This strikes me as highly non-obvious, do you think the average person spends more than $10/month purchasing music?

Annual US music sales are about $7bn

With the US population at 320 million that's only ~$22/year per capita, not counting Spotify's cut (and whatever portion of that already comes from streaming) that's means if no-one bought music any more only 22% of the US population would have to stream to make up the difference.

I doubt there are many people spending $120/year purchasing music long term. $10/month strikes me as a wildly lucrative prospect for the music industry.

It's a combination of three things.

1) Harper isn't nearly as bad as the US right. There are certainly elements of that in his party, but he would still be a better fit as a Democrat than Republican in the US.

2) First past the post exaggerates strong minorities into big majorities. He should be PM but he shouldn't have a majority.

3) Even being a decent PM, he's still too far right for Canadians. The reason he's stuck around is he is good at winning elections, and the Liberal candidates not nearly as much. That might change, since Justin Trudeau took over he has actually out polled Harper fairly regularly, but whether Trudeau holds up through an election campaign is a big question.

My interpretation of the comment was that 88.2% of Linux kernel developers have Linux kernel development in their job description.

I think I understand your argument. But I think there's an important distinction: Is dead company A selling the technology to new company B, or just the right to use the technology?

If they're selling the technology, ie "company A knew how to do X, lets buy their IP so we can do X" then they're contributing something and new company B benefits from the exchange.

But if the situation is more like "we want to do X, but it turns out company A has patents on X, therefore we need so pay off those patents" then I'm a lot more skeptical. Sure company A's innovative investors make some money off of B, but that money came from B's innovative investors so I'm not sure you're actually promoting investment in innovation. Not only that but the patents added a lot of overhead, cash that would have been better used innovating by both parties.

As to my point I'm very skeptical Eolas actually did anything to further the development of browser plugins. Why are they entitled to a fortune when they never actually contributed anything of value?

The evil is the term of the patent.

Change the term of software patents from 20 years to somewhere between 2 and 5 years (maybe hardware gets to be 10).

Small companies and independent inventors can still develop something new and have a healthy head start in either selling it or developing it into a product.

But 2-5 years isn't long enough to build an ecosystem, so you don't get a ridiculous situation where someone suddenly owns a piece of a fundamental technology like Bluetooth or MP3.

Moreover it fixes the incentives regarding patents. The current 20 year term means you can patent and forget, hoping someone else doesn't the work of developing the idea and you can then swoop in for license fees, that's where the patent trolls come in.

But a short term doesn't give you that option, the only way your patent is going to have value before it expires is if you make a push to build something with it, which is the kind of the point.

FTA:
Currently, Scholz's star is a small, dim red dwarf in the constellation of Monoceros, about 20 light years away. However, at the closest point in its flyby of the solar system, Scholz's star would have been a 10th magnitude star - about 50 times fainter than can normally be seen with the naked eye at night.

Unless it's gravitational effect was way larger I'm not sure it would be large and close enough to have an affect.

It doesn't strike me as a scam as much as a sincere attempt by a group of moderately accomplished yet fairly typical geeks to take their best shot and go as far as they can.

I look at their plan and my thought is that it's more-or-less what I would do if I really wanted to launch a mission to mars. The big asterix is cost and technical expertise. They say they need 6 billion which might be feasible, big Hollywood blockbusters can run $200 million and Olympic broadcast/sponsorship would be enough to cover the budget, so if they get something credible (or at least entertaining) going then the networks might get interested. More likely might be some eccentric billionaire willing to dump a large percentage of their net worth into a vanity project.

For me the big thing is the technical and organizational expertise, I suspect they're massively underestimating the difficulty of the technical challenges and it will be a very long time before they've built up the organizational expertise to even address them. And because they're underestimating the technical difficulty I also suspect the budget is massively underestimated.

I suspect the best case for the project is a moderately successful media venture that either sets up the organization for a proper attempt in 20+ years, or spurns a government to action.

I think it explains half, mostly the trolling half.

The other half is the fact that people speak up when they're passionate about something, and there's nothing that makes you as passionate as thinking you know the truth when everyone else is wrong.

Personally I think the solution is to speak up even when you don't care that much. You can't convince the fringe players that they're wrong, but you can demonstrate to them (and others) that the fringe viewpoint is a minority one.

Assuming they can find a way to avoid people scamming them off widescale all they have to do is bake the price of the new battery into the car.

Car rental companies have built a business around lending people a very significant asset, I don't see why electric car manufacturers couldn't do the same with batteries.

Why buy Tesla when you can hire them for a lot less:

Musk also said Apple has been trying to poach Tesla employees, offering $250,000 signing bonuses and 60 percent salary increases.

“Apple tries very hard to recruit from Tesla,” he said. “But so far they’ve actually recruited very few people.”

So is Apple making those offers because they think those employees are that valuable to Apple, or to Tesla?

You own the car but the auto-maker owns the battery and automatically replaces bad batteries free of charge.

You go up to the charging station swap out the spent for the new, the spent goes to a charging station that runs a diagnostic during charging, if the battery fails the diagnostic the attendant sets it aside, then once a week they call the automaker who sends someone around to pick up the duds and drop off replacements.

Since owners don't need to buy replacement batteries there's less of a market for counterfeits, and if you can make the verification works the only extra labour is the weekly exchange.

Fine in theory until the officer opens with "can you please hand me your phone so I can check your license information".

People have trouble saying no to completely unreasonable and unnecessary requests from cops, how many people do you think will start a police interaction by rejecting what sounds like a reasonable request for a standard procedure?

The same could be said of Tesla Motors.

Established car companies have a brand in that market to maintain. Google has no such burden, consumers have far lower expectations of a Google car and if it does fail it doesn't really affect Google's other offerings.

They can if you set them up.

If I want to search youtube I just type 'y search phrase' into the URL bar, same with wikipedia, imdb, etc.

I think this is less the case of "we found a bug in package X" and more like "we've been getting a lot of attacks from phishing group Y, we've been doing Z to stop them".

That's not the kind of info you can disclose publicly since it tells attackers where you're vulnerable, if you're going to do this kind of thing you're going to have to make it a small circle.