Posts by Flocke Kroes 4557 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007
It got part way through the court process. The 'arguing about discovery' part was approximately complete. The next event on the calendar would have been Twitter's lawyers deposing Musk. Musk capitulated completely at a break-neck pace rather than let that happen. Almost as if he has a lot to hide and can easily be baited into saying something really self damaging.
I expected his proposals for Twitter would destroy it unintentionally. Musk worked out that driving Twitter in his preferred direction would destroy its value both financially and as a platform for advertising pump and dump schemes - hence the desperate attempts to get out of the merger agreement.
Musk fans have a technique for being right all the time just like I can hit gold every time at archery:
1) fire an arrow at a barn
2) paint a target where it hits
The "Musk destroying Twitter intentionally" idea is just fans looking for possible places to paint a target. If it were actually true it would be Musk painting the target on his own back and the arrows would be fired by the investors and bankers who helped him buy Twitter.
This is not the time to even considered soliciting promises of large pay cheques. The actual clauses you could be looking for are "payment in advance" and "severance pay held in escrow". The key phrase I would be looking for is "job satisfaction" and I wouldn't bother looking for it at Twitter.
You do not have to read every single article. You are allowed to skip the ones with 'Musk' or 'Twitter' in the title.
I am still enjoying watching the train wreck. Every day it continues is a day that professional rocket scientists can make progress on Starship without the help that Twitter staff are currently enjoying. I am sure it will get dull for me eventually and I will signal my waning interest by not reading more about Musk / Twitter. That is a hint that the Register staff understand. You can contribute to a reduction of articles like this one by doing absolutely nothing.
If someone shorted Eli Lily before faking the free insulin tweet then they could have got an excellent return for their $8. This highlights several problems for Musk's business model. He could have charged far more, by taking a significant share of the fraud he would become a co-conspirator, Elizabeth Holmes could tell him there are consequences to committing securities fraud against rich people and after getting burned three or four thousand times a few investors might start listening to what Musk's libel lawyers have been saying for years: "Twitter is a home to invective and hyperbole. No reasonable person would use it as a source or factual information."
Eventually faking insane tweets from large corporations would not cause panic selling and Musk would have to come up with a new scheme like offering higher interest on deposits than an Icelandic bank.
One of Musk's goals was to get the share of Twitter revenue from advertising under 50%. I am sure he is well on the way to achieving this if he hasn't gone further already.
Of course this is all Musk playing 4D chess: getting others to trash brand names is just viral advertising a future revenue stream. Soon you will be able to by brand protection from Twitter for a reasonable hourly fee. All negative comments about your company, criminal activity or war will be silenced.
In the mean time content creators will be able put their videos in a pay walled section in return for high performance Twitter shares.
The correct response is to have a cup of tea, calm down and be polite so you do not give your employer any excuses then ask your lawyer about constructive dismissal.
Geosynchronous orbit has a circumference of 265000km and Earth has a diameter of 12600km so the shadow of a GEO satellite races across half the equator in a little over an hour once each day. The area of the Earth that catches sun light is 125 million square km. From the point of view of someone on the equator, in theory it would be possible to detect a tiny dot flicking across the sun once per day but it is not something you would be able to see. Loss of sunlight: 4 parts per billion, but you get back some of that energy from the microwaves.
For a low Earth orbit, the satellite spends about half its time in shadow over the night side and the other half casting a shadow over the day side. That area of Earth that catches sunlight still applies. If you happen to be on the very narrow path of the shadow you might notice the sun dim for a tenth of a second. Again, some of the tiny fraction of sunlight blocked by the satellite would be made up for by the microwave energy beamed from the satellite. Less this time because a LEO satellite spend half its time in shadow while the GEO is in the dark for far less time.
What I have seen of SOLARIS is extremely vague. I think they are talking about sun synchronous orbit. This is a weird type of LEO. The satellite crosses over the dawn area of Earth, goes over one of the poles then back across the dusk to the other pole. The Earth is a slightly flattened sphere. The gravitational pull from the bulge twists the orbit around so that the satellite remains in SSO despite the Earth going around the sun each year. The satellite would remain in sunlight all the time and its shadow would never fall on Earth. The satellite could only beam power down to stations almost directly below. These would only ever get coverage for a short time during dusk and dawn. Using several satellites each ground station could have a satellite over head each dusk and dawn. It would take many ground stations to take advantage of the continuous sunlight available to each satellite.
