What I always find somewhat funny about that is that Bush was suppose to be the dumbest fucking person on the planet yet all these people in congress were fooled multiple times by him which should be fairly telling about the quality of the people in the house and senate.
It wasn't Bush doing the fooling. He was effectively little more than a figurehead who could get elected. The real movers and shakers were people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest. They were the tail that wagged the dog. Bush wasn't a strong enough leader to dominate the room when they were in it. Furthermore when the CIA, NSA and the rest of our "intelligence" agencies were feeding bad information it becomes hard to make a properly informed decision even at the best of times.
That said, a lot of congress isn't terribly bright or capable. Certainly not our best and brightest except maybe for purposes of looking out for their own interests.
BS. Most of the politicians voted for it because the war was very popular with their constituents at the time.
The war was NEVER popular with many/most constituents. What the politicians were worried about was being vulnerable to the (bogus) argument that voting against the war meant they were "soft on terrorism and getting voted out of office as a result. While there was a portion of the population that was very hawkish just like with any conflict, most people were not at any time in favor of starting a war with Iraq. There was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks and the case against Iraq was obviously shown to be a fabrication. No, congress voted to support the military action (there never was a declaration of war) out of political expediency and based on what turned out to be false information.
Trump never solidly supports any position. He changes his mind more often than a teenage girl changes moods. I don't actually mind someone changing their mind about a topic when they learn new information or even if they give a matter serious consideration. Trump never gives anything serious consideration. His policy positions are the very definition of fickle and certainly aren't based out of any ideology or even pragmatism but instead out of whatever whim strikes him at the time. He basically plays to whatever crowd he is facing and lies almost all the time.
Hillary Clinton voted for the war; that's a bit more serious.
So did most of congress at the time and they did so largely based on bad data from our intelligence agencies and the Bush administration. A mistake I think but not one that makes me think Trump would be a better choice as commander in chief.
Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders oppose this merger.
The fact that he might have a position that agrees with Bernie Sanders on some random issue is actually rather high since Trumps opinions are selected apparently at random. Anything that comes out of his mouth may as well have been chosen by throwing darts at a list of policy options. And he has a high probability of denying his positing ever having been his position the following day even if he was recorded saying it. But some amount of them will agree with Sanders just by pure chance.
Which is exactly why we should go there. Were not going to find out or learn anything without going to Mars to test these things.
Agreed. This is actually one of the most compelling arguments against the "only send robots" crowd. You cannot learn much of anything about topics like exo-farming by just sending robots. Same with every other topic relating to human physiology and space. I strongly expect that anything we learn would have immediate and useful applications on terrestrial farming.
If we send 1000 people to Mars how exactly are we going to feed them?
It will be a substantial challenge but hardly the only one. Early explorers will be supplied from Earth but they'll have to develop some self sustaining exo-farming technology. This is not a trivial problem. And manufacturing will have even bigger problems. You basically have to develop an entire self contained supply chain from scratch which except for life support issues is probably the biggest show stopper problem with colonizing another planet. Need some tungsten? You have to either ship it from Earth at tremendous cost or you have to figure out how to mine it and refine it locally on Mars. Either way it's a tough challenge.
Has anybody done some thinking on the steaks and the veggies?
Yes though such research has a looooong way to go.
We do but that doesn't mean we can do so with 100% reliability. Plus we have a lot to learn before we start exo-farming. It's not clear how reliably we can grow crops on Mars even in a well controlled greenhouse. There is reason for optimism but there is a lot we don't know yet.
Mars has enough gravity that most plants should grow just fine,
Perhaps but currently that is an unproven assertion. Frankly the gravity is likely to be among the least of the challenges to growing food on Mars. When you have a small self contained garden you run the risk of any number of problems hugely disrupting the entire crop. And the crop for early explorers will necessarily be small with minimal excess most likely. On Earth we have enough agriculture that we only tend to experience localized famines due to distribution problems because other areas can make up for a shortage. Early Mars explorers could very easily have their entire crop wiped out and the only back up option is to ship food from Earth. I'm not saying it's impossible but it probably will be quite a challenge.
