So if these potential criminals are all finding other lines of work, who's committing the violent crimes in the US? Just that.. there are rather a lot of them.
Fewer than in the UK, per capita. And your numbers are suspect, IMO. I've read in a couple different places accounts by people who went to file a report in London and were told the cops didn't have the resources to deal with it anyway so be a good chap and let's just not file a report at all it makes us look bad.
...expressing doubts that 'Apple's interface will be so much better than DirecTVs' that people will be willing to pay for an extra box.
He's thinking "extra" when he should really be thinking "instead of". I bought a Roku box for $60. Between Amazon, Netflix, and Crunchyroll (which all comes to about $35/month) I always have something to watch. This guy is nuts if he thinks he's not going to get pushed out of the picture by streaming internet video. Eventually only people who can't get a decent internet connection will be paying for satellite TV.
Nah, there's no double bank shot reasoning going on here - your cable company charges you more because they lose money when you drop basic TV. There are channels for which people are willing to pay extra, like ESPN or HBO. Those broadcasters charge the cable company money for each subscriber. And then there are channels (like HSN and travel channels) that nobody would pay for, so they pay the cable company to be delivered to customers on a per subscriber basis. They're basically 24/7 advertising channels, after all. Because you have internet you're already in the billing system, and the wire to your house needs to be maintained, and you'll still use up some amount of customer service time, so the incremental cost to deliver basic cable in addition to internet is basically zero. When you drop TV the cable company loses the income you brought in from the advertising channels, so they charge you enough to make up the difference.
Doesn't surprise me at all. Old people have more to lose. Break into a 20 year old's bank account and you'll net yourself fifty nine dollars and seventy two cents. But a guy who's nearing retirement might have a few hundred grand in his brokerage account. And he doesn't have forty years to make it back if it's stolen.
Yeah, I'll try using my newly developed social skills when someone's raping my sister.
The point of having an armed citizenry (well, one of the points) is burglars and rapists and muggers don't know who is armed and who isn't. It's not that anybody feels like a big man when he has a gun, it's that potential criminals find another line of work because they don't want to be shot by their intended victims. And in the US you don't go to jail for shooting someone who's attacking you.
Well, okay. But it's going to be a few hundred years before we have that kind of technology. Everybody was holding their breath last week on a mission that launched from the earth and came within a few meters of the ISS. You're talking about stuff that we couldn't begin to design with our current technology.
Besides, while I can envision robots building a smelter for iron ore and maybe even producing steel girders for construction, it's not so easy to imagine the robot horde is going to have access to the materials it needs to build things like semiconductors. Your asteroid is basically a big lump of iron. Where are the rare earth elements going to come from? What about helium they'll need for welding? Where are they going to get aluminum and titanium?
Actually, I can think of one big thing that would be perfect to mine for: fuel, air, and other consumables.
... for what? Sure you can make fuel and store oxygen. But for this to be an ongoing enterprise you need customers. What is the profitable enterprise in which your customers are engaging?
Yes, gun violence goes down, but all other types of violence go up. Take away guns and you give the big and the strong in your society license to let out their inner bully. Even though my chances of actually getting killed would be lower if, say, I moved to the UK, I don't have any desire to live in constant fear of getting my ass kicked by a gang of five "youths" because their favorite team lost that day.
Besides, in the US if you're not a criminal yourself your odds of being killed by a gun are infinitesimal. Where I live we have a couple of gun murders every year, but I can't remember the last time it wasn't drug dealers shooting each other.
One of the reasons there hasn't been much commercial interest in space is there's no way to make money. Under no conceivable scenario is it going to be cheaper to mine asteroids and ship back the product than to just mine the stuff here on the earth. You might want to mine asteroids if you want to build something in orbit or at a Lagrange point, but then the question becomes "what are you building that's going to eventually return a profit?"
Now, maybe, hundreds of years from now there will actually be people living in space or on mars, at which point you could argue some sort of permanent infrastructure makes commercial sense (and could thus be profitable). But that's not going to happen for many generations if it ever does.
And he was absolutely ruthless about all of them, ending careers on the spot if skippers and senior officers didn't live up to his near-impossible standards.
The "vertical chop" (where the guy who screwed up and about three levels of officers above him are forced into retirement) is still alive and well in the USN. The reality is any functional military is shaped like a pyramid, from an organizational standpoint. For each admiral slot you have many captains, for each captain slot you have many commanders, etc. So if there's any hint one of those mid-senior officers isn't competent, he's out - you need to get rid of a bunch of them anyway.
