Without getting into whether Scotland is an appropriate site for a spaceport... Orbits can be broadly divided into two categories - equatorial and polar.

Equatorial orbits are aligned close to the equator. The most useful one are geosynchronous (slight inclination so its ground track is a small figure-8 called an amalemma) or geostationary (zero inclination so they stay above the same spot on the equator). The satellites stay above the same general spot on earth, so are always "visible" to ground stations and satellite dishes. These orbits have to be about 36,000 km above the earth's surface to match the earth's daily rotation (23h 56m). Lower altitude equatorial orbits aren't as useful because their ground track is limited to a swath of latitudes centered around the equator. The primary reason they're used is because of your point (2) - they take less energy to achieve if you launch from close to the equator. If you just want to be in space and don't particularly care about where in space (e.g. the ISS), an equatorial low earth orbit is your cheapest option.

Polar orbits are aligned to pass over the poles (or close to it). These are the second-most useful orbits because they allow a satellite to observe 100% or nearly 100% of the earth's surface. Scientific data-gathering and spy satellites are put into polar orbits. (Do note that because the poles tend to be rather cold and uninhabited, and because a satellite's altitude lets it peer beyond its max orbital latitude, you can get near-100% coverage of the populated regions of the earth with a highly inclined equatorial orbit. But the more you incline the orbit, the less benefit there is from launching near the equator. For a polar orbit which passes directly over the poles, you actually have to spend energy and fuel to get rid of any sideways velocity imparted by the earth's rotation at the launch site.)

I never understood this desire to keep Pluto a planet. Even an elementary school student could see it was a bit of an oddball compared to the other eight, with a highly eccentric and tilted orbit, a dimunitive size, and recurring announcements every few years of possible discovery of other tiny planet like things out in a similarly distant orbit.

Size is not really the point. Pluto (2300 km radius) is almost the same size as Mercury (2440 km). Both are smaller than the moons Ganymede (2634 km) and Titan (2575 km), while Callisto (2408 km) falls right in between them.

People just need to get over the notion that a "planet" is somehow better or higher ranking or more important than a "moon" or "Kuiper belt object" / whatever. Those are not hierarchical terms. They are just definitions of what a body's orbit is like, and the effect its gravity has on other nearby objects (or vice versa). Nailing down a static definition of "planet" was also important for not having to rewrite school science textbooks every couple years.

Considering how bookshops have been obliterated by Amazon in the US and the UK I don't think the French attitude towards restraining Amazon is bad. It simply puts everyone on the same playing field.
[...]
This ensure really big companies like Amazon can't destroy local shops only on price.

You've completely mis-identified the problem, which means mostly likely your proposed solution will not work.

Amazon is not obliterating local bookshops. The Internet obliterated the old definition of "local". Amazon is the local bookshop for most people now. I can access and browe Amazon in far less time than it took me to go visit the corner bookstore.

This effect of the Internet is most prominent on purveyors of software - virtual goods like computer software, movies, music, and yes, books. The Internet gives you instant access to those. It has had less of an impact on merchants selling physical goods. But even there, distance for the purposes of defining "local" is no longer measured in miles or km. It's measured in shipping time and cost.

Correct. And since they're not authorized by the copyright owner of the allegedly infringed work the statute should kick in.

For the umpteenth time, no that's not how the DMCA's perjury clause works.

I own the rights to a video I made about dogs. I file a DMCA takedown notice claiming your video about cats violates my copyright.

Because I am asserting you're infringing my video about dogs, and I own the copyright to that video, there is no perjury. I am legitimately filing takedown notices to protect the copyright on the dog video. That your video is about cats is irrelevant to the DMCA. By issuing a takedown notice, I am swearing that I own the rights to (or am authorized by the owner of) the dog video. It is only perjury if I don't own the dog video or am not authorized by the owners of the dog video (e.g. what those lawyers filing lawsuits against people downloading porn were doing - threatening to sue even though they weren't authorized by the real copyright owners, in the hopes that because it was porn people would roll over and settle without a fight).

There's tons of precedent for this, by the way. If I call the police and say "so and so robbed my house today" and then, when they come and investigate and find no evidence that my house was robbed I say "oh, well, not really" - I'm going to jail in that case. That's filing a false report and it's a crime.

Yes that's the way it should work. But that's not the way the DMCA is written. At this point I think the only way this will ever be fixed is if millions of everyday people start filing DMCA takedown notices against stuff owned by studios (e.g. official Justin Bieber videos on YouTube), claiming it violates the copyright on their cat or dog video. Since the DMCA puts the burden of proof entirely upon the accused with no penalty for the accuser, the only way to stop the abuse is to accuse the accusers who are abusing it.

