You seem to be perfectly willing to sell out the long term future for the medium term, which is the weirdest case of short-sightedness I've ever seen.

And at this point, I think you are deliberately misstating my argument. Fusion is a dream at this point that the most knowledgeable in the sciences say is at least 60-80 years away from economic viability. Don't believe me? Look at the ITER roadmap, publically available. And the reality is that the visionaries are usually overoptimistic. You and I will be dead before it becomes viable and our children as well. And that is assuming this becomes viable as there is always a risk when talking about advanced tech like this. Even if you are convinced the science will work out, political upheaval could mean that we can't see the project through to the end. Just imagine a more indebted US and Europe having to cut science and a China that no longer has a market to sell to and collapses on its own centrally managed bureaucracy. Insert your own worst case scenario and you see why century long, multi billion dollar research projects are risky.

So, fund it? Sure. But not at the expense of something that is a sure thing and will have a huge benefit now. You state that solar is somehow selling out the long-term... unless you mean over a billion years from now when the Sun goes nova, I'm not sure how this is remotely accurate.

Uh-oh, someone has been drinking the renewables koolaid again.

Thank you for your well-reasoned, informative response. Based on your information, I am changing my entire worldview. Thanks again, Anonymous Coward!

It may be cynicism, but it is well placed cynicism. I'm all for funding fusion research, but the reality is that we are decades away from seeing anything remotely economically viable.

And the other reality is that we do have solar which is already economically viable but still behind fossil fuels (if you forget about externalites). If I were king of the world, I'd fund solar heavily because it can do good NOW. Serious good. World saving good.

And, yes, it is a false dichotomy to say we can only fund one. But the other reality is that we have only so much money for the sciences and one dollar spent on one project is one not spent on the other. If I were King of the world I'd also cut military spending and fund sciences much more heavily.

But, alas, I am not King of the world.

I was going to post that too. But while googling to make sure Dropbox still used Amazon S3, I came across this article. Apparently the problem for Dropbox is the price volatility. Amazon can lower or raise its prices on a whim because they don't have much competition. Dropbox doesn't have that luxury.

It's all about degrees of disaster. If there's a real disaster, I wouldn't give a rodent's behind about my electronics and I too would be happy with my emergency stash of food and water. But even so I have taken some precautions... My router, server, NAS etc sit in the basement, but they are mounted as high as possible in case there's a flood, and there's a flood detector as well. No use against a real flood (we live below sea level), but if the water mains bursts or if a minor dike breaks, my stuff will be reasonably safe and I will be notified in time to move it if the flooding continues. The same level of protection that people arrange in hurricane areas, I suppose, like having sheets of wood handy to board up the windows with. Not sure how you'd protect your things against a minor earthquake, though. Not mounting them in a wobbly cabinet is probably a good start.

They are doing both the space program and doing something about living conditions. The problem is that fixing poverty is hard, and like the problem of travelling to the moon or Mars, you don't solve it merely by allocating a budget, that's only the start. If fixing poverty was easy, a lot of other countries wouldn't have any. Hell, perhaps the USA wouldn't have any. And fixing their poor living conditions probably costs a multiple of what it costs to run their space program. According to their 2013 budget, the Rural Development Ministry alone receives over 16 times the ISRA budget. My point is that I think it would be a big mistake to shift the +- 1 billion $ space budget to further rural development.

I thought people were allowed to have their own beliefs in this country without others attacking them for it.

>modded insightful

Yeah, well moderation here isn't perfect. Because you are wrong, and I will demonstrate how in the next two sentences.

You are perfectly free to spout inane bullshit.
Other people are perfectly free to call you on it.

That's how free speech works.

And your post was complete bullshit supported by toddler logic.

Have a nice day.

--
BMO

So how about you get off your ass and change the laws governing how ridiculous your taxes are?

No, you don't ACTUALLY want that do you? My guess is that you're happy to take all the benefits those taxes provide, but somehow think its okay to not actually participate in paying them.

