Viewing profile — adastra

The book is interesting, but the level of detail he goes into in some of his speculation is completely unjustified. It's kind of ridiculous. "There's no sense in being precise when…

The telcos are running utilities and should be regulated like utilities. And they should especially be regulated this way if they are heavily subsidized build the infrastructure in…

Biking in Soma is incredibly dangerous. Everyone I know who bikes there has had an accident at some point in the last few years. And I suspect its getting worse with Uber and Lyft …

I don't think Paul Graham owes Michael O Church a damn thing. PG has always been clear that he built this site as a place for a certain type of reasoned discourse with a certain to…

This is certainly kind of legislation that could come down to a close vote, especially if IV throws around some lobbying dollars against it. A little advocacy will go a long way, a…

I tutored teenagers in physics and math for a while to make ends meet. And they love snapchat. They are also basically ready to be done with facebook. There are two reasons they pr…

Have to interject here on the off chance that some gmail engineers are paying attention. That's nice that you like it, but forcing the new compose on users is just plain inexcusabl…

No can do. I refuse to turn shortcuts on because there are at least 2 (and maybe more I'm not aware of) ways to send the email I'm currently drafting. Command + Enter, or hitting s…

The new compose has at least 4 things that are broken for me: 1) When you hit "forward", it hides the subject box, even though the majority of the time when I hit forward I want to…

I did try it just now. See my above comment.

Disaster. 1) I just turned it on, and it is not customizable at all . You cannot create custom tabs, and you can't even pick what goes into the tabs they have created. 2) When you …

I'd say the goal is to find a survivable planet that can support billions of people. In that sense, the amount of water ice that is in a couple of permanently shadowed craters is r…

Mars is a non-starter? I think you've received some bad information. Average radiation on the Mars surface is 10-20 rem/year. With a thicker atmosphere it will be less. And for peo…

But the goal isn't to just colonize any old planet. It's to colonize a place we can successfully terraform. Mars is the clear winner in that respect, and it's not close. Mercury ne…

This is the best explanation. What I think a lot of the public doesn't realize is where the money comes from when you walk into a bank and you get a loan from that bank (instead of…

'Rather than steal money from depositors' accounts, Bhalla just invented a new account for himself. "We went into the database where the accounts are and set up an account with $14…

ITAR, like all US federal regulations codified in the CFR, have the full force and effect of the law. See the first couple paragraphs here for further explanation: http://library.l…

Absolutely yes this is a risk. Do not do this. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) is not something you want to mess with.

If only someone had predicted this exact possibility 3 years ago... "[2] In theory you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. You can get pr…

That's not correct. The US government doesn't subsidize SpaceX, it purchases launches and technology. It's just a customer. And it buys those things for much cheaper than before. Y…

I would put it this way. They're not responding to your ideas, they are responding to you . A thought experiment: imagine Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk is sitting across …

Bezos, or his handlers anyway, can be pretty outrageous with this kind of stuff. Water landings of VTVL's have been talked about since the 1960's by various people. It would be pre…

The first stage isn't going at orbital velocity of course, but the second stage is. The SpaceX announcement for Grasshopper refers to both: http://www.space.com/13140-spacex-privat…

You won't find a bigger supporter of SpaceX, and no one wants Grasshopper to be doing operational flights tomorrow more than I do. But it will take 10 years, minimum. Keep in mind …