And then the next logical step is for the EU to impose some sort of sanctions on the infrastructure and payment services involved if any of them have any connection to the EU -- just as the US government has done with things like DNS and payment services that are conveniently within its jurisdiction.

I'm not sure I like where this is all going. I'm sure we can all agree that overall the Internet has been a great advance for humanity, and in recent years governments from all over the world have presumed to carve it up and control it in their own interests, almost invariably to the detriment of people somewhere else (or, in some cases, their own people).

However, we are going to have to confront some difficult philosophical and ethical differences sooner or later, because clearly we also can't have a situation where the Internet is somehow above the law, but we don't always agree on what that law should be. Frankly, the US government have been throwing their own weight around for years, and Google have been doing things that push the boundaries of typical European legal and ethical standards for a long time too. Neither has shown any particular concern or remorse about the effects of their actions abroad, and neither has suffered any significant negative consequences so far, with the possible exception of the Snowden fallout. Sooner or later the rest of the world was going to push back.

In as much as this marks a change in the general acceptance that the US can export its laws and ethics but won't be subject to anyone else's, that is probably a good direction to move in. It will force the issues of Internet governance and extra-territorial law enforcement into the open, where at least we can scrutinise and debate them honestly, instead of everyone's government doing sneaky things often without much public scrutiny and often because of coincidences involving which infrastructure happened to fall somewhere they could get at it.

When grading expertise on any given task/process, the top level ("Master") is usually defined to be when the person can not even explain how she is doing it, everything is automated to such a degree that "the solution was obvious".

Magnus Carlsen used to play even faster than he is doing these days, but he explains that this is not because to takes him longer to figure out the best possible moves, but because he has to take the time afterwards to do all the required calculations to confirm his instinctual choices.

He has also explained after some really complicated end games where he has kept on playing for small advantages, eventually turning "obvious draws" into wins, that "it was very easy, I just had to play the only possible move".

I believe the foot/leg motor skills of a Neymar is comparable to those of a world champion orienteer: The best orienteers can run cross-country, through rocks, stones, windfall & vegetation, while studying an incredibly detailed map in order to navigate, making it impossible to focus on the ground while looking at the map. This means that the actual broken field running must use a small amount of brain capacity, all the movements are fully automated.

I know that Petter Thoresen (former multiple world champion) once was told to do a training race in Germany while a champion Kenyan cross country runner would tail him to check his technique: Even while orienteering Petter could run fast enough that the x-c runner was dropped after less than a mile.

Terje

Just because the market wants it and would pay for it doesn't mean it would be profitable.

They presume it won't be, so they don't try it. I worked for a cable company once. I ran the numbers. It worked to make money a la carte.

The problem was "everyone else is doing it the package way" so risk was avoided. It is profitable to provide channels a la carte. It's just confusing to the cable companies, if not the customers. But I imagine most customers wouldn't mind or get confused by "order the base package, and check all the optional channels you want". Also, Starz and others ran "free weekend" promotions every few years. The cable company could open everything up and let people see what the other choices are.

Of course, as the guy that oversaw the build of the delivery of content, and not the buying of content or marketing side, nobody listened. But the numbers were sound. Unless the people who said what they' pay for a la carte channels were lying.

The real reason it would never work is that consumers are dumb. Would you pay $30 for your favorite 30 channels, where you spend 99%+ of your watching time, when you could get 200 channels for $50? Sure, you've never watched 150 of them, and another 20 had a show on it that you watched that was on one of the remaining 30 channels, but is being re run. But you "need" 200+ channels.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

The *only* reason we don't have a la carte pricing is that the carriers refuse to provide it. The carrier may be required to "buy" ESPN 2-54 if a subscriber has ESPN 1, but I've never seen where the subscriber must "pay" for ESPN 2-54. They could still be a la carted with the prices proportional to the cost. The carriers suspect it would be a poor model, but nobody actually knows, they just refuse to try.

Don't be ridiculous. The dinosaurs lived long before the GNU utils were written. They would have been compressed.

In many cases... yes. The most expensive phones have an up-front cost in addition to the two-year commitment, but if you get the most expensive phone you can without an up-front fee, then there is no price difference between that one and the cheapest phone.

Yes, this is ridiculous.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

That would be a nice quote, but it contains an implicit assumption which is seriously wrong: That there is any distinction between humanity and nature.

It's not surprising that we tend to see ourselves as distinct from the rest of nature, because we are dramatically different from all other forms of life around us, and not just because we're self-centered, or even because we're objectively hugely more successful than any other species. We're dramatically different because we're the only species we know of that is capable of creating explanatory knowledge, of conjecturing and criticizing ideas, individually and in collaboration, to understand how and why things work. Many species on Earth are capable of learning, but as far as we can tell it's all "behavioral" learning; understanding merely that specific behaviors cause specific results. Sometimes the results of that level of understanding can be quite sophisticated, as in the animals who can create and use tools in complex sequences to accomplish goals, but it's still on a completely different level from the ability that humans have to deduce deep explanations of the structure and nature of the universe, and how to manipulate it.

Regardless of the temptation to view ourselves as separate from nature, though, we're not. That doesn't mean we won't benefit from applying our understanding of the rest of nature to maintain the elements of it that are beneficial to us. Obviously, we're better off if we don't make the world a worse for ourselves -- the flip side of that is that we are better off if we make the world a better place for us, so stasis is not the goal. That's really good because stasis (aka "sustainability") is impossible.