You are quite wrong - look at the real numbers Californian's pay more in taxes proportionally than they receive back in benefits from the federal govt.

It's the bible belt states, Trump's big supporters, who really suck at the teat of federal government, paid for by those very people in California you deride

REF: http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

you don't need to change the constitution to get a winner of the popular vote become president - the constitution says the states decide how to choose electors, used to be in some states you didn't get a vote your state govt did, the whole people voting thing is a relatively recent idea - if enough states, those representing at least the number of electors+1, choose to assign all their electors to the winner of the popular vote it simply happens - no constitutional change whatsoever

Of course it should - essentially Trump won by an accident of geography ... largely because of a system designed for the days befopre the invention of the telegraph where throwing someone on a horse and sending him off to represent you in the final caucus to vote for the President was the most practical thing to do.

Times have changed, a national vote is completely practical, certainly less unwieldy than sending someone to vote for you.

It's also time we got rid of a system that effectively gives every voter in Wyoming 3 votes for every 1 a California voter gets

Oh for heaven's sake, the Hawking knows the planet is a sphere, if you use a vertical dipole sure you don't send a whole lot straight up, and you radiate more of your energy horizontally away from the antenna .... and while the photons head out in a donut away from that antenna, which is poking up from the surface of a sphere, as they move away from their source the ground falls away and any photons that don't hit anything ... radiate away into space in that same donut shape, inverse squaring to infinity (and beyond!)

yes, there's also vapour escaping from around that point for 10-20 seconds prior to the explosion - were they pressure testing the upper stage tanks? (unlikely with live fuel) or loaded the wrong tanks by mistake?

pigs with wings? devils in uggs?

Of course one person's "dangerous neighbourhood" is someone else's "home" .... crowd sourcing the distinction is probably a silly idea - or was there an "Occupying Army" switch they forgot to turn on to tell it what side they were on?

So now we have private companies setting up gross hoovering of network traffic worldwide - listening in to all the world's net traffic.

Why was it the powers that be want to get rid of good encryption again? certainly not to protect my credit card data when I buy stuff.

The time for crypto everywhere is now!

I spent a decade building set top boxes, I did the network protocol stack and the crypto .... I've implemented most of the US cable and satellite crypto at one time or an other .... and cablecard too

Most of the US has cable plants built in the US have one of two types of head-ends - built by two different companies - they're very not compatible - if you want to build a set top for a Motorola (or whatever they're called these days) plant you need some Motorola crypto hardware in your box, if you want to build for a SA (or whatever they are this week) plant you need some of their hardware.

Essentially a cablecard is just that particular bit of hardware wrapped around a common hardware/software interface.

So opening up the set top market means what? I guess this hardware and the secret protocol info that goes with it - a set top's going to need both sets of hardware and both sets of software - the rest of the hardware can be shared - the qams and video are mostly the same, the out-of-band tuner can be shared if it's agile enough (simply qpsk transport streams vs davic ATM frames) - it's an enormous amount of work - at least 5 man years from personal experience

How did anyone think this was a good idea? it wasn't just that some lone hacker snuck this in .... there were committees, marketing buy in, engineers who did the work, management who OK'd the budgets ..... and no one stood up and said "this is not a good ioea"? no one?

What's to appreciate -English also needs lots of simplification - 'c', 'k', 's' pick two of them, make them always sound different, 'q' can go ('kw' does the job in "Bridge over the river Kwai"), 'g' or 'j' pick one, toss the silent 'h' and the silent 'k' - 'gh'->'f', etc etc

We can probably get down to 20 letters if we try hard

English is an insane polygot mess it's long past time we tossed all that useless history from it

but I do - and I go to Schenzhen to build my open source hardware - the thing is it's the first-mover advantage - have a bright idea and get it to market fast. If you build and sell stuff cheaply from the get-go you're less likely going to get nuked by copying,the copiers will go off an copy someone pumping their prices higher

Luckily I live in a country that doesn't allow software patents - as I said if one doesn't have to have the US's stupid rent-seeking IP laws you have a leg up - the whole TPP et al attempt to force the rest of us into the straight jacket you've made for yourselves is sad, if it succeeds, I'l just reincorporate in China, that's quite doable these days

what a bunch of whooey - China has a quarter of the world's population, and a quarter of the world's smart people. Do you really think those smart people are just going to make 'rip offs', when there's more fun stuff to do - Chinese geeks are just like geeks anywhere

Spend some time hanging out in Shenzhen and you'll see just what you're up against, lots and lots of smart people - your designers in the US are building in China, but they're designing 1000s of kilometres away from their factories, designers in Shenzhen are a subway ride away from them, they can pop over and tweak a process to save money and time to markegt

Chinese IP law may not be the same as the US's - they're a different country, you know they are allowed their own laws, they don't have to have yours. If they can compete better by not having the US-style copyright nightmare - good for them - without Disney on their backs they can compete far better than you can

Why? because in geostationary orbit the sun shines (mostly) at night, and always during the peak evening hours

ah - I see Bob Twiggs, who started ARLISS, is on these guy's board ... so it's sort of a continuation