> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.

Why is it more cost effective to build a new Capitol than to build a water pipeline?

> from a security, stability or usable prospective

You and me both but most people only score feature count. If they've grown accustomed to some oddball feature for a few months they feel they can never use anything else.

That they went their entire lives without it before isn't relevant.

From a market perspective, rushing more features to market makes more people with money happy than getting a good product to market.

It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.

I used to have many magazine subscriptions.

They would each mail me a reminder to renew my subscription.

If I sent them a check my subscription would continue. If I didn't send them a check my subscription would end.

I didn't have auto- anything. I didn't have to call to cancel.

The same went for when I was a paperboy. You pay for your week or you stop getting papers. When you remember to pay you start getting papers again.

I think this is how subscriptions have worked for hundreds of years, with auto-renew on a payment card developing in the past couple decades.

Without a contractual definition the corpus of caselaw would very likely date to throughout the history of the country.

> quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons

Would it be too much to ask to call them Heisenberg Compensators? Please, it would be fun.

China's geology is really bad for petroleum production. A bad lot in the luck of the draw.

They are building a monster pipeline and rail system across Mongolia and Siberia to Russian reserves but it's a decadal project.

Electric transportation is a smart option for their situation. Their necessity has become their Mother of Invention and they are dominating the world in electric power systems innovation.

If we're graduating Seniors with Junior level math skills that's hardly "Can't do Math."

I suspect even that claim is wrong and we're also teaching the wrong math for an informed electorate. In undergrad we need people sharp in probability and statistics more than matrix algebra. So they can be numerate against politicians' bullshit. I guess we should ask politicians to work on that.

Some of us are neither Republicans nor Democrats but would support a strong 10th Amendment with strict observance of Article I limitations.

But nearly all the Democrats and Republicans want to selectively choose which parts of the Constitution to ignore. There is no will for Rule of Law.

The Congressmen get elected on the principle of stealing money from one person to give it to five. That's a guaranteed win in a Universal Suffrage system with no strong moral foundation.

The trick is they inflate the money supply to actually do it so everybody pays. The five "winners" suffer the most in real numbers.

I'd rather see a stable Constitutional order but it's fantasy to believe that's achievable. We'll see fiscal collapse, likely War and a Draft, and chaos instead. All because oligarchs and the poor want "free stuff". And it's hard to blame the poor when everything they want is unachievable for them because the markets are all rigged against them.

The Gini Coefficient is too damn high, so don't get between them and the guillotines.

Robots lack emotion, they can take risks humans should not, and will not be stressed like emotional meatbags.

Why are you conflating robots with police abuse? Robots lack emotion which is the root of all evil.