Digital media could have made most knowledge freely available to all. And of course its being abused to make the rich even richer - clearly monopolies are one of the most efficient mechanisms of wealth extraction, so most forms of physical ownership are being subsumed into rental models with increasingly constrained rights and entire new revenue models. Many fronts here - physical vs. streaming media, eBooks, DRM on any embedded systems, right to repair. Libraries are just one of the casualties of the war on ownership by the common man. Related - RIP Aaron Swartz, and Alexandra Elbakyan should be nominated for a Nobel.

(sigh) The Windows EULA gives them permission to scan your network, read your files on your systems and any file shares accessible to them, upload anything they learn or want to examine up to their systems, delete anything they want from your systems with no warning or notice, and upload telemetry whose scope can include every button you press on your keyboard and URL you ever click on. Anyone approving the Windows EULA is foolishly presuming it doesn't mean exactly what it says.

BlueOrigin has a billionaire backer too. SpaceX bet the farm on orbital capability, and NASA helped fund that to delivery as the US needed a source other than Russia for orbital class engines since US aerospace engine R&D was costed-out into oblivion for short term profits - I saw this from the inside at UTC. BlueOrigin is allegedly funded for $1B a year, but lets be honest - they haven't achieved a fraction of what SpaceX has done with a fraction of the money. And while BlueOrigin is happy to deliver the sort of one-offs that traditional aerospace loves to build in cost plus programs which are apparently required to relocate to Huntsville Alabama, SpaceX is executing on an actual long-term goal oriented platform plan that pushes humanity into space instead of pushing congressional kickbacks and stockholder portfolios.

Blue Origin has done a good job making an expensive ride that takes people almost into space. From the outside they also appear to have decided to be part of traditional cost-plus aerospace, which seems far more interested in milking contracts than building hardware. From the data points leaking out of the company, delivery of a flight ready BE-4 isn't looking good. SpaceX willingness to blow things up to fail fast and learn seems to be working much better than the turtle taking it step by step.

IIRC the EU charges a larger 'camcorder tax' if a video device can record for more than 29 mins 59 seconds...

FWIW my standard practice on youtube for the last few years is to just rip the video, and watch it later without ads. And decide if its worth keeping or not.

Honestly just laziness at this point. I have a hobby project in mind that needs reasonably high ISO, >5MP, and global shutter, which are vanilla machine vision specs. Commercial cameras start around $1.5k as they include processing and support industrial temps/environment. The image sensors only cost about $100, and the cost of fabricating a small PCB has come down enough that I could do it myself, but then I burn a few weeks, itch hasn't hit me bad enough to overcome waiting for someone else to bring it to the hobbyist market. OpenMV H7 w/ global shutter module is also nice, but falls short in resolution (only 640x480). Getting closer...

Its nice, but looking at the specs its a consumer grade camcorder sensor and the hardware only supports a rolling shutter. For decent machine vision applications we need an option with global shutter support and a higher ISO rating. Could also use a higher resolution video digitizer on the Pi too. Great steps though...

Spacecraft use something called a 'non-propulsive vent' to eliminate unwanted thrust from routine venting, in its simplest form its a flow divider with two exhaust ports so the thrust generated from one cancels the other out. Pic of one from ISS: https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Take a closer look at embedded model based design of high reliability control systems, especially how decisions are made when data is late (which happens in the real world.) Kalman filters are often used to improve the state estimations of other parts of noisy systems (in every sense of the term), and are often used to make better decisions. Like basing remote state predictions off more than just a external single point of failure MET sequence timer.

Interesting system engineering question - why was the RCS (reaction control system) in zero deadband correction mode because it thought the vehicle was in OMS (orbital maneuvering system) burn state based on the MET (mission elapsed time) clock? You make a state decision that critical in one subsystem based on a clock window instead of using actual vehicle state data??? I can see putting safeties around OMS burn state detection using MET as a reasonable window, like requiring it to be between earliest reasonable and latest reasonable window, but that should be a confidence input, not the gating input. This is Kalman filter design 102 here for autonomous system engineering. At the very least it suggests the flight systems weren't put through broad enough testing to identify the corner case this slipped through...

There are interesting clauses in US zoning laws around this problem space, specifically stating that within rural areas (rural residential, farm & forest, exclusive farm use) you're not allowed to complain about noises 'typical' to farm, agricultural, or forestry use. The main potentially colliding laws are the noise ordances in municipal areas that allow you to file complaints if noises exceed particular limits (typically 60-80 dBA) between certain hours at your property line. So a suit this would (normally) be automatically dismissed. If you tried testing rocket engines on your rural property without suitable noise abatement you might have to deal with the neighbors and the nearest municipality.

Unless "cover %" is defined as "broadband throughput inside the homes of %" then 5G is meaningless in its current frequency ranges which do not penetrate most walls and windows. Otherwise a tech can claim he could detect a few 28 GHz photons using his van's gear and declare the property covered.

Reminds me of Microsoft Visual Studio Code - lots of people at work raved about this app, but when I tried it on my MacBook its as full of telemetry as any Windows 10 app - no thanks! (Without Radio Silence to firewall outbound connections...) Since A/V normally has elevated permissions, and Microsoft's attitude about telemetry seems to be 'your computer and your data are ours and you can't do anything about it', how can we trust this?

This. Over 99% of all fossils are piled in boxes in storage rooms at universities and museums. Be nice if there was a way for scientists and collectors to coexist peacefully. Hoarding a cool skeleton in a mansion somewhere is less valuable than a museum display, but hiding it in boxes in a warehouse only accessible to one or two departments isn't much better.