What gets me is the vagueness. I have to guess the orbit from clues in the slides. The conversion efficiency from sunlight to microwaves sounds impossible. Sunlight is a mixture of wave lengths. Layers of solar panels have a preferred wave length. Anything longer does not generate electricity. Anything shorter, some of the energy is wasted. If you are prepared to pay astronomical prices you can make a panel with a few layers, each with a different preferred wave length. The hinted conversion efficiency seems to magic this problem away. Finally, the really big one: what if you zero the cost of launching the satellites. How in space could these satellites and ground stations be cheaper than solar panels on Earth?
Light pressure is tiny and only makes a big difference to really thin films. You are looking for a massively huge difference here. That 1km satellite looking like a small moon gives an altitude of about 100km. At 100km the vacuum of space is so thick that air resistance would drop a lead brick before it completed a single orbit. A more realistic altitude would be 300-500km. A huge surface area satellite would still need a large collection of ion thrusters to remain in orbit. Their required mass, the mass of the propellant and the support structure would swamp light pressure and we haven't even got to cooling yet. The supplied figures assume magic >80% efficient conversion of sun light to microwaves. Even with that magic the waste heat would be huge and the heat sink to stop the satellite melting would add another layer of mass.
Has anyone seen real numbers for SOLARIS? I followed some of the links and all I found were hand-wavy power-point slides. No proposed satellite orbit+altitude, no figure for overall conversion efficiency. The old proposals were GEO satellites that had to beam power tens of thousands of km but could hit a single receiver all day and night. This sound more like a SSO constellation. The satellites remain in sun light all the time but can only hit targets near dawn/dusk. Similar economics to Starlink: profitable when the satellites pass over rich Americans with monopoly priced broad band but the satellites spend much of their time over regions sparsely populated by poor people.
Twitter has value because of the number of people who use Twitter. Using Twitter and paying $8/month both add value to Twitter. Twitter does several things, perhaps some that you support and some that you don't. I think that balance is going to change. If some of the things Twitter did had value to you then the time to consider a plan B was last month. For some, the evidence of the direction Twitter is going was sufficient to jump ship last week despite any negative consequences. If you want to wait and see then that is your purgative (not a miss spelling - I believe that seeing for themselves what Musk intends Twitter to become will cause vomiting among many of the remaining supporters).
Musk tweets have not matched reality before and Tesla investors did not care. My guess is he is paying off debt secured by Tesla shares. If Tesla stocks fall below a certain value the banks will sell them for him and crash the price further. By selling now before the price bottoms out he can cut his debt, cut interest payments, delay the banks from foreclosing and can use the excuse "need the money for Twitter" instead of "getting out of Tesla before the fans work out how much trouble Tesla is really in".
NASA was required to build SLS out of space shuttle parts built by space shuttle contractors. The only thing that they could be sure of was that every time monopoly suppliers took advantage of that requirement by tendering ridiculously high bids congress and the senate would insist on providing the required budget. Reds and Blues both funded SLS because that was a necessary for re-election. There is a huge lists of issues that make SLS difficult to operate - by design. Cost plus program so all operational difficulties increase billable hours. In theory NASA could put in change requests to make operation somewhat cheaper. Contractors would then celebrate some new huge const plus contracts that would add years more delay.
NASA used to have an educational outreach program. That got de-funded. Perhaps politicians were concerned about the consequences of voters understanding how tax payer dollars are burned.
Intel did try other architectures but not in a way that stood a chance of commercial success.
For a start: Intel iAPX 432 - very ambitious for early '80s. Next up, Itanic: designed to require transistors than anyone else could put on a chip. They did some high end ARM CPUs at the beginning of the millennium. All high end, comparatively low volume devices. Dividing huge NRE costs by the low volume made the chips both expensive and low margin. Even worse, they had to compete for FAB resources against high very high margin x86 chips.
Successful new architectures all took off when they were low performance compared to x86. Ambitious dreams aged into the low performance range, got built with cheap end of life process technology and sold off at low margin in bulk for embedded systems. The huge numbers and long stable production runs divided the NRE costs down sufficiently to finance the next generation of slightly higher performance low end chips.
The sell by dates for the SRBs is this month. NASA launches this month or they replace inspect them and get another waiver. The SRBs support the rest of the stack so they cannot just detach them. Instead they have to dismantle the middle from the top down then reassemble starting with the SRBs intended for Artemis 2. That would keep them busy until the middle of next year. As Artemis 2 is supposed to launch in 2024 its SRBs would have to be ready almost a year early. Luckily NASA poured those SRB segments in 2019 to get a good head start into their shelf life (68 months).
Plan for the best theoretically possible no earlier than date. Do not change the plan until long after non-rocket specialist journalists work out the plan was thoroughly busted years ago.
For years the free software community have had to deal with FOSS referring to the freedom to do various things, and that free software did not necessarily mean a price of £0. Now that Elon is following up on his promise to charge for free speech on Twitter he can enjoy the same problem.