California has one of the highest tax burdens in the country. It's even worse if you factor in average income. Graduated income taxes means states with higher incomes naturally have a higher tax burden. The #1-3 tax burden states are all in the top 5 in income. But California at #4 in tax burden is 15th in income.

It's not about being unwilling to pay taxes for services. It's about the state being inefficient at providing those services. Any shortfall is viewed not as a spending problem, but a revenue one; meaning the inefficiencies are allowed to remain while taxation goes up relative to other states. Most of what I've seen in my two decades here has been creative phantom budget cuts which really only push the costs to future years, and hiding new taxes in places the public won't notice. If the government spent half as much creative effort trying to actually streamline spending, things wouldn't be so bad.

Unfortunately, voting doesn't make much difference because the districts have been gerrymandered (that tends to happen when one party controls a state for a long time). The breakdown of likely voters in California favors Democrats by only about 60% to 40%. But in the legislature Democrats hold 69% of the Assembly and 68% of the Senate (down from 78% after the latest election). The last time the state had anything close to proportional representation was in the late 1990s after governor Pete Wilson (R) vetoed the districts drawn by the legislature. The State Supreme Court ended up redrawing the districts, and the breakdown of elected legislators was much closer to the will of the voters (who were about 55%/45% in favor of Democrats back then).

India is doing well economically and I think they have the right idea: they promote high tech industry and have a couple of high profile projects like these. This makes them more independent, builds their economy, and instills national pride. The wrong way to do it is to take things one at a time: first get plumbing and sanitation in place, and only then work on getting a meal into every child's belly, and only then provide basic education, and only then introduce mechanised farming, and only then work on a national road network and electrical system, and so on. India's space program is money well (and frugally) spent.

-Microsoft develops product in U.S, generating tax credit for R&D.
-Microsoft shifts ownership, or "Profit Rights" of product off-shore, to say....The Bahamas.
-Microsoft Bahamas subsidiary sells U.S developed product to Americans.
-Microsoft Bahamas claims all profit. Microsoft America gets all Tax Credits.

And that's how they avoid paying taxes. It's legal. It might not be "right," but it's legal, and won't change until our nation's useless politicians do something about it.

Let me propose an alternative to playing whack-a-mole with corporations shifting expenses and revenue across borders.

Every sale is also a purchase. Instead of splitting the taxes so both the purchaser and manufacturer have to send some of the money from the same transaction to the government, put it all on the purchaser. Drop the corporate tax, increase the sales tax to compensate. The retail store or branch making the sale can't shift their location offshore, so the tax revenue will stay in the country where the sale was made.

• The government collects the exact same amount of money, it's just the retail store which collects it and sends it to the government, instead of both them and the product manufacturer.
• The buyer (eventually) pays the same amount for the product, because with the manufacturer no longer needing to pay tax, they lower the price to where old_price + old_tax = new_price + new_tax.
• With the lower tax burden on companies, the tax credits become politically untenable and are reduced or disappear.

Taxes just shift private sector money to the government. Where you collect it doesn't really change the big picture. Money is just a representation of productivity, and people are the only source of productivity. So ultimately, all taxes are paid for by people. If you crank up corporate taxes, they raise prices to pay for it, and the people buying the products are the ones who ultimately pay the tax, not the corporation.

So with all that in mind, we should be striving for the simplest tax system with as few tax extraction points as possible to keep down collection and bookkeeping costs. Having a bajillion different taxes just drives up collection costs and decreases money available for the government to spend on other things, as well as increases the amount of tax code which can have bugs or loopholes in it.

Welcome to modern video game journalism, where people endlessly navel-gaze about how amazingly mature things like adult relations and romances in games are, because you can choose to fuck the chick with the gas mask on her face *or* the chick with the tattoos *or* the chick with the booty in Mass Effect.

On a volumetric basis, a 4 TB HDD contains as much info as a 80 BDs at 50 GB per disc. So a HDD is a more compact storage form factor.

Blu-ray, like other WORM (write-once read-many) storage devices, fills a particular niche - long-term archival and storage of static data. It doesn't really fit Facebook's particular use case (dynamic data), unless they're planning to use it as an excuse not to have to delete user data upon request.