Want to get rid of industrial pollution? Without returning to the 13th century? Then help move them to lunar orbit, were it can't hurt anything else.
That is not likely to be a realistic solution to industrial pollution. You are going to generate VAST amounts of pollution and extra cost just getting to/from orbit with products even if you had a space elevator. With chemical rockets it's just not even worth considering. Even if it were technically feasible withing a reasonable time frame (it isn't) it makes no sense economically. That's not to say a space program couldn't help us hugely with the problem. It just won't come from that vector. Building stuff in space only really makes sense for a space based economy thanks to the costs of dealing with gravity wells. We're not going to build a bridge or even an iPhone in space and transport it back to Earth any time soon. But we can use technology developed for space to help with terrestrial problems. Heck the information from satellites alone is invaluable not to mention all the spin off technologies.
I strongly suspect that climate control and life support technologies developed for space travel and space based manufacturing would have immediate and valuable applications to pollution control here on Earth. Totally worth doing but we're not going to move industrial production into space in any sort of meaningful scale for a long time. Not that it isn't worth doing but just that our technology is far too primitive to consider it realistic. Maybe in a few hundred years.
The space program is not the best way to preserve the human race. Repeat, if you are worried about preserving the human race, space is not the way to do it.
Hah! Ok Mr. Smart Guy. Enlighten us with your inspiring message of what you think is the best way to preserve the human race. Bear in mind that your solution has to include a solution for large rocks falling on Earth from space as well as all other threats to the Earth's ecosystem which keep it compatible with human life.
I think we have a couple of ULA shills posting frequently here. The ULA (Lockheed and Boeing) are cutting jobs, since their comfy monopoly on space launches involving minimal R&D costs has been broken up by SpaceX.
Sigh... It's a long time tradition here on slashdot to call anyone with a different opinion a "shill". As if paid representatives of those companies have the time to give a shit about a minor technical discussion forum like slashdot. It's an idiotic argument because what is really happening is one of two things. A) someone has a genuine difference of opinion or B) they are a troll and you shouldn't feed the trolls. The folks at ULA could not possibly care less about the opinions of some random poster here on slashdot. Anyone who thinks otherwise has an unjustifiably over inflated sense of their own importance and/or the importance of this website.
That guy with the binary username is the main one I've seen. He talks about "space nutters" a lot.
He's just an idiot. If he has a sponsored agenda he's doing a good job of hiding it under all his stupid arguments.
Football isn't "slowed down". It was designed to support TV ads. It's a lazy spectator's sport. The whole ecosystem is designed from the ground up to be a show with branding, ads, and stuff to buy.
The "whole ecosystem"? No. The sport wasn't designed to support TV ads - it just happened to be a remarkably good fit with them and the folks in charge of the NFL and D1 college football recognized that and took full advantage. The rules of the sport were laid down long before TV revenue was a thing. That said, it obviously works since it is the most popular spectator sport in the USA.
No other sport fits the schedule of television as well as American Football. Nor has anything enjoyed its success. Comparatively, Pro Wrestling is a distant second.
"Pro wrestling" of the sort you see through the WWE and similar organizations is NOT a sport and never has been. They are actors in a live action scripted play. I have been a wrestler and coach of 35 years in the actual sport of wrestling (the sort they do in the Olympics and in colleges) so I speak with authority on this matter. Furthermore calling the WWE actors "pro wrestlers" is kind of a misnomer since they aren't actually wrestlers and there are actually real athletes like Jordan Burroughs who are competitive wrestlers and are pro athletes (they get paid to compete, primarily through endorsements).
Given that the game has 1 hour of actual playing time and maybe 7 or 8 seconds of action per play and about 2 plays per minute that doesn't add up to much action in a game that drones on about 3 and a half hours.
"1 hour of actual playing time"? Try 11 minutes of actual football action. While the sport has some pretty amazing highlights there is a TON of waiting around while nothing actually happens.
Throw Google under the bus not the poor folks just trying to feed their families.
"Poor folks just trying to feed their families"? These are well paid engineers with options. Anyone talented enough to get a job at Google is talented enough to secure employment elsewhere. They are willing accomplices to this action and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Evidently these engineers lack a moral compass and their word means nothing. If they had a problem with this action they could easily have spoken up and taken action but they took the easy path and did nothing.
