For instance, excessively high payment from TV networks require excessively high fees to cable providers which are paid by all cable subscribers, even if they never watch the channel.

You don't need to subscribe to cable. Plenty of folks don't, and more seem to be cutting the cord every day. I haven't subscribed to cable television since the 1990s.

The cartel is also able to leverage national monies to convince localities to force taxpayer to fund stadiums, even if those that are never going to use the stadiums.

If your local and state government sucks, blame your neighbors. This doesn't seem to happen in the Northeast -- both Boston and New York teams paid for their own stadiums (partial exception: Barclay's).

Because the rules are set, public tax dollars can be used to train kids for the NFL through public school funds.

Yeah, and public tax dollars are training rock musicians, artists, debaters, glee-ers, chess players, and goodness knows what else.

Because salaries are set, the players, though well paid, do not have the ability to truly negotiate a contract.

The salaries are set following a union negotiation. If you want to claim that unions set salaries and that's bad, be my guest. You'll certainly have support around here. Union participation in America is nearly 15 million. There's nothing unique about the NFL negotiating with a union to set wages.

I'll stop now, though I'm sure there's more criticism of your weak tea.

This is true. As the linked article notes, a remarkable number of early 747s are still in service in Iran, either with the Iranian Air Force or as part of the fleet of Iran Air. These airframes date to before the 1979 Iranian Revolution. I didn't really want to open that can of worms, though--given the diplomatic situation between Iran and the United States, one wonders at the level of support that Boeing would feel it had to provide (or even would be allowed to provide, as a U.S. company).

I would wonder if there were any parallels to the situation in, say, Cuba, with its large population of Batista-era (pre-Castro, pre-Communist revolution) U.S.-built "classic" automobiles. Though you'll still see them on the roads of Havana, I wouldn't expect Ford to still have parts for, say, the 1957 Fairlane.

Since airlines were still ordering new 747-8s (the platform on which the new Air Force One(s) would be built) in 2014 - and might still continue to do so - this isn't exactly an obsolete aircraft. I mean, the first 747-8s weren't delivered to customers until 2011. There are still-flying 747-variant fuselages in commercial (passenger and freight) service that have been in the air since the late 1970s and early 1980s. Based on that history, it seems likely that Boeing will need to support its commercial customers through to at least 2045 or so.

Who are these "people"? Sure, there are some who will do this - and this being Slashdot, we've probably got a population enriched in them - but if you take a random person with a car or computer problem, they will just ask (respectively) their local mechanic or teenager--in exactly the same way that many people approach their doctors.

Yes, there exist people who will try to troubleshoot their cars, computers, or their own bodies. And there exist subsets within those groups who can are capable of doing so in a way that makes things better rather than worse. Most people aren't comfortable going beyond the most basic diagnostic steps in any of those three spheres, however. Putting gas in the car is their limit; checking the oil and topping up the washer fluid is something that happens at the dealership, and borrowing an OBD-II reader to interpret a Check Engine light is in the realm of black magic.

Worse, there are also people who spend good money on magic grounding straps for their cars, insist on clicking on VIRUS WARNING links in spam emails, and who actually believe stuff that homeopathic practitioners tell them.

The fact that you - automatically - hold the copyright for the works you create doesn't prevent you from doing either of those things. Indeed, copyright is necessary for you to be able to license the work.

The summary is flat wrong in its terminology. A key point about hypersonic weapons, from a tactical and strategic standpoint, is that they aren't ballistic. They're potentially faster and sneakier.

Aside from acceleration during boost and (generally limited) manoeuvering during descent, ballistic weapons are - by definition - coasting unpowered for most of their flight time. Ballistic missiles put their warheads into an elliptical orbit that happens to intersect the surface of the earth (typically somewhere around Moscow) and let gravity do most of the work.

Hypersonic weapons, in stark contrast, are in powered flight for most or all of their journey. Instead of being lobbed up and coming back down, they can go straight to their target (modulo the curvature of the earth). They can travel a path and a velocity that is limited by their own engineering rather than by orbital mechanics. From a strategic standpoint, they would allow delivery of warheads (particularly nuclear warheads) in shorter times by less-detectable and less-interceptable courses, with all the attendant consequences for the calculus of nuclear war, first strikes, and mutually assured destruction.

This. Exactly this. Inexperienced typists just don't get it.

To convey proper nuance in text, I don't always want exactly 1 letter "A" when I press the "A" key. Using uniform whole letters can seem jarring and mechanical, particularly when writing personal email. Sometimes a message composer only wants, say, 0.95 "A", just to soften the letter out. Other times, it's nice to smooth the letter out a bit, letting it fade out genty across the length of the word instead of being uncomfortably square.

These mechanical keyboards are usually tuned to be "warmer", as well--when you press that "A" key, it has overtones and harmonics from other vowels. A little bit of "E" goes a long way, but true "golden fingers" agree that plenty of "O" adds mellowness and roundness.

