I guess it depends on who you believe, but there have been climate scientists that have said we are beyond the tipping point, that even if we reduce emissions warming will happen. Ok well if that's true, and if it is true that the warming will be a net harmful thing, then some kind of geo engineering would be necessary. You can't very well say "Reducing CO2 won't fix the problem, but let's do as much of that as we can and only do that and then cry about the problem!"

Apparently, the patent office initially rejects 90% of patents, but that figure is slightly misleading. The patent submitter simply has to rework, rework, appeal, and you can still get it approved. What percentage of patents are *eventually* approved after the resubmissions and appeals? In 2012 that number was calculated at 90% approved!

Moreover, the patent filing fee is kept even if the patent is rejected, and fees are also required to resubmit or appeal. So, there's financial incentive to first reject the patent a few times, perhaps force an appeal, and then finally approve it.

I'm not saying they're strictly considering revenue here, but... yeah, let's face it. The patent examiners would probably get in big trouble if they made it too difficult to file patents and keep those fees coming it.

In case you haven't seen it yet...

Manufacturing businesses with fewer than 500 employees are officially categorized as "small businesses" in the US. For some other types of companies like say, computer services, the amount of revenue is used as a metric, with the cut-off being $21 million average receipts for the past three years. The amount varies by the type of business.

Typical government... making a simple thing as whether a company is "small" or not into such a complicated issue.

It's because there's currently a rather pronounced backlash against all anti-terrorist provisions right now, because politicians and three-letter agencies keep using it as a "sky is falling, please cede more of your freedoms, privacy, and dignity to the state" excuse. And people are tired of it.

Yes, punishment for "material support" of terrorism is fine in theory, but only if you trust the government to justly apply that charge. And trust in the government is in short supply these days, at least among some demographics.

The modest carbon tax in British Columbia has cut emissions in that province by 16% while emissions grew in the rest of Canada by 3% (a rate that likely would have grown higher still if Ontario and Quebec weren't also working to reduce emissions). A carbon tax, by itself, might not reach a 50% reduction, but it could spur changes in consumer behavior. For instance, now that gas prices have fallen again, sales of SUVs are increasing again after declining during our last period of high prices. That's probably a missed opportunity to reduce emissions.

Without a carbon tax, the United States is aiming at (and currently looks like it will hit) a target of 20% below 2005 levels. If a carbon tax had been added to the policy, the United States might have been able to hit 40% below 2005 levels, which is not that far from 50%.

Frankly, I doubt you understand politics. Despite your claims the parties are different entities although with very similar goals (power and control). In some areas, the policies of the parties are indistinguishable because they are appealing to same people for funding and trying to get same people to vote for them. Both parties need a majority of votes to win so they are by necessity fighting over the same people in the American center.

Frankly, in the current American system, large differences are not sustainable because if the difference loses votes, it will be abandoned and if it gains votes it will be copied or mirrored by the other party. The American system, whether by design or by accident, generates nearly identical parties.

It's not that the parties are the same organization, because they clearly are not, it's that the American political system is so poorly designed that serving the people brings few benefits when compared to playing internal politics for advantages and begging money from sponsors to fund election campagins.

Okay, shoot, I feel sort of bad now. I thought twenty years was pretty obvious as a joke. Honestly, I have no idea how long this project took.

I've worked on a five year project that easily topped half a million lines of code, maybe more, with well over a hundred developers working on it. And oddly enough, it actually was a videogame (as mentioned later in this thread) - an MMO, which actually shares some characteristics with such a system, I suppose. No one died if the game crashed or calculated something incorrectly, although we certainly took every crash very seriously, especially the game servers. It was still damn hard to get everything working correctly.

It's not unreasonable that an FAA-sponsored project with critical safety tolerances could easily have been a decade in the making or more. I'd say that twenty years, while not out of the realm of possibility, still sounds like an awfully long time though.

Well, yes, but keep in mind they started on this project 20 years ago. It's about time now to start on this new system's replacement, which is scheduled to go operational in 2035.

Bleh, after looking into this a bit I think it's even worse than that.

Autodesk is calling this an "open platform", but it's most certainly not "open" in the same way we'd usually talk about more permissive "open source" licenses, such as BSD or Apache. So, it's more of a "free as in beer" sort of open, as far as I can tell. They've got a bunch of cloud-related features that (I think) are intended to facilitate transfer of models from design to manufacturing regions, but it looks like it's all very tightly under Autodesk's control, and they're very clear that they're not giving anyone else any control or licensing rights to the code or platform.

Check out the Spark Terms of Service. Open, my ass. How do you get "open" out of that? They're simply defining open as "anyone can use it if they sign up with us", which is about as "open" as Facebook. I was initially hopeful that this might be a good thing for the 3D printing industry, but all it would do is cede a massive amount of control over the 3D printing process to Autodesk, and I can't see how that's a good thing at all.

Meh. Now I'm sort of hoping this dies.

Heh, you know that's true! Thanks for sharing. It's always fun to learn about small cultural differences like that which you normally never learn unless you go live and work in another country.

One of these generations I'm hopeful the US will eventually go metric as well, but we seem to be unusually stubborn about that sort of thing.

Who's "we"? Certainly not NASA.

Anything expecting to make contact with another celestial body undergoes sterilization for exactly this reason, which should take care of most organisms. And of course, it would need to survive the trip and eventual impact, as well as then miraculously be adaptable to Mercury's incredibly hostile climate. In this particular case, the probability of native contamination is deemed so low that only a level I (lowest of five levels) decontamination procedure is needed.

Please. The entire OS is still smaller than a single Netflix HD movie. And disk space costs pennies per GIGABYTE. The entire feature will probably add a few dozen megabytes to the OS at *most*, which translates into a couple of extra seconds of downloading and about a tenth of a penny worth of disk space.

The question is sort of answered in the article if you read between the lines:

So, the fuel was needed to keep the orbit stable, and without that, it degraded and impacted the planet. It's likely they didn't have enough fuel to even break away from orbit, and if they did, it would have shortened the mission duration. And to what end? It's not like it harms anything. It's just another crater on the planet.

Yes, because we certainly don't want our PCs to actually do new and interesting things, right? What's "bloat" to you is a "feature" to someone else. And when you have over a billion people using PCs, your OS has to support a lot of different features.

Do you know what a "lean" OS is? It's an OS that nobody actually uses because it doesn't have the features they want.