Pretty sure you'd scream bloody murder if you employer's actions were layer at your feet - douche!
My employer's actions are routinely laid at my feet and rightfully so. I am responsible for my actions at my employer as well as those who work for me. Companies are comprised of people who commit these actions and when these actions injure others there should be some accountability. If I have an ethical problem with what management at my company is doing or if I was wrongly accused of something I was not responsible for you can be quite certain I would either leave or take appropriate action to defend myself. But if I'm quiet about something then effectively I am endorsing it.
In the end, IT saved millions globally because their stock orders were drastically reduced, yet on the local level you had engineers being paid upwards of $1000 a day to twiddle their thumb while they wait for their $500 computer to arrive. But IT doesn't see one dime of that cost.
That just means that the accountants at that company were crap at their job and weren't assigning costs properly. Sadly this isn't an uncommon occurrence.
There are no known "facts" regarding the safety of the full vaccine schedule
You've said that elsewhere and it's still bullshit. There are is plenty of evidence and research about that exact thing and I've given you links in other threads. You just can't be bothered to look for any of it. Stop it with your nonsense. You are wrong and don't know what you are talking about.
Have you ever seen scientific study of the full schedule of vaccines in a double blind?
No and you haven't either. Conducting such a study would be hugely unethical because it would involve exposing large numbers of people to preventable diseases with known means of prevention. Double blind studies are ideal when possible but there are plenty of other valid means of studying diseases without resorting to double blind studies.
A vaccine may be safe, but the full schedule of vaccines has NEVER been studied.
Not true at all. It has been studied extensively. Furthermore there is substantial empirical evidence than any safety concerns about the full schedule of vaccines is a very small effect if it exists at all.
Now, tell me. where is the actual science on the full schedule of vaccines?
In the clinical studies for each and every vaccine and diseases that could conceivably be related to their administration. I suggest you go speak to an epidemiologist since you are in need of a clue about this. I'm sure they'll be happy to fill you in.
In other words, do you have scientific proof that a full vaccine schedule is safe. Until then, you're just sciency not scientific.
Yes we do have proof that a full vaccine schedule is safe. Scientific proof in the form of a measurably healthier populace and hugely reduced incidence of disease with barely any measurable side effects despite copious studies about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
At a U.S. average rate of 12 cents/kWh = $120/MWh = $0.12 million/GWh, that's $947 million worth of power generated per year.
The amount of revenue it generates is not the important consideration in determining if a project is economically worthwhile. It has to generate enough PROFIT to repay the investment. If the annual cost of generating your $947M worth of power is $947M then the project will never repay the cost of building the plant. The cost of generation plus the amortized cost of building and maintaining the plant has to be less than the amount of revenue brought in. Presumably the amount charged for a unit of electricity is high enough to pay for the plant during it's lifetime but you cannot just assume that to be true. In the case of a plant that cost $4.7B to build and is expected to last for 40 years you would need to bring in $117.5M in revenue each year in excess of the operating costs just to break even. And that is ignoring inflation, financing costs, etc. So by your example that electricity had better not cost more than $829.5M per year (actually less than that in the real world) or the plant will not break even.
So now that the costs of research and experimentation have been paid for by the public, "entrepreneurs" are willing to step up and reap the profits?
Yes! That's one of the great things about publicly funded research. It turns into economic benefit to society via technology transfer. You seem to be implying (wrongly) that this is somehow a bad thing. Quite the contrary - this is a hugely awesome good thing. It means tons of jobs, new industries, and economic benefits all around. It grows the economy. Keeping the research in a lab where it will do nothing would be pretty much the worst thing you could do with it because then you spend the money and get no economic benefit either.
Ok but it doesn't change the argument meaningfully.
I can see why Tesla would want to be able to impose that kind of condition. However, I think the First Sale Doctrine is going to say they can't. Especially, if they allow it to be used on their own driverless taxi network.
First sale doctrine doesn't apply if you sign a contract that stipulates explicitly that you will not use the car for that purpose. Now the interesting thing is that the second buyer of the car cannot be bound by the first buyer's agreements so you'd have to have a GPL style agreement whereby the first buyer would be forced to impose a similar restriction on future buyers. Not sure if that would work out in Tesla's favor under current laws.
