Please send me more of your "society" dollars - I'll make sure they're well-spent.
Between 2008 and 2014 the Fed used Quantitative Easing to create $4 trillion dollars out of thin air. If you want your share, go re-finance your house for 3.5%. You're welcome.
There is no way the government should be paying full retail to the telcos for this. Most of the cost of an Internet connection is paying for infrastructure, which is a sunk cost. The marginal cost of delivering Internet in urban areas to people who would not otherwise subscribe, is very low.
They also charge more than most weekly magazines.
The Economist charges more per magazine, but if you consider the amount of news you get, it is actually cheaper. The Economist is mostly actual news and analysis. Time, Newsweek, and most other "news" magazines contain a huge amount of photo spreads, celebrity gossip, ads, and other fluff.
They use a set of well known frequencies, usually 2.4Ghz WiFi
In a dense urban area, there would be dozens or hundreds of 2.4Ghz transmitters close enough to be a threat. A good drone can move fast. It could be over the fence and into the rose garden in seconds, and could carry enough of an exposive payload to kill someone. There would be insufficient time for a human to react, so any defense would need to be automated. Maybe the president should permanently relocate to Camp David. Is there any reason he (or she) needs to be in downtown DC?
I guarantee there are two people out there right now
Two people are not "a lot". The vast majority of people, even non-techies, can understand that if their files are not on their own computer, yet still exist, then they are somewhere else.
While the cloud provider might have better bandwidth, the non-techie may not.
If I share photos via the cloud (e.g. Dropbox), I upload them once, and then family, friends, etc. can view them dozens of times, using Dropbox's bandwidth, not mine.
I store customer facing content in "the cloud". This includes webpages, images, databases, etc. I only need to upload this content once. Then it is downloaded by others thousands of times. So my cloud vendor needs to have far more bandwidth that I need to have.
But that is counter balanced by owing it to their editors and share holders to skip those few minutes and facts to publish an article that will catch more readers eyes.
They can still do that, while reporting accurately. They just need to include a disclaimer in the article that there was no peer review, and it likely total nonsense. Responsible publications have articles about unconfirmed preliminary research all the time, they are just careful to label it as such.
A lot of nontechnical people don't understand that "moving services to the cloud" is sometimes precisely moving services to someone else's servers in someone else's rack in someone else's datacenter(s).
I think everyone understands that. How else could it possibly work? The cloud vendors may not be perfect, but they likely have better reliability, better bandwidth, better backups, and better security than a "nontechnical" person could provide for themselves.
How much longer do you think this planet will be able to support the exponential growth of the human population?
If present population trends continue, including both the first and second derivatives, the population will peak at about 9.5 billion between 2050 or 2060, and then begin to decline.
Clean water, land, food, they are all going to start costing more soon
In nominal terms, they will, but not as a proportion of people's total income. So they will cost more, but be more affordable. Resource consumption has increasingly become decoupled from economic growth, as technology improves efficiency.
If we could stop starting wars and cut the military we could easily afford it.
A more realistic option would be to fund space travel by selling ice cream made from unicorn milk.
How about collaboration, a team can do more than single entity
How about we focus on different goals? The Chinese are focused on establishing a human presence on the moon. America is focused on robotic exploration of Mars, the outer solar system, and asteroids. That seems like a good division of resources.
Close collaboration can be a victim of political friction caused by, say, your partner invading one of your allies.
The moon race is not a good model for success. It squandered huge amounts of resources, while having few long term goals beyond "winning". The glory of the Apollo landings was followed by decades of aimlessness.
Here's the trick: You and I know this, but the average schlub out there does not.
Science journalists should be better than "average schlubs". They owe it to their readers to do at least a few minutes of fact checking before publishing.
AC is still the only way to send electricity any distance.
No, most modern long distance transmission uses high voltage direct current. The main advantage of AC, is that it was easier to step from one voltage to another using transformers, a technology from the 1800s. With modern solid state DC to DC converters, that is no longer an issue.
I am bothered by technical capabilities being copyrighted instead of patented
Interfaces, including APIs, should be neither copyrightable nor patentable. There is precedent for this in prior supreme court decisions concerning the interface for printer cartridges. In principle, this is no different.
Why because the court asked for the government's opinion?
No. Because the government's opinion sounds like it was written by Oracle's general counsel
since global ore reserves of current substrates such as silicon and aluminum dioxide are rare and almost depleted.
Indeed. Silicon is already down to only 30% of the earth's crust, and aluminum has dwindled to only 8%. We are down to our last few peta-tonnes.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion
