Because the tax on citizens is already retarded and no other country is that retarded. The fix is to get rid of that retardation, not spread it to corporations.
*That* is an argument that is very possibly worth making.
I have an even better idea. Tax only the corporations, and none of the natural persons. These artificial entities control the majority of the money, by far. Let them pay the taxes.
We don't have to endorse the privacy-violating things the NSA is up to in order to actually have a good opinion of THE WHOLE AGENCY. The NSA isn't just "a few oversteps that Snowden reveals piecemeal". The bulk of what they do is absolutely invaluable. A world with no NSA would be a worse one.
Good god the shills are out in force tonight. No it wouldn't. If anything, it might be better, because people would be paying more attention to HUMINT instead of wasting such a colossal amount of money on failed SIGINT. The Boston Marathon Bombing happened. They failed to prevent it. They have always failed to prevent even the failed attempts. The NSA only succeeds in infringing on the rights of innocent Americans. The NSA only succeeds in blackmailing congresscritters. The NSA only succeeds at passing foreign corporate secrets to the oligarchy for exploitation. The NSA absolutely and totally fails at anything and everything having to do with safety. A very very few people benefit from its existence. The vast majority of us would be far better off if it were to be expunged.
Or perhaps the rest of us are more realistic than you. We know there are bad guys out there who don't like the US and would like nothing better than to see it lose its power, or for some of them cease to exist. Perhaps you see this as paranoia; the rest of us see it as realism.
We're quite well aware of this. So what? They're on the other side of an ocean! They have never designed an aircraft! No one, in their entire culture, has ever designed an aircraft! In Afghanistan, a significant fraction of these people have barely Iron Age tools, left to their own devices. The only thing that makes them dangerous is other people's money and other people's weapons, and even with those things they are not especially dangerous here.
Your "realism" has made you stupid. You are willing to throw away all of the prerequisites on which this country was built. This country has done great things, but it was not a given that this would happen. It was designed. When we speak of our Founding Fathers in hushed tones and with those capital letters, it's because we are acknowledging that they were political geniuses. They designed a system that was unheard of. They took a giant step, that had never been taken before. Sure, there was precedent in things like the Magna Carta, but the Magna Carta was signed by a king. In their system, there was no slot labeled "anointed of God, his Majesty the King." That was revolutionary. But they didn't stop there. They had long arguments and wrote many papers about how a government should be designed, rather than just grow into place the way all governments before had done. And they laid out principles by which a government should run. Spying on everybody all the time is not in the rule book. It is, in fact, forbidden by the rule book they wrote. For very good reasons. The fact that you think this somehow protects you from literal Iron Age savages is mindboggling.
"America" is not a few buildings on the east coast. It is an idea. Let them try to attack us. We will still be here. Well, I will. You will be hiding under a rock somewhere, apparently. If you are willing to bow down before people claiming they have to watch everything you ever do in your entire life, cradle to grave, you have LOST. The idea is dead, and America is over. Something will go on in its place, but it won't be America.
The most bloated budget in the history of the world wants freebies from software developers? Really? Domain/framework-specific freebies? Thank you for your contribution to open source, US Army, but judging by the fact Slashdot can barely muster the will to snark, I don't think you're going to get a lot of contributions.
What I wouldn't give for a quality centrist party that's willing to compromise and work out policy that meets somewhere in the middle rather than having notthing but weird fringe parties who are way off to the edge in one extreme or another.
What are you complaining about? Obama is the best moderate Republican president to come along in years.
"This is the closest we can get to something like Europa," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California...
So, not very close at all, considering that ocean is attached to all the world's oceans, which enjoy the benefits of most of the solar energy the planet receives impinging on a liquid surface. Europa is a long long way from the Sun, and the inverse square law is a bitch. While Jupiter really wants to grow up and become the brown dwarf it was always meant to be, it didn't. The radiation it puts out is hardly enough to make up the difference between the solar energy received by Earth and by Europa.
Is life in Europa possible? Yes. Liquid water indicates there is at least some energy to be had. Is high energy life possible? We can't categorically say no unless we go and look, but it's improbable.
