tater

I have an iWatch (first gen). My dad gave it to me as a birthday present. It's a great thing to be given as a gift, but I'd not buy one I think. Pluses: The fitbit-like functionality is great. Texts, etc on my wrist are nice (if you are in a meeting, or otherwise unable to check your phone without being impolite, it's nice to be able to triage messages). Control of my music/podcasts when hiking, etc. Minuses: Expensive. Battery life. It needs to be charged every night if you use a lot of the apps that drain it---we're taking the kids to Italy this summer, and I won't take it, I think, just another thing to have to worry about charging. So I end up using it, and I do like it, but it's not worth the cash (unless there are cheaper ones out soon), IMO. IO might just be a cheapskate, lol. My wife has one as well (dad got her one for her birthday), but she wears her fitbit every day, and the iwatch only sometimes.

Awful, like everything else about the contracts.

New Mexico at 1981m, but the snow was more widespread, even at lower elevations (Denver got clobbered by a blizzard). Still, the point is that the farming season is somewhat constrained compared to say California, where the climate in the major farming areas almost never freezes.

We don't have to make stuff up, my statement is uncontroversial, Musk has said as much. SpaceX is a BUSINESS, and requires customers to be a thing. That one is NASA has resulted in R&D money.

A scenario isn't enough. You need all the givens. What drives do they use? What are the goals of fighting, exactly (it's a bizarre idea frankly that they would have much to fight about)?

Self-sufficiency is in fact incredibly hard. As there is no plausible need for a relationship between Earth/Mars, why would Earth care what they do? If Mars somehow owed creditors on Earth, the solution is not sending anything from Earth. The "commerce" would really be a one-way affair.

No, it's a business because he doesn't have the money otherwise. Their first successful launch was cobbled together from parts... it was the last they could afford, too, had it failed, he'd have given up as it was costing too much (according to Musk in an interview I saw).

They said May 26 at the post-launch press conference.

That's BSG, right? They have numerous small craft that are SSTOs from Earthlike worlds, and they never seem to have any fuel problems to speak of... It's safe to say the smallest craft in the universe has well north of 20 km/s dv. That gives the craft 50X its total mass in TNT worth of energy (200 MJ/kg). That goes up with the square of the velocity, so what's the total dv of a small craft?

This would be a more applicable statement to BO than SpaceX. Musk doesn't have that much money, which is why SpaceX is a business---that actually sells product. BO is Bezo's hobby.

Yep, it's liftwood.

I think the key is not the bodies. It's the career/science/tech overhaul required. It requires quite a lot about their career and science systems to change.

No argument there, the budgets (treasure, and mass to Mars) would of course be vastly higher.

BEAM installed.

Yeah, I've actually done that before. The psychology of completing stuff in games is interesting.

Martian colony declares independence. Earth stops sending them supplies. Martians die. The End.

Mine looks exactly the same now, except I have a dirt runway.

Within a fairly long range (by current standards) directed energy weapons can't miss. The target needs to be able to move a ship randomly a cross-sectional radius (from the POV of the shooter) during the time of flight of the weapon for there to be a chance of a miss. For weapons moving at or near c, this is a pretty long range, it need not look anything like bad SF movies with the ships closer than WW1 battleships would engage. On the subject of WW1 battleships, Jutland shows the problem with any large warships vs weapons capable of destroying their target with a single hit, as the RN battlecruisers discovered in that battle.

Multiple harvests may have more to do with low latitudes (longer growing seasons). I live only a few hours north of Mexico, but as an example, it snowed pretty hard at my house today.

And the 2' mount lenses will generally give better eye relief. The only real issue become cost... It's like you're buying a DSLR camera body that comes with a general purpose lens... if you want a good image stabilizing lens for your camera, the glass will cost more than the camera did.

It's filled with liftwood which negates the mass it should have, since it bests the mk1-2 in every statistic, but is magically lighter.

Magnification is going to be the focal length of your scope (1200mm for the one you linked) over the eyepiece focal length. The specs for that scope say the best useful magnification is 300X, which is a 4mm eyepiece for that scope (1200/4=300). 2" eyepieces are better, but more expensive. The nice thing is that you can keep eyepieces to use with whatever telescope. They'll get expensive with quality, it's like buying lenses for cameras.

Urban areas use less resources than the people spread out, however.

Except it says nothing about density. It has to be saying that X% of the population lives in "urbanized" areas, not that 75-100% (for example) of the US is at urban density, that's nonsense.

What is the definition of "urbanized" in that image? My state is the size of many of the countries on that map, and our population density is 6.62 people/km2. That doesn't even count that fact that over half the people in the state live in Albuquerque. None the less, the whole US (look at Alaska! is "75-100% urbanized."). That image is nonsense. Perhaps it is by nation, and expresses the % of the population that lives in urban areas? That I'd buy. In which case the US is tiny pockets of people, and vast areas of nothing (far closer to reality).