Without getting into whether Scotland is an appropriate site for a spaceport... Orbits can be broadly divided into two categories - equatorial and polar.

Equatorial orbits are aligned close to the equator. The most useful one are geosynchronous (slight inclination so its ground track is a small figure-8 called an amalemma) or geostationary (zero inclination so they stay above the same spot on the equator). The satellites stay above the same general spot on earth, so are always "visible" to ground stations and satellite dishes. These orbits have to be about 36,000 km above the earth's surface to match the earth's daily rotation (23h 56m). Lower altitude equatorial orbits aren't as useful because their ground track is limited to a swath of latitudes centered around the equator. The primary reason they're used is because of your point (2) - they take less energy to achieve if you launch from close to the equator. If you just want to be in space and don't particularly care about where in space (e.g. the ISS), an equatorial low earth orbit is your cheapest option.

Polar orbits are aligned to pass over the poles (or close to it). These are the second-most useful orbits because they allow a satellite to observe 100% or nearly 100% of the earth's surface. Scientific data-gathering and spy satellites are put into polar orbits. (Do note that because the poles tend to be rather cold and uninhabited, and because a satellite's altitude lets it peer beyond its max orbital latitude, you can get near-100% coverage of the populated regions of the earth with a highly inclined equatorial orbit. But the more you incline the orbit, the less benefit there is from launching near the equator. For a polar orbit which passes directly over the poles, you actually have to spend energy and fuel to get rid of any sideways velocity imparted by the earth's rotation at the launch site.)

I never understood this desire to keep Pluto a planet. Even an elementary school student could see it was a bit of an oddball compared to the other eight, with a highly eccentric and tilted orbit, a dimunitive size, and recurring announcements every few years of possible discovery of other tiny planet like things out in a similarly distant orbit.

Size is not really the point. Pluto (2300 km radius) is almost the same size as Mercury (2440 km). Both are smaller than the moons Ganymede (2634 km) and Titan (2575 km), while Callisto (2408 km) falls right in between them.

People just need to get over the notion that a "planet" is somehow better or higher ranking or more important than a "moon" or "Kuiper belt object" / whatever. Those are not hierarchical terms. They are just definitions of what a body's orbit is like, and the effect its gravity has on other nearby objects (or vice versa). Nailing down a static definition of "planet" was also important for not having to rewrite school science textbooks every couple years.

I dunno. Has Obama come out in favor of it yet?

Considering how bookshops have been obliterated by Amazon in the US and the UK I don't think the French attitude towards restraining Amazon is bad. It simply puts everyone on the same playing field.
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This ensure really big companies like Amazon can't destroy local shops only on price.

You've completely mis-identified the problem, which means mostly likely your proposed solution will not work.

Amazon is not obliterating local bookshops. The Internet obliterated the old definition of "local". Amazon is the local bookshop for most people now. I can access and browe Amazon in far less time than it took me to go visit the corner bookstore.

This effect of the Internet is most prominent on purveyors of software - virtual goods like computer software, movies, music, and yes, books. The Internet gives you instant access to those. It has had less of an impact on merchants selling physical goods. But even there, distance for the purposes of defining "local" is no longer measured in miles or km. It's measured in shipping time and cost.

Correct. And since they're not authorized by the copyright owner of the allegedly infringed work the statute should kick in.

For the umpteenth time, no that's not how the DMCA's perjury clause works.

I own the rights to a video I made about dogs. I file a DMCA takedown notice claiming your video about cats violates my copyright.

Because I am asserting you're infringing my video about dogs, and I own the copyright to that video, there is no perjury. I am legitimately filing takedown notices to protect the copyright on the dog video. That your video is about cats is irrelevant to the DMCA. By issuing a takedown notice, I am swearing that I own the rights to (or am authorized by the owner of) the dog video. It is only perjury if I don't own the dog video or am not authorized by the owners of the dog video (e.g. what those lawyers filing lawsuits against people downloading porn were doing - threatening to sue even though they weren't authorized by the real copyright owners, in the hopes that because it was porn people would roll over and settle without a fight).

There's tons of precedent for this, by the way. If I call the police and say "so and so robbed my house today" and then, when they come and investigate and find no evidence that my house was robbed I say "oh, well, not really" - I'm going to jail in that case. That's filing a false report and it's a crime.

Yes that's the way it should work. But that's not the way the DMCA is written. At this point I think the only way this will ever be fixed is if millions of everyday people start filing DMCA takedown notices against stuff owned by studios (e.g. official Justin Bieber videos on YouTube), claiming it violates the copyright on their cat or dog video. Since the DMCA puts the burden of proof entirely upon the accused with no penalty for the accuser, the only way to stop the abuse is to accuse the accusers who are abusing it.

