This is just one more episode in the perpetual game of cat and mouse between the makers and the takers.
It's grandstanding and nothing will come of it.
But I agree, these parasites should be paying their fucking taxes like the rest of us.
You'll see every major company in the world immediately relocate to the US..
No, you won't.
What bizarre world do you people live in, anyway?
Ali Baba will remain a Chinese company. ICBC will remain a Chinese company. China Construction Bank will remain a Chinese company. Agricultural Bank of China will remain a Chinese company. Bank of China will remain a Chinese company. PetroChina will remain a Chinese company. So will every other Chinese company. Fully half of the top 10 of the Forbes 2000 list will not EVER become American companies.
Royal Dutch Shell will remain a Dutch company. Toyota Motor (Forbes says their name has no 's' on the end. Who knew..) will remain a Japanese company. HSBC Holdings will remain a British company. BP will remain a British company. Volkswagen Group will remain a German company. Gazprom will remain a Russian company. Samsung will remain a Korean company. We're now through a majority of the top 20 with absolutely zero chance of relocating to the US, regardless of US tax policy.
That's just the publicly traded companies. Saudi Aramco will stay in Saudi Arabia. They own that government. They ARE that government. The LEGO Group will stay in Denmark. Etc.
When you get right down to it, it's mostly only US corporations that are sociopathic bastards. Many large foreign companies identify with their own nationality and explicitly support it. Do you really think Royal Bank of Canada (55th ranked in the Forbes 2000) is going to incorporate in the US? Really? Don't be ridiculous.
Your back of the envelope calculation is worth spit. A zero US corporate tax rate would simply rob our budget of billions. Billions that, whether or not they are necessary, are already spent, so we'd damn well better not cripple our ability to pay back the loans.
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?
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