When I was working as a contractor supporting naval exercises it was amazing how fast the ships wanted telemetry data on their missile shots. The reason was if the ship was found to be at fault for two successive failures, by policy the captain was axed. That could mean something like a 19 year old fire control technician twisting a knob to the wrong setting.
The tax money in question is only the part of the tax that goes to the local municipality. They cities in question can't bargain away the state's portion of the tax, so other cities aren't losing out on tax revenue. And we're not talking about a lot of money here - of the $316m Amazon is expected to pay in taxes only $8m apiece was slated to go to the cities in question. Now, you could argue that the sale actually happens wherever the customer is clicking away on his computer and therefor that city should get the money, but that's not how sales taxes are collected for brick-and-mortar sales. If I drive to another city and blow a bunch of money at the mall my sleepy burg doesn't get any of the tax money.
These kinds of deals are done all the time by cities and states. Whenever a company decides to build something that's going to employ a lot of people or generate a lot of tax revenue it typically will shop around for the best deal. Nothing wrong with that, IMO. Cities and states aren't losing money when someone comes in and employs a bunch of people, some percentage of whom who would otherwise have been on the dole. All those employed people pay income taxes (which are quite high in CA), and they pay sales tax every time they buy something (well, in CA it doesn't apply to staple foods and clothes, but still).
This happens at the country level as well. Multinational corporations have options when it comes to siting a factory, and what kind of tax deal they can get is always going to be considered along with the normal stuff like infrastructure and labor costs.
What would be shocking is if Amazon didn't shop around. Anyway there isn't anything California could do to force Amazon to collect sales taxes as long as Amazon didn't have a presence in the state, so presumably they ground out all the numbers and decided the supply chain advantages outweighed the tax liabilities.
You forget these "private rockets" are almost fully funded with government grants at this point.
No, actually this isn't true in the SpaceX case. The design was fully funded by SpaceX. Now, much of the business they hope to capture is government business, so it's not like SpaceX would exist without the government. But they didn't get grants to build the rockets they've built.
To be fair, NASA doesn't make any of these decisions. Whether to build a system or not, and how long that system is operated are decisions made by Congress. For Congress, NASA is nothing more than a way to deliver federal money to key Congressional districts. That's how we ended up with ten different space centers. Hell, that's why mission control is in Houston instead of at the Cape where it would make more sense. It's literally impossible for NASA to function efficiently - Congress won't allow it.
Even if SpaceX succeeds beyond everyone's wildest dreams, Congress will start to meddle the way they do in defense contracts. "Sure, you can build rockets for us, but you have to build the nozzles in Maine, the bodies in Nebraska, join them in Utah, and ship the assembly by boat from Texas."
If they give you $10 off your internet it's because some of the broadcasters on the basic cable tier pay your cable company to deliver eyeballs to their network. Channels like HSN pay a fixed amount per subscriber.
Yes, but they do not charge you a monthly fee for the privilege of getting further charged based on usage.
Really? Every utility that comes to my house has a minimum fee. Most of them break it out as a separate "provide service" line on the bill, and the ones that don't charge a fixed amount for the fist 0-x kWh (or whatever they're selling), which amounts to exactly the same thing. In fact, if Comcast goes to this model they'll be matching exactly the pricing model in my area for water, gas, electricity, and land line phone. The only one that is purely fixed price is sewage.
I would be hard-pressed to hit 300Gb watching streaming services. They don't stream at blu-ray resolutions. I don't watch broadcast television, but I watch (too much) video using crunchroll and Amazon prime through my Roku. On a heavy month, when I got hooked on something with lots of episodes, or I was home sick with the flu for a week and didn't do anything else, I hit maybe 100GB. And that includes downloading games from Steam and watching the odd youtube video.
They trot out the pirate excuse because it's a cost driver for their business. I know people who fire up bittorrent and download dozens of full resolution movies that they subsequently never get around to watching, and I don't feel particularly inclined to pay extra to support that kind of stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously doubt slashdot is dominated by men 18-35. Men, yes, but I think the age bracket is much higher than that.
So if these potential criminals are all finding other lines of work, who's committing the violent crimes in the US? Just that.. there are rather a lot of them.
