If they can do those things, then they will do those things regardless of tax.
No, they won't.
If they cut wages, they lose their best staff. If they cut dividends, their stock price drops. If they raise prices, customers start looking for alternatives to their products.
None of those things are likely to be good in the long term, which is why sane companies won't do them. But when you're suddenly forced to pay more money at gunpoint, you have no choice.
I mean, really, seriously: where do you think the magic pile of money comes from to pay higher taxes? Your company profit is $X million a year, and the government demands you pay them an extra $X/10 million a year.
Where do you think the company magics up that money from?
Where, if not by increasing revenue or reducing spending?
It sounds silly but that's exactly how autopilot and fly by wire systems work in Airbus and Boeing aircraft and they have hundreds of passengers at a time.
And pilots, with far more training and much more time available to determine what's happening and correct it... fly a perfectly good aircraft into the sea.
Autopilots have proven again and again that 'just dump the problem in the human's lap when the computer doesn't know what to do' is disastrous.
You're apparently an idiot who's getting all hyped up about cars that can 'drive themselves' in extremely constrained conditions that bear no resemblance to real life for most of the drivers in the world.
Yes, one day there'll be driverless cars on the road, capable of handling any conditions without human intervention. But that day won't be any year soon.
Yeah, when we bought a new car last year, we were laughing at all the models that now come with 'lane assist' based on tracking the lane markings, because you can't see the lane markings on our roads for about nine months a year...
But, hey, I'm sure a 'driverless car' that's been tested on a highway in California will handle it just fine.
During peak there would be the possibly of carpooling effectively creating a privatized transportation system.
People can do that today. Most don't, because they don't want to have to spend ten minutes waiting outside someone else's house and end up late for work because they couldn't get out of bed on time.
None of these utopia schemes work so long as everyone has to travel at roughly the same time.
Because if a driver is expected to sit in the driver seat, hands on the wheel, ready to take control, but not actually in control the entire time, then there is no reason to have an autonomous car.
That's not entirely true. Hands-free cruise control, for example, could be useful even if you have to keep an eye on the road to check nothing disastrous is about to happen.
But, yeah, in a city, forget it. When my 'driverless car' starts sliding sideways on ice, I don't want it to suddenly tell me to take over and then blame 'human error' when I crash.
You're talking about a company which is going to buy enough cars that it can transport everyone everywhere in the rush hour, yet magically charge less than the cost of owning one of those cars. If it has that many cars, they're going to spend most of the day in a parking lot not making any money, so how do you expect them to be cheaper than owning a car of your own?
There was a time when Slashdot was full of people who'd think more than two seconds about their brave new economic ideas, rather than just demanding a pony.
The horseless carriage was a novelty at first. I mean, who wants to ride in a machine that has no mind of its own? Something that can't even avoid minor obstacles on its own?
Your analogy is silly, unless it was a 'horseless' carriage that required you to pull a horse behind it just in case it refused to drive anywhere under its own steam.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, my car can't even figure out when I say 'redial', and gets about four of of ten numbers wrong when I try to dial a number directly.
People need to _think_ about the function of time in their applications
Yeah, like that's gonna happen.
and stop pretending like it's a simple problem or that it can solved for you by tweaking international standards.
99% of of software expects a monotomically incrementing time which has 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes. Having the detault time not meet those expectations is moronic, and potentially catastrophic in a world so reliant on computers.
One of the projects I worked on spent weeks just checking that the system could handle leap seconds correctly, which required getting special firmware from the GPS manufacturer which allowed them us trigger artificial leap seconds. The spec for the communication protocol that system implemented had to have special cases purely to handle leap seconds, and someone has to be on call every time it happens just in case something bad goes wrong.
They cause havoc around the world for minimal beneift. Those who care should adjust and let the rest of the world get on with their lives.
There is plenty of money to be had for NASA, Congress simply needs to do its job better to get it. Stop monkeying with the tax code and make corporations actually pay income tax and there will be plenty of revenue.
Corporations don't pay tax.
If you increase corporate taxation, they cut wages, or cut dividends, or increase prices. In all those cases, that means less money goes to real people, who now have less money to spend on useful things that keep the economy going, rather than government boondoggles.
I don't think it's about the accuracy of their information. It's about your own "qualifications" to make a diagnosis based on a web page.
It's about the Medical Guilds wanting to retain control over our health.
If anyone told you that you shouldn't try to work out what's wrong with your car, and you should have to go to a qualified mechanic to get a piece of paper that allows you to buy replacement parts, which may not even fix the problem your car really has, you'd think they were insane. So why do people accept the same nonsense when their own body is involved?
The last couple of times my girlfriend had to go to the doctor, we already knew what the problem was from a quick Google search, we knew what treatment she needed, but she still had to go to the doctor so he could say, 'Lo! this is exactly what you thought it was' and sign a piece of paper so she could buy the drugs she knew she needed. What a colossal waste of time and money.
... to explore in the future, when we have paid our bills. Unless NASA can invent a time machine, Outer Space will still be there when we have the budget under control.
But we probably won't be. Or we won't have the ability to reach it.