Yeah, this could lead to the demise of the cable companies as we know them. For a long time I've said cable TV/Internet needs to be regulated as a utility. With a utility like gas or electricity, the utility company owns the pipes but is prohibited from selling the content that's carried over the pipes. They can set up a subsidiary to sell the content, but they must also allow other gas/electric suppliers to sell to customers at the same transport rates they charge their subsidiary. Those transport rates are set by a public utilities commission. Effectively, the utility company has a monopoly on the pipes (it makes no sense to install multiple gas or electric lines to each house), but due to the monopoly its transport pricing is subject to government approval and it must offer the same pricing to all sellers. Thus maintaining a free competitive market for gas and electricity.

In the U.S., cable TV/Internet has been the big exception. Because it doesn't make sense to install multiple cable lines, most municipalities only grant access to a single cable company. Yet that artificial monopoly is not regulated like a utility - the cable company completely controls the pipes and the content that's sent over those pipes. (This is a necessary step when an industry is first developing. Different companies have to be allowed to try different ways to lay down pipe and offer content over those pipes for the market to determine the most efficient way to distribute that content. But once the best method is determined, the industry is essentially a utility. At this point I think we all know TV/Internet delivery is headed towards fiber to the home.)

If Aereo can get themselves classified as a cable company, that does to cable TV what VoIP did to phone service. Right now the cable companies sell you TV, and oh by the way you can get Internet access too. With Aereo's model, you only need to get Internet from the cable company, and you can get your TV from Aereo. The cable company essentially becomes a utility giving you only Internet service. Companies like Aereo could then sell you TV service delivererd over the Internet.

Unfortunately, this means Aereo is going to have both the broadcasters and cable companies arguing against them to the FCC and the courts. While I hope they succeed like VoIP did, the influence of money in politics makes me think their chances are slim.

Close, but what's happening here is similar to what happened with Pandora and online music broadcasters. They tried to get by by paying the same royalty rates as radio stations, which are negotiated between the RIAA and all radio broadcasters en masse. The RIAA smelled an opportunity and finangled the courts so Internet radio got defined as something new and different, and thus they could negotiate rates against a much smaller and less established entity. Consequently, Internet radio pays much higher royalties than broadcast radio.

I suspect the TV stations are trying for a similar play here. It's completely illogical (like saying you're not buying the movie, you're just buying a license to view it; but then saying you need to buy a new one at full price if you're upgrading from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray), but logic is secondary to them if there's an opportunity to extract more money from people. I think that's my biggest gripe with Copyright law - since it's a completely artificial monopoly I think the rules governing it must make logical sense in order for supply and demand to work as with natural property. But instead the copyright holders are twisting that artificiality to completely illogical means that break how markets naturally work.

"Probably the best solution would be for the company to split up. The people who make the Xbox are probably weighed down by the rest of the company's ineptitude. I'd like to see those guys go their own way"

XBOX is running a version of Windows, which, is in many ways better than Linux. What's up for debate is its openness or lack thereof, but featureswise, Windows has lead Unix in a lot of ways.

Even Windows 3.1 had a better device independent rendering model than did the X terminals it competed against. And, ever since Windows NT, Windows has always had better APIs for threading while all many Unix's had (except for Solaris), was fork. DirectX is generally better than OpenGL. COM has its faults but in the long run proved to be the only binary object model that ever got used, and even the Windows desktop and shell has vastly better basic things like file dialogs than does Linux.

Visual Studio is still arguably the best IDE around and has been ever since Microsoft bought the Delphi guy over to write C#, and speaking of which, C# is a way better language than Java. Microsoft Office is still better than Open Office.

It's not that Microsoft has really sucked at the desktop, ever. They've just won so completely at it that they don't know how to do anything else right, although, I do think my Windows 8.1 phone is better than my iPhone 5s in some ways.

Air Transat 236 also glided in to a safe landing. A fuel leak in one tank and crew misdiagnosis of the problem led them to pump all the fuel in the good tank into the leaking tank, resulting in fuel starvation at cruise altitude. The incident is not as well known because the pilots have refused to talk about it.

The altitude (10 km) and distance to the final airport (120 km) when the second engine flamed out also point to a 12:1 glide ratio. Slightly better in fact as the pilot had to execute a 360 and some S-turns to bleed off altitude just prior to landing. It was an A330, which is slightly larger than a 767. Both are widebody (twin aisle) aircraft, and both were saved by the RAT providing emergency power. So while it's certainly possible to power electronics even with total engine failure, it's not something a good engineer should be designing the plane to be reliant upon in an emergency.

