The intelligence agencies used to be that smart. They armed the Taliban against the Soviets, and they armed Iraq against Iran. For some reason they stopped the strategy of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Go figure.

For less than $5B, they could have hand-crafted individual maps for every customer, given how well their phones have been selling since they jumped into bed with Microsoft.

Apparently the working title before his death in 2004 was "Faster Pussycat, Fuck, Fuck", but Micron's marketing department thought XPoint might go over better with the target market.

These types of studies come in three forms: lies, damned lies and statistics. This statement is a red flag which eliminates one of these.

If there are advanced alien species out there that would go to the trouble of decoding our message, we expect them to be audiophiles who would turn their nose up at ISO files and the CD medium they represent.

I'm more surprised by the fact that LinkedIn still has users to be surprised by this. Some people must have a high tolerance for this sort of treatment. I left the site the second time they decided to reset everyone's privacy settings because much of their user base was missing out on some of their new "business" opportunities they had introduced.

No doubt he'd end up in jail for failing to indicate a lane change when he thought it'd be a good idea to get out of the way of the patrol car that was rapidly approaching from behind too. Some people just don't seem to have much luck with the police in the US for some reason I just can't fathom.

Here's a way that the government could be even less involved: don't DO that. Let people who want to show programs to a large audience find their own way to fund the production and dissemination of that material. Say, by selling ads or attracting sponsors, etc.

And being under heavy influence by advertisers is better than being at arms length from government influence how exactly?

But it works both ways, so instead of paying for foreign shows as they do now, they now get those for free.

BBC doesn't get them for free. The British public does due to lack of geoblocking.

Personally I think that programming that is commercially viable on the international market shouldn't be paid for by taxes (or other practically unavoidable licensing fees) anyway. It puts commercial broadcasters at a competitive disadvantage and takes funding away from arts/documentaries and community programming that needs public broadcasters to be viable.

I'm curious, did you eat seafood from the Pacific Ocean before 2011?

WMA was invented because of the patent demands surrounding MP3, not to kill off Vorbis. Microsoft licenses WMA out to hardware vendors at 0.10 per decoder, compared with 1.35 for a stereo MP3 decoder, and 0.98 for AAC. Probably we have Microsoft to thank for the more reasonable licensing fee structure adopted by MPEG-LA for their patent pools for H.264 and H.265.

$6.5M is the cap. At $0.20 per device, that is a lot of devices for a small company to be selling without growing into a big company.

Do we have the results of what the "ice" actually is? The only element with a melting point within the range of temperatures expected on Pluto is Neon, but I guess internal heating from the core could be melting something with a slightly higher melting point like Oxygen or Nitrogen and causing it to spread out smoothly like that.

The real question is why ANYONE would want to work with people who did not like them.

The real question is how any large company can find anyone willing to work for them. Beyond a certain size, it is virtually guaranteed that someone at your workplace will not like you.

However the issue we had with older people was that they were so much harder to train.

If you hire young people on the other hand, you don't need to train them, because they still know it all.