* Posts by gecho

87 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Mar 2013

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Branson's wallet snaps shut for Virgin Galactic

gecho

Re: the not so royal we

Billionaires like to perpetuate the myth that they are paying for these things themselves when it is really investors doing the heavy lifting. SpaceX isn't funded by Musk but billions and billions from investors. Throw in a small fraction of the money for a large fraction of the ownership. It is a trickier dance for publicly traded companies as it is easier for investors to pull the rug out from beneath you.

Elon is the bakery owner swearing in the street about Yelp critics canceling him

gecho

Feedly

This old fart still likes RSS feeds. I can scan through a bunch of headlines and queue up tabs for the stories I'm interested in.

Hubble science instruments still out after going down 3 times in a week

gecho

The docking adapter they added for de-orbit would also make it easier for a robotic mission to visit and service the telescope. One of the past proposals was to use a version of the 2 armed maintenance robot that attaches to the space station Canadarm.

Bezos might beat Musk to Mars as NASA recruits Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket

gecho

If all goes according to plan the Blue Origin engines will get their first flight test Christmas Eve on ULA's Vulcan rocket.

NASA's Psyche spacecraft beams back a 'Hello' from 10 million miles away

gecho

So they probably need to calculate where the spacecraft is expected to be when the light arrives in order to lead the target.

Tesla Cybertruck no-resale clause vanishes faster than a Model S in Ludicrous Mode

gecho

Tesla wanted to limit the flipping of Cybertrucks to the road.

Want a Cybertruck? You're stuck with it for a year, says Tesla

gecho

Speculative Investment

I wonder how many of the early pre-orders were speculators looking to immediately flip the purchase.

4,000 days of Curiosity: Rover still 'strong' despite worn joints, vision issues

gecho

Re: Pour One Out

You are thinking of Spirt & Opportunity. This is the first of the two active nuclear powered rovers.

FAA is done with Starship's safety review, now it's over to the birds and turtles

gecho

There should be a pretty good chance of the next launch succeeding. The first stack was strong enough to flip end over end at supersonic speeds and survive the FTS detonation for a time. It launched with engines, and a thrust vectoring system that had already been due to be replaced with something better.

And the launch pad concrete is considerably more beefy with a water cooled steel plate on top.

X says it's only worth $19B after year of Muskmanagement

gecho

Investors

I'm sure plenty of authoritarian governments would love a stake in return for certain concessions. Monitoring of citizens, suppression of undesirable facts, elevation of alternative facts.

Blue Origin pulls sheets off cargo lunar lander prototype

gecho

If many of these landers stay on the lunar surface or leave parts behind like the Apollo ones, NASA might need to think about sending a bulldozer to the Moon to start pushing the junk into a large crater.

'Recession-resilient' Tesla misses Q3 expectations, slows Mexico expansion

gecho

Dents

I wonder how dent resistant the cyber truck panels will be. Anyone with stainless appliances will know how awful dents look as a small dent warps reflections over a noticeably large area.

Twitter further restricts free tier with option to limit replies to verified accounts

gecho

Notice me sempai

Watch all the Musk fanboys rush to enable the setting in hopes of getting attention from Elon.

Elon Musk's ambitions for Starship soar high while reality waits on launchpad

gecho

Mars Taxation

Since Musk gets US tax breaks on his plans to abandon Earth, does the US get to tax Mars profits?

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

gecho

I wonder if something like the AMS experiment could be salvaged and moved to a new station. They went to the trouble to repair it, so it must be sort of important. A commercial station would certainly have a much different orbital inclination favoring launches from the US as there would be no need to accommodate Russia. I get the impression changing the inclination of an orbiting object is much more complex than changing its altitude.

Musk's mighty missile is ready for launch once FAA says OK

gecho

Re: Cost

> Is it SpaceX's problem though, if their competitors can't get their shit together?

More of a humanity problem with so much power in the hands of one unstable individual.

gecho

Re: Cost

Perhaps one of the more unsettling things about Starship is the power it will give SpaceX in space. They can launch everyone else's cargo at just enough under competitors rates such that the competitors will find themselves unprofitable. Probably at least 8 years until anyone beside Blue Origin has a hope of fielding something similar since they'd have to develop both heavy lift and propulsive landing at the same time. Meanwhile SpaceX can launch all their own stuff at cost giving all their ventures a huge cost advantage. Right now that is just Starlink, but that could quickly expand into other areas either developed in-house, through acquisition or partnerships.

gecho

Cost

The marginal cost of building another ship / booster is about 3 orders of magnitude less than an SLS. The development cost will also be spread out over thousands of launches vs maybe 8 total for SLS. Hell current billion dollar launch tower will only be used twice for SLS before being scrapped because they need a new billion dollar one after switching to a taller second stage.