If I have understood the pot addled ramblings correctly, the long term plan is for Twitter to become a bank (x.com) and a distributor so when you click on an advert Twitter charges you money and delivers the product. The tried and trusted strategy would be for Twitter to merge with another company, the combined company fires Elon then Peter Thiel sells it to eBay. Peter would have to do a really amazing job to sell for over $44B.
I have not been basing my opinions on what the media says about Musk. His own words alone are damning. Compare his company's court filings to his own words and it becomes clear why he is in deep legal shit and needs to either control free speech or buy a president to stay out of trouble.
I love the rockets but Musk's words and actions make me feel guilty for doing so.
One of the big loans was taken out by Twitter. If Twitter fails to pay the interest on that loan it will be promptly controlled by bankers.
Other big loans use Musk's Tesla stock as security. Tesla has been overvalued for a long time, to the point where the banks will not lend more against what Musk has already committed. This is why Musk had to sell billions of it to buy the rest of Twitter with cash. The major creditors would love to reduce their risk by selling some of the debt to other banks. Other banks are not buying - not even Deutsche Bank or Alfa. Musk has to keep paying interest on those loans or the banks will sell his Tesla shares.
People will not buy products from adverts next to Donald's Tweets. Advertisers will not buy adverts from Twitter. Musk will quickly have to follow through on his promise to start charging for free speech - or at least his version of it.
Starliner seats 5. NASA buys 4 of those seats for a price that was expected to cover costs and a reasonable profit. Boeing could then sell the fifth seat for a price competitive with Dragon and take all of that as profit. Costs have grown, the price is fixed and the fifth seat only earns money when the vehicle is fully operational.
If that were not enough, there are enough Atlas Vs reserved for the contracted Starliner launches. Anything beyond that requires either human rating Vulcan or convincing other customers to switch their reserved Atlas for a Vulcan. Vulcans requires 2 BE-4 engines each. One was delivered very late, another has not yet been delivered. Evidence for engines 3 and 4 would have been all over the rocket focused web sites if there was any. All I have heard of is an increased number of cars parked outside the factory.
NASA wants two independent human rated vehicles to assure access to space. Long term that is looking more and more like Dragon and Starship. Very long term, the small launch startups are talking about medium sized rockets for constellations (because the small launch market is far too small to support more than SpaceX + Rocket Lab). Some of that talk might turn into a real rocket big enough to launch people.
The Russian space program has a limited life span. Even without sanctions it would die of neglect and any attempt to modernise dies of corruption. When Russia can no longer benefit from space they will threaten to blow stuff up until there is so much junk that nothing survives in orbit long enough to make a profit. They might hope to extort concessions but they would get nothing from the US and far worse from China.
1) Money. They have some budget to research the most cost effective methods but not to actually do anything.
2) Law. Touching other people's stuff in orbit is naughty. If it beaks up as a result and the bits hit something it becomes NASA's legal responsibility.
Launching a tug from the ISS could be cheaper than launching from the ground if the tug was already at the ISS and the destination orbit was similar to the ISS. In real life, there is no tug at the ISS and getting it to the required orbit directly from the ground would be easier than going to the ISS first. Once the tug has done the tugging it is in a good orbit for burning up in the earth's atmosphere. Any other space junk in the same orbit would burn up without any help from the tug. Getting to another lump of junk would require a large amount of propellant - which would have to come from Earth. It would be simpler to send another tug from Earth than to send propellant to the existing tug in the wrong orbit then change to the required new orbit.
Given some budget and minimal constraints on how to spend it I am sure NASA could come up with something useful. I am less confident in politicians renegotiating the required international treaties.
These ones live in China. Habitat destruction is driving them up into mountains where it is too cold for their eggs to develop. They would have to swim a long way to get to the Himalayas. Probably better to commute by plane and keep a home near a viable breeding ground.
I half agree. The first problem I see with the lock is the price. Apple specialises in Veblen goods so by itself that should not be a problem for their target market but the lack of a distinctive logo and the opportunity to flash it around the bar/restaurant/golf club limit how much Apple can increase the price. Next up, the lock is going to need power. As I plan on getting through my front door when the batteries are flat or during a power cut then a key is required. (OK, I don't actually need a key for an ordinary pin tumbler lock but with improvised tools and minimal skill it takes me a while.) Adding phone access just increases the attack surface.
Not a product for me but I can understand that it would suit some other people.
