Firstly, I agree that 14 years or so is plenty of time for a copyright, but I'd like to comment on this point:

The current length of copyright is approximately a lifetime, ostensibly to ensure their works can benefit the author until their death. However it's approximately the lifetime of a person. A corporation can easily live longer.

If we agree that:
  a) a lifetime that is a valid length of time for copyright
  b) companies can create work and/or own copyright
  c) corporate person-hood is a valid concept

Then why not extend copyright to the lifetime of a corporation too? Or to generalize, the lifetime of the rights-holder... and keeping in mind that these rights are transferable, it's clear that appropriate wording would make it easy to extend copyright in perpetuity.

It's not a big leap from here to there, and I wouldn't be surprised if a draft has already been written and is in a draw somewhere today.

So you'd be OK with paying Babbages descendents a royalty for every computing device implemented since then?

Rubbish. Cars are insanely cheap in the US, and $40K USD is typical medium-sized family car price in many places.

Clearly it's industry best practice.

Physical stores in the USA used to be difficult to buy from too. An international transfer was scary, and filling out a shipping form too hard. That's changed in a big way over the last few years and lots of folks are making money selling things outside the country... you know, exporting... bringing new money into the economy... offsetting debt and stuff...

Hopefully these guys will eventually realise their bean counters estimated wrong and opening their markets to billions of new customers is actually a good idea.

That would be pretty cool. You'd want to include topology in that calculation too, because 10 miles on a flat freeway is very different to 10 miles of mountain road.

Perhaps Nissan knows something about their batteries and BMS that he doesn't, and the false zero reading is there to ensure the batteries last as long as they're intended to? Last I heard, you weren't supposed to completely discharge lithium batteries if you wanted to ensure a usefully long service life.

Nice, you figured it out. The trick here is to offload your support costs to "the cloud" so to speak. Crowd-source your support and get better results for minimal cost. And no recourse.

Try it and see. X-Plane lets you fly on Mars. Yes, there's a Linux version too, and you can find a bunch of electric (and/or rocket) aircraft for Mars on X-Plane.org.

I'm surprised actually, because E Ink does have a colour product available. Maybe it just came too late for Amazon product development.

http://www.eink.com/display_products_triton.html

My guess is we need an experiment that lets us "see" 4 (or more) dimensional things.

Imagine a flat-lander trying to figure out why his circle seems to pull other things towards it when he's not aware of the 3rd dimension which makes it a sphere with large mass... or why different circles of the same size behave differently, because he can't see how far through his 2D plane they are.

If we can do that (and maybe we can't) then we'll be closer to making some sense of this invisible mass.

Which is how it started, back in the day, albeit with a different definition of neighbour. I expect it'll be wireless and encrypted this time around though.

Yes, because they're already on the list.

It appears to be a VM Motori / GM Daewoo powerplant.

But, but, but... shareholders!