Please make them easily re-fuelable AND establish a real refueling system. Hell, add in the ability to replace / upgrade parts during the pit stops.
It seems obvious that if you want to support on-orbit refueling, you had better support on-orbit upgrades too. Satellites are basically big piles of electronics with solar wings. What iterates faster than electronics? Nothing. So if you're going to go to the trouble to maintain longevity on-orbit, you're going to want to update them when they're obsolete too.
That said, replaceable parts always make for a bigger device than an integrated system. Traditionally the space industry has counted and begrudged every gram, because putting any more grams into orbit than you had to would cost you a fortune greater than the technical expertise needed to eliminate the extra grams. SpaceX launch costs might put a dent in that attitude, but won't eliminate it entirely. SpaceX launch costs after first stage reuse is perfected may actually tip the balance. But probably not.
Judging by the quoted numbers of satellites, the SpaceX launch cost reduction bonus is going to mostly be spent on lofting a larger constellation, rather than increasing maintainability. Considering replaceable boards reduces reliability (launch vibration + unsoldered connection == bad), that's probably the prudent choice. It won't contribute much to the space junk problem. Stuff in low Earth orbit has a tendency to fall out of orbit quite quickly, relatively speaking.
I had to re-read the article about five times trying to figure out what hiring African-Americans had to do with anything else. I still don't know.
That looks like the author was trying to say that Google had hired multilingual African-Americans to be able to easily speak to African governments, locations that are known to be under-served in the Internet connection department. The theory being that Google could more easily grow a subscriber base where there is zero competition than where there is some competition.
Then a hamfisted editor decided that made the article too long, and cut out three sentences and put in that stupid phrase.
I'm curious, how do they average for the whole year? Is it monthly averages that they average for the year? Is it daily data that is averaged for the whole year?
It's a least squares mean calculated over the daily temperatures.
Vacuum systems are really really really really expensive.
Really? And that does 75 microns. Which translates to slightly better than a 99.99% vacuum. The Hyperloop is expected to operate at about 1000 microns. The extra superlatives apply when you're trying to build a giant particle accelerator, but Elon Musk specifically chose the point on the vacuum pump curve where that reduced pressure is achievable without falling off a cliff in terms of cost. Expensive, yes. But not vastly more expensive than any other part of the system.
I love the idea of electric cars, and Tesla is on my "lottery win" shopping list. With that said, if you apply hard numbers these cars do not make any sense at the current gas prices.
What's with this "current gas prices" meme? The current gas prices have applied for maaaybe 3 weeks, if you're lucky. And suddenly people are absolutely giddy. Yay! Gas is free again! What? No it's not. It's temporary, despite the pronouncements of random Saudi princes. It's probably short term temporary, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when it rebounds.
Even if it's not short term temporary, I would be vastly surprised if gas prices stay this low for the lifetime of a new car purchased this year.
Absolute nonsense. I can stream an HD movie easily at 10mpbs if the neighborhood lets me actually HAVE 10. WTF do you *need* 25mpbs for, much less to assert it's some sort of "bottom adequate floor"?
Got kids? Got a wife? Got a wife's parents, whose breadwinner got injured on the job and has been out of work for 2 years?
There are more households in the world besides the lone hipster.
I'm wondering why everyone seems to think so highly of their local officials. What cities have such great local officials that we want to give them all these new responsibilities?
Because some of us have local officials who can keep the roads paved? And not just paved, but straightened and leveled, with new fire hydrants and storm drains installed, in the case of the road nearest my house that I drive on every single day. The road all of my neighbors drive on every single day. The road the local fire department drives on, hopefully not every single day.
I don't want to hold my elected officials accountable
Full stop.
Just because you are fine with living in a Third World shithole that can't even meet the standards of the ancient Roman Empire, it doesn't mean the rest of us have this problem.
Funny thing. A lot of my family live in rural areas around the country, and many of these areas are gaining faster fiber than what's available in the cities. The common pattern that I'm seeing is the metro areas are taken over by incumbents and the incumbents are staying or running away from rural like the plague. Even with little to no competition in rural areas, they're starting to see faster, cheaper, more reliable internet because these areas are being serviced by ISPs less greedy than incumbents.