BUT here is the real question. We need a legal determination for who is operating the vehicle when it is being driven autonomously. If the legally responsible entity that is considered to be the "driver" is Tesla then they have every legal right to refuse to use the vehicle for purposes they do not approve of. After all, it would be unreasonable for me to be able to incur liability for Tesla with them having no say in the matter. If the legally responsible entity is determined to be the vehicle owner then Tesla really shouldn't have any say in the matter. To date I don't think there is a clear determination legally for this key issue.
Apparentley there is no more freedom in opinion in Australia, and also no more freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech does not apply here. Conscious misrepresentation of known and proven facts by medical practitioners who should know better is called malpractice. It's a crime with real consequences for good reason. They are literally harming patients by spreading provably false and dangerous information. People who do that should at minimum lose their license to practice medicine and if anyone is demonstrably harmed they should go to jail for their actions.
Autism can and does run in families but I don't know if there is a gene or genes you can check for it.
We don't because autism isn't a single thing as far as we can tell and we don't even have a clear definition of what it is. Any time you hear the word "syndrome" what that really means is that we have a collection of symptoms that we have observed seem to run together but we don't know much about the cause or pathology of them. Autism is clearly a real thing but we don't understand it terribly well and we certainly don't know the cause(s). Genetics seems to play a role but the nature of that role is still being determined.
Suppression of freedom of opinion and expression thereof is never 'very welcome'.
Conscious misrepresentation of known facts by individuals who should know better because of their professional training is not expressing an opinion. Ignorance (willful or otherwise) of a fact does not make an "opinion" about those facts valid when the expression of that "opinion" demonstrably results in illness and death of others.
Slashdot Mirror
What I always find somewhat funny about that is that Bush was suppose to be the dumbest fucking person on the planet yet all these people in congress were fooled multiple times by him which should be fairly telling about the quality of the people in the house and senate.
It wasn't Bush doing the fooling. He was effectively little more than a figurehead who could get elected. The real movers and shakers were people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest. They were the tail that wagged the dog. Bush wasn't a strong enough leader to dominate the room when they were in it. Furthermore when the CIA, NSA and the rest of our "intelligence" agencies were feeding bad information it becomes hard to make a properly informed decision even at the best of times.
That said, a lot of congress isn't terribly bright or capable. Certainly not our best and brightest except maybe for purposes of looking out for their own interests.
BS. Most of the politicians voted for it because the war was very popular with their constituents at the time.
The war was NEVER popular with many/most constituents. What the politicians were worried about was being vulnerable to the (bogus) argument that voting against the war meant they were "soft on terrorism and getting voted out of office as a result. While there was a portion of the population that was very hawkish just like with any conflict, most people were not at any time in favor of starting a war with Iraq. There was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks and the case against Iraq was obviously shown to be a fabrication. No, congress voted to support the military action (there never was a declaration of war) out of political expediency and based on what turned out to be false information.
Trump never solidly supported the Iraq War.
Trump never solidly supports any position. He changes his mind more often than a teenage girl changes moods. I don't actually mind someone changing their mind about a topic when they learn new information or even if they give a matter serious consideration. Trump never gives anything serious consideration. His policy positions are the very definition of fickle and certainly aren't based out of any ideology or even pragmatism but instead out of whatever whim strikes him at the time. He basically plays to whatever crowd he is facing and lies almost all the time.
Hillary Clinton voted for the war; that's a bit more serious.
So did most of congress at the time and they did so largely based on bad data from our intelligence agencies and the Bush administration. A mistake I think but not one that makes me think Trump would be a better choice as commander in chief.
Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders oppose this merger.
The fact that he might have a position that agrees with Bernie Sanders on some random issue is actually rather high since Trumps opinions are selected apparently at random. Anything that comes out of his mouth may as well have been chosen by throwing darts at a list of policy options. And he has a high probability of denying his positing ever having been his position the following day even if he was recorded saying it. But some amount of them will agree with Sanders just by pure chance.
Which is exactly why we should go there. Were not going to find out or learn anything without going to Mars to test these things.
Agreed. This is actually one of the most compelling arguments against the "only send robots" crowd. You cannot learn much of anything about topics like exo-farming by just sending robots. Same with every other topic relating to human physiology and space. I strongly expect that anything we learn would have immediate and useful applications on terrestrial farming.
If we send 1000 people to Mars how exactly are we going to feed them?
It will be a substantial challenge but hardly the only one. Early explorers will be supplied from Earth but they'll have to develop some self sustaining exo-farming technology. This is not a trivial problem. And manufacturing will have even bigger problems. You basically have to develop an entire self contained supply chain from scratch which except for life support issues is probably the biggest show stopper problem with colonizing another planet. Need some tungsten? You have to either ship it from Earth at tremendous cost or you have to figure out how to mine it and refine it locally on Mars. Either way it's a tough challenge.
Has anybody done some thinking on the steaks and the veggies?
Yes though such research has a looooong way to go.
Hang on. Why are we sending people again?
I think this comic sums it up rather well.
We have the technology to grow plants inside,
We do but that doesn't mean we can do so with 100% reliability. Plus we have a lot to learn before we start exo-farming. It's not clear how reliably we can grow crops on Mars even in a well controlled greenhouse. There is reason for optimism but there is a lot we don't know yet.
Mars has enough gravity that most plants should grow just fine,
Perhaps but currently that is an unproven assertion. Frankly the gravity is likely to be among the least of the challenges to growing food on Mars. When you have a small self contained garden you run the risk of any number of problems hugely disrupting the entire crop. And the crop for early explorers will necessarily be small with minimal excess most likely. On Earth we have enough agriculture that we only tend to experience localized famines due to distribution problems because other areas can make up for a shortage. Early Mars explorers could very easily have their entire crop wiped out and the only back up option is to ship food from Earth. I'm not saying it's impossible but it probably will be quite a challenge.
Want to get rid of industrial pollution? Without returning to the 13th century? Then help move them to lunar orbit, were it can't hurt anything else.
That is not likely to be a realistic solution to industrial pollution. You are going to generate VAST amounts of pollution and extra cost just getting to/from orbit with products even if you had a space elevator. With chemical rockets it's just not even worth considering. Even if it were technically feasible withing a reasonable time frame (it isn't) it makes no sense economically. That's not to say a space program couldn't help us hugely with the problem. It just won't come from that vector. Building stuff in space only really makes sense for a space based economy thanks to the costs of dealing with gravity wells. We're not going to build a bridge or even an iPhone in space and transport it back to Earth any time soon. But we can use technology developed for space to help with terrestrial problems. Heck the information from satellites alone is invaluable not to mention all the spin off technologies.
I strongly suspect that climate control and life support technologies developed for space travel and space based manufacturing would have immediate and valuable applications to pollution control here on Earth. Totally worth doing but we're not going to move industrial production into space in any sort of meaningful scale for a long time. Not that it isn't worth doing but just that our technology is far too primitive to consider it realistic. Maybe in a few hundred years.
The space program is not the best way to preserve the human race. Repeat, if you are worried about preserving the human race, space is not the way to do it.
Hah! Ok Mr. Smart Guy. Enlighten us with your inspiring message of what you think is the best way to preserve the human race. Bear in mind that your solution has to include a solution for large rocks falling on Earth from space as well as all other threats to the Earth's ecosystem which keep it compatible with human life.
I think we have a couple of ULA shills posting frequently here. The ULA (Lockheed and Boeing) are cutting jobs, since their comfy monopoly on space launches involving minimal R&D costs has been broken up by SpaceX.
Sigh... It's a long time tradition here on slashdot to call anyone with a different opinion a "shill". As if paid representatives of those companies have the time to give a shit about a minor technical discussion forum like slashdot. It's an idiotic argument because what is really happening is one of two things. A) someone has a genuine difference of opinion or B) they are a troll and you shouldn't feed the trolls. The folks at ULA could not possibly care less about the opinions of some random poster here on slashdot. Anyone who thinks otherwise has an unjustifiably over inflated sense of their own importance and/or the importance of this website.
