In WWII battleships lost out to airplanes. If airplanes could find a battleship they could attack it more effectively than it could them. Airplanes also had a threat radius of hundreds of miles vs tens of miles for battleships. What carriers allowed for was that threat radius to center at some random spot in the middle of the ocean.

The difference between modern carriers vs old battleships is the carriers have the same threat radius as their opponents. They're also highly mobile and nestled in fleets of defending ships.

While fast boats or submarines with drones, cruise missiles, and whatever else are threats to carriers they need to avoid all the defensive