Viewing profile — 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…

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…

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 th…

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…

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 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 tha…

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 fitn…

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 me…

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 seem…

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 resu…

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…

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, yo…

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 vol…