes Scandinavia look like a libertarian wasteland. I want ten times the corporate regulation we have now.
But there is no reason for the government to be the primary driver or provider of routine space launch services, especially when it's done such a piss-poor job of it since Apollo.
Private companies like SpaceX have ample incentive to advance the state of the art in launch services and are demonstrably doing so for less than the government has ever managed before. NASA can and should take advantage of that.
Where exactly have you lived that you've avoided knowledge of Vostok, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Soyuz, the Space Shuttle, Skylab, Salyut, Mir, the International Space Station, and the thousands of observation, spy, communications, and scientific satellites that have been launched since Sputnik in 1957?
I'd call that more like three orders of magnitude, and the world has been launching rockets and landing capsules since 1961. Nothing even remotely like what you are speaking of has ever come remotely close to happening.
No one launches rockets over populated areas, nobody aims capsules for populated areas, the CIA spent the 1960s recovering CORONA satellite film canisters with such precision they captured them with planes in mid-air.
No, in many cases these are actual, realized losses, as in "we bought at this price and sold at this much lower price". They have no money, and no stock. Recovery of the stock is irrelevant to them.
Well they shouldn't have bought it. Sorry but that's capitalism and the way the market works. If you invest, you invest in the possibility of it going down.
Day and Short-termers should have known it wasn't going to do well. For me, this stock was literally the Grinch. And long-term investors well it certainly hasn't been long-term yet now has it.
But really, why anyone bought any Facebook stock...I'm just clueless.
Most Americans simply don't have the time or expertise to puzzle out educated positions on various specialized topics. [1]
The vast majority must inevitably defer to trusted intermediaries to summarize, weigh arguments and state positions. Historically, these would be the press and popular community and national public figures.
The problem today is that those intermediaries are busy leveraging that trust for personal financial gain, feeling no obligation to perform the actual duty being entrusted to them. [2]
To remotely "pay attention" to the breadth of political discourse absent trustworthy filters and intermediaries is beyond a full time job.
Not to mention that it's generally a first-class ticket to becoming disaffected, as one discovers that the issues worth talking about are largely ignored and in many cases there are simply no alternative positions being offered by our political parties.
[1] A person with no training in economics simply cannot make an educated position on any but trivial economic policy short of actually studying economics. And Dunning-Kruger doesn't paint an optimistic picture of anyones ability to fairly weight the various arguments while they're still coming up to speed on these topics in a highly polarized, highly politicized environment.
And to 'pay attention' one must not only do this with economics, but criminal justice, property rights, the health care industry, international politics, business operation, lobbying rules and restrictions, etc.
I forget what exactly I was going to insert there. Likely a brief condemnation of what has become overwhelming and universal tabloid journalism, not to mention the almost comically partisan books being pushed by news organizations to justify the media 'personalities' they populate talking-head shows with.
Transparency is a first step. When the data is available, people (and robots) can analyze it. The FOIA has revealed some interesting stuff, but it is a slow process.
This seemed extremely bizarre to me until I read the filing itself[1].
The RSUs in question are unvested. Apparently a change was just made by the board that means unvested RSUs will collect dividends which will be paid out upon vesting. Cook is declining those.
I can kind of understand that it would look strange to make a change like this to already-granted RSUs, but if it were that big of a concern, it seems odd that only Cook would decline the dividends, or that the board would have made the change retroactive in the first place, so I still don't entirely understand declining them.
Dividends on unvested stock options kind of suck. You don't get the money, but the value of your stock goes down (in theory by the amount of the dividend).
He's actually wrong. Starcraft introduced usernames/passwords and unique names to Battle.net in early 1998. The support was then patched into Diablo 1.05. Diablo I's Battle.net functionality did not originally include usernames/passwords at all.
It was quite a strange little architecture, initially. Your displayed name was whatever you'd named your character, with the distinguishing feature being an "account number" that could be re-generated by deleting a file in your Diablo directory (the corollary being if you didn't back the file up, your account number would change upon a reformat or migration to a new computer).
Ultra minor nit-pick, but your account number was stored in a registry entry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Battle.net\Configuration), not a file.
The account number consisted of four parts:
Registration Version: This was always 1 for all the account numbers that I still have lying around.
Registration Authority: I don't actually remember what this was used for.
Client ID: The actual account number.
Client Token: Random number used to verify the validity of the Client ID.
Or you used a tool to change your account to 1537 and nobody could ever find you because hundreds, if not thousands, of people all used that same shared account.
I'd be fine with that. In fact, it'd probably be an objective improvement with regard to my search results.
Not all of us believe search engines have some magical obligation to be complete or impartial. If you don't like the results you get from one, try another.
Agreed. The most frustrations I've had with google lately is when it assumes I care about some cluster of social chatter that vaguely intersects with my search terms.
> I reckon every few function calls you make could potentially trigger an exception.
One Java module I had the misfortune of writing theoretically had to deal with checked exceptions on the majority of its calls, and the only possible response to virtually all of them was to crash, because in that context, it could only have meant someone had either ripped the DRAM off the board, or placed the board in a particle accelerator.
And there was nothing particularly special about the module aside from the extreme concentration. Every piece of Java I've ever written or even looked at has this same problem on a reduced scale.
My point is to show how utterly broken and worthless the concept is. Either there's a ton of exception-"handling" boilerplate that does nothing useful, or there's "throws Exception" everywhere, itself useless boilerplate that exists only to tell the compiler to buzz off.
Reusability is of no ground-safety consequence. By basic physical law, these devices will be very nearly empty of fuel by the time they reach the ground -- in fact almost all fuel will have been expended within minutes of liftoff.
The first stage of a Falcon 9 has a dry mass less than a 14-seat Gulfstream V business jet, the Dragon capsule is less than 1/3rd that.
If you trust thousands of planes to fly through the air over and into major cities every day without killing thousands of people on the ground, you should trust spacecraft far, far more.