Me: Kids should not have to stand in the dark each morning to wait for the school bus 3 months a year. Society: OK. We can adjust the clocks by an hour twice a year to make it better. Typical Slashdot troll who binges Squid Game or House of Cards until 3:00 AM and stays up after midnight on New Years Eve each year: BuT mY bEaUtY sLeEp!!! ScIeNcE sAyS!!!! ChAnGiNg ClOcKs is HARD!!!

Sorry youâ(TM)re butt-hurt that you donâ(TM)t have daylight 4:30-5:30 PM so that people who make the world run (and children who go to school) can have at least a little daylight as they drive to work or wait for the school bus. Talk about selfish.

I live near the border of Canada, in the far northern United States (Fargo, ND). Sunrise in my city will happen at 4:30 AM in mid-June if we keep âoeStandard timeâ all year (instead of 5:30 AM, as it currently is with the time change). Sunrise in mid-December will be after 9:00 AM if we keep Daylight Savings Time all year (instead of 8:00 AM). All these whiners who want to drop the time change must not have jobs where they wake up before 7 AM and not have kids in school waiting for bus pickup in the pitch black mornings of winter. Or they all live in southern states, sucking up terawatts of energy to run their air conditioners year round to make their desert and swampland homes habitable for the convenience of not having 4 seasons or days shorter than 10 hours or longer than 14 hours.

Appleâ(TM)s smartphone market share continues to grow, even in the face of a wonderful alternative: Android. Statista reports that Apple currently has 45-46% of the US smartphone market. Even though Appleâ(TM)s behaviors are supposedly âoebad for consumersâ and âoebad for innovationâ and âoebad for (insert random thing here)â, a large segment of the American public seems to REALLY like their products, even with a zillion Android options available at every Walgreens, Target, and gas station prepaid phone aisle. Could it be that some people actually prefer that limited, walled garden ecosystem? This isnâ(TM)t like Microsoft and the browser wars where they had 95%+ of the home PC market and torpedoed competitors like Opera and Netscape. This isnâ(TM)t AT&T dominating landline phone service. This is a phone company saying âoewant access to our ecosystem, play by our rules, thereâ(TM)s a competitor with 55% market share in the USA who you can sell your apps for, too, and the American public is welcome to make their choice.â I wonder why, if their practices are so bad for everyone, and so limiting for consumers, and their products are so expensive (more than probably 80% of Android alternatives), and even old, second hand phones hold their value better and are more expensive than Android equivalents, people KEEP BUYING IPHONES?

Keeping DST is going to be great in the winter in northern places like Bemidji, Minnesota. Without the âoefall back,â the sun wonâ(TM)t rise until after 9:00 AM in December there. I know all the people who are flocking to the south for the nice weather donâ(TM)t like the hassle of changing a clock or two twice a year (especially since most of that is automated on smartphones, computers, and smart devices), but it has real-world implications for those who donâ(TM)t live in the southern USA. In Houston, the length of daylight ranges from 10-14 hours over a year. In northern Minnesota and other northern states, it ranges from 8 hrs and 15 minutes to 16+ hours of daylight seasonally. If they kept standard time all year in Bemidji, the sun would rise around 4:20 AM on the summer solstice. Ridiculous.

Between Elon Musk's description of global thermonuclear destruction (he advocated... more as a joke but it was a semi-serious suggestion... that the polar icecaps of Mars could be nuked to release atmospheric gasses to terraform the planet), building tunnels under cities, having orbital space lasers under his control (with the Skylink satellites), and a forgotten island retreat under his control (Kwajelin Island)..... does that make him into a Bond villain?

It is merely a matter of perspective, but billionaires like him certainly seem like they have the potential to be a supervillain as much as a superhero.

What these dudes making AI with a PhD are doing instead is a new level of bullshitting with fancy words that impresses people with money and of course legislators who are about as clueless regarding computer technology. They think manipulating a URL to look at the image directory of a server is "hacking".

Machine learning isn't all that complex and it sure isn't even new either. I agree with others here that this is just an ignorant journalism major spouting off buzz words.

If you want to see a really nice GUI designed AI interface? Grab Scratch from MIT and then look at some of the AI experiments that have been done in that programming environment. They aren't necessarily all that fast and certainly some other programming environments would make them work more efficiently, but it isn't even all that new.

Also.... the other shoe dropped when they got into the "app store" business model the developers of this "Cortex" programming environment started to explain what they were doing. It is a scam to separate you from money in your wallet where the author bought into the buzz words to make this seem like a cool thing.

