I work at a facility with a large number of CNC machines making high tech stainless parts. Usually someone has to reverse engineer the old part. Someone has to draw parts in solidworks. Someone has to figure out what size the raw material has to be cut to, before it goes into the CNC. Someone has to load material into the CNC and know how to position it and run the machine. Someone has to order raw material. Someone has to be out trying to find customers. Someone has to make the raw materials at a vendor. Someone has to drive the trucks that deliver raw materials and take away finished goods. The actual cutting of metal might be automated but there are plenty of related jobs which are not.

Or any other instrument. I bought a $150 banjo, a $12 electronic tuner, and a $15 book (ISBN 978-1883206444) about 5 weeks ago. I've only had time to put in about 8 sessions of 30-60 minutes but that's all it took to start sounding somewhat good. I was concerned I would annoy my wife to death but the banjo sounds good even in the hands of a beginner.

Video games are not a commodity like brown sugar. There may be slight differences between brown sugar manufacturers but 99% of people aren't going to notice. There may be "open world third person shooter with grappling hooks" games available for Linux, but I don't want to play "open world third person shooter with grappling hooks", I want to play Just Cause 2. If Just Cause 2 isn't in that 1/3 of games that Linux supports, then no, the progress on games for Linux isn't enough for me.

Have you actually tried to use the streaming regularly? For me, the input lag is significant enough to make it a nonstarter. There are a lot of little quirks too. I'm very happy they added the feature, but it isn't usuable for some games.

That's pretty much what we have now in many areas of the US (not all). It is called Locational Marginal Pricing, or LMP. You can see various realtime pricing maps by searching Google for "LMP map". Here's one of them.

The problem is that the people advocating for "net metering", AKA "I want to sell my power at full retail rates", don't want to pay to keep the grid maintained. The LMP price is wholesale. Getting that power to where it is needed requires transmission lines, and transmission lines need maintenance and have a basically fixed capacity. Therefore, there are real costs involved in transporting electricity from where it is generated, to where it is needed. "Net metering" is a fancy way of saying that you don't want to pay those costs.

Generation costs (wholesale cost) + Grid transmission fees = retail price

You are more than welcome to run an extension cable to your neighbor, but if people want to sell to the grid, they need to accept that the grid costs money to maintain, and demanding that utilities pay retail rates for wholesale electricity isn't going to happen.

Maybe he invented a "better way to do things", which was ignored for some time because changing would have required breaking the inertia of proven technologies. Then when companies today are trying to shave 0.2s from boot times, or improve performance by 3%, they see the value in doing things differently. I could easily see that happening.

Oh really? Because it sounds like they are basically shutting out the adult industry from their Blogger platform. If they wanted to maximize money, they would analyze adult content and serve up relevent ads, the same as any other industry. Budweiser certainly doesn't have a problem with selling alcohol to strip clubs. Johnson & Johnson doesn't take offense when adult stores stock K-Y Jelly. Google's business is analyzing data and serving up ads. Not leveraging a specific type of data to make money, for seemingly moral reasons, doesn't strike me as benefiting the stockholders.

Paid music is a relatively recent innovation. Back in the day, people made music for fun, without pay. Then we went through a period where the very wealthy financed music, either by paying musicians a salary to hang around with the King and play things on request, or by wealthy individuals commissioning music to be written.

The concept of the average Joe paying for music is only about as old as devices which could record and play back music. In addition, this time period almost completely overlaps with the time period in which we had free broadcast radio, where you could just pay a 1-time fee for some hardware and listen to the radio with no additional costs.

And SiriusXM is a nasty company to deal with to boot. Tons of hidden fees, subscriptions are renewed in sneaky ways, and they treat their customers like crap. I bought a brand new car a year or so back. The Dealer "registered" the radio with SiriusXM, but this doesn't mean that the radio was active. It wasn't, and the radio wouldn't play anything from the satellite and demanded that I call SiriusXM. I was going on a 2 month business trip and decided to call Sirius when I got back to start the free 3-month trial. When I called them, they told me that they couldn't give me the full 3 months because my dealer "registered" the radio with them 3 months before. I fully expected them to cave if I escalated the issue high enough, but they refused to budge.

No. The test is usually what "a reasonable person" would have thought, not what "The VICTIM" thought. There are lots of unreasonable people in the world who are crazy and would be fearful if someone tried to shake their hand in greeting. This also defeats the problem of victims who thought one thing at the time of the incident then later changed how they thought of the incident. Rather than debate what Joe was thinking about (impossible to argue/debate) we can make arguments on what a "reasonable person" might have thought.

That's the entire point of a class action suit. To stop powerful companies from doing a large number of small harms and getting away with it.

Police used to issue tickets for these things. But sitting in a speed trap maximizes more revenue. I have never heard of anyone in my lifetime (30 years) getting a ticket for actual unsafe driving, despite seeing it every day. Everyone I know has gotten a speeding ticket however.

Same as North Korea. And the US to some extent. You need a big bad enemy to keep people distracted from the real problems.

Maybe the nations of the world should meet and discuss such a protocol. It will probably take a couple months to round up all those diplomats. I propose mid-April. The cherry blossoms should be blooming in Japan around that time. How about meeting in Kyoto? Beautiful city with plenty of high class hotel rooms.

What we really need is better crowdsourcing funding of scientific studies. Big business bankrolls their own science all the time, often paying university professors to do their R&D for them. Marijuana enthusiasts need a mechanism to fund studies too. I would be happy to drop a lot of money on rigorous studies into marijuana effects. There is an incredible amount we don't know. Just as an example, I don't know of any study which tries to pin down the various effects of marijuana by comparing vaporization / ingestion (THC + CBD + ??) and combustion (THC + CBD + CO2 + CO + toulene + benzene + soot/tar + ???). Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of these nasty combustion products are responsible for "couch-lock". They might be responsible for other effects but we just don't know.