Most new audio visual tech gets its initial push from one particular market sector. A minimal internet search shows rule 34 applies to the Metaverse. A quarter of the population for an hour a day seems like an over generous estimate but with a lighter, cheaper headset and inappropriate add-ons the market could grow to a respectable fraction of that size. A few years ago I would have thought Facebook's reputation for privacy would exclude them from this market. Now it would not surprise me if it became the new cool hangout for teens desperate to attract over 10,000 followers.
Elop triggered a large contractual bonus for himself by selling Nokia to Microsoft. Elon appears to be going for the greater fool investment strategy but I am not convinced anyone of Earth is greater than Elon. This may explain The Boring Company and SpaceX working toward a rocket capable of a return trip to Mars.
I was thinking the other way around. There were time units already:
(square root nanoWales) per (Percentage of maximum velocity of sheep in a vacuum)
square root (Great White Shark Linguine per Noris)
In more standard units, a Truss is about πF.
If you have an enormous budget you can design something for a specific use, order tooling for manufacture and a year or two later have something ready that does the job without any help from the user. In the real world, delivery must be this month or the customer will go elsewhere. If you divide NRE costs by even a whole hundred customers they will put the phone down as soon as you mention the price. The only practical solution for a small market is to adapt what is mass produced, available and cheap. That will inevitably lead to compromises in usability - and even more so in the '80s when 3d printers did not grow on trees and a smart phone app was slightly less practical than a whole major Amazon data centre.
The label printer mentioned above is a good solution. An instruction card is pushing your luck and a whole 4 page user manual is going too far. On top of that, you have to deal with computer illiteracy. Here is an example from the '90s: the customer had bought an external hard disk and successfully plugged it in. He was calling and asking politely why his floppy disks where not loading and saving faster as a result. For '80s, you are looking for things more like "remove floppy disk 1 and insert disk 2". Missing out the first part of those instructions would lead to technical support calls - but the user could easily get to disk 4 before calling.
The delay was not to figure out the financing. He had that ready to go. He was hoping that delay would cause the financing to pass its sell by date. Somehow his lawyers have explained to him that that does not matter: the court would appoint a special master with the authority so sell anything Musk has to complete the purchase. On top of that, Musk would have to go through deposition and his inability to keep his mouth shut would have dropped him in even deeper trouble.
He makes an offer so large that the Twitter board literally cannot refuse then says he is obviously over paying - well derr that was why the Twitter board put the sale up to for a vote and why the share holders voted to sell.
Now he says "the long-term potential for Twitter, in my view, is an order of magnitude greater than its current value". If that were true he would not be over paying.
Perhaps he is right because there is an obvious synergy with Tesla. Soon I will be able to buy a Tesla bot that can write Tweets for me, follow the trend setters for me, click on the adverts for me and buy the things he says I should want.
You are quite right: it is not just the prime minister or the conservative party that is the problem. The entire house of commons is a barrier to constructive government. Although the appropriate time is approaching, the problem with the Guy Fawkes solution is they would get replaced by more of the same. I propose replacing the lot with sortition. That way only 50% would be below average intelligence/competence/criminality/...
If Intel/AMD can say I can run the CPU at xGHz I expect I can run it at xGHz for a few seconds if it has been idle for the last 10 minutes, is fitted with a bigger heat sink than the one supplied and I need to wear gloves to avoid frostbite. If I complain I expect to be told that the promise applied to the model 1OIl0 I saw reviewed, not the 10lIO that was delivered.
A network shredder is an amazing device. It can never jam. You will find it next to the turbo encabulator.
I am concerned Bill Nelson's quote will come true:
"If we can't do a rocket for $11.5 billion, we ought to close up shop."
Most people assume he was talking about keeping development cost within budget but imagine if he was talking about how much Boeing+subcontractors would get per launch. He still has about $7.5B of headroom.
I first heard a CD in 1985 and it was a massive improvement in quality over records. I am vaguely curious about whether I would notice the same difference today but I could not be sure a reduction if the difference would mean turntables have improved or my hearing has deteriorated.
Tesla's advertising works differently to traditional car manufacturers. Elon writes tweets. Very quotable short tweets about how great full self driving will be real soon now. Those tweets get walked back in longer vaguer less quotable statements. People are good at hearing what they want to hear and the advertising standards authority does not regulate Twitter. After another disaster Elon's lawyers can repeat "Twitter is a home to invective and hyperbole. No reasonable person would consider Mr Musk's Tweets as a source of factual information." Regrettably the internet is not populated entirely with reasonable people.
Sometimes the statistics you want are not easily available, like accident rates per million miles on roads where Tesla's advanced driving assistance features can be activated. Comparing Accident rates with assistance activated to unassisted accident rates on all roads (including the difficult ones) gives a really false impression that has been amplified by social media.
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