rdancer

Source?

Let's put it this way: the IT guys set it to be fit for the purpose outlined by the boss. And it was a success.

More like "nagged" than "pushed". The responsibilities of a salesman vs. doctor are clearly delineated. The salesman sells. The doctor must not outsource his decision making to the salesman.

What people underappreciate is that salespeople provide a vital role. Their job is to aid buyers in choosing what to do with their money. If doctors were susceptible to fraud of other underhanded sales tactics, that'd be alarming — they're the smart ones, are they not? But it's not that. They're not being duped. They succumb to corruption, or actively seek it.

The demand seems to be quite inelastic at the current price levels, but the comsat industry has been gearing up for reusability. It is possible that there will be some price elasticity at radically lower prices, and the increased demand makes up for the lower unit margin. SpaceX need to kickstart a whole new trans-lunar economy for the Mars colonisation project to work, so it is within their interest to stimulate long-term demand.

If Musk wanted to maximize his risk-adjusted profit, SpaceX would never have started. Remember, he financed the cashflow out of his own pocket, and went from a 100-millionaire to not being able to afford rent during the process. He himself said SpaceX had less than even chance of success, and he is known to be both very meticulous in preparation, and an incurable optimist.

> the barge outweighs the rocket by orders of magnitude

The energy amount the rocket impacts with is dominated by its speed, not its mass. A small, fast-travelling projectile can make a hole in just about any kind of armour. The terminal velocity is quite low, but that's in part because of the way it is engineered — an ICBM would probably be able to put a hole through a ship deck with ease.

There is a lot of reasoning by analogy vs. reasoning from first principles going on, and the latter seems to be winning. But the main driver of the space industry is governmental funding, not commercial. Much of those statements were probably political; SpaceX have prevailed, and indeed found some champions of their own (John McCain is rabidly behind them, and some of the statements he comes up with are ludicrous in their own right, for example), though not before enduring some setbacks.

Yes. Please note I borrowed the phrase "only suckers pay retail" from someone much older and wiser than I. It reveals a powerful and profound truth about the relationship between a seller and a buyer in a retail situation.

You can get that stick of bread cheaper (bulk discount, in-store offers, credit card cashback) or more convenient (free delivery, freshly baked). And those are just the publicly available ways, no extra hassle and for everybody. If you are willing to drive a really hard bargain, you can usually negotiate a price slightly below cost (that's why retail can be cheaper than wholesale). Sociopaths can get to negative price, but not everybody has a stomach for that.

Maybe it is not a burden for you to pay $3 every day to have fresh bread, and maybe you don't eat that much of it anyway. But the same applies to a computer, a house, equity share, even loan rate. If it is a standard agreement, if it is the public offer, if it is the sticker price, you can go way down and still make an equitable deal. And if you don't care about the relationship, you can go even lower and still get good deal just for yourself. If you are on the selling end, it is even more important you understand this, even if just to avoid toxic customers.

Conversely, you should pay more than the sticker price when it makes sense. I do much better service for my customers who are more valuable to me, because I don't want to lose them. If you want better service, demand to be treated specially and insist to pay more.

I wonder what else may have been happening circa 1814–1818 that could make people more violent in its aftermath?

The incentives create a market in which the energy consumer and producer can trade in their existing inefficiencies. The market will decide where it is best to make the compromise, whereas before there were just wasteful externalities.

If you have an industrial process that can cope with intermittent power supply, it may be only slightly more expensive to design or build so that interruption of power won't result in interruption of production. If the overall cost increase is less than the decrease of energy costs due to incentives, there is no downside.

The energy producers likewise price the incentives so that their loss of revenue is lower than their cost savings.

Unless of course the market is created and operated by Enron, then we're all fucked.

Even in modern times, only suckers pay retail. That has ever been true, and ever will. Price in economic terms is whatever is paid. The list has for example different prices for ale, wine, and uni education. The descriptions seem to indicate both difference in quality and the affluence (or negotiation skills) of the buyer.

Or two turns ahead if you're cycling. They don't seem to take speed into account.

Contract termination usually means that parties settle their obligations in a way that terminates the relationship fully. The plaintiffs may not have expected this, but consider the patently unjust situation when customers can cancel the contract, while T-Mobile still must provide financing for their handsets (which is what the plaintiffs want). Why would it be in the public interest to force T-Mobile to do that?

This is a case of somebody not thinking things through, and not reading what they're signing. T-Mobile may be more explicit, but should they be forced to explain every possible contingency? That's why the print is small — because reality is messy, and there are so very many corner cases.

GP and I mean the Baltic route; if he went around, sailing would not be quicker than driving.

The drive would take less than three days each way[1]. Spring is upon us, and the temperatures en-route currently straddle the freezing point[2][3].

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/dir/Moscow,+Russia/Oslo,+Norwa...

[2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=weather+olderfjord [3] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=murmansk+weather+10+day+fo...

Companies regard their employees as slaves. It follows that if your property says or does silly or unpopular things, you dispose of it.

Shame on me if I ever allow myself to treat people who work for me like that. What people do or say or think outside of business hours is their damn business.

Basically the model of a communal taxi with no set route or scheadule. Common in the third world. This kind of carpooling is not exactly something people haven't written about before; I can even faintly remember it being floated in connection with Tesla in the past.

Do they have a no-fly list now as well?

> sea route

Through international or territorial waters of third countries? Not unless he's hitching a ride on RFS Bespokoynyy.