Binoculars won't cut it if you want to see Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings.

The problem with this argument is that you've just listed the only things he will be missing with a budget purchase. Ideal viewing times for these come rarely, and at the magnifications required he would also need a very expensive tracking mount in order to really enjoy them.

The four Galilean moons around Jupiter are easily visible with binoculars. Heck if you have good eyesight and dark skies, you can sometimes barely make out Ganymede or Callisto at maximum separation with the naked eye. Max separation is about 10 arc-minutes, while 20/20 vision is the ability to distinguish a 1 arc-minute separation. The 4.5-5.5 magnitude is the bigger problem. I'd say tracking the movement of Jupiter's moons from night to night is probably the best fun "project" for a kid just getting into astronomy. It really drives home the point that these things move.

I don't know why you'd think ideal viewing times are rare. They're the same as for anything else in the sky other than the sun. Say you define "ideal" viewing as a 150 degree swath of sky (anything more than 15 degrees above the horizon). Figure the kid can view from an hour after sunset til midnight, so an average 5 hours (less in the summer, more in winter). The sky rotates 15 degrees per hour, so that's an additional 75 degrees of visibility. So on any given evening, 225 degrees of the sky will fall under "ideal" viewing conditions for part of the night. i.e. On average Jupiter and Saturn can be seen 62.5% of evenings. (The fact that they move doesn't change the percentage of time they're in any given part of the sky. It just means their visibility does not map to the same months every year.)

You don't need a tracking mount to see bands on Jupiter or the rings of Saturn. I saw those things just fine with a non-tracking 60mm refractor from K-mart. It's only a problem showing kids these things because the planet will cross outside the field of view within 20-30 seconds.* That's not much time to locate the planet, then get the kid in position to look through the eyepiece to see. The tracking mount makes it a lot easier, but is not necessary. (*The sky rotates at 15 deg/hr, or 15 arc-seconds per second. Jupiter is about 30-50 arc-seconds across, so it'll move a full diameter every 2-3 seconds. At a decent magnifcation, Jupiter will span about 10% of your field of view, so it'll move from edge to edge in 20-30 sec.)

Astronomy binoculars have many benefits in the budget arena. They are rugged, low maintenance, both eyes is nice, and most importantly portable.

The other reply had mentioned that a downside is that they are hard to hold steady. Thats what a tripod is for.

I agree with the recommendation for binoculars. But realistically, you're going to use binoculars handheld most of the time, with the kid locating objects in the sky on his/her own. Using them with a tripod is more difficult and complicated than using a scope with a tripod.

You have to look straight through binoculars, so you have to view them with your head pointed up (sometimes even straight up). That means the tripod needs to hold them higher than your head. Even if you're seated, that's a really tall tripod. It also complicates switching off viewing to your kid. You take a seat in front of the tripod and adjust the binoculars. Then the kid gets in the seat and... the binoculars are too high. So you lower them, and get back in the seat to reposition them and... now it's too low for you.

Most telescopes come with a 90 degree inverting mirror/prism, which vastly simplifies viewing by allowing you to iew through the scope with your head pointed down. You just position the scope low enough for the child to view through it, then you just stoop lower so you can look through it to position it. Because you're viewing down instead of up, stooping lower doesn't require you to angle you head further (or impossibly) back.

Not really. School is used less as a tool for actual enlightenment and education and critical thinking skills and more for indoctrination and acclimation to submission to authority throughout most of the world.

I play most games on my PC as well, but sometimes it is just nice to boot up a quick game on the console and have at it with some friends. My main niggles about the PS3, compared to the older consoles:
1) The old games were very much about head-to-head action, but many PS3 games have poor support for multiple players on one console, and instead focus on networked play
2) The updates. The god-damned updates. The PS3 is switched on only every now and then for a few quick games, only to find that both console and game require a patch, which sometimes takes over an hour to download and install. Fail. The whole point of a console is that it's instant-on.