Camacha

As we've all seen, the forum comes with new terms and conditions. This seems to be the result of Take-Two Interactive taking over. This has implications and this thread is intended to discuss these, as it's not always easy to interpret things for what they are. The most notable difference seems to be that the forum is now subject to US law, rather than the (I think) Mexican law it was subject to before. Considering various data laws in the US, this is means significant change in your position as a visitor. How do you guys feel about that? What guarantees can those running the forum give, other than the standard nothing is our fault these boilerplate terms and conditions entail?

I predict there will be an Episode IX.

The ability to fix it without losing data doesn't mean it's not a hassle. You're statistically more likely to restore data and experience downtime in return for gains that are nice on paper, but generally have very limited practical use. Not to mention I've seen too many people get quite annoyed after having to rebuild their RAID sets once too often. It's nothing that isn't surmountable, but it does mean that it's generally not worth the hassle. Only if you enjoy pushing hardware for the sake of it or have very specific requirements it seems to make sense. Especially if you run SATA, the prudent advice would generally be to save yourself some trouble and upgrade to NVMe.

I was going to suggest this one too. Normally I don't buy games for their graphics, but I made an exception here. It's an excellent walking simulator. The latest release of Resident Evil 7 has some very convincing graphics too. I mean, look at it:

This isn't a "Windoze" versus anything thing. And disks crapping out and ruining your RAID set and all the data on it is what I would call a hassle.

Are those SATA SSDs or NVMe? I don't feel RAID 0 and SSDs are a very useful combination. If you want more speed there generally are more efficient or reliable ways to get there and the practical gains don't quite seem to be worth the hassle.

It's a marathon, not a sprint. It's about accepting failure as part of the process and working towards your goal. Frantic all-nighters with the whole team isn't a long term strategy. I have no doubt they're going to get some sleep and get together tomorrow to start figuring it out. Keeping already exhausted engineers up all night after an already intense build up to the launch isn't likely to produce the best results, even though there might be a few that can't keep themselves from poking around in the data. Today the first prototype of one of the most powerful rockets ever built executed its first test flight, and despite warnings that failure was likely, the payload was delivered successfully into an orbit no private company before managed. While doing this, two out of three major sections returned to Earth unharmed. Apparently, acknowledging the successful part of this highly experimental flight is having a "slavish devotion", even though both the people here, experts and and the world press all agree it's quite an achievement. Not flawless, mind, but impressive nonetheless. I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve by insulting people who recognize this achievement. I don't think anybody thinks Musk is going to Mars any time soon either. It's obvious he'll need the BFR for that. We all know the BFR isn't going to fly any time soon. Ergo, Musk isn't going to Mars very soon. However, if you wanted to go to Mars, SpaceX seems to be on a very reasonable development path, tackling increasingly complex challenges along the way.

It sounded like they have a pretty good idea of what went wrong. Considering it's also a test flight, I doubt there's a scramble to find out what went wrong. Though the core engineers might indeed sleep a bit less sound than the others.

That's what I'd think, but I can't find any confirmation either way. A lot of people seem to think you could just drive the car if you somehow got it down, and SpaceX seems to be carefully wording its communications. They never say it could or couldn't, as far as I can tell, but say things like they're just regular Tesla seats. That suggests it's an actual full blown Roadster, but they don't actually say that. They just hint it. To be honest, if I were to put a car into space as a PR stunt, I wouldn't want to clearly state it's not actually a full car either.

SpaceX announced ahead of the mission that it was likely that something would go wrong. Everything went according to the expectations they had before the flight. More importantly, a pile of data was returned, which is the point of a test flight. You seem to be consistently hunting for negatives and proudly holding them up for us to see. Nobody cares that Kerbal7 on the internet feels it's a partial failure. Many engineers will go to sleep very drunk tonight and we're celebrating with them.

They expected at least partial failure, so things went according to plan. I'm not sure why you're so insistent to bash Musk and SpaceX, but they're going to be successfully launching rockets, whether you're sulking about it or not.

Is the car modified? There seems to be a support structure in the wheel well and the regular parts are missing. Is it a shell on a frame?

Star Man the Space Car Man.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be an actual complete Tesla.

All the rocket launches are fake. They just fall into the ocean after launch. The camera's cutting out on the barge at the moment landing is just so the crew can quickly put a prop in place.

Another Moon shot.

I think we could see the Moon next to the engine just now. A tiny sliver of basalt floating in the Grand Nothingness of Terror.

Something seems to be outgassing and ending up on the car. A lot. There seems to be some kind of vapour condensing on the wind screen too.

I'm reasonably convinced it's actually his life dream to go to Mars. It might be a nice business pitch, but it makes sense. He had more money than he could ever spend at a very young age. What more is there to do? Make even more money you cannot spend? A lot of very rich people get caught up in the "being rich contest", but you see that many at some point switch to furthering mankind in various ways. Many of the richest people try to make a difference, rather than just being rich and getting richer. When you realize you can buy everything you wish for the rest of your life, I can imagine that not being satisfactory any more. The Gates family seems to be doing a lot to eradicate disease and improve the standard of living in the less developed parts of the world. Musk seems intent on getting mankind to space, and improving our way of dealing with power in his other endeavours of course. Human PCBs. I like it.

That sounds like a controlled and graceful failure. If you're going to fail, that's the best way to do it. I think the Blue Origin rocket does this little sidestep to make sure the landing platform doesn't get hit when there's trouble, I'm not sure about the Falcons.

The point is that none of these ventures are what regular business logic calls a good investment. If you want to make a buck, you invest in something more traditional and see the money roll in. There seem to be other reasons to make the choice that are being made.

We're used to continuous disappointments in regards to space flight time frames due to it being publicly funded. Various projects have been kicked off, only to get cancelled later. There wasn't any proper control over the funding. In that regard having a single person in charge that won't quickly be replaced or succeeded is beneficial. At that point, it start becoming an engineering problem, rather than the political problem it often was.

That's not where the market is going. Small payloads is where the money is at. They just launched the most powerful rocket in existence. If you're into making money, you exploit that to the hilt. Yet that's not the plan. It's just a stepping stone towards a launcher suited for payloads nobody wants to launch right now. If this is not about going to Mars, all the individual steps are suspiciously close to what you'd do if you would actually want to go to Mars.

Maybe you should Tweet this to Musk. It might be vital information. Satellites have become lighter, and most agencies have responded by creating light launchers or combining launches. The latter is becoming problematic. The money isn't in super heavy launches, so what you say makes no sense. Besides, none of Musks endeavours after Paypal have been about making a buck. They're all highly experimental new technologies and sectors without an obvious return on investment. You can insist it's all about the money, but you would have to ignore reality to do so.

At this point it's fairly clear that Musk does whatever he pleases, and he's fairly good at doing that too. Musk says he's going to Mars and started a highly experimental, yet successful rocket launch business. Random internet guy says Musk feels it's too expensive. I don't know, it's a tough choice, but I'm inclined to believe the billionaire wonder boy here.