Fewer than in the UK, per capita. And your numbers are suspect, IMO. I've read in a couple different places accounts by people who went to file a report in London and were told the cops didn't have the resources to deal with it anyway so be a good chap and let's just not file a report at all it makes us look bad.
He's thinking "extra" when he should really be thinking "instead of". I bought a Roku box for $60. Between Amazon, Netflix, and Crunchyroll (which all comes to about $35/month) I always have something to watch. This guy is nuts if he thinks he's not going to get pushed out of the picture by streaming internet video. Eventually only people who can't get a decent internet connection will be paying for satellite TV.
Nah, there's no double bank shot reasoning going on here - your cable company charges you more because they lose money when you drop basic TV. There are channels for which people are willing to pay extra, like ESPN or HBO. Those broadcasters charge the cable company money for each subscriber. And then there are channels (like HSN and travel channels) that nobody would pay for, so they pay the cable company to be delivered to customers on a per subscriber basis. They're basically 24/7 advertising channels, after all. Because you have internet you're already in the billing system, and the wire to your house needs to be maintained, and you'll still use up some amount of customer service time, so the incremental cost to deliver basic cable in addition to internet is basically zero. When you drop TV the cable company loses the income you brought in from the advertising channels, so they charge you enough to make up the difference.
Doesn't surprise me at all. Old people have more to lose. Break into a 20 year old's bank account and you'll net yourself fifty nine dollars and seventy two cents. But a guy who's nearing retirement might have a few hundred grand in his brokerage account. And he doesn't have forty years to make it back if it's stolen.
Yeah, I'll try using my newly developed social skills when someone's raping my sister.
The point of having an armed citizenry (well, one of the points) is burglars and rapists and muggers don't know who is armed and who isn't. It's not that anybody feels like a big man when he has a gun, it's that potential criminals find another line of work because they don't want to be shot by their intended victims. And in the US you don't go to jail for shooting someone who's attacking you.
Well, okay. But it's going to be a few hundred years before we have that kind of technology. Everybody was holding their breath last week on a mission that launched from the earth and came within a few meters of the ISS. You're talking about stuff that we couldn't begin to design with our current technology.
Besides, while I can envision robots building a smelter for iron ore and maybe even producing steel girders for construction, it's not so easy to imagine the robot horde is going to have access to the materials it needs to build things like semiconductors. Your asteroid is basically a big lump of iron. Where are the rare earth elements going to come from? What about helium they'll need for welding? Where are they going to get aluminum and titanium?
Actually, I can think of one big thing that would be perfect to mine for: fuel, air, and other consumables.
... for what? Sure you can make fuel and store oxygen. But for this to be an ongoing enterprise you need customers. What is the profitable enterprise in which your customers are engaging?
That's exactly the point. But how could they list that as a reason?
Yes, gun violence goes down, but all other types of violence go up. Take away guns and you give the big and the strong in your society license to let out their inner bully. Even though my chances of actually getting killed would be lower if, say, I moved to the UK, I don't have any desire to live in constant fear of getting my ass kicked by a gang of five "youths" because their favorite team lost that day.
Besides, in the US if you're not a criminal yourself your odds of being killed by a gun are infinitesimal. Where I live we have a couple of gun murders every year, but I can't remember the last time it wasn't drug dealers shooting each other.
One of the reasons there hasn't been much commercial interest in space is there's no way to make money. Under no conceivable scenario is it going to be cheaper to mine asteroids and ship back the product than to just mine the stuff here on the earth. You might want to mine asteroids if you want to build something in orbit or at a Lagrange point, but then the question becomes "what are you building that's going to eventually return a profit?"
Now, maybe, hundreds of years from now there will actually be people living in space or on mars, at which point you could argue some sort of permanent infrastructure makes commercial sense (and could thus be profitable). But that's not going to happen for many generations if it ever does.
Didn't New Yorkers pay for some nuclear plants to be built that were never licensed to operate?
And he was absolutely ruthless about all of them, ending careers on the spot if skippers and senior officers didn't live up to his near-impossible standards.
The "vertical chop" (where the guy who screwed up and about three levels of officers above him are forced into retirement) is still alive and well in the USN. The reality is any functional military is shaped like a pyramid, from an organizational standpoint. For each admiral slot you have many captains, for each captain slot you have many commanders, etc. So if there's any hint one of those mid-senior officers isn't competent, he's out - you need to get rid of a bunch of them anyway.
