I think that Washington's attorney general is confusing the right to publish with being responsible for what you publish. It is extremely hard to restrain speech in the U.S. prior to publication.

The Pentagon Papers were relevant to national security and there could not be prior restraint on publishing those. https://legal-dictionary.thefr...

Some state attorney generals willies about someone 3D printing a gun isn't even close to a national security issue. Stopping the information from being posted until a final adjudication should be nigh-on impossible.

When IBM shows up and asks if you want to pay a flat rate to license its 45,000 patents-in-force, what can you do? Finding out whether you infringe any of 45,000 patents is prohibitively expensive. Groupon rolled the dice, IBM went to its stupendous pile of patents, and Groupon is where it is today.

Stalin certainly was right when it comes to patent portfolios.

The original post indicates that cashless societies are dangerous. Well, it is a different danger. There are reasons why low-infrastructure, high violence locations (Afghanistan) turn to digital money. Cash invites criminals to commit violence for cash in cash societies. Businesses hate handling cash when it gets to be enough to be a security concern.

While the digital can have broader theft, it has less violence. That is a point in its favor.

I was an administrator at PixieMUD (same handle). Yes, it was fantasy adventure themed. But the features that drove player attention was not the combat and treasure, but rather the range of "emotes" supported and the social chat lines and the ability to emote over them.

The internal coding of the MUD environment meant that players who earned write permissions ("wizards") could code areas and objects. Many people got their first exposure to coding through this. (A C-like language, LPC). That's important because the games were not played only by comp-sci students, in fact mostly by people from other majors.

Alaska has been sharing its oil revenue since 1976.

The reasonableness of doing so depends in part on what you do with it. If you warn the person against doing it again, you can set up a situation that when the police catch the person driving recklessly the court can set the punishment based on the total history, not just the incident the police caught.

Using it to issue warnings would also give the driver an incentive to correct himself.

So there are socially reasonable ways to use it, if you can get past the whole Big Brother thing.

Think of it as recycling. You don't increase the amount of CO2. You just keep those carbon atoms turning from hydrocarbon form to CO2 form in an endless cycle.

For the foreseeable future, liquid hydrocarbon fuels will be important to do that for applications that require very high energy density like commercial aviation. If you can create that liquid fuel by genetically engineered microorganisms, or chemical reactions that take atmospheric CO2 and make the fuel, you are even on a carbon basis.

Cell phones reached places where landlines were hard to string because they were an easier form of infrastructure in places like mountains. For remote places with poor or non-existent roads, for delivering small loads, I can easily see drones being preferable to building the infrastructure.

I mean yeah, isn't all you have to do is scale up your typical recreational drone to airplane size?

The system to put an end to this should be possible. I should be able to use a simple code, *## to tag the prior call as spam. The best information available about the caller should go to the FTC and the spam blocking function of the telecom.

If you make the process harder than a second or two, you are going to drop your complaint rate by a factor of 100.

I suppose in the US, the FCC would have to authorize a telecom charge of $X a month, and require it to be effectively deployed to block spam. If there is no cash flow for it, it won't get done.

One problem with these gene-editing treatments is that it is very hard to measure the safety of the treatment. It could be that the company tried to show how it would measure safety, but FDA wasn't satisfied with the process.

Chemical and Engineering News (probably behind a paywall) has an article about how companies are trying to come to a consensus on how to measure safety. https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceut...

A huge problem here is that DNA breaks all the time in our cells and gets repaired. That is the exact process CRISPR leverages to make its edits. So, how do you tell a natural break and mis-repair from a misdirected CRISPR edit. Not an easy thing to tell. FDA wants the applicant to show safety, not for someone else to show dangerousness. Proving a thing that is very difficult to measure in the first place is a great challenge, and may keep these treatments from advancing at FDA.

The Europeans have a similar issues with their beta-thalassemia trial. https://www.bionews.org.uk/pag...

First of all, the scientist in the article (RTFA, please) is planning on using cross-breeding to attain the desired plant to avoid GMO activists. That is not a GMO technology. It is taking different existing, non-GMO chickpeas and breeding them with each other to make new ones. It is genetic change in the plants, but is of a type GMO activists approve of.

But with cross-breeding it may take decades or never succeed. The scientist does not control the genetic outcome with cross-breeding. Detailed systematic study of genetic variation is impossible. That impedes results.

And while the US has not had Europe's history of violence in the area, it could. Not wanting to take the risk is perhaps strongly cautious, but there is nothing irrational with not wanting to be the first. We have had violence in animal research protests, logging protests and other activist causes.

The technology presents interesting questions for search and seizure law in the U.S. Currently, in Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court is considering a case where warrantless cell phone tower data for over four months is an illegal search. Scotusblog has a page (the transcript is available as audio or video as the "Tr." or "Aud." under the "Argument" heading).

The key to Carpenter is that earlier cases held that there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in the metadata about a phone call since the phone company had it. The problem in this case is how much there was -- basically protracted surveillance via cell towers. Even though your license plate is in plain view on streets, perhaps the government cannot engage in protracted surveillance of it without a warrant.

It is not unusual for the U.S. government to try to maintain cost control on its data that is popular and therefore relatively expensive to provide. Sometimes, it seeks to have private partners take on distributing the data. At some point the Patent Office (an entirely user-fee operated organization, not taxes) worked with private companies to provide copies of patents to interested people in addition to the for-free U.S. Patent Office patent copies service. When the USPTO went online, it had to limit expense by providing a painful portal (download 1 page at a time). For-fee companies that the Patent Office shared data with would provide better electronic service at a price.

Had the Patent Office fully charged each patent applicant for its patent in the past? Yes. But it needs money to keep handing out the patents. It has to come from somewhere. Other pieces of the government face the same problem.

Why shouldn't the researchers bear the cost of accessing the data? To some extent it is the U.S. government moving money from one pocket (research grants) to the other (Landsat image fees). I think the out of pocket costs for the public would be minimal for the benefits obtained, so why not defray some of the costs from the users?

Ethan Siegal at Starts With A Bang (makes the point that https://www.forbes.com/sites/s...) makes the point that what is a planet should be considered in light of what we know about solar system evolution. According to that perspective, it does not appear that Pluto is a planet. If Pluto is a planet, then there are over 100 of them.