You do realize that a logo is a trademark issue, not copyright, and trademarks don't expire as long as they are in use?

You do realize that trademark law concerns the exchange of goods and services, not the appearance of symbols on sculptural works constructed as permanent momuments to the dead, don't you?

Copyright is one of the few things that DC Comics could plausibly assert if this is a one off produced by an artist -- i.e., the logo does not attempt to designate a good, service, or source of such goods and services.

You'll notice that the summary takes a shot in saying that the logo "should be public domain," not that it is, and that DC does not actually claim that trademark law is involved. Thanks for offering the trademark theory, if only because it provides an opportunity to show non-lawyers that trademarks are not equivalent to never-expiring copyrights.

The point of airport security isn't to stop terrorists. It's to calm and reassure the public. After every major airliner accident, there's a drop in airline travel. (Least there was back when we'd have 2-3 commercial airliner crashes a year. We're now to the point where it's so safe we go 2-5 years between accidents.) How do you think these people are traveling if they're too scared to fly? Some of them just stay home, but most of them travel by car. Where they are more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist attack.

So the point of airport security is literally security theater. Show the public, "Hey we're doing something to stop those terrorists, so it's safe to fly!" When the real goal is to stop people from getting themselves killed while driving because they're too scared of terrorists to fly.

Unfortunately, the people running the TSA never got the memo and are taking their jobs way too seriously.

That said, every time I've had a phone or laptop die from a drained battery, I've been able to turn it on, and it'll power up for at least 5-30 seconds before sensing the low battery and automatically powering off again. This is due to an intentional safety feature of Li-ion batteries - if you drain them too much, they can explode when charged. So devices are designed to shut off long before the battery reaches this point, and consequently there's always enough juice left to briefly turn the device back on again. The only way you can get to a state where the device literally will not power on is if you drain the battery, then let the device sit there for weeks or months so that it self-discharges below the voltage where the device will refuse to use the battery at all. So the guy whose phone dies while traveling shouldn't be affected by this policy change at all (unless the TSA decides to be assholes and require you to demonstrate something more than the phone booting, while not providing a standard microUSB charger).

God made humans rational beings.

Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.

If Amazon's updates cause resetting of in-app purchase flags, learn to deal with it. Part of dealing with it is to inform Amazon that their policy is broken, but it's their policy to make; if you don't like it, move on to the next or learn how to deal with it to fit your needs.

No, it's not their policy to make. You may wish it was, but (1) that's your individual opinion, (2) that's not the law, and (3) there are quite a number of people who disagree with you which, even in a representative democracy, goes quite a way to ensuring that your opinion is unlikely to become the law.

Quite a number of states, alongside the FTC, have laws governing unfair and deceptive trade practices. They've had them for quite a long time. Your ultralibertarian viewpoint does not reflect the way the world works, or apprecitate the difficulty even above-average customers have in finding good information about how a product or service actually works before purchasing it, or consider that 'learning to deal with it' or 'moving on to the next' have substantial after-the-fact costs, or actually demonstrate why we should permit a practice like 'resetting in-app purchase flags' on a routine basis.

You're perfectly happy assigning responsibility to the parents, yet you're willing to give the manufacturer/service provider a complete pass even after parents have learned the technology they use, and used the very mechanism provided by the manufacturer/service provider to deny the ability to make such purchases, only to see their efforts actively thwarted by manufacturer once they are 'on the hook'? It makes no sense.

Although we warn people 'caveat eamptor,' we do not endorse that as an absolute governing principle of business. You can neither intentionally design in nor conceal a material product defect, whether its a lock mechanism in a car or a parental control in an app store, and expect the public to say "well we just have to learn how to deal." Once you design in that sort of mechanism, it has to actually work as a reasonable person would expect it to. Otherwise, you become liable under any governing philosophy, whether it's Austrian school laissez-faire capitalism or European-style consumer protection regulation.

Oh, yes, there are MANY problems with this whole scheme. And a lot of it could be solved TOMORROW by the FCC choosing to regulate ISPs as Title II Common Carriers.

Actually, all this is probably exactly why the FCC is choosing not to regulate ISPs as common carriers. If they do that, then the copyright holders and the government have to do the legwork of tracking down and prosecuting copyright violators. The way it's set up now, they can just threaten the ISP and make the ISP do the busywork for them.