The whole idea rests on some questionable pop history. Much of what people claim to be the product of the "space race" was developed far earlier for military or commercial uses. Velcro, for example, commonly cited as NASA breakthrough was actually patented in Switzerland in 1948. If we're going to pour resources into something, instead of doing a pointless vanity project like a moon landing let's do something useful this time. Nuclear fusion, for example, or diabetes research.

I am bothered by technical capabilities being copyrighted instead of patented, and thus never expiring. Apple's Macintosh "look and feel", anyone? Most of that isn't a particular style of horizontal line thru a window bar at the top, something that might be a legitimate copyrightable thing.

I understand what you are saying, but the public are not the rightful owners, either. After the patent or copyright expires, nobody is, and hence anyone is free to use it.

This is a philosophical difference, and I refuse to participate in some The Glory Of The People rhetoric. You don't get to own something simply by pure numbers.

$70k in no way puts you in the "poorest residents" category in California. That income places him at the very top of the third quintile, above the median state income, which is around $60k.

It's worse than that, though. Grid maintenance costs are rolled into the per-kWh charges in most places (definitely in CA). The power company is buying power from its suppliers for five or six cents, and then selling it to consumers at a much higher rate (22 cents the last time I looked). That difference mostly goes to pay for the power company's overhead. So when you sell power back to the power company at retail rates your neighbors are subsidizing your use of the grid.

Looks like taxing the shit out of yourselves is the way to go!

No, I am Poor-ticus!

Whitebox testing would point to exercising an ellipsis if treated specially. But good old blackbox billions of random strings should stumble across an ellipsis surrounded by non-Latin script characters, and fairly quickly.

For complicated c9mbos, perhaps. But random string generators should relatively quickly stumble across an elipsis in the middle of Latin or Arabic characters.

I wouldn't a priori suspect a string display routine to have a problem, but the guy who wrote it to do some gymnastics switching character sets should, and should have run such a test in a debugger ready to trap bad memory accesses.

Not necessarily. You could use AI to reject things if it gets scared.

The patent itself is worthless to find any basic, quick facts, for that matter.

I feel sorry for you if you actually believe this.

It's a question of timing, though. Most voters don't think about politics much, so even just a few hours at the right time could be critical.

"Unfair competition", against government laws whose purpose is, against the concept of freedom, to restrict competition? Against a government/big business coalition to carve up the rights to sell to people-qua-owned cattle?

How ludicrous.

> there's'nt

Your second apostrophe should be between the "n" and the "t".