In Missouri, rural areas are getting fiber because the state government appropriated funds to help establish rural fiber co-ops. Charter and AT&T want no part of it. By the time the decade is out, rural Missouri will have better, cheaper bandwidth than any metro area in the state.
There is no cable service, and AT&T only provides phone service because the law demands it. DSL can not be had. The central offices are too widely scattered and AT&T has zero interest in installing DSLAMs for 6 subscriptions at a time.
But most rural people have TV and cable, won't they be able to get internet through that?
Most rural people do not have cable. Rural subscribers are the majority of satellite TV subscribers, because they have no access to cable television. My parents recently built a brand new house, in a subdivision large enough that it has a homeowner's association, in a cluster of three subdivisions—surrounded by farmland in rural Illinois. They don't have access to cable, nor do any of their neighbors. And it's not a matter of money, either. It can not be had for any price. The cable company flatly refuses to run wire, no matter what percentage of the neighborhood would sign up. It's rural. It's ignored.
You conveniently forget things that actually do get passed and signed, and focus only on your frustration when the agenda of one person is disliked by a majority of the people in the country...
Says who? Last I checked the majority of the country didn't even vote in the most recent national elections. 36%, says the New York Times and the Washington Post. The majority of the people in the country haven't expressed a meaningful opinion since 2012, and at that time, the majority of the country expressed agreement with his agenda.
... and by congress.
I don't give a flying fuck what congress likes or dislikes, since I am absolutely certain the only things they like are the things that bring in the most campaign contributions, and I'm not a billionaire.
The majority of the country find his foreign policy positions to be complete feckless, and clumsily handled even if they approve of them.
No, the 30% of the country that listens to Fox News thinks his foreign policy positions are completely feckless and clumsily handled. The rest of the country thinks he's substantially better at diplomacy than his predecessor, and for most of his terms in office, his foreign policy was roundly praised in the national media outlets most people consider important. Saying it ain't so doesn't make it not so.
The points where his own party dislikes his foreign policy are the points that, in a Republican president, the Republicans praise to the skies. Republicans like bombing the shit out of sand people. We have 8 years of quotes to prove it. We know damn well that had it been a Republican president bombing Libya, all Republican commentary would have been about how it's right and just and necessary to bring peace, democracy, mom, and apple pie to Libya, plus loud protestations that it's 100% constitutional and within his purview. We KNOW this, because those arguments have been made.
Obama and his party have solidly earned the opposition they've cultivated, and the recent mid-term election demonstrates once again how tone deaf they've been.
That's a remarkable echo chamber you have there. The recent mid-term election demonstrates that everyone hates Congress. It soundly demonstrated that the Republican Party is wildly tonedeaf to social issues. As noted by one of your own analysts, every Republican social initiative either failed to pass or was contradicted by votes. Republican economic positions failed too, with minimum wage hikes passing in every single state that had one on the ballot, including every single "red state".
Your entire argument consists of labeling. "We say it's bad, therefore it's bad. We say Obama is incompetent, therefore he is incompetent." The reality is somewhat different, and there are a few of you who have noticed, but not enough.
Anyway, I don't know what your beef is with Obama. He's the best moderate Republican president to come along in years.
dissent will be recorded on your permanent record.
I'm going to hire the kid that has 100% of all available badges, including those that were only available for a limited time before s/he was born and those that are mutually exclusive because it's physically impossible to be in 3 places at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Reaganomics is opportunity.
Really? Then why is upward mobility among US citizens the lowest is has ever been in the history of the country?
Because the tax on citizens is already retarded and no other country is that retarded. The fix is to get rid of that retardation, not spread it to corporations.
*That* is an argument that is very possibly worth making.
I have an even better idea. Tax only the corporations, and none of the natural persons. These artificial entities control the majority of the money, by far. Let them pay the taxes.
We "must" tax the corporation? What kind of goal is that?
