How is it wrong. How can you prevent me from selling my vote if I vote by mail? How can you prevent an abusive spouse or parent from stealing my vote? How can you prevent a local thug from coming around to collect my vote, making sure I voted for his preferred candidate, and then mailing the envelope himself.

The answer is you cannot prevent any of those things. For any of that, you need a secure location.

Extending voting past Tuesday is the solution to that problem, not remote voting.

Despite your claim to the contrary, there is very little documented evidence that in-person voting fraud is significant. This is not an accident - this is due to years of adjustments and fine-tuning of in-person voting procedures. Look at Chicago for historical examples of how badly it used to go. Unlike in-person voting, remote voting can never guarantee the anonymous vote. Every election is inherently at risk when more than a handful of people use remote voting.

At the end of the day, a technical analysis does not matter. The idea of remote voting is fundamentally flawed, as it fails to guarantee an anonymous vote. It does nothing to prevent vote buying, proxy voting by an abusive relative, stealing of votes (for instance, at a retirement home), voter intimidation, etc. A secure voting location is absolutely vital to a fair election. Even absentee ballots need to be minimized - we recently had a tainted election in NC thanks to those.

OK, we're talking about big numbers in aggregate. Edge cases don't really matter. Lots of people are gifted $200 Androids, too. iPod sales got so low compared to iPhone sales that Apple stopped reporting them.

Compared to a $600-1200 phone, that $2.99 app just doesn't matter. There are also really nice Android phones, and I suspect those flagship users will also part with cash. But while the average iPhone costs $700, the average Android handset costs ~$230. That's a looooot of budget-minded people buying Android handsets.

The connector is not why I buy a new charger - the charging standards keep changing as devices become more power hungry and more capable of fast charging.

In any case, I go through far more cables than I do chargers. They have a finite life. If you have teenagers, you need to buy a constant stream of Lightning / micro-USB cables.

Who in the world will bother developing the next-gen connector when you aren't allowed to actually use it?

In reality, Apple will ship a single USB-C to Lightning adapter with their phones and call it a day.

GPS isn't the only game in town. There are now Russian (GLONASS) and European (GALILEO) systems as well. Soon there will probably be a Chinese system, and maybe an Indian one. Consumer-level devices already are including the three global systems. The peers fighting would need to disable not only each other's systems, but also the systems of everyone else - which is probably "act of war" territory. If we're talking world war, then commercial aviation is pretty much on hiatus anyway.

In most places where a meaningful number of trees can be grown - and grown fast enough to make a dent in atmospheric CO2 - the cellulose won't last very long. You could drag them out into the desert, but...

Yes, but you'd need a lot of energy to harvest billions of trees from somewhere wet and move them to somewhere dry. All carbon capture techniques need large amounts of energy.

Trees can buy us a short reprieve, but eventually trees die and release their CO2. At best they are a short-term sink of atmospheric carbon. Geological processes will gradually sequester CO2 over 100s or 1000s of years.

If you need more speed than that, you are going to need a big source of energy to power CO2 extraction equipment.

As to your first link, I think it agrees with the person you are replying to - nuclear energy is too damn hard to get built, so it isn't currently helping displace CO2. I think the parent would embrace policies which make building nuclear reactors cheaper and faster. That solar and wind are cost-competitive with nuclear is immaterial once we have built solar and wind out to the technological maximum and need something for the base load.

In support of your argument, the constitution specifically says: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."

The point of patents is not to drive innovation - economic necessity does that. The point of patents is to share knowledge. Without patents, someone with a unique solution would have incentive to keep their processes and methods secret. This forces mankind to constantly reinvent the wheel, and sometimes the secret is lost entirely. With patents, we don't need to wonder what is in the wonder drug and we don't need to guess how it is made - instead, after 20+ years we can make a generic using the patents as a basic blueprint.

But I agree with you - in this case, we'd be better off is Sonos had gone the trade secret route and we were forced to replicate their trivial "innovations".

The design patents you mention are another matter. They are more similar to copyright or trademarks, though I think the terms are much shorter than for copyrights.

"1.5 million New Yorkers"

Wow, amazing - that's almost the same as the population of the NYC elderly!

Welcome to the USA! Enjoy one of our websites while you are here.

Why replicate the fire-prone design? The original is gone - no use in pretending otherwise. Use modern materials which are visually indistinguishable but fire resistant. The oak beams were not visible from inside or outside the cathedral unless you went into the attic - they were not an important aspect of the design, but rather an implementation detail.