It's not that you cannot play for Blackhawks for a few seasons, and then sign up with Rangers. As the revolving door metaphor suggests, the movement is both more frequent and continuous. Glenn Greenwald goes even further in With Liberty and Justice For Some, suggesting the government and the industry have in practice become two departments of the same organization, with employees being reassigned, but never actually leaving:

"People like [the Democratic appointees] Rubin, Summers, Patterson, and Gensler shuffle back and forth between the public and private sectors, taking turns as needed with their GOP counterparts. When in government, they ensure that laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall Street firms, abolishing most regulatory safeguards that keep those behemoths in check. When the electoral tide turns against them, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented (or failed to implement) when they were in charge. Then, when their party returns to power, back they go into government, where they use their influence to ensure that the cycle keeps on going."

And if you don't care for a 9–5 back at your old bank, or your party holds the presidency for too long and you're kinda strapped for dineros, you just ask for a reassignment with a short period of unemployment. During the sabbatical, you visit your Wall Street office for a few hours, collect a "speaking fee"[1], and take a holiday. When you come back, infused with vitamin D and liquidity, your lesser-minded colleagues may think you never left or (gosh!) took a bribe.

[1] http://americablog.com/2013/07/tim-geithner-speaking-fees-go...

The book that superb movie is based on is well written as well.

> Where I can get funding to research short-range telepathy

DARPA[0].

This kind of research really has been done to death, and much of the groundbreaking research has been declassified by now. For example the CIA mind control research[1].

[0] http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-01-19 [1] http://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/cia-mkultra-col...

Tell us more?

> banning UK nationals from having anything to do with companies in tax havens at all

What if I buy a few shares in a publicly traded overseas company, and that company in turn buys a few shares of a company based in a tax haven? Short of making the UK an insular economy, this is not going to happen.

My take would be that the ease of setting up a business in the UK is a great thing for the business people, the general public, and the economy. It is sad that people end up with debts that will never be repaid when a company folds, but without the institution, there would be much lesser chance of a cheap product, gainful employment, or profit in the first place. When a company shields criminal activity, the courts readily bring the people behind it to justice, as the fine article itself mentions. The only going concern seem to be the undertaxation stories repeatedly reported in the press — good rage fodder for the financially illiterate, but they never hold much water under scrutiny.

And it's been done[1], successfully — but the signals need to be amplified before the receiving brain can detect them. Parapsychology research was answering a pressing need in the 1950s, and so it was pursued and funded. Now that we have ubiquitous resilient encrypted wireless broadband communication on the worldwide scale, and we're pretty sure the enemy forces cannot submit our soldiers using the power of concentration, the need is much less pressing. Recent advances in brain activity imaging with fMRI and the impetus to create computer-brain interfaces will lead to any advances in telepathy that can be had, and maybe discover new questions to study.

Out of all the futures that seemed possible at the beginning of the Cold War, ours is no less strange and awesome than one where telepathy were a mundane experience. Being skeptical about telepathy in the style of the great Sci Fi works of the latter half of the 20th century reflects the understanding that some ideas become reality, and some just peter out.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/first-brain-to-brain-telepathy-com...

An expert is a child wise beyond his years, who sees the state of emperor's clothing for what it is. An "expert" is anyone who can persuade the presumptively adult fools that he knows something they don't.

Your argument re: experts fails because it reaches for the authority of "experts", while that's exactly what OP lampoons.

This is a recurring theme within the Unix world — amongst others, vulnerable programs have included tar(1), xterm(1), and vim(1), and they always stem from the eagerness of the authors to provide both the ability to run shell commands, and the ability to run commands from untrusted sources; the fix is to limit the extended ability to trusted sources. But when reported, it (1) gets fixed quickly, and (2) leads to an uproar within the community. Here it has been a wontfix: works as expected, and will likely stay that way.

The changes a package install makes ought to be limited to the source files within its subdirectory (and perhaps some precompiled binaries). I don't quite expect it to be installing rootkits, and the principle of least privilege dictates that it should not be allowed to.

Once the package is installed, it is already too late for a code review, or any mitigation. A well-written worm will never be detected.

It is unexpectedly bad design (or, in case of the JavaScript community, an expectedly bad design).

You vastly underestimate both how different these old systems are, how many resources it takes to support every additional platform, that the burden increases non-linearly, and what kind of weird release-blocking bugs those extra platforms may introduce, delaying fixes and hogging resources.

At minimum, slow systems require gracefully degrading GUI, which increases complexity by an order of magnitude. The graphics card capabilities are a much better first approximation than the word width.

If it took just a few extra engineers, or a few thousand, to fix the bugs that they have, Apple would have done it. The Mythical Man-Month, and all that.

I think the difference is that when a C programmer hits an undefined behaviour, they either blames the spec, the compiler, or themselves. A JavaScript programmer doesn't need a prompt to blame the spec proliferation and dilution, the necessity to write cross-platform by default, and their lack of foresight in not including a 3rd-party library that would have provided some vestiges of a targetable platform. The C code that started as a nice asprintf(3) for GNU/Linux will sprout a few if-defs once it has to run on some embedded PoS without a sane malloc().

A function is dedicated if it is well-suited for a use case. It does not require it to be ill-suited for other use cases.

Either you arguing that `left-pad` is not a "dedicated" function for padding by 42 characters, because it can also pad for 43 or 41, or I don't understand you at all?

Yes, but you're jumping in the middle of it.

A sane package repository won't disappear overnight, or ever. I can still install packages distributed with Debian Potato, the first ever Linux distro I used, which is now 15 years old. The code that I wrote against the libraries distributed with it will still compile, and had I only burnt stripped binaries to a CD back then, they would still runtime-link and run today on a brand-new install. And because it is all free software, the people and orgs who wrote those libraries, compiler, and standards, had given up their rights to force unpublication.

In a sane package management system, and with version pinning on the consumer's side, your hissy fit would have had exactly zero effect. Assuming your package were free software, people could fork it, and still make improvements.