The adoption of these digital, non-mechanical keyboards is also one of the major reasons why emotion and subtext - especially related to humor - are so often lost in text-based messaging.

"Robust infrastructure" is good. "Adding lanes to freeways" isn't the only way to reach that goal--and it isn't necessarily the most cost-effective use of those tax dollars. Just laying down roadbed and asphalt isn't terribly costly; call it $10 million or so per mile of 4-lane interstate. Building wider bridges, digging supplementary tunnels, constructing complex interchanges, realigning adjacent utility conduits and ramps--well, that costs quite a bit more. Expropriating massive amounts of land adjacent to existing interstates in dense urban areas - or adding parallel routes, or building stacked or buried lanes - is extraordinarily, sometimes ruinously, costly. (Boston's Big Dig cost something like $200 million per lane-mile.)

And each lane gets you about 2,000 cars per hour, at best. If you have a million people in the suburbs who want to get to work between 8 and 9am, and they're all driving their own vehicles, your system grinds to a halt unless there are 500 live Interstate lanes into the city. Worse, each additional car you add to the city means more traffic on the roads in town, and demand for parking, and production of local air pollution, and so forth. "Build more lanes" is a solution that ultimately just doesn't scale.

In contrast, bus rapid transit systems can achieve at least 10,000 passengers per hour and sometimes as high as 30,000 per hour depending on configuration. Light rail achieves similar passenger numbers. Metro (subway) systems typically top out north of 30,000 passengers per hour, per line; Hong Kong's metro system clears 80,000 per hour on its highest-traffic lines. (For those keeping score, that's enough to offset 40 Interstate lanes.)

That's sort of like saying you can't measure the area of a room using a tape measure,. After all, you have to perform a calculation based on the measurements you collect; the tape measure doesn't have an "area" reading. By one sufficiently pedantic, narrow, arrogant, obnoxious measure, you could argue that you were correct--and you probably would get punched by a lot of tradespeople who recognized you were just being an insufferable prick instead of making a useful contribution.

The sensors - or the tape measure - are necessary tools for the process, even though they don't directly output the final processed result.

France isn't insolvent, that's ridiculous. Their borrowing costs are barely above Germany's. Get your economic facts from actual factual sources like the Federal Reserve, not from nutso right-wing opinion mongers.

No, that is how (one metric for) UNemployment is measured. The FRED data I referenced is the comprehensive employment (_not_ UNemployment) of all persons aged 25 - 54 in France and in the US. No issues about measuring who's looking for a job and who isn't. You should actually look at the data source I posted instead of making these inaccurate statements.

I am getting my data from the Federal Reserve's domestic and foreign data: http://research.stlouisfed.org...

Tons of data you can view there. Pull up France's 25 - 54 employment, and the US's. My statement is true.

You, and Business Insider, are pushing a narrative that relies on apples-to-oranges. You and BI are relying on unemployment data covering all 18+ year olds. But that's a ridiculous metric for a country with strong educational social programs for the younger generation and strong retirement social programs for the older generation. The young take the time to learn more skills, the old are able to retire at a much younger age than the wage slaves in the US.

But of course the free market fundamentalists are going to seize on faulty reasoning if it can be used as an argument to dismantle social programs and worker protections.

Just prior to the 2008 economic collapse, France's employment for those aged 25 - 54 was around 83%, compared to 80% in the US. Lately, after the collapse and some recovery, the rate in France is 81%, compared to 76% in the US.

France has good educational opportunities, skewing comparisons for those under 25, and good retirement benefits, skewing comparisons for those over 54. But apples-to-apples for the core years of productivity show France has the right idea.

And thus the beginning of the end of the RESTful fad. Not that there's anything wrong with RESTful architecture per se, but as a fad it has been shoe-horned by ideologues into so many inappropriate domains lately: embedded P2P, M2M spaces, etc. Sure, it makes sense for one-to-many patterns involving human-readable, human-discoverable resources, particularly of semi-static resources that can be cached and proxied by middle agents. But of course that later part only works for unsecured transactions. So now the exemplar of RESTful design itself, the WWW, is abandoning one of the key supposed benefits of being RESTful.

Could be neither. In many jurisdictions, the roadside breath test (or field sobriety test) merely provides probable cause for law enforcement to obtain a warrant, with which they can compel a blood sample. I wouldn't be surprised if they are allowed to test for a range of intoxicating substances - including THC - and not just ethanol with these tests.

Note, as well, that "25% tested positive" is not the same as "25% were 'high' or intoxicated". Detectable amounts of THC or metabolites don't mean, necessarily, dangerous or intoxicating quantities. (Depending on exactly what was being tested, and the sensitivity of their instruments, they could have been seeing very low levels associated with marijuana use days or even weeks previously, or even with secondhand exposure.)