From The Right Stuff:

Gordon Cooper: You boys know what makes this bird go up? FUNDING makes this bird go up.
Gus Grissom: He's right. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

You might even say this opens windows into trade mark law.

the libertarian solution would be to remove these blocks and open up the options.

We had such a situation at the turn of the 20th century. There were too many poles and wires. A more recent example is the fiber that was laid in the late 1990s. In some cities, each fiber company was allowed to lay its own fiber. This actually resulted in some streets being cut into just weeks after they were patched over from the previous fiber install.

Any sane solution to the Comcast problem requires a public infrastructure. The free market would work well re-selling service over that public infrastructure. That's what we're arguing about here anyway--free access to a public entity, namely the Internet. The irony of libertarians arguing for a pure free market on something that was created by the government never gets old.

I figured as much; but don't knock that. Talk to anybody who has wrecked the plastic on their sport motorcycle. If you could print that stuff at a reasonable price, that wold be HUGE.

Copper and silver have anti-microbial properties. This problem was solved centuries ago by pure dumb luck.

[nothing good] ever comes outa Africa.

Drink some coffee, google around a bit, and get back to us.

I take it to mean 1/3.

There's no way a country that small, and that close to the US could hold out as a communist nation in the face of unrestricted trade with the US - it'd become so utterly dependent on the US that it'd simply have no choice but to bow down to US wishes and culture.

Have you been to Berkeley? Joking aside, the US is starting to have more trouble keeping its own states in line on issues like pot, gun control, immigration and even monetary policy. Living next door and trading DVDs is no guarantee that you will always get along.

They'd totally be into this... unless they've already done it and you're violating their patents. In that case, hide resume from Japan.

If I'd say I'm underwhelmed, it would be a big understatement.

Every major device announcement that Apple made in the recent years was always driven by one thing: It had a purpose. It provided something that was lacking in the world. Not a totally new invention in many cases, but a solution. Smartphones existed before the iPhone, but it is clear that the smartphone market history can be divided into "before the iPhone" and "after the iPhone" - just look at pictures of smartphones from those two periods.

iWatch? I know it was rumoured for two years or so, but in all that time I couldn't see which problem it solves and what meaning to life it has, and I still can't. It seems the Jobs spirit has left, because this is clearly a device that was made in response to the rumours about it, not because someone knew what he was doing.

Except for the battery, a street car was often an electric "bus". It drew the power from overhead lines. These were common until we were forced into automobiles by a combination of post-war cultural attitudes and downright bamboozling by the likes of GM.

So yes. Switch back. There. FTFY.

Is there any precedent for a country to create new land like this, and claim territory around it? If international law is good for anything, it seems like this would be a good time to cite it.

Wow. I was rather embarrassed over not having read TFA and everybody pointing out the finger-print thing. After reading your post I think I'm standing up pretty good by comparison.

Before: That guy has an iPhone that I can fence for $100, and maybe he has about $100 in cash.

After: That guy has an iPhone with a credit limit in that's probably in the $1000s, and I can buy stuff with that until he wakes up in a ditch.

E*D*M*T*P*J*

Where E=documented experience, D=degree or other credential, M=motivation, T=talent, P=practice, and J= the number of jobs available.

If you have a really high E for COBOL, maybe it will overcome the low J. Same deal with a lot of these other unpopular languages. That's not to say "life" won't develop on some unlikely "planet", but it's not the best place to look.

Standard disclaimer: I'm leaving out some factors, and any ridiculous inference you've just made is not what I meant to imply.