That guy with the binary username is the main one I've seen. He talks about "space nutters" a lot.
He's just an idiot. If he has a sponsored agenda he's doing a good job of hiding it under all his stupid arguments.
On a more serious note, what's with all the anti-science prats showing up on Slashdot recently ?
Just trolls mostly. Nothing new and they've always been here. We only notice them because the traffic on Slashdot isn't what it used to be.
Windows 10 is a disaster, the Surface is a disaster, yet their stock just hit an all-time high.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Football isn't "slowed down". It was designed to support TV ads. It's a lazy spectator's sport. The whole ecosystem is designed from the ground up to be a show with branding, ads, and stuff to buy.
The "whole ecosystem"? No. The sport wasn't designed to support TV ads - it just happened to be a remarkably good fit with them and the folks in charge of the NFL and D1 college football recognized that and took full advantage. The rules of the sport were laid down long before TV revenue was a thing. That said, it obviously works since it is the most popular spectator sport in the USA.
No other sport fits the schedule of television as well as American Football. Nor has anything enjoyed its success. Comparatively, Pro Wrestling is a distant second.
"Pro wrestling" of the sort you see through the WWE and similar organizations is NOT a sport and never has been. They are actors in a live action scripted play. I have been a wrestler and coach of 35 years in the actual sport of wrestling (the sort they do in the Olympics and in colleges) so I speak with authority on this matter. Furthermore calling the WWE actors "pro wrestlers" is kind of a misnomer since they aren't actually wrestlers and there are actually real athletes like Jordan Burroughs who are competitive wrestlers and are pro athletes (they get paid to compete, primarily through endorsements).
Given that the game has 1 hour of actual playing time and maybe 7 or 8 seconds of action per play and about 2 plays per minute that doesn't add up to much action in a game that drones on about 3 and a half hours.
"1 hour of actual playing time"? Try 11 minutes of actual football action. While the sport has some pretty amazing highlights there is a TON of waiting around while nothing actually happens.
Throw Google under the bus not the poor folks just trying to feed their families.
"Poor folks just trying to feed their families"? These are well paid engineers with options. Anyone talented enough to get a job at Google is talented enough to secure employment elsewhere. They are willing accomplices to this action and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. Evidently these engineers lack a moral compass and their word means nothing. If they had a problem with this action they could easily have spoken up and taken action but they took the easy path and did nothing.
Pretty sure you'd scream bloody murder if you employer's actions were layer at your feet - douche!
My employer's actions are routinely laid at my feet and rightfully so. I am responsible for my actions at my employer as well as those who work for me. Companies are comprised of people who commit these actions and when these actions injure others there should be some accountability. If I have an ethical problem with what management at my company is doing or if I was wrongly accused of something I was not responsible for you can be quite certain I would either leave or take appropriate action to defend myself. But if I'm quiet about something then effectively I am endorsing it.
In the end, IT saved millions globally because their stock orders were drastically reduced, yet on the local level you had engineers being paid upwards of $1000 a day to twiddle their thumb while they wait for their $500 computer to arrive. But IT doesn't see one dime of that cost.
That just means that the accountants at that company were crap at their job and weren't assigning costs properly. Sadly this isn't an uncommon occurrence.
There are no known "facts" regarding the safety of the full vaccine schedule
You've said that elsewhere and it's still bullshit. There are is plenty of evidence and research about that exact thing and I've given you links in other threads. You just can't be bothered to look for any of it. Stop it with your nonsense. You are wrong and don't know what you are talking about.
Have you ever seen scientific study of the full schedule of vaccines in a double blind?
No and you haven't either. Conducting such a study would be hugely unethical because it would involve exposing large numbers of people to preventable diseases with known means of prevention. Double blind studies are ideal when possible but there are plenty of other valid means of studying diseases without resorting to double blind studies.
A vaccine may be safe, but the full schedule of vaccines has NEVER been studied.
Not true at all. It has been studied extensively. Furthermore there is substantial empirical evidence than any safety concerns about the full schedule of vaccines is a very small effect if it exists at all.
Now, tell me. where is the actual science on the full schedule of vaccines?