Yeah, this could lead to the demise of the cable companies as we know them. For a long time I've said cable TV/Internet needs to be regulated as a utility. With a utility like gas or electricity, the utility company owns the pipes but is prohibited from selling the content that's carried over the pipes. They can set up a subsidiary to sell the content, but they must also allow other gas/electric suppliers to sell to customers at the same transport rates they charge their subsidiary. Those transport rates are set by a public utilities commission. Effectively, the utility company has a monopoly on the pipes (it makes no sense to install multiple gas or electric lines to each house), but due to the monopoly its transport pricing is subject to government approval and it must offer the same pricing to all sellers. Thus maintaining a free competitive market for gas and electricity.

In the U.S., cable TV/Internet has been the big exception. Because it doesn't make sense to install multiple cable lines, most municipalities only grant access to a single cable company. Yet that artificial monopoly is not regulated like a utility - the cable company completely controls the pipes and the content that's sent over those pipes. (This is a necessary step when an industry is first developing. Different companies have to be allowed to try different ways to lay down pipe and offer content over those pipes for the market to determine the most efficient way to distribute that content. But once the best method is determined, the industry is essentially a utility. At this point I think we all know TV/Internet delivery is headed towards fiber to the home.)

If Aereo can get themselves classified as a cable company, that does to cable TV what VoIP did to phone service. Right now the cable companies sell you TV, and oh by the way you can get Internet access too. With Aereo's model, you only need to get Internet from the cable company, and you can get your TV from Aereo. The cable company essentially becomes a utility giving you only Internet service. Companies like Aereo could then sell you TV service delivererd over the Internet.

Unfortunately, this means Aereo is going to have both the broadcasters and cable companies arguing against them to the FCC and the courts. While I hope they succeed like VoIP did, the influence of money in politics makes me think their chances are slim.

Close, but what's happening here is similar to what happened with Pandora and online music broadcasters. They tried to get by by paying the same royalty rates as radio stations, which are negotiated between the RIAA and all radio broadcasters en masse. The RIAA smelled an opportunity and finangled the courts so Internet radio got defined as something new and different, and thus they could negotiate rates against a much smaller and less established entity. Consequently, Internet radio pays much higher royalties than broadcast radio.

I suspect the TV stations are trying for a similar play here. It's completely illogical (like saying you're not buying the movie, you're just buying a license to view it; but then saying you need to buy a new one at full price if you're upgrading from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray), but logic is secondary to them if there's an opportunity to extract more money from people. I think that's my biggest gripe with Copyright law - since it's a completely artificial monopoly I think the rules governing it must make logical sense in order for supply and demand to work as with natural property. But instead the copyright holders are twisting that artificiality to completely illogical means that break how markets naturally work.

It's your father's microkernel. A more elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

That's not what your mom said.

Air Transat 236 also glided in to a safe landing. A fuel leak in one tank and crew misdiagnosis of the problem led them to pump all the fuel in the good tank into the leaking tank, resulting in fuel starvation at cruise altitude. The incident is not as well known because the pilots have refused to talk about it.

The altitude (10 km) and distance to the final airport (120 km) when the second engine flamed out also point to a 12:1 glide ratio. Slightly better in fact as the pilot had to execute a 360 and some S-turns to bleed off altitude just prior to landing. It was an A330, which is slightly larger than a 767. Both are widebody (twin aisle) aircraft, and both were saved by the RAT providing emergency power. So while it's certainly possible to power electronics even with total engine failure, it's not something a good engineer should be designing the plane to be reliant upon in an emergency.

The point of airport security isn't to stop terrorists. It's to calm and reassure the public. After every major airliner accident, there's a drop in airline travel. (Least there was back when we'd have 2-3 commercial airliner crashes a year. We're now to the point where it's so safe we go 2-5 years between accidents.) How do you think these people are traveling if they're too scared to fly? Some of them just stay home, but most of them travel by car. Where they are more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist attack.

So the point of airport security is literally security theater. Show the public, "Hey we're doing something to stop those terrorists, so it's safe to fly!" When the real goal is to stop people from getting themselves killed while driving because they're too scared of terrorists to fly.

Unfortunately, the people running the TSA never got the memo and are taking their jobs way too seriously.

