It's hard to fail Apple for not allowing music purchased from other stores to play on the iPod. It'd have required Apple to support third-party DRM (which would cost Apple money), while iirc the original iPod would play mp3, amongst other formats. Can one really demand someone else to play your resticted-play files? Especially when that other party does support various other industry standards already?

Bitten by their own DRM I'd say. Proves again that DRM stands for Digital Restrictions Management - in this case restricting to which devices may play a file. The iPod was not included. The moment they dropped this restriction from their store, the iPod could play their files just fine. Which, of course, is in part what did in DRM on music files. It's too restrictive on the sellers.

The only possibly valid claim I see is Apple not licencing their DRM system to other players.

It seems the choice has been made already.

In Europe: let them live (i.e. provide proper social security).

In the USA: let them die. Maybe extend the suffering a bit by suffocating them with bank loans they can't pay back (and in the end taking the rest of the world down with it)..

Maybe they'll have to use food banks more. Maybe they'll have to use public transport instead of a gas guzzling SUV. Maybe they have to start cooking themselves instead of buying take-away every day. Maybe they have to stop smoking and drinking. Maybe they have to make do with that over sized TV for longer than two years.

The above are just some suggestions. I don't know exactly what they're supposed to do - I don't know the American way of life well enough for detailed budget advice. All I know is that borrowing for consumption is always a bad idea.

If that's really the reason they borrow money, we should have a hard look at the lenders. It's simply a bad idea to lend money to people who are most likely not going to pay it back. Which of course is exactly what got us the 2008 mortgage crisis: US banks lending left, right and centre to anyone who asked (especially when it came to buying homes), without checking whether they could reasonably pay anything back.

That should not normally get you to 100-120% debt/assets levels. Banks will normally not lend more than 70% of the home value - the rest has to come from the home buyer's down payment. Many governments will top this up to like 95% though guarantees or insurance type schemes though, for better or for worse, allowing more people to buy. This will inevitably push up home prices as well. So after buying the house you should still be under the 100% level, and that level should fall as you're paying off this mortgage, making an average level of 50% a more reasonable value. Starters near the 100% level, people who live in their property for a few decades and paid off their mortgage closer to the 0% level.

The above has been my strategy. Admittedly I've never done coding for pay, however I've been coding my web site, I've written some Android apps, etc.

When I first learned to program, it was BASIC. Later in college Turbo Pascal - which was dead easy to me as I knew BASIC, meaning I knew about the key paradigms of programming. Another decade or so later I had the need to write some small software, and in a few days I got myself going in Python - to this day my language of choice. HTML was added when the need came to design a web page, and the moment it needed more complexity the python module for Apache appeared together with MySQL. I wanted to write an app for my phone, so got myself going on Android and learned the Java that goes with it.

I've taken the same approach with my current business as tour operator. I know my way around my area well, I know many interesting hidden spots, and decided to just start doing tours. The learning how to do it, came as I went. I started by getting some general advice on the Internet, followed by just doing some tours, and see how it went. I learned a lot, really fast. I found out I miss parts of knowledge, and dove into those specific subjects.

Anyway, long story short: my general advice is to learn what you need, as you go.

Your disadvantage is that you don't know any language yet; Python is considered one of the easiest ones to learn these days, and can give you the basics of object oriented and procedural. I can't say "if you know one, you know them all", but that's not too far from the truth. All languages use, at their core, the same paradigms, and those paradigms are the hard part of programming. Understand them, and the language is just a way of expressing it. Also the more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn yet another one.

In this case, based on the comments, maybe you should start learning Swift first. Or try both, spend an afternoon browsing some tutorials in both langauges, and see which you find easiest to grasp. The moment you need the other language it'll come easy. Maybe you'll get a request to add an Android version to an existing iOS app - I'd say just take it, grab the dev kit, learn Java as you go - by then at least you already have a basic understanding of the pitfalls of mobile development, you just have to learn a new language. You may risk pissing off your first employer for Android apps because you're too slow (learning takes time) but the next such job will go a lot easier already.

Citation: the post that I replied to.

If funds decrease, it's because investors lose interest in a project, and are less willing to invest in it. If fund decrease while research progresses (like fusion - a hot topic for decades already), obviously positive results are lacking and there is less and less hope of a successful outcome.

That, if it is technically even possible to sustain fusion on a very small scale (which may have to be really big on human scales, but really tiny compared to what's going on in the sun and other stars).

It seems more and more investors are losing faith in the very possibility of producing energy with fusion. Fusion as such of course we know can be done, but sustaining a contained fusion reaction and tapping the energy it produced, that part not so much.

So that's 10.3 TWh renewables vs 14.8 TWh from non-renewable sources.

Interesting numbers game. Certainly only by lumping all the renewables together, and splitting out the other sources, they could make it work. Not exactly a fair comparison. Nevertheless impressive that they are now at about 40% overall coming from renewable sources.

Finding stories about artists screwed and finally bankrupted by the music industry directly is easy - there are many more of those. I was looking for stories of artists that actually suffered direct, attributable losses to megaupload and related file sharing sites.

Read-only, sure. Just like Linux may have read-only access to Windows' NTFS drives. And a shared FAT32 partition (rw for both OSes) to exchange files.

Somehow I doubt this. Unless the 2nd generation of recoding happens after humans have become extinct.

Well, of course! After all that, how could he pay for those legal costs? Not to mention the fact that they cut off his main source of income - megaupload.com.

Without having to defend himself from all that legislation I'm sure he wouldn't have been bankrupt now. Or at least, not yet.

It's just an eye for an eye.

Just think of all those musicians he has driven into bankruptcy by his unfettered permission of copyright infringements, like ehm... well... I'm sure we can come up with at least someone... anyone? Please?

There are scheduled outages caused by energy shortage, and they work hard on solving that. However unscheduled outages through events like the weather are very rare.

Even China has a far more reliable power supply than the USA. Virtually no outages due to normal storms or lightning or so; occasional outage after a particularly destructive typhoon (hurricane on your side of the Pacific) or a massive earthquake.

Can't really call China a small country.

It's just the sad truth that the richest country in the world has one of the most unreliable power supplies.