SpaceX set a company record for the most flights in a calendar year, but not quite a global record for any company/organization. They are doing some good though and are definitely a competitor in the global launch market and having a significant impact upon launch prices right now.

And I agree with you that any company which can send aloft a piece of equipment which functions at all while in orbit is pretty damn impressive. Getting into space is just barely possible and has almost no room for excuses or lazy engineering. Virgin Galactic is an example of a company who has tried and failed with unfortunately several deaths associated with their efforts too.

What you are describing is what is called a test pilot. The crews have even already been announced and are among some of the most experienced pilots you could ever imagine existing and veterans of several shuttle flights too I might add along with years of experience being test pilots with aircraft and many other accomplishments.

That is how you do a crewed test flight. A test pilot is somebody who is both an engineer and an accomplished pilot and gives detailed engineering analysis both during and after the flight based upon actual experiences.

As a side note, every aircraft ever made commercially has a test pilot which flies that aircraft for the first time before it is handed over to a customer, sometimes it is flown several times. That doesn't happen much with spacecraft other than most pilots and commanders of space missions in the past have traditionally been test pilots anyway including usually a thousand hours+ of experience operating multiple kinds of aircraft and spacecraft.

While space-based factories might be useful a century from now, the infrastructure needed to get one built simply doesn't exist right now.

I'm sure Elon Musk has heard every crazy idea you can think up and more, 99.99% of which he legitimately ignores as a waste of his time and even has hired multiple assistants to filter out the cranks and scam artists who try to give him such suggestions. It is a bit harder to filter out ideas from actual SpaceX employees, but then they tend to be a bit more grounded because they are producing actual spacecraft doing things in space.

There is zero reason for Elon Musk to be reading any of these comments, and little if any reason for any of those assistants who filter the crap like this to bother reading either.

That perfectly describes air traffic at Heathrow or O'Hare. A "collision" in this case is multiple aircraft trying to take off or land at a given airport where there is a priority scheduler which decides what "packet" or aircraft will enter the "airstream".

On rare occasions though, actual collisions do happen. It can be a fatal error too. It is mainly an issue of the proper "software" being "installed" or taught properly to avoid those errors.

The first flight of the Space Shuttle (STS) was incredibly risky. So much so that the astronauts actually sat in ejection seats (which were removed in later flights) and only two astronauts flew in what was arguably a test flight without any cargo at all... other than the two crew members and food for about a day. It didn't spend that much time in space either, but was mostly a flight up, a few orbits to evaluate systems in actual spaceflight, and then an incredibly risky landing.

It should be pointed out also that there were nearly a dozen landing tests prior to STS-1.

The Shuttle flew without major problems and did not blow up on the pad on the first flight (that happened later). The truth be told, the Shuttle was an experimental vehicle on all 135 flights, and on the last flight it was evaluated that the odds of survival (literally.... the odds of the crew living after the flight) was less than 90%. That is less than a Sigma 1 reliability... hardly something of any kind of praise.

I agree. The Falcon Heavy isn't a successor. It is an additional launch vehicle which can put up payloads that the Falcon 9 simply can't do.

The largest advantage of the Falcon Heavy is that it shares a great many components with the Falcon 9, including the engines and the internal tank design. That is also the reason why it has taken so long to get built, as the Falcon 9 design kept shifting and getting rolled onto the Falcon Heavy. As a matter of fact, the Falcon 9 is currently capable of sending the same tonnage that was anticipated for the Falcon Heavy when it was originally unveiled at the National Press Club so many years ago.

That whole thing is moot anyways as both the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy are slated to be retired as a design in the next 5-10 years and factory production may even be slowed down or stop altogether in the next couple of years in favor of the BFR. The only thing that will keep them coming out of the factory is due to the fact that the BFR is by necessity going to be built in another factory as the City of Hawthorn has refused to give permits to move the BFR through city streets. And yes, SpaceX asked.

What testing would a Tesla Roadster need to go through that hasn't been already done by the U.S. Department of Transportation, given that the vehicle has already a mountain of test data simply to put the vehicle into serial production?

It would be far more expensive to certify a block of concrete than to take a vehicle which already has the data needed for evaluation available. It isn't like this is the first automobile that the FAA has needed to certify for flight worthiness before.

The other choice is to do something like the RatSat spacecraft which flew on the Falcon 1 Flight 4. That was basically a big hunk of Aluminum which had the names of the SpaceX employees who were working for the company at the time go up into space (and it is still in orbit BTW).

Oddly enough, sending up a Roadster is actually cheaper than the custom made spacecraft even if it is just a hunk of metal. A bill of materials can even be quickly sent to the FAA-AST for clearance and review in a format that they can evaluate as well.