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

gecho

Well my slightly newer ipad (first retina one), won't even load most webpages anymore maxed out at iOS 9.

gecho

I'm using a Core i5 from back when the cpus just had a 3 digit part number it definitely won't support switching from Windows 10 to 11. Crazy that a computer from 14 years ago is still perfectly usable today.

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

gecho

Re: Mass Matters

If Starship becomes operational in the near future it will change a lot of things. I have to wonder how much effort SpaceX is putting into the DragonXL cargo vehicle as there really won't be any reason for it to exist. I think NASA is quietly hoping to roll the Falcon Heavy / DragonXL resupply contract over to Starship.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

gecho

Move Fast and Break Things

Musk sues law firm for overcharging Twitter when Twitter was suing Musk

gecho

Earned Their Pay

They managed to get Musk to cave and pay full price for Twitter rather than having what they dug up during discovery become public record. I'd say they did a smashing job.

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

gecho

Verbose

I find AI generated text overly verbose. Almost like the developers were socially inept and looked to Hollywood dialog as a guide for how normal people talk. It comes across as condescending.

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

gecho

Live

I noticed this week that Twitter got rid of live (ie: chronological) results for hashtags. It's making Twitter useless as a local news source for me since it only shows Top results from a week ago.

Fat EVs may cause 'more death on our roads' – watchdog

gecho

Temporary Problem

Solid state batteries expected within a few years should reduce battery size and weight by 30 to 50%, which in turn means weight can be removed from the vehicle structure as well. We're in the late early adopter stage for EVs. Most of the vehicle electrical systems are quite mature, it's just the batteries that need a bit more work before mass adoption.

US postal service electrifyies its next-gen delivery fleet

gecho

Re: With a "quantum computer"? With "cold fusion"? With "superstrings"?

Large fleet operators often have their own onsite fuel tanks. I don't see it being any different with EVs. Several shipping container sized batteries to act as a buffer so they aren't hammering the grid.

Public EV charging stations will likely need on site battery storage as well to help balance demand. They can recharge their storage at night when power is cheaper, or through solar on the charging station canopies.

Galactic anti-nuclei travelers could help illuminate dark matter

gecho

Accronyms

"A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE)"

Reminds me of the Norm MacDonald bit.

ID

I stands for I

D stands for dentification.

US ends case against Huawei CFO who holed up in Canada for three years

gecho

China fucked with Canada for years over this costing billions of dollars in trade and held a few citizens hostage in retaliation. All for doing America's thankless bidding.

On the plus side it forced Canada to invest in processing canola domestically instead of exporting raw seed. Downside, I think a lot of that is destined for biodiesel, not human consumption.

After lunar orbit trip NASA's Orion capsule is on its way back home

gecho

Re: unbelieveable accuracy

Yes it's an OMS engine not an SSME.

ISS resupply drops off experiments for life in deep space

gecho

Private Space Labs

I imagine the red tape and lead time for getting an experiment flown on the ISS is rather spectacular. We should see a (metaphorical) explosion in research once the private space stations launch. The uncrewed New Shepherd flights always seemed to be flying a bunch of experiments, which made me wonder how much science you could do in a few minutes of microgravity.

Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move

gecho

Remote Procedure Calls

The comment about remote procedure calls in Elon's architecture diagram brought up memories of Trump's sharpie modified hurricane path visual aide.

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

gecho
Facepalm

LOL'd at this one

"For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line 'chat' platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis."

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

gecho

Made up Words

I was talking with my boss once and couldn't think of a particular word. I ended up saying something that I don't think was even a word, then she started using it all the time.

All the US midterm-related lies to expect when you're electing

gecho

"let us see what they say after the GOP sweeps"

They'll still say there was election fraud and just complain about their margin of victory. They are equal opportunity d-bags, sore winners and sore losers.

NASA uses space station dust sensor to map 50 methane 'super-emitters' on Earth

gecho

Republicans immediately announced plans to defund NASA.

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

gecho

I deleted my account a few months ago. What finally made me ditch my account is when they introduced topics and bulk subscribed me to hundreds of them completely flooding my feed. You had to remove each one at a time.

