offering bouncy rides.
When Australia was first settled a few people did indeed try it. I remember a school teacher showing us some drawings of special saddles and other stuff that people had made for the purpose. The problem is that a roo large enough to carry a human is a powerful and aggressive animal, it puts up a hell of a fight. There were at least a couple of people that somehow managed to saddle the roo and then mount the saddle, but in both cases the roo just bashed them into a tree tree or something. The first seven people to try it were all killed. I've never heard of anyone trying it since.
I can just about guarantee that if you knew how genuine fish sauce was made, you wouldn't put it in your mouth.
I counter-guarantee that if you knew how awesome and useful it is, you wouldn't care how it is made. It should be called "magic sauce"
Knowledge should be free.
I generally agree with this, but people choosing to profit is not evil at this point in our evolution, and may never be.
seven of the largest companies on the planet, whose sole business plans are to exploit the free exchange of information by putting up artificial barriers and charging for access to things
This is true as far as their own IP goes, but this isn't generally true even for Apple and Microsoft. Google in particular is doing quite the opposite. They are providing access to all the information they can, for the cheapest possible price. I don't really see how any other large companies are doing this either.
They're creating the next Dark Age
You can't even accuse Microsoft of that. You might have argued they've slowed things down a bit, but "Dark Age" is pretty fucking far from reality.
the power imbalance between the information-rich and the information-poor is growing, exponentially.
There's some truthiness here, if you squint a bit...however the "information-poor" is rapidly heading towards zero. So what's really happening is that everyone is becoming enriched.
Well, you could always blink, or just close your eyes.
Screen Savers!
other than about 387 billion thermocouples
You can't realistically generate electricity with a thermocouple. With this thing you can.
Curiosity in fact uses a radioisotope thermal generator...
3000 WiFi radios emiting together on how many channels and using what bandwidth ?
Yeah, all 3000 devices will have high gain antennas and be on the same stretch of road.
Most of the improvement is likely due to increased distance between the amplification circuits and the noisy AC/DC power supply.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but the two most important things are the converters and the clock.
Hackers of the world, unite!