Of course they have rules! But, some of the payment processors have far more draconian rules.

The two docs you link from MC list requirements like: "not illegal", age verification of (real-life) people depicted, age verification of uploaders, and an appeals process for people to get their pics removed. (The rules are generic, not specific to game sellers.)

Compare that to the paypment processors. Itch.io uses PayPal, Stripe, and Payoneer. The Payoneer published requirements disallow quote "games that include pornographic or mature audience content"! Stripe's requirements include similar wording.

Visa/MC are indeed a problem. But, some of the payment processors are far worse than MC/Visa. And, itch.io needs to go shopping for less restrictive payment processors.

I've worked for a couple of payment processor companies.

Steam and Itch.io do not connect directly to the Visa and MasterCard networks. Instead, they use "payment processor" companies. Itch.io uses PayPal, Stripe, and Payoneer. Those payment processors are a middleman between the merchants and the card networks.

Visa and MasterCard are in the payments industry but they are not payment processor companies.

Collective Shout is a small Australian non-profit with maybe 10 employees. They got about 1,000 people to send letters to put pressure on payment processor companies. Those processors gave in way too easily.

It's those payment processor companies that are making the demands, not Visa/MC. Itch.io put out a notice stating that the changes were due to the demands of their payment processor companies (and not blaming Visa/MC).

I haven't seen any reports that Visa/MC put pressure on the payment processor companies though. (Not that I like Visa/MC. I think it's nuts that they can charge merchants 1% to 3% of sales. But, they're not the big villain this time.)

Unfortunately, a law to prevent payment processors from dictating these kinds of restrictions was proposed, but didn't become law - Fair Access to Banking Act, H.R.987

Actually, power beamed from space would be incredibly useful to the U.S. military. They have spent truly enormous sums of money flying in fuel to power generators for field camps. And, that's when they have mostly uncontested airspace. IIRC, in Afghanistan they needed a lot of power for A/C to keep the troops cool enough to be combat effective. That said, you need literally acres of space for the power receiving antennas and I don't know how many theaters that would be feasible in.

Russia isn't launching a new space station anytime soon and probably never will again.

They simply don't have anywhere near the capabilities they used to have. The most recent example is that they very recently launched Iran's "Khayyam" spy satellite and then announced that they were going to borrow it for a while. With a resolution of 1.2 meters or less, it's not even that great of a spy satellite and doesn't come close to what some commercial providers have. But, Russia needed it because they don't actually have a lot of spy satellites and many of the ones they do have aren't great either.

They do have a starter segment named NEM available for the new station. Sort of. They claim that it's been in development since 2016 and was originally intended for the ISS. But they just announced that it needs at least three more years of work and new funding. And, the design initially was targeting MIR before being re-purposed to ISS (and now re-purposed to yet another station).

And, then there's all the recent brain drain.

Is there anywhere I can bet money against this station ever existing?

There's no way that this was a *representative* sample. TFA (or the TFS) claims that one out of every six developers is "actively working on crypto-related projects" and that one out of every nine developers is "actively working on NFT technology". I call bull.

Yes, I'd forgotten that the digital conversion was one of the reasons some people could no longer get a signal.

I read somewhere that stations used to often broadcast a higher than their minimum allowed level, but rarely do that anymore. I can't find any reference for or against that though.

In the days before cable, there was social, political, and financial pressure to make sure as many people as possible could receive the nearest OTA broadcasts. Today, the local stations can put the minimum power required by regulations into their OTA transmissions and depend on there being more than enough cable subscribers to drive income via the re-broadcast fees. Supposedly, people are finding they can't get OTA in places they could have a few decades ago.

Some posters above argue that OTA is becoming irrelevant.

Not quite. It's just that most of the content put out by these local stations ... isn't actually received OTA. OTA broadcasters charge cable companies and other providers two arms and two legs to carry their content. A lot of people still want to see their local stations. Partly for the local "news". Partly for sports (broadcast rights for college and pro sports are often hogtied in interesting ways to a small number of content sellers). So, there's plenty of money in the CBS, NBC, ABC, whatever broadcasting stations. And, they'll use local news or sports or whatever they can latch onto to maintain an income stream.

Apparently the judge didn't think that "deployment" was covered under "maintaining and operating". It seems that it's OK to spend non-profit income to maintain servers and other equipment ... as long as you don't first spend to deploy them!

This was an overly literal interpretation of what congress wrote and doesn't fit the spirit or intent of the law.

Maybe someone will start a locast 2.0 that uses two different income streams with one stream for deployment and another income stream for operations.

This year, I've switched from NFL Sunday Ticket at $300 to NFL Game Pass at $100. NFL Sunday Ticket is only on DirecTV and is live. NFL Game Pass is available on Roku and other streaming platforms, but isn't available until just after a game is finished playing. We never watched live football anyway; we'd start watching no sooner than an hour after the game had started and by fast-forwarding though commercials and other downtime, we'd skip an hour of non-game.

How? This is going to one of the earth/sun Lagrange points, not earth orbit. So, a falcon 9 won't do; you need a falcon 9 heavy. No problem there. But, this bird won't fit in the fairing of a falcon 9 or falcon 9 heavy. The SpaceX Starship isn't flying yet, so we can't use that. The JWST will fit in an Ariane 5. Because it was designed to do so. This observatory is so old that SpaceX, much less the falcon 9 didn't exist when the project started! Ariane 5 was a new upcoming rocket at the time. Now, the Ariane is about to be retired.

The JWST has sucked all the money out of alternative projects, so let's hope it works.

I've also bemoaned technologically incompetent bosses. And, when I did, I missed the point.

Does a boss have more than passing competence in the fields that his subordinates work in? Well, if you think the answer is "yes", it follows that every president or prime minister or other leader of an entire country has to be at least partially incompetent. Because a president's job covers so many areas that no one could be great or even good on all topics. And, there have been effective presidents and prime ministers and kings. So, thinking that subject matter expertise is required in a boss would be a wrong conclusion, so ... there must be something wrong with my premise that the boss has to know the work.

I'm almost 60 and I've had a lot of bosses while working mostly as a programmer or systems administrator. Good ones. Bad ones. Technical ones. Not so technical ones. And, you know what - there's been very little correlation between who has been a good boss and who has had technical chops! When a boss is both good at management and at technology, that's great. But, one of the worst bosses I've ever seen was a promoted techie. I was quite thankful to be a peer not his subordinate. I've had good bosses who weren't very knowledgeable in IT, but were good bosses.

It's almost as if management was a skill and that some people had technical skills and some people had management skills and some people had both. Let's not talk about those that had neither...

The technical boss can be a micro-manager and focus too much on his own experiences and capabilities. The non-technical boss might make decisions based on what peers or salesmen say. Or, either might be a great leader.

A good boss has to know how much to delegate, how much to listen to his people, how to chose which person to listen to, when to put his/her foot down, etc. etc. If they know how to "manage" their advisors, they can be quite effective while only having a very basic technical understanding.

TL;DR Ability to boss IT workers is poorly correlated with IT expertise.

That said, I want to think that an MBA might negatively correlate with *anything* useful, but that just might be personal prejudice. :-/