Just takes one wacko with a home virus assembly kit to wipe out much of the human race, and we still have no viable way to power our civilisation once the fossil fuels run out. So, if we don't go soon, we're handing the universe to the next technological species that comes along, somewhere else in the universe.
As some bureaucrat once said: work expands to fill the budget available. Fund researchers to spend years developing an experiment, and they won't have it ready next Wednesday.
I'm baffled, how being more involved in your own health is a bad thing.
Because if people didn't have to go to a doctor to tell them the obvious and prescribe the drugs they already know they need from five minutes on Google, doctors might not be able to buy another Porsche.
Yes, we won't see the private space tourism that already exists and has for more than a decade. Much more than a decade, if you include some of the non-essential passengers on shuttle flights.
The story apparently seeks to establish that these methods do not teach the desired lessons, but instead, teaches people that the leaders are evil, and that compliance doesn't protect or save them, and that their Hope is to resist evil, even at a high cost.
Well, duh.
The problem with Hunger Games was not that it was hard to understand, but that it was politically retarded, and nowhere near as funny as Battle Royale.
The numbers I've seen say that Skylon will cost the same for the first launch.
I haven't been following Skylon for a few years, but the last claim I remember was around $100 per pound into orbit ($250 per kg? Or maybe it was $250 per pound?)
Falcon Heavy is supposed to start around $1000 per pound, and around $100 per pound if and when it becomes fully reusable. So they're in the same ballpark, and probably both have a similar chance of actually making their cost predictions, but one won't cost $10,000,000,000+ to develop.
Does anyone know whether the Falcon 9 can't take off in bad weather, or whether they won't do a launch in bad weather because they'll lose visual contact with the vehicle, which is critical for monitoring the performance of what is fundamentally a prototype?
Isn't it usually because the range safety entity has to be able to see where the rocket is to decide whether they should blow it up?
It is almost like you have never played Kerbal Space Program.
In the real world, the mass of the first stage is usually mostly fuel, so a 10% increase in the mass of the engines doesn't make much difference to the amount of thrust you need to launch. This is why, for example, most of the weight-saving work to increase the Saturn V payload was in the second stage, where it made a much larger difference than the first.
Slashdot Mirror
If they can do those things, then they will do those things regardless of tax.
No, they won't.
If they cut wages, they lose their best staff.
If they cut dividends, their stock price drops.
If they raise prices, customers start looking for alternatives to their products.
None of those things are likely to be good in the long term, which is why sane companies won't do them. But when you're suddenly forced to pay more money at gunpoint, you have no choice.
I mean, really, seriously: where do you think the magic pile of money comes from to pay higher taxes? Your company profit is $X million a year, and the government demands you pay them an extra $X/10 million a year.
Where do you think the company magics up that money from?
Where, if not by increasing revenue or reducing spending?
Where?
What is so difficult about this to understand?
It sounds silly but that's exactly how autopilot and fly by wire systems work in Airbus and Boeing aircraft and they have hundreds of passengers at a time.
And pilots, with far more training and much more time available to determine what's happening and correct it... fly a perfectly good aircraft into the sea.
Autopilots have proven again and again that 'just dump the problem in the human's lap when the computer doesn't know what to do' is disastrous.
You're apparently an idiot who's getting all hyped up about cars that can 'drive themselves' in extremely constrained conditions that bear no resemblance to real life for most of the drivers in the world.
Yes, one day there'll be driverless cars on the road, capable of handling any conditions without human intervention. But that day won't be any year soon.
Yeah, when we bought a new car last year, we were laughing at all the models that now come with 'lane assist' based on tracking the lane markings, because you can't see the lane markings on our roads for about nine months a year...
But, hey, I'm sure a 'driverless car' that's been tested on a highway in California will handle it just fine.
During peak there would be the possibly of carpooling effectively creating a privatized transportation system.
People can do that today. Most don't, because they don't want to have to spend ten minutes waiting outside someone else's house and end up late for work because they couldn't get out of bed on time.
None of these utopia schemes work so long as everyone has to travel at roughly the same time.
Machines do not make that mistake.
You're right. Machines see a bunch of random blobs and think it's a bike.
Because if a driver is expected to sit in the driver seat, hands on the wheel, ready to take control, but not actually in control the entire time, then there is no reason to have an autonomous car.
That's not entirely true. Hands-free cruise control, for example, could be useful even if you have to keep an eye on the road to check nothing disastrous is about to happen.
But, yeah, in a city, forget it. When my 'driverless car' starts sliding sideways on ice, I don't want it to suddenly tell me to take over and then blame 'human error' when I crash.
You're talking about a company which is going to buy enough cars that it can transport everyone everywhere in the rush hour, yet magically charge less than the cost of owning one of those cars. If it has that many cars, they're going to spend most of the day in a parking lot not making any money, so how do you expect them to be cheaper than owning a car of your own?
There was a time when Slashdot was full of people who'd think more than two seconds about their brave new economic ideas, rather than just demanding a pony.