In the clinical studies for each and every vaccine and diseases that could conceivably be related to their administration. I suggest you go speak to an epidemiologist since you are in need of a clue about this. I'm sure they'll be happy to fill you in.
In other words, do you have scientific proof that a full vaccine schedule is safe. Until then, you're just sciency not scientific.
Yes we do have proof that a full vaccine schedule is safe. Scientific proof in the form of a measurably healthier populace and hugely reduced incidence of disease with barely any measurable side effects despite copious studies about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
At a U.S. average rate of 12 cents/kWh = $120/MWh = $0.12 million/GWh, that's $947 million worth of power generated per year.
The amount of revenue it generates is not the important consideration in determining if a project is economically worthwhile. It has to generate enough PROFIT to repay the investment. If the annual cost of generating your $947M worth of power is $947M then the project will never repay the cost of building the plant. The cost of generation plus the amortized cost of building and maintaining the plant has to be less than the amount of revenue brought in. Presumably the amount charged for a unit of electricity is high enough to pay for the plant during it's lifetime but you cannot just assume that to be true. In the case of a plant that cost $4.7B to build and is expected to last for 40 years you would need to bring in $117.5M in revenue each year in excess of the operating costs just to break even. And that is ignoring inflation, financing costs, etc. So by your example that electricity had better not cost more than $829.5M per year (actually less than that in the real world) or the plant will not break even.
So now that the costs of research and experimentation have been paid for by the public, "entrepreneurs" are willing to step up and reap the profits?
Yes! That's one of the great things about publicly funded research. It turns into economic benefit to society via technology transfer. You seem to be implying (wrongly) that this is somehow a bad thing. Quite the contrary - this is a hugely awesome good thing. It means tons of jobs, new industries, and economic benefits all around. It grows the economy. Keeping the research in a lab where it will do nothing would be pretty much the worst thing you could do with it because then you spend the money and get no economic benefit either.
Substitute the word "use" for the word "drive".
Ok but it doesn't change the argument meaningfully.
I can see why Tesla would want to be able to impose that kind of condition. However, I think the First Sale Doctrine is going to say they can't. Especially, if they allow it to be used on their own driverless taxi network.
First sale doctrine doesn't apply if you sign a contract that stipulates explicitly that you will not use the car for that purpose. Now the interesting thing is that the second buyer of the car cannot be bound by the first buyer's agreements so you'd have to have a GPL style agreement whereby the first buyer would be forced to impose a similar restriction on future buyers. Not sure if that would work out in Tesla's favor under current laws.
BUT here is the real question. We need a legal determination for who is operating the vehicle when it is being driven autonomously. If the legally responsible entity that is considered to be the "driver" is Tesla then they have every legal right to refuse to use the vehicle for purposes they do not approve of. After all, it would be unreasonable for me to be able to incur liability for Tesla with them having no say in the matter. If the legally responsible entity is determined to be the vehicle owner then Tesla really shouldn't have any say in the matter. To date I don't think there is a clear determination legally for this key issue.
Apparentley there is no more freedom in opinion in Australia, and also no more freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech does not apply here. Conscious misrepresentation of known and proven facts by medical practitioners who should know better is called malpractice. It's a crime with real consequences for good reason. They are literally harming patients by spreading provably false and dangerous information. People who do that should at minimum lose their license to practice medicine and if anyone is demonstrably harmed they should go to jail for their actions.
Autism can and does run in families but I don't know if there is a gene or genes you can check for it.
We don't because autism isn't a single thing as far as we can tell and we don't even have a clear definition of what it is. Any time you hear the word "syndrome" what that really means is that we have a collection of symptoms that we have observed seem to run together but we don't know much about the cause or pathology of them. Autism is clearly a real thing but we don't understand it terribly well and we certainly don't know the cause(s). Genetics seems to play a role but the nature of that role is still being determined.
Suppression of freedom of opinion and expression thereof is never 'very welcome'.
Conscious misrepresentation of known facts by individuals who should know better because of their professional training is not expressing an opinion. Ignorance (willful or otherwise) of a fact does not make an "opinion" about those facts valid when the expression of that "opinion" demonstrably results in illness and death of others.