Not to mention any more considerable violation results in a lawsuit against the violator, and in that case eBay must provide whatever help available in identifying and locating the violator.

Here, we're playing whack-a-mole, with Google pretending to help while in reality they protect the violators.

That's a very selfish approach.

What about giving of yourself freely to the world? Contributing - and making sure your contributions stay around, available to these, who need them?

Maybe they aren't significant enough for someone to establish some estate that would perpetuate publishing them; that doesn't mean they are useless - and sure once I'm dead I won't care what happens to them and the rest of the world, but currently I am alive and I do care.

Thermal death of the universe will happen long after we develop cross-multiverse travel.

I thought I could connect with the world of living over the Ethernet but it appeared not to be what I hoped.

Modify your robots.txt and allow the Wayback Machine to archive it. Once it's there, feel free to shut it down. People who need it, will find it in the archive.

You're way optimistic with that "forever". Flash memory is based on electromagnetic charge which has the nasty property of leaking.

I tried some MicroSD cards that's been sitting in my drawer for past 4 years. All needed to be reformatted. SSDs may retain data longer, but it's by no means 'eternal'.

Cherry-picked for "a week" yes, but still disturbing. It's not an issue for datacenters, but for offices.

Imagine an office PC set next to the radiator - oh, the employees are free to set up their desks as they like, and they really don't care about stuff like that. Given employee going for a holiday break for a month, taking the family for a skiing trip. The PC experiencing 50C on regular basis. That's quite enough to cause the data loss.

Yes, in a responsible company there will be backups - or the data will be held on network drives. Visit your average office and see if they use these responsible practices; roughly half don't. Yes, once that occurs any admin who isn't a total idiot will spot the reason for the problem and recommend moving the PC away from the radiator. Still, the problem is not an impossible one - just needing a bad set of circumstances; iterate over enough PCs and offices and it *will* happen.

Reduce the number of flights to what can be comfortably served by existing infrastructure. Reduce maximum planes size. Make it a domestic terminal for flights to several major airports where large, intercontinental flights depart.

As I understand all the problems originate from too high traffic at various points and all of them would need to be expanded. So what if you instead reduced the traffic to the narrowest choke point size?

Do build a large airport away from the city. If someone goes on a 14 hour flight, an extra hour of commute won't change much, especially if it means comfortable and organized boarding experience. OTOH it makes a difference if you want to visit your aunt seven hours of driving away, if you can get there through one hour of commute, half-hour of boarding and an hour of flight.

Closing down all that existing infrastructure would be a huge waste of money. Smaller planes mean safer landing. Less traffic means safety in air. Fewer passengers mean the terminals, parking lots and public communication will be able to handle the numbers comfortably, without need for upgrades.

Sure the solution shares some disadvantages of leaving the airport running at current capacity, and some disadvantages of shutting it down and building a new one - but it seems to me it resolves the worst of disadvantages of both.

https://w2.eff.org/IP/DMCA/Fel...

I tend to hoard my old electronics, for scavenging them for parts when I need them.
So, a dedicated GPS-Bluetooth ding that was horrible at both; I tried to use it with a netbook for geocaching, it didn't work out. A terrible idea, powered over USB but needing Bluetooth for communication and with enough quirks to make it useless.
my two old Windows Mobile phones, same cheap Medion knock-offs, after charger of one broke I found the other costing maybe 30% more than a new charger so I bought it, same model. Funny thing, external GPS powered from car charger socket. They worked fine for a time, but then the support for that version of Windows Mobile became so scarce I couldn't get any up-to-date maps, and MiniSD became a dead standard.
My first Android phone, still kept as a backup, original G1. A very nice phone, I miss the trackball. I still use it if I'm unable to use my new phone for some reason.
My current Android phone.
If I buy a new phone it will likely have GPS in it too. I know if I bought one generation newer SLC camera, it would come with GPS as well. The tablet I have doesn't have GPS but it's crap; if I wanted a better one I'd have GPS, simply because every better tablet has one.

If you stay up-to-date with the tech - buying only phones and tablets and not discarding old ones - you'll have 6-8 GPS devices easily.

You mean you'll be able to do "apt-get dist-upgrade" in Windows?

It doesn't matter how trivial and stupid the DRM is - what matters is that circumventing it is illegal.

Like these AudioCDs that had a data track that would auto-install some malware that breaks your CD writing capability. Circumventing it required holding shift down while inserting the disk, to prevent autoplay from starting. The guy who published that information was arrested for "providing tools for circumvention of DRM".

Their whole DRM could have consisted in a single notch in the edge, and as result placing scissors next to the coffee maker would make you a felon.

You're as much a customer as a product. You are provided service and your *basic* customer data is protected.

But more advanced data - like data usage, profile of usage, tracking information, network of contacts, all that "meta" stuff - is a product you manufacture and they sell or use to optimize their service (read: give you less, get you to pay more). And the police can just request free access to that product.

the distance to the visible horizon - the most distant object we can see - isn't growing, it's *shrinking*.

Not yet.
We have a much more firm limit in the form of the image of the Big Bang and it's still within the Hubble Sphere. We technically *could* see past it, but even if we had the hardware, it's pretty much opaque.

Yes, as the universe ages, the image moves away from us at c + expansion rate, and eventually it will vanish behind the cosmic event horizon forever, and since then its acceleration will begin to swallow objects making less available for observation. But we have a good few billion years until the cosmological limits imposed by space expansion become our worry. Until then, our theoretical limits are caused by the structure of the universe, and practical limits - by $$$.

That's only if our telescopes could reach the Hubble Sphere. That way light speed + space expansion would be our distance limit and only time would allow us to see objects between the Hubble Sphere and the Cosmic Space Horizon.

But so far with our best equipment we are barely reaching a third of this distance and our limits are still of technological nature - or more accurately of economical nature (we *know* how to build better telescopes that would reach farther, but we don't have the budget).