The horseless carriage was a novelty at first. I mean, who wants to ride in a machine that has no mind of its own? Something that can't even avoid minor obstacles on its own?
Your analogy is silly, unless it was a 'horseless' carriage that required you to pull a horse behind it just in case it refused to drive anywhere under its own steam.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, my car can't even figure out when I say 'redial', and gets about four of of ten numbers wrong when I try to dial a number directly.
If I can get a reasonable alternative, say a company has a fleet of these things to pick people up and drop them off I would be so happy.
I expect you'd like a pony, too.
Best thing is, they're self-driving, so long as you don't really care where you end up.
People need to _think_ about the function of time in their applications
Yeah, like that's gonna happen.
and stop pretending like it's a simple problem or that it can solved for you by tweaking international standards.
99% of of software expects a monotomically incrementing time which has 60-minute hours and 60-second minutes. Having the detault time not meet those expectations is moronic, and potentially catastrophic in a world so reliant on computers.
Life's too short. I'll let NTP deal with it and happily ignore leap seconds.
That's what most people thought before the last leap second, then they found all their Java services sucking up 100% of the CPU in the morning.
One of the projects I worked on spent weeks just checking that the system could handle leap seconds correctly, which required getting special firmware from the GPS manufacturer which allowed them us trigger artificial leap seconds. The spec for the communication protocol that system implemented had to have special cases purely to handle leap seconds, and someone has to be on call every time it happens just in case something bad goes wrong.
They cause havoc around the world for minimal beneift. Those who care should adjust and let the rest of the world get on with their lives.
There is plenty of money to be had for NASA, Congress simply needs to do its job better to get it. Stop monkeying with the tax code and make corporations actually pay income tax and there will be plenty of revenue.
Corporations don't pay tax.
If you increase corporate taxation, they cut wages, or cut dividends, or increase prices. In all those cases, that means less money goes to real people, who now have less money to spend on useful things that keep the economy going, rather than government boondoggles.
I don't think it's about the accuracy of their information. It's about your own "qualifications" to make a diagnosis based on a web page.
It's about the Medical Guilds wanting to retain control over our health.
If anyone told you that you shouldn't try to work out what's wrong with your car, and you should have to go to a qualified mechanic to get a piece of paper that allows you to buy replacement parts, which may not even fix the problem your car really has, you'd think they were insane. So why do people accept the same nonsense when their own body is involved?
The last couple of times my girlfriend had to go to the doctor, we already knew what the problem was from a quick Google search, we knew what treatment she needed, but she still had to go to the doctor so he could say, 'Lo! this is exactly what you thought it was' and sign a piece of paper so she could buy the drugs she knew she needed. What a colossal waste of time and money.
... to explore in the future, when we have paid our bills. Unless NASA can invent a time machine, Outer Space will still be there when we have the budget under control.
But we probably won't be. Or we won't have the ability to reach it.
Just takes one wacko with a home virus assembly kit to wipe out much of the human race, and we still have no viable way to power our civilisation once the fossil fuels run out. So, if we don't go soon, we're handing the universe to the next technological species that comes along, somewhere else in the universe.
As some bureaucrat once said: work expands to fill the budget available. Fund researchers to spend years developing an experiment, and they won't have it ready next Wednesday.
I'm baffled, how being more involved in your own health is a bad thing.
Because if people didn't have to go to a doctor to tell them the obvious and prescribe the drugs they already know they need from five minutes on Google, doctors might not be able to buy another Porsche.
Yes, we won't see the private space tourism that already exists and has for more than a decade. Much more than a decade, if you include some of the non-essential passengers on shuttle flights.
The story apparently seeks to establish that these methods do not teach the desired lessons, but instead, teaches people that the leaders are evil, and that compliance doesn't protect or save them, and that their Hope is to resist evil, even at a high cost.
Well, duh.
The problem with Hunger Games was not that it was hard to understand, but that it was politically retarded, and nowhere near as funny as Battle Royale.
No, faster was important when you didn't have to be at the airport three hours before your flight for your ceremonial security grope theater.
The numbers I've seen say that Skylon will cost the same for the first launch.
I haven't been following Skylon for a few years, but the last claim I remember was around $100 per pound into orbit ($250 per kg? Or maybe it was $250 per pound?)
Falcon Heavy is supposed to start around $1000 per pound, and around $100 per pound if and when it becomes fully reusable. So they're in the same ballpark, and probably both have a similar chance of actually making their cost predictions, but one won't cost $10,000,000,000+ to develop.
Does anyone know whether the Falcon 9 can't take off in bad weather, or whether they won't do a launch in bad weather because they'll lose visual contact with the vehicle, which is critical for monitoring the performance of what is fundamentally a prototype?
Isn't it usually because the range safety entity has to be able to see where the rocket is to decide whether they should blow it up?
It is almost like you have never played Kerbal Space Program.
In the real world, the mass of the first stage is usually mostly fuel, so a 10% increase in the mass of the engines doesn't make much difference to the amount of thrust you need to launch. This is why, for example, most of the weight-saving work to increase the Saturn V payload was in the second stage, where it made a much larger difference than the first.