Some of Amazon's facilities have some seriously awesome robots, and their operating practices (while occasionally...horrifying) are still really effective. I suspect that this agreement is actually aimed more at startup wannabes playing at corporate espionage. Which seems really silly...but considering that fast shipping is their lifeblood, if someone who worked for them in a capacity that could play with their warehouse toys started "inventing" new techniques for running a warehouse or building better robots, that could hurt.

Yeah they can't sue warehouse workers because what the hell are they going to get out of it. But they'd love to find ways to sue the next Kiva if they can't buy them.

Rendezvousing with asteroids is actually really tricky, especially if you want to get the same one twice. Hell with astronauts--putting this boulder somewhere that we can reach it over and over again, even just with probes, is a real big win. Especially considering how the last asteroid mission went... I don't think astronauts are the important part of the equation so much as the lunar orbit part is.

Even then I'm wondering how easy it is to get this thing back to Earth surface intact. If it was tiny, then sure, stuff it in aerogel, but this thing is going to be somewhere on the order of 800,000 kilograms (napkin estimate)...that's almost half the mass that the Space Shuttle was when full of fuel, and one hell of a lot more than its payload-to-landing! Anything you wrap it in is going to wreck fine features of the surface when you decelerate--for scientific purposes, it's a lot more fragile than astronauts. You need to pickaxe parts off of it gently for transport and study. I'm not sure how good our teleoperated waldos are in practice, so...astronauts.

Somehow I misread that as PTMC, which struck me as being the very last people we'd want fabbing space vehicles.

In case you didn't notice, they're already in a state of pretty much all out war versus ISIS. Wasn't the King of Jordan personally flying combat missions against them a few weeks ago? (Even if you do think it's just PR, they are seriously invested there.)

I've got a sneaking suspicion you've never, not even once in your life, had those particular moral convictions run up against your personal convenience.

I would LOVE to send internet Libertarians to Somalia, and see what kind of paradise they can build with the sweat of their brow.

Aww, look at the cute college Libertarian! Shouldn't you be in your poli-sci 102 class right now? I know arbitrary grading criteria are unethical too, but sadly your professor is a tool of the Liberal Conspiracy and will fail you if you keep skipping lectures and failing tests. And for the love of God try to pronounce Ayn Rand's name right in your next rant, you're only embarrassing yourself.

In a city that wants to make any kind of design sense at all, zoning and licensing don't need to be about ethics at all. If you want to be in the business district, you have to sell to the public. If you don't sell to the public, you get kicked out of the business district, because you're screwing up the city layout and taking up valuable space. Go sell weddings cakes from your website. Nobody will care.

When you run a public business, the government gives you nice shiny benefits in exchange for you following certain standards. You can't kick out service dogs, you can't advertise sales on things you don't have, and as a public business, you have to serve the public. That's what your business license says!

When your city says "yes, you can own this land and open a storefront"--they sold that land to you because it's zoned for businesses that sell to everyone. They don't sell land on main street to warehouses, they sell it to companies that bring foot traffic and make that area into a commercial hub. Again--you own (or rent) the land because you agreed to serve the public.

If you're baking cakes out the back door of your house and selling them on Etsy (never mind how that works), fine, the government probably didn't support you, and you didn't promise them you'd participate in the economy they set up. But if you have a storefront, or if you pay taxes as a corporation, then society gave you special consideration and you MUST return the favor by doing what you agreed...serve everyone, regardless of skin color or orientation.

Consumers will do anything to feel more socially or economically responsible! They'll buy twice as many of these new bottles just for the privilege of wasting less ketchup and plastic.

Swap the word "gay" for "black" and try again. The country already learned, rather painfully, that letting businesses refuse to serve whole segments of the population causes one hell of a lot of unrest.

Charge an extra $0.30 per bottle just for the novelty factor, while at the same time converting more people away from the store brand.

They probably meant CSVs.

People who can't maintain safe following distances shouldn't be driving--but we have tech that can react very quickly to the guy ahead of you braking, in case you don't. People who don't check for children children behind their rear tires before they back out of the driveway shouldn't be driving--but we have rear-view cameras. People who can't stay in their lane shouldn't be driving, but we have lane assist...etc...etc.

I don't see how it's _needed_. Depends on the tasks. I guess I kinda see it as rooftop solar...if it's bright and everyone has extra, cool, they can sell it back to the grid and (in a perfect world) electricity is cheaper overall. If it's cloudy, you still need the electricity, so you get it from somewhere else.

Alternately maybe they're just mining bitcoins, so crunching numbers means extra cash but it's not mission critical to everyone.