There are still a few people I like to follow. Twitter must have realized a bunch of people were doing this because after you scroll past a few posts on the web the UI get locked and you are prompted to log in.

California legalizes digital license plates for all vehicles

gecho

Where I live they ditched expiration stickers 20 years ago (along with front plates). Maybe they make more sense in places with police that do foot patrols. Whenever a driver gets pulled over the officer punches the plate # into their in vehicle terminal to check registration status. And now an increasing number of police cars are equipped with plate scanners.

Er, Musk's trial hasn't stopped, no matter what he told Twitter, says judge

gecho

Yeah, sounds like a delaying tactic to slow the court case, which is something he wanted from the start of litigation. If he did managed to get the case dropped or paused, there would be a problem with financing after a drawn out period of nothing happening.

"said he would go ahead and buy Twitter after all, provided he had the debt financing in place to bankroll the acquisition and that Twitter's lawsuit against him in a Delaware court was immediately brought to a halt."

US accident investigators want alcohol breathalyzers in all new vehicles

gecho

Also

Proof of registration / insurance detection. Proof of authorized operator. Driver attentiveness monitoring.

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

gecho

Re: V2X

No the ones here are cameras, I looked up the model on the manufacturers website. Before that I did actually make a corner reflector and attached it to my bike to no effect.

Over the past few years they "upgraded" to new cameras. The old ones had a huge sweet spot for detection. The new ones are much more focused so they can ignore vehicles making right turns. But the wind knocks them out of position, and on a bike you sometimes need to ride in the oncoming traffic lane to trigger a change.

gecho

Re: V2X

Oops:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/v2x-is-finally-dead-as-court-refuses-to-stop-fccs-5-9-ghz-reallocation/

gecho

V2X

This sort of thing is supposed to be address in V2X in a more cross industry wide basis. I would expect that the tech would eventually be mandatory in all phones / vehicles as an OS feature, not a 3rd party app. I think its based on broadcasting position and direction vectors.

It should cut down on rear end collisions by detecting when vehicles ahead of you out of site suddenly brake. Or a when a vehicle from the side is going to blow a stop sign / red light.

As a cyclist I really looking forward to it. People have a habit of waiting until the last second to pass cyclists, screening you from the vehicle behind until they have completely switched lanes which ends up being 10-15 feet behind you, then blam-o zero time for driver behind to react. Would also be a huge help for pedestrians when drivers are making right (left in UK) turns and typically only look upstream for traffic not even looking the other way for anyone on the sidewalk.

It would also let traffic light know that a cyclist is approaching. The camera based detectors which are on 95% of our intersections only pickup cyclists 25% of the time. No detection, no green light, if a vehicle pulls up behind you they are too far back to trigger a green as well.

One obvious abuse would be to attach something with V2X to done and flying it into traffic to trigger auto braking in cars.

FCC Commissioner demands review of Starlink rural broadband subsidies

gecho

Re: Good! Give the money to Starlink!

I thought rural folk weren't down with that socialism stuff.

gecho

Dish

I wonder how much SpaceX will be able to reduce the cost of the dishes over time. Looking at tear down pictures, the dish is one giant circuit board with an array of hundreds of chips.

Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $6.9b as Twitter lawsuit looms

gecho

Re: Musk's sofa

This sofa change will probably generate a billion dollar tax bill. This hedging alone cost him the Twitter breakup fee in just taxes.

Bill Gates venture backs effort to bring aircon startup to market

gecho

Copper

Since the refrigerant stays in the unit there will be no need to run copper tubing to an indoor evaporator, which should help reduce cost, complexity and a failure point.

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

gecho

Re: Burn

He could make a bunch more by taking SpaceX public, but then he'd be subject to SEC oversight and whims of the market on that business too, so it's the last thing he'd do.

gecho

Which he won't be able to do. Twitter didn't court Elon, they wanted him to F%&K off. Elon forced this deal on them.

gecho

Re: Burn

Elon does what billionaires do to avoid paying taxes. Instead of selling stock which generates a taxable income, he uses that stock as collateral for loans. The only reason he sold stock last year was to cover the taxes on stock options that were about to expire. With his shenanigans causing the stock price of Tesla to fall, he's at risk of the banks demanding more collateral. If he's suddenly forced to sell a bunch of stock to cover the twitter deal he could be facing another billion dollar tax bill. And dumping more Tesla stock could further drive down Tesla's stock.

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