A fair one. Because they sure as FUCK "must" tax ME. So yeah. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
We don't have to endorse the privacy-violating things the NSA is up to in order to actually have a good opinion of THE WHOLE AGENCY. The NSA isn't just "a few oversteps that Snowden reveals piecemeal". The bulk of what they do is absolutely invaluable. A world with no NSA would be a worse one.
Good god the shills are out in force tonight. No it wouldn't. If anything, it might be better, because people would be paying more attention to HUMINT instead of wasting such a colossal amount of money on failed SIGINT. The Boston Marathon Bombing happened. They failed to prevent it. They have always failed to prevent even the failed attempts. The NSA only succeeds in infringing on the rights of innocent Americans. The NSA only succeeds in blackmailing congresscritters. The NSA only succeeds at passing foreign corporate secrets to the oligarchy for exploitation. The NSA absolutely and totally fails at anything and everything having to do with safety. A very very few people benefit from its existence. The vast majority of us would be far better off if it were to be expunged.
Hard drives would get cheaper, for one.
Or perhaps the rest of us are more realistic than you. We know there are bad guys out there who don't like the US and would like nothing better than to see it lose its power, or for some of them cease to exist. Perhaps you see this as paranoia; the rest of us see it as realism.
We're quite well aware of this. So what? They're on the other side of an ocean! They have never designed an aircraft! No one, in their entire culture, has ever designed an aircraft! In Afghanistan, a significant fraction of these people have barely Iron Age tools, left to their own devices. The only thing that makes them dangerous is other people's money and other people's weapons, and even with those things they are not especially dangerous here.
Your "realism" has made you stupid. You are willing to throw away all of the prerequisites on which this country was built. This country has done great things, but it was not a given that this would happen. It was designed. When we speak of our Founding Fathers in hushed tones and with those capital letters, it's because we are acknowledging that they were political geniuses. They designed a system that was unheard of. They took a giant step, that had never been taken before. Sure, there was precedent in things like the Magna Carta, but the Magna Carta was signed by a king. In their system, there was no slot labeled "anointed of God, his Majesty the King." That was revolutionary. But they didn't stop there. They had long arguments and wrote many papers about how a government should be designed, rather than just grow into place the way all governments before had done. And they laid out principles by which a government should run. Spying on everybody all the time is not in the rule book. It is, in fact, forbidden by the rule book they wrote. For very good reasons. The fact that you think this somehow protects you from literal Iron Age savages is mindboggling.
"America" is not a few buildings on the east coast. It is an idea. Let them try to attack us. We will still be here. Well, I will. You will be hiding under a rock somewhere, apparently. If you are willing to bow down before people claiming they have to watch everything you ever do in your entire life, cradle to grave, you have LOST. The idea is dead, and America is over. Something will go on in its place, but it won't be America.
The most bloated budget in the history of the world wants freebies from software developers? Really? Domain/framework-specific freebies? Thank you for your contribution to open source, US Army, but judging by the fact Slashdot can barely muster the will to snark, I don't think you're going to get a lot of contributions.
What I wouldn't give for a quality centrist party that's willing to compromise and work out policy that meets somewhere in the middle rather than having notthing but weird fringe parties who are way off to the edge in one extreme or another.
What are you complaining about? Obama is the best moderate Republican president to come along in years.
"This is the closest we can get to something like Europa," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California...
So, not very close at all, considering that ocean is attached to all the world's oceans, which enjoy the benefits of most of the solar energy the planet receives impinging on a liquid surface. Europa is a long long way from the Sun, and the inverse square law is a bitch. While Jupiter really wants to grow up and become the brown dwarf it was always meant to be, it didn't. The radiation it puts out is hardly enough to make up the difference between the solar energy received by Earth and by Europa.
Is life in Europa possible? Yes. Liquid water indicates there is at least some energy to be had. Is high energy life possible? We can't categorically say no unless we go and look, but it's improbable.
Yeah, the time for coding them from scratch probably passed about 7-8 years ago.
Uh huh.
May I suggest a counterpoint?
Please make them easily re-fuelable AND establish a real refueling system. Hell, add in the ability to replace / upgrade parts during the pit stops.
