I am amused by the fact that a private company does better than our government at disaster transparency.

Outside of classified launches... when exactly was the government not this transparent (and more)?

At first I was going to ask the doubters why Hawking would be involved if the project was so dubious

All manner of people, smart and otherwise, hold all manner of dubious beliefs.

This further entrenches my opinion that the people defending Uber care nothing for others, and do nothing to appreciate the situation that others find themselves in.

Sadly, it don't think it's as much about people defending Uber (though Slashdot is populated with the self absorbed and self centered) as much as it Slashdot's demographic slants heavily towards ignorant self entitled assholes. (Read any article on diversity or women in tech, etc... for existence proof.)

Second, the "prefab road sections" are absurd; nobody builds roads like this already (of any material) because they would be ruinously expensive (not because of the raw material costs), nothing has come close to the level of durability needed to handle 50-ton trucks repeatedly for decades, and extremely hard to deploy.

Conventional (asphalt or concrete) roads aren't specified to last fifty years - so why would you require plastic roads to do so?

Not to mention that prefab sections of rail track (handling 100 tons of locomotives pulling half a mile of freight behind them) have been common for decades.

Will there be any staff to notice that you're unwell and call an ambulance?

Have you ever actually stayed at a hotel? Interaction with the human staff is already at a minimum (and has been for a long time - a hotel that constantly intrudes on the privacy of it's guests doesn't stay open long).... unless you keel over in a public space, there's pretty much already nobody to notice until housekeeping stops by.

Unless there's a lot of these attention-desperate people, why should we be interested in this?

Because This Is Slashdot - and how can we feel superior without our daily Two Minute Hate?

Here's the funny thing. My politics are anything but right wing.

I'm just going on what you wrote - and it's all rightwingnut talking points.
 

Do you have actual evidence that shows that not having valuable skills and not working hard results in better outcomes?

Do you have any actual evidence that they invariably (as you imply, "can be assured") result in better outcomes? No, you do not. You're just repeating a rightwingnut talking point.

Piss right the hell off, you don't get to make unsupported claims and then insist that I'm the one who has to produce evidence.

The system we have now insures conflict because you can force a slight majority to your will.

The system you propose is hardly better - because it will never accomplish anything. (Yeah, yeah, bring on the ignorant jokes - but consider a system that fails to anything is also a system that fails to do what you'd like it to do. It won't pass tax breaks for the rich, but it also won't approve the ACA or funding for New Horizons.)

New Horizons had a 100 km by 150 km window of space that it had to be in within 100 seconds. If it was out of this area, the photos would return blank space. While we won't know if it hit the target until the photos come back late tonight/early tomorrow, it looks like they hit the mark. That's planning a route 9 years out and 5 billion km away.

You left out, as Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story.

While they planned the route fourteen years ago, they've spent the last nine years (since launch) analyzing the spacecraft's current trajectory and making mid course corrections as needed to ensure that New Horizons hit the window. If they hadn't done so, less than forty minutes after launch New Horizons would have been doomed to miss Pluto entirely. (The booster ended up performing a little 'hot' - when the final stage was discarded, it was actually going too fast.)

Don't get me wrong, it's still a fantastic achievement that all they needed was 20 m/s (give or take a little) of course correction - but the fact remains that New Horizons wasn't passively ballistic, it was actively flown.

UV isn't ionizing either. Neither are microwaves. Prolonged exposure to either is... not a really bright idea.

So please, let's leave off the cargo cult science babble about "cell phones don't emit ionizing radiation". They emit energy, and that energy goes somewere. Nor do we need a mechanism when we have an established result.

The sad part is that idiots like you believe that somehow personal experience and anecdata trump reality. It doesn't even occur to you to question either one.

A reliable income can be assured through having valuable skills and working hard.

So sayeth Faux news and scattered anecdata. (And the rest of your comment is just the same - rightwingnut talking points.)

" UV isn't ionizing at least the far UV bands are, the lower bands are close enough in energy to cause photochemical reactions that break bonds so they are treated as ionizing radiation"

[[Citation Needed]]

Meanwhile, both the WHO and Wikipedia note that it is considered non ionizing.

It's not ionizing according the World Health Organization. In the same vein, Wikipedia also lists it as non ionizing.

So? You think radiation is only dangerous when it's ionizing? UV isn't ionizing, neither are microwaves.