The problem is that they may well have a high IP rating when new but how long will the frequently opened cover on the charging port stay waterproof?

Sattelites come in two main varieties both of which have their problems.

GEO sattelites can cover the world with a handful of sattelites but they are a LONG way from anything on the ground and a long way up the gravity well. That limits the data rate possible with a given antenna size and RF bandwidth, it also makes them expensive to launch and makes the latency high (best case for round trip time on a GEO based sattelite internet service is ~500ms, protocols for on-demand upstream bandwidth allocation will make that much worse).

LEO sattelites have much lower radio path loss and much lower theoretical latency but each sattelite has a relatively small coverage area and worse the sattelites are constantly moving which makes use of high gain antennas difficult, requires frequent handoffs, makes it impractical to focus coverage on areas with the most demand.

A flying platform would be even closer to the ground than an LEO sattelite and would stay in a more or less fixed position allowing it to serve a fixed area. The question is can you make an economical permanent flying platform (either by lighter than air flight or by heavier than air flight with solar power)

Two reasons

1: They probablly see this as the thin end of the wedge, the first step would be botique car manufacturers selling directly. Then perhaps the major car manufacturers would look into how they can set up an "independent" company that isn't bound by the parent company's dealer relationships or look into how they can end the current dealer relationships and hence become a "dealer-free" manufacturer.
2: tesla may be a botique manufacturer now but what happens if and when battery costs drop or fuel costs rise to the point that the total cost of ownership of an electric car makes sense for most drives. Will the current major automakers adapt or will they be replaced by a new group of automakers who aren't bound by the legacy contacts of the current big players

Of course the speed you need depends on what you want/need to do with it.

1mbps is more than enough for browsing the web, filling in government forms, doing your banking, keeping in touch by email, posting on slashdot and so-on, it should even be just about enough for low resoloution youtube videos. Dialup is no longer really sufficient, the modern web has become too bloated.

Much as I like fast internet I think bringing people stuck on dialup onto some form of DSL is probablly a better use of subsidies than upgrading those in the single digit mbps to 10 mbps. It's IMO a much easier argument that 1mbps+ internet should be considered a basic public service than that 10mbps+ internet should be considered a basic public service.

I think to a certain extent "Cartoony" is what you get when you have a small pallette of bright colors and a small number of pixels to work with.

There are border controls between the UK and france becasue the UK is not part of the schengen area. Normally EU countries are required to join the schengen area but the UK and the republic of ireland negotiated themselves an exception.

If scotland joins the EU and is unable to negotiate an exception from the schengen area and the rest of the UK decides to remain outside the schengen area then scotland would be required to implement border controls with respect to the remainder of the UK.

If scotland does not join the EU then I'm not sure what the situation would be but I expect there would need to be customs controls but possiblly not full border controls.

So-far I haven't seen a good answer (that is an official answer from someone with the authority to make the descision) to the following questions

1: will the independent scotland be allowed to stay in the EU? if so will they choose to do so? if so will they get the same exemptions the UK gets or will they be forced to join the euro and the schengen area to maintain their EU membership? If they choose not to stay in the EU what will their relationship with the EU and UK be? if scotland is forced into the schengen area will the rest of the UK follow them?
2: in the event that the UK government refuses to let scotland have a currency union (which is what they are saying at the moment) and they are not forced into using the euro what will they do? will they use the UK pound unliterally? will they create their own currency but peg it at 1:1 with the UK pound? will they create their own currency and let it free-float? will they join the Euro?
3: in the event that scotland does not keep the pound which if any of the following groups will have their bank balances automatically or forciblly converted to the new currency? scotish people using scotish banks? english people using scotish banks? scotish people using english banks.
4: how will citizenship be handled (this is especially important if scotland ends up not in the EU). Will people get to chose? will they be forced to one side or the other based on where they lived at the time of independence? will people who want it be able to get dual english/scottish citizenship.
5: what will the impact on transportation and other infrastructure be? this is especially important if the answer to question 1 requires the construction of border controls at the scotish border.

Have I missed the answer to those questions or are the scots basically voting on independence without knowing the details of how it will work? how have these issues been handled in other country breakups?

You could have a system of signed routes. When you pass a route to an upstream you would add a signed statement to that affect to the route. When receiving a route from a customer or peer you would check for a valid chain of signatures leading from the owner of the IP block to the entity sending you the route.

Obviously you'd still have to trust your upstreams but you can't really avoid that. You'd also have to have some kind of central database that recorded the owners of IP blocks and the corresponding public keys.

Afaict ISP SLAs only cover the quality of the route to the ISPs border, what happens to the traffic beyond that is not (and can't really be) specified.

If you want "100% uptime and 1ms jitter" to a specific place then you buy a direct connection to that specific place you don't use the internet. If you want "100% uptime and 1ms jitter" to the whole internet that is not going to happen.

Your "medium sized ISP" is a cheapskate. Either they have only one upstream or they have multiple upstreams but aren't really taking advantage of the resiliance it gives them.

BGP is how all the major internet providers exchange routes with their customers, upstreams and peers.

A cheapskate ISP may chose to ignore the BGP information from their upstream(s) and use default routes instead. This means they can use cheaper routers but it means if they have more than one upstream they can't determine which upstream will provide the better route or indeed a route at all to the destination.

Did you read the rest of that wikipedia article.

Explosive decompression does suck but losing cargo space to inward opening doors also sucks. Afaict outward opening cargo doors are the norm on airliners*. Yes the DC-10 initially had a flawed locking design on the cargo doors and also had inadequate protection from hydralic failure of it's flight control systems and yes a couple of planeloads of people had to die before these issues were taken seriously but the overall safety record of the plane has been pretty normal compared to other planes of it's age.

The 747 also had a cargo door failure incident, fortunately it only killed a handful of people.

Afaict the main reason for retiring old airliners is not safety but economics, more modern planes tend to use less fuel per ton-mile and are also queiter (when airports are under noise restrictions quieter planes means more flights fit within the noise quota) and are easier to get spare parts for.

* At least doing a google image search for various common airliners shows outward opening doors.

TV networks in various countries buy exclusive rights to distribute the program in thier country (or sometimes a group of countries, for example EU regs mean you can't really limit a license to an individual country in the EU).

The primary rightsholder can't sell rights to distribute the program worldwide to netflix because they have already sold exclusive rights to distribute it in particular countries to various TV networks.

So getting rights to show programs in australia requires a totally new set of negotiations with totally different parties to getting rights to show those same shows in the US.

Because generally the rightsholders sign exclusive contracts with a company in each "market" (usually either a single country or a small group of countries). The result is netflix can't just go to the original creator of the content and buy a worldwide license, they have to buy licenses for each "market" from whoever controls the rights in that market.

So if netflix want's to enter a new market (e.g. australia) they have to start their negotiations for content largely from scratch (there may be some indie content that they got a worldwide license for but they are highly unlikely to get that for the big name stuff). That takes time and may not result in as good a deal as they got in their primary US market (see complaints from canadian and european netflix users about how the library sucks compared to the US one).

Now netflix have to make some attempt to keep people from other countries out to satisfy their contracts with those they bought the rights from. The question is how far do they have to go, is using a standard geolocation service suficiant or do they have to go beyond that and put in place further measures to make evading the block more difficult.

Yes distance learning institutions exist and some of them even have a good reputation but they have remained an exception, not revolutionised education.

Well "incorrectly" is a loaded term. Si prefixes are base-10 but the byte is not an SI unit. The IEC issued a standard saying that binary versions of the prefixes should be indicated with an extra i but only long after the use of those binary prefixes without the i was well established in the computer software industry.