It seems obvious that if you want to support on-orbit refueling, you had better support on-orbit upgrades too. Satellites are basically big piles of electronics with solar wings. What iterates faster than electronics? Nothing. So if you're going to go to the trouble to maintain longevity on-orbit, you're going to want to update them when they're obsolete too.
That said, replaceable parts always make for a bigger device than an integrated system. Traditionally the space industry has counted and begrudged every gram, because putting any more grams into orbit than you had to would cost you a fortune greater than the technical expertise needed to eliminate the extra grams. SpaceX launch costs might put a dent in that attitude, but won't eliminate it entirely. SpaceX launch costs after first stage reuse is perfected may actually tip the balance. But probably not.
Judging by the quoted numbers of satellites, the SpaceX launch cost reduction bonus is going to mostly be spent on lofting a larger constellation, rather than increasing maintainability. Considering replaceable boards reduces reliability (launch vibration + unsoldered connection == bad), that's probably the prudent choice. It won't contribute much to the space junk problem. Stuff in low Earth orbit has a tendency to fall out of orbit quite quickly, relatively speaking.
I had to re-read the article about five times trying to figure out what hiring African-Americans had to do with anything else. I still don't know.
That looks like the author was trying to say that Google had hired multilingual African-Americans to be able to easily speak to African governments, locations that are known to be under-served in the Internet connection department. The theory being that Google could more easily grow a subscriber base where there is zero competition than where there is some competition.
Then a hamfisted editor decided that made the article too long, and cut out three sentences and put in that stupid phrase.
I'm curious, how do they average for the whole year? Is it monthly averages that they average for the year? Is it daily data that is averaged for the whole year?
It's a least squares mean calculated over the daily temperatures.
gravity is just another form of control! it's the liberals trying to keep us close to 'mother earth'. it's bullshit Gaia-ism if you ask me.
You don't happen to work for SpaceX do you?
Vacuum systems are really really really really expensive.
Really? And that does 75 microns. Which translates to slightly better than a 99.99% vacuum. The Hyperloop is expected to operate at about 1000 microns. The extra superlatives apply when you're trying to build a giant particle accelerator, but Elon Musk specifically chose the point on the vacuum pump curve where that reduced pressure is achievable without falling off a cliff in terms of cost. Expensive, yes. But not vastly more expensive than any other part of the system.
John Postel wisely said:
Dr. Jonathan Postel, abbreviated Jon.
I love the idea of electric cars, and Tesla is on my "lottery win" shopping list. With that said, if you apply hard numbers these cars do not make any sense at the current gas prices.
What's with this "current gas prices" meme? The current gas prices have applied for maaaybe 3 weeks, if you're lucky. And suddenly people are absolutely giddy. Yay! Gas is free again! What? No it's not. It's temporary, despite the pronouncements of random Saudi princes. It's probably short term temporary, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when it rebounds.
Even if it's not short term temporary, I would be vastly surprised if gas prices stay this low for the lifetime of a new car purchased this year.
Absolute nonsense. I can stream an HD movie easily at 10mpbs if the neighborhood lets me actually HAVE 10. WTF do you *need* 25mpbs for, much less to assert it's some sort of "bottom adequate floor"?
Got kids? Got a wife? Got a wife's parents, whose breadwinner got injured on the job and has been out of work for 2 years?
There are more households in the world besides the lone hipster.
I'm wondering why everyone seems to think so highly of their local officials. What cities have such great local officials that we want to give them all these new responsibilities?
Because some of us have local officials who can keep the roads paved? And not just paved, but straightened and leveled, with new fire hydrants and storm drains installed, in the case of the road nearest my house that I drive on every single day. The road all of my neighbors drive on every single day. The road the local fire department drives on, hopefully not every single day.
I don't want to hold my elected officials accountable
Full stop.
Just because you are fine with living in a Third World shithole that can't even meet the standards of the ancient Roman Empire, it doesn't mean the rest of us have this problem.
Funny thing. A lot of my family live in rural areas around the country, and many of these areas are gaining faster fiber than what's available in the cities. The common pattern that I'm seeing is the metro areas are taken over by incumbents and the incumbents are staying or running away from rural like the plague. Even with little to no competition in rural areas, they're starting to see faster, cheaper, more reliable internet because these areas are being serviced by ISPs less greedy than incumbents.
