This has zero to do with investment, it has to do with eliminating insanely cheap holidays through taxation, and funding the purchase of SAF. It's a direct tax on customers, not on companies and it's not one a customer can avoid by doing anything other than not taking a plane. The duration of the taxes existence is irrelevant.

Because it simply wasn't a major card. If you didn't accept Visa or MasterCard you will find your business in a very different position. They have a virtual duopoly in the world. Bonus points in country where the Maestro network has been shut down, now you've locked yourself out of the most common form of transactions since you need to rely on Visa or Mastercard to process even debit transactions.

Oh now I know why you don't want to go back. You're sick and tired of the wait staff who you think don't deserve to make a living wage pissing in your soup.

Fun fact I think tipping is the worst, but I'm simply not enough of an unbearable arsehole not to tip in America. Go back to the early 1800s if you want slaves to work for you for nothing.

Why would you not go there for paying a credit card fee? Do you not eat now? As it stands you're paying a fee, companies aren't just eating this cost. Honestly that's a super strange position to make a decision based on an additional fee. Where in your post did you discuss the cost vs quality of food you received? The mere presence of a fee making sure you don't go back seems like you weren't that interested in going out to dinner in the first place and are looking for any excuse not to do it again.

Nothing. Profit margins are profit margins, and CC fees are expenses and therefore by definition are already included in the 2% profit margin. That's the dirty secret, no one is eating this cost, they are passing it on to you, maybe not directly, but it is happening.

That is absolutely false. Most airlines make a profit without any connection to any credit card company. What you're describing is a very American quirk that applies to Spirit, United, and American almost to the exclusivity of the entire rest of the industry. In fact most of the world don't even know what you're talking about when you say miles/points in relation to credit cards. That's also something that is only done in a select few countries.

The source code is written in assembly, it would be borderline useless without information and documentation to go with it. It's hard enough for people to read abstract languages without context. Just the source code itself for would require some serious weapons grade reverse engineering to make sense of it. You can work source code for a long time without ever understanding *WHY* something does what it does, which is far more important than how (provided by source code) or what (provided by testing source code).

Put this source code in front of 99.9% of the people here on Slashdot and they'd be able to do nothing with it. Put the documentation in front of them and many will be able to have an alternate system up and running without ever seeing the source.

Sorry to hear you have a terminal prognosis.

I'm not sure there are enough terminally ill but still fairly healthy people who also have the right skills and mindset though. When you think how few people manage to become astronauts... And they would want to be extremely sure that your condition is stable and you won't deteriorate during launch g-forces, in zero-g, en-route, or shortly after arriving. A lot of the work is quite physical. Even in Mars' lower gravity, those suits are heavy and bulky and stiffer than normal clothing.

Then there are the legal aspects of it. Countries that allow assisted dying only tend to do so in fairly narrow circumstances, so the legal landscape for suicide missions is, at best, unclear.

I don't fear for civilisation in the slightest. Knowledge builds on knowledge to stay current. I don't need the original design documentation for the first ever wheel to know how how to make a modern one. We have lost countless things over the eons. We're not sure how the pyramids are built, we don't have design documents for the first aqueducts, we just know they existed but are unsure of how they figured out how to make them, we didn't know the Roman formulation for cement.

Yes civilization here has surpassed those losses of knowledge in every way. We've built bigger buildings than ever before, we've advanced sanitisation and water management in ways the Romans couldn't imagine. Even now we're using advanced computers with modern Unix kernels without any knowledge of what the source code to Unix V4 looks like. This is an archeological curiosity but not something that underpins our civilization in any way.

By the time we lose collective knowledge we've typically already surpassed needing it.

Using more smaller ships affects logistics capacity. You've now created a queue at ports, a queue at maintenance yards, a high requirement for shipping staff, etc. Economies of scale apply.

This is a great example of people's priorities not being aligned. No I think there's a million things they should do instead of this. I already have several PDF renderers on my PCs for various other reasons, I wonder why it has a Save to PDF function in the first place.

I'm with you. I was just countering your view that this was a Linux only thing.

False. As soon as your login screen is up you can get to the desktop within seconds even on the most rubbish hardware. If your computer is taking longer than mere seconds then the problems is *you* or your IT department. One of you broke something.

For the record I'm partially with you. It takes ages to for my work PC to get to the desktop, but I know exactly whose fault that is, and it has nothing to do with Microsoft. Incidentally our company issued Macs also run like dogshit.

No Windows boots in under 30 seconds on the cheapest nastiest computer you can buy. You don't need a decent anything to get Windows up. It will however run like dogshit as soon as you open Teams.

I'm surprised Elon isn't saying that we will have quantum computing in every Tesla by the end of the year and that if you buy a car today it'll be worth more next year.