When I was working as a contractor supporting naval exercises it was amazing how fast the ships wanted telemetry data on their missile shots. The reason was if the ship was found to be at fault for two successive failures, by policy the captain was axed. That could mean something like a 19 year old fire control technician twisting a knob to the wrong setting.
You would too if your name was Hyman.
And Portsmouth, New Hampshire owes it's name in turn to a shipyard in England.
The tax money in question is only the part of the tax that goes to the local municipality. They cities in question can't bargain away the state's portion of the tax, so other cities aren't losing out on tax revenue. And we're not talking about a lot of money here - of the $316m Amazon is expected to pay in taxes only $8m apiece was slated to go to the cities in question. Now, you could argue that the sale actually happens wherever the customer is clicking away on his computer and therefor that city should get the money, but that's not how sales taxes are collected for brick-and-mortar sales. If I drive to another city and blow a bunch of money at the mall my sleepy burg doesn't get any of the tax money.
These kinds of deals are done all the time by cities and states. Whenever a company decides to build something that's going to employ a lot of people or generate a lot of tax revenue it typically will shop around for the best deal. Nothing wrong with that, IMO. Cities and states aren't losing money when someone comes in and employs a bunch of people, some percentage of whom who would otherwise have been on the dole. All those employed people pay income taxes (which are quite high in CA), and they pay sales tax every time they buy something (well, in CA it doesn't apply to staple foods and clothes, but still).
This happens at the country level as well. Multinational corporations have options when it comes to siting a factory, and what kind of tax deal they can get is always going to be considered along with the normal stuff like infrastructure and labor costs.
What would be shocking is if Amazon didn't shop around. Anyway there isn't anything California could do to force Amazon to collect sales taxes as long as Amazon didn't have a presence in the state, so presumably they ground out all the numbers and decided the supply chain advantages outweighed the tax liabilities.
Eh? The fact that they successfully built everything in the US says something about the "dreadful state of aerospace manufacture in the US"?
The reason they aborted was excess chamber pressure in one of the engines, which is something that couldn't occur if the engine is off.
No, actually this isn't true in the SpaceX case. The design was fully funded by SpaceX. Now, much of the business they hope to capture is government business, so it's not like SpaceX would exist without the government. But they didn't get grants to build the rockets they've built.
To be fair, NASA doesn't make any of these decisions. Whether to build a system or not, and how long that system is operated are decisions made by Congress. For Congress, NASA is nothing more than a way to deliver federal money to key Congressional districts. That's how we ended up with ten different space centers. Hell, that's why mission control is in Houston instead of at the Cape where it would make more sense. It's literally impossible for NASA to function efficiently - Congress won't allow it.
Even if SpaceX succeeds beyond everyone's wildest dreams, Congress will start to meddle the way they do in defense contracts. "Sure, you can build rockets for us, but you have to build the nozzles in Maine, the bodies in Nebraska, join them in Utah, and ship the assembly by boat from Texas."
If they give you $10 off your internet it's because some of the broadcasters on the basic cable tier pay your cable company to deliver eyeballs to their network. Channels like HSN pay a fixed amount per subscriber.
Yes, but they do not charge you a monthly fee for the privilege of getting further charged based on usage.
Really? Every utility that comes to my house has a minimum fee. Most of them break it out as a separate "provide service" line on the bill, and the ones that don't charge a fixed amount for the fist 0-x kWh (or whatever they're selling), which amounts to exactly the same thing. In fact, if Comcast goes to this model they'll be matching exactly the pricing model in my area for water, gas, electricity, and land line phone. The only one that is purely fixed price is sewage.
Is Comcast's connection to the rest of the internet insensitive to data volume? My impression was that it isn't.
This makes no sense. Broadcast is a completely different beast.
I would be hard-pressed to hit 300Gb watching streaming services. They don't stream at blu-ray resolutions. I don't watch broadcast television, but I watch (too much) video using crunchroll and Amazon prime through my Roku. On a heavy month, when I got hooked on something with lots of episodes, or I was home sick with the flu for a week and didn't do anything else, I hit maybe 100GB. And that includes downloading games from Steam and watching the odd youtube video.
They trot out the pirate excuse because it's a cost driver for their business. I know people who fire up bittorrent and download dozens of full resolution movies that they subsequently never get around to watching, and I don't feel particularly inclined to pay extra to support that kind of stupidity.