That said, every time I've had a phone or laptop die from a drained battery, I've been able to turn it on, and it'll power up for at least 5-30 seconds before sensing the low battery and automatically powering off again. This is due to an intentional safety feature of Li-ion batteries - if you drain them too much, they can explode when charged. So devices are designed to shut off long before the battery reaches this point, and consequently there's always enough juice left to briefly turn the device back on again. The only way you can get to a state where the device literally will not power on is if you drain the battery, then let the device sit there for weeks or months so that it self-discharges below the voltage where the device will refuse to use the battery at all. So the guy whose phone dies while traveling shouldn't be affected by this policy change at all (unless the TSA decides to be assholes and require you to demonstrate something more than the phone booting, while not providing a standard microUSB charger).

Oh, yes, there are MANY problems with this whole scheme. And a lot of it could be solved TOMORROW by the FCC choosing to regulate ISPs as Title II Common Carriers.

Actually, all this is probably exactly why the FCC is choosing not to regulate ISPs as common carriers. If they do that, then the copyright holders and the government have to do the legwork of tracking down and prosecuting copyright violators. The way it's set up now, they can just threaten the ISP and make the ISP do the busywork for them.

Yes, because anyone who cannot afford to pay for a baby sitter should forego ever eating out or watching a movie.

And the reason you find more babies out is for a few reasons:

1. Families are smaller and there is less of grandma and grandpa living 'round the block. As such, you are left with no family help.

2. Economic realities make childcare extreme expensive, even in double income families.

3. Single parents are also a lot more common, and the single parent already has someone taking care of the kid during the day. They can't magically "leave" the kid behind for everything that they do, just because other assholes in public find them to be an inconvenience.

If I can't get a sitter, I'll do my best to calm my baby when I'm out in public. If you don't like it, you can bugger off.

You know, I cannot understand the recent cultural backlash against babies.

Yes, babies cry. They cry at night, they cry in restaurants, and they cry on airplanes. They cry when they are hungry, when they are tired, when they're pooping, and when they need a diaper change. And often, they cry for apparently no reason at all.

As a father of a four month old, I can tell you that we parents aren't exactly pleased to hear our babies cry, either. We don't want our kids to be in pain, and we want them to be happy. We are acutely conscious of bothering others, and we feel helpless about the whole thing.

But you know what's worse? Assholes who cannot stop complaining about crying babies. Guess what? It's how human beings are. You cried too. So did every human being who's ever lived.

So, get over it. Babies cry. Live with it. If you don't like it, find a place without any humans who procreate. And show some empathy, for crying out loud.

A member of Germany's foreign intelligence agency has been detained for possibly spying for the U.S. The 31-year-old is suspected of giving a U.S. spy agency information about a parliamentary inquiry of NSA activities.

So the investigation into the NSA's secret spying activities, is itself being conducted in secret under penalty of espionage charges should any German violate that secrecy?

We seem to be forgetting why people object to the NSA's activities. Something about governments being open and transparent in their operation so the public can be assured their actions are trustworthy. Any investigation into the NSA's activities should be done publicly and openly, to demonstrate a contrast with how the NSA operated.

Unless that is the German government has something it wants to keep secret from its own people. But in that case they become the pot calling the kettle black.

Ideally we'd like a "right to be forgotten" that means when I ask Facebook to delete my account, then by delete I mean "not a single bit of my accounts data remains".

Even that is problematic. Presumably Facebook keeps backups. And for a backup to be a true backup, it has to be offline and off-site. So when you submit an account deletion request, they can't just scrub your data from their servers. They have to bring those backups back on-site and online, and scrub your data from them as well.

A better solution is to mandate a maximum period to private data retention policies, e.g. 1 year. Then you can submit your deletion request, Facebook scrubs your data from their servers immediately. But by law they're allowed to keep the offline backup for up to a year, at which point they're required to scrub it. When it's a year old, it's not any good as a backup anymore, so they can just delete the whole thing instead of having to find your specific data within it.

Yeah you probably want all the backups scrubbed immediately. But the whole point of living in society is that everyone makes compromises to arrive at a solution which works better for everyone overall. You don't get your data entirely scrubbed immediately. Facebook doesn't get to keep that data forever.

That's why Google shouldn't be wasting time trying to do this. It's not their job, and the task is damned if they do, damned if they don't.

They should simply invert the process - remove every search result older than x years from the countries affected by this court decision. Pre-comply with all possible cases before people submit privacy takedown requests. Then provide the court with a list of all removed content and say they will add each removed link back if and when the court approves it. Make the people who want old stuff to reappear submit their request to the government - the institution who thinks this policy is a good or even workable idea.