I really enjoyed this, primarily playing as the Tornado.
The main issue I had with the game was trying to get to spectator mode - it was a very short amount of time between respawns which was great, but hard to actually hit when trying.
I'd suggest either or both of a hotkey to enter spectator mode, or a button to spectate after next death.
I don't think that's quite right. Say for example a number of small satellites were arranged on the points of a triangular grid pattern, with the points the same distance apart as the diameter of the spacecraft: This would result in a much higher collision chance (for a spacecraft passing through) than if there was a single satellite with the same amount of cross sectional area.
It's worth noting that the SpaceX satellites only have a mission length of 5-7 years, and the Spectrolab solar panels are built to last for a typical 15 length mission (from the link you provided).
Perhaps they will opt for (presumably) cheaper components given the shorter lifetime.
15 years is the nominal design lifetime for an "insured" geostationary telecom satellite... When SES or Intelsat launches a new 3500 to 6000 kilogram sized satellite it's insured by a third party company. There's specialists in this. I'd say it's much more likely the SpaceX program will be self-insured so they can take a risk with satellite bus technology and other tech that has never been flown before.
How this will affect their choice of PV cells I don't know.
With 4000 satellites it's likely that their approach to each satellite will be smaller and much less redundancy:
If a traditional 5000 kg geostationary telecom satellite can be compared in analogy to a big, expensive, 4U, quad socket xeon server that has multiply redundant everything.
These small satellites might be much more like a facebook open compute blade server, 1+0 and redundant nothing, but much, much cheaper to build and with a software architecture tolerant of entire nodes failing and disappearing from the network.
Despite the impact it has on the availability of unskilled manual labour jobs, I think it's great that machines are finally turning to harvesting - having worked on a similar project to do with grapes (specifically, pruning), it's not always the easiest of things.
It does highlight to me that we are getting closer to the point of needing to rethink labour distribution, because the non-technical jobs are the easiest to replace with machines.
Even the people who get replaced get some benefit in that they get access to cheaper food. Not enough to replace their income, but the point is that automation is good for humanity.
Only the Luddites want to smash machines and keep a shirt costing a days wages.
The article describes [anecdotally] that mechanization makes the remaining labourers' work assignments more physically demanding. All the easy pickings go to machines, not humans and people with an already hard workday for low pay has gotten harder as a result of mechanization. The give in the system for low wage workers is systematically being removed in the age of the unlimited time off meme.
Before the machines, just as many humans still had to do that crappy work, they were just a smaller percentage of all the workers. That part didn't make any sense to me. I know this is naive, but maybe with the net cost savings of using machines, the farmers could avoid planting the places that machines can't reach easily.
Hasn't that been the case for all of human history? Mass Migration has been a thing for thousands of years. Populations grow and shrink to meet needs of the workforce. The United States was settled by mass immigration mostly manual laborers who had 8 or 9 children per family. Now field labour is a rarity. and family size is 2 to 3 children.
The minuet you think Central planning can override natural market forces you run into much bigger problems that usually end in catastrophe for the people you were trying to 'help'.
> The minuet you think Central planning can override natural market forces you run into much bigger problems that usually end in catastrophe for the people you were trying to 'help'.
Corporations are central planning. Just on a smaller scale. (Though, companies like the old IBM were bigger then some small countries.)
> Corporations are central planning. Just on a smaller scale.
No, they're not. Corporations plan their production and allocate their resources based on market information within their industry in an attempt to capitalize on the market signals they observe.
Central planning is a process by which a central government attempts to control and direct the output of a nation's economy by deciding what to produce and when, ignoring market signals.
Working in the vehicle routing industry, this is something that I has passed through my mind on more than one occasion. I'm quite pleased to see it implemented - I definitely did not have the means.
In my mind, this sort of product is a great stepping stone towards the reduction in personal cars - it's starting to bring the cost of travelling down by sharing, hopefully by enough to make it accessible to less well-off people. I certainly couldn't afford a taxi to work every day.
If this sort of service really takes off, it will hopefully also reduce the number of cars on the road, reducing congestion.
The obvious next step for this sort of service is to use self-driving cars, reducing the cost even further as there are no drivers to pay.
It is obviously an idea whose time has come, and I'm glad!
I share your sentiment. On the other hand, the upper bound of the number of car reduction is maybe 50% of the cars that would be there otherwise (assuming we can replace most single car trips by 2-3 people trips). It's a huge improvement, but the US really needs to work on public transport. Heck, why is Caltrain not more efficient?
Eventually you'll be able to get a shared "bus" in five minutes to take you to most common destinations and at night you will be able to get a less-shared "taxi" that will cost more since there aren't people to share your trip with you.
We'll build the brave new tech world equivalent of a decent transportation system.
when someone can buy a self-driving vehicle and hook it up to uber's network, buying a car could be a capital investment that gets you recurring revenue: you just hook your car up to uber's api, and take it to an automatic service station when the on-board diagnostics report that it needs work to be done.
Caltrain runs on diesel, is incredibly slow (much slower than driving), frequently breaks down, and doesn't travel across the bay. It was probably OK for the 70s.
> The obvious next step for this sort of service is to use self-driving cars, reducing the cost even further as there are no drivers to pay.
Maybe eventually you can put some sort of a fixed guideway along most common travel start/end points, use larger vehicles, then perhaps try to find a way to reduce rolling resistance?
I personally love the idea of Google self-driving cars being used in this respect. Would be interesting to see Amazon get into this space as well considering their work in optimizing inventory and restocking algorithms - seems like it could be a natural fit.
Which bank are you with? Having had accounts with 4 major banks here (Kiwibank, ANZ, Westpac, ASB), I can confirm that you are allowed passwords more than 8 characters.
Also, several of them offer a second protection level for logging in.
The main issue I had with the game was trying to get to spectator mode - it was a very short amount of time between respawns which was great, but hard to actually hit when trying. I'd suggest either or both of a hotkey to enter spectator mode, or a button to spectate after next death.