In Missouri, rural areas are getting fiber because the state government appropriated funds to help establish rural fiber co-ops. Charter and AT&T want no part of it. By the time the decade is out, rural Missouri will have better, cheaper bandwidth than any metro area in the state.
There is no cable service, and AT&T only provides phone service because the law demands it. DSL can not be had. The central offices are too widely scattered and AT&T has zero interest in installing DSLAMs for 6 subscriptions at a time.
But most rural people have TV and cable, won't they be able to get internet through that?
Most rural people do not have cable. Rural subscribers are the majority of satellite TV subscribers, because they have no access to cable television. My parents recently built a brand new house, in a subdivision large enough that it has a homeowner's association, in a cluster of three subdivisions—surrounded by farmland in rural Illinois. They don't have access to cable, nor do any of their neighbors. And it's not a matter of money, either. It can not be had for any price. The cable company flatly refuses to run wire, no matter what percentage of the neighborhood would sign up. It's rural. It's ignored.
You conveniently forget things that actually do get passed and signed, and focus only on your frustration when the agenda of one person is disliked by a majority of the people in the country...
Says who? Last I checked the majority of the country didn't even vote in the most recent national elections. 36%, says the New York Times and the Washington Post. The majority of the people in the country haven't expressed a meaningful opinion since 2012, and at that time, the majority of the country expressed agreement with his agenda.
... and by congress.
I don't give a flying fuck what congress likes or dislikes, since I am absolutely certain the only things they like are the things that bring in the most campaign contributions, and I'm not a billionaire.
The majority of the country find his foreign policy positions to be complete feckless, and clumsily handled even if they approve of them.
No, the 30% of the country that listens to Fox News thinks his foreign policy positions are completely feckless and clumsily handled. The rest of the country thinks he's substantially better at diplomacy than his predecessor, and for most of his terms in office, his foreign policy was roundly praised in the national media outlets most people consider important. Saying it ain't so doesn't make it not so.
The points where his own party dislikes his foreign policy are the points that, in a Republican president, the Republicans praise to the skies. Republicans like bombing the shit out of sand people. We have 8 years of quotes to prove it. We know damn well that had it been a Republican president bombing Libya, all Republican commentary would have been about how it's right and just and necessary to bring peace, democracy, mom, and apple pie to Libya, plus loud protestations that it's 100% constitutional and within his purview. We KNOW this, because those arguments have been made.
Obama and his party have solidly earned the opposition they've cultivated, and the recent mid-term election demonstrates once again how tone deaf they've been.
That's a remarkable echo chamber you have there. The recent mid-term election demonstrates that everyone hates Congress. It soundly demonstrated that the Republican Party is wildly tonedeaf to social issues. As noted by one of your own analysts, every Republican social initiative either failed to pass or was contradicted by votes. Republican economic positions failed too, with minimum wage hikes passing in every single state that had one on the ballot, including every single "red state".
Your entire argument consists of labeling. "We say it's bad, therefore it's bad. We say Obama is incompetent, therefore he is incompetent." The reality is somewhat different, and there are a few of you who have noticed, but not enough.
Anyway, I don't know what your beef is with Obama. He's the best moderate Republican president to come along in years.
I think the PC name for that game is Little People's Fortress.
Vertically Challenged People's Fortress, you pusillanimous poltroon.
Unarmed men are corralled
Unarmed men who have access to diesel fuel, styrofoam, and a hardware store need not remain unarmed for long.
And the governments in question really don't like that I can say that legally.
*Sigh*. I look forward to the day when Coursera runs An Introduction to Sarcasm for Americans...
Won't help. You're looking for An Introduction to Sarcasm for Aspberger Syndrome Patients.
dissent will be recorded on your permanent record.
I'm going to hire the kid that has 100% of all available badges, including those that were only available for a limited time before s/he was born and those that are mutually exclusive because it's physically impossible to be in 3 places at once.
That kid understands computers and the system.