mendort

A mark 84 bomb, one of the largest conventional munitions in frequent use, costs about 3k a piece. The mark 84's smaller cousins are cheaper. JDAM kits costs about 27k a piece. How am I making things up?

A tail kit that costs almost 10 times as much as the bomb.

I don't think living on mars will be that hard. I think building the large industrial base required to extract resources and manufacture the equipment required to live on mars will be very difficult (read expensive and slow).

It may, in fact, require more resources for one person to live on mars than one person can produce with our current (or near future) level of technology.

I think just building the energy infrastructure to do energy expensive things like make steel or silicon ingots will be very difficult. Not to mention that there is no source of petroleum on mars, so plastics are going to have to synthesized using other materials. The difficulties are legion once you get down to the details.

I suspect that once we see how hard it is to build a self-sustaining extra terrestrial colony, we'll come to appreciate what we have even more.

huh.. you're right. I assumed that anything the military bought these days came with a 1/4 million dollar price tag, but the Mark 84 bomb is only about twice the price per lb of the pumpkin bombs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_84_bomb

They cost between 13k and 26k a piece in 2014 USD. That is truly amazing.

EDIT:

Even more amazing when you consider that they weighed about 10k pounds.

In my region there is a group of charities that get food that would otherwise have been thrown out from local grocery stores. The handling of the food tends to be a bit careless so it's best to stay away from the things that really need to be refrigerated, but it was really helpful for me when I was unemployed. So I for one am glad that grocery stores have too much.

I'm on the latest release of GNU emacs. I'm mostly on Windows, which could be the issue.

I also am a long time emacs user, but whenever a plugin freezes emacs I immediately stop using it. Is is cider now stable? I know nrepl.el would crash emacs frequently if you asked it to evaluate the wrong thing.

It seems like from the definition of viscosity and the estimate of glass viscosity provided we should easily be able to observe some glass flow over the course of 10^12 years or so.

It does have less than 1/4 of the payload (by mass) of NASA's MAVEN. So it's not like NASA's much higher budget didn't buy them anything. Still, it is a wonderful thing to show that you don't need NASA sized budgets to do interesting things in space.

I have found it to be MUCH easier to get regular exercise when I live in a reasonably pedestrian safe neighborhood. I have found that the perceived level of effort to maintain fitness varies wildly with my external conditions (stress, neighborhood, prosperity, relationships, etc.). Saying that everyone can do it if they just give it the old college try may be a result of your circumstances.

That'd be great way to establish a regressive tax. Luxury foods don't have more calories than cheap ones so as a percentage of cost cheap food prices would increase more. Not to mention that percentage of income spent on food for low income people is much higher than % of income spent on food by rich people.

Sometimes 'dispose of' means 'accidentally drops in a lake'. Accidents happens, and inadequate backups are part of the human condition.

Is 3D printing really enabling this? If they can make the measurements, I have a hard time believing that an experienced machinist couldn't fabricate the parts necessary. This seems more like a victory of measurement technologies that allow the requirements for a replacement skull to be precisely mapped, than a triumph of 3d printing. (Though I do admit that 3d printing would probably be a lot cheaper than machining.)

The end of the cold war also meant the end of battling propagandas between east and west. Maybe what we're feeling is a result of no one telling us stories any more, and not a result of any real change.

I used to work for a company contracted to a major US Telecom to provide certain SMS related network services. There were basically zero protections on user data. Anyone who wanted to could watch the stream of SMSs go by.

And Tomatoes... Though fortunately that is finally being rectified.

I don't think anyone would argue that the compiler in question is far from optimal for compiling this particular program.

However, if you are writing a general purpose compiler, you need to accommodate any program. Each of the properties (e.g. no use of getters, only one variable) that you point out about this program would take a compiler pass to establish.

I haven't thought too much about it, but some of the properties are very likely to be undecidable by static analysis for many programs.

It seems likely that using time to determine whether the program being compiled has these properties would not be efficient for most real world programs, even if it did provide enough information to choose a more optimal compilation strategy in some cases.

To be fair to Apple, I think it's fair to say that their ROI on the iPad has been respectable, even if it doesn't turn out to be a product that's successful in the long term.

Well, we know that CIA was doing something like it in Pakistan. It would be a little surprising if the FBI didn't the potential for the technology.

Oh my goodness. We can't know what causes of a phenomenon are simply by observing it? Stop the presses.

Maybe they can call it "Standardized Markdown" which would be both more descriptive and accurate.

You can buy cars online in the US. And Tesla does sell its cars that way. This is about whether Tesla is allowed to run Brick and Mortar stores in various places in the US.

Man, the shuttle's cargo bay was rediculously huge. Lofting that whole volume for a routine iss resupply seems insanely wasteful. (I know that it is expensive to loft mass, not volume. But in this case it is volume that needed to be enclosed in a shell that could survive reentry.)

He probably also credits his doctors with enabling his recovery. And the drugs he took. And his own decision not to just give up and die. How can he possibly handle all these crazy contradictions?

Exactly. Anyone who objects to easter eggs because they may accidentally introduce vulnerabilities should be objecting much more strongly to features of the application that they don't need. If you want to know every aspect of a program, then you need to own the code and be brutal about stripping out features that you aren't currently using.

There was a mildly annoying effect somewhat reminiscent to pop-in seen when terrain geometries go from lower to higher detail in video games. It was particularly evident here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOpwHaQnRSY#t=170

It would, I think, be even more distracting if the video was higher resolution.

Maybe you can monkey patch Object.prototype to include a toMap function? That way you get nice literals and the benefits of maps.

You also assume that amazon is free to price ebooks however they want provided that they pay the publisher the right amount. They are not. This is one of the reasons that this conflict has developed. Amazon has traditionally been happy to sell many physical books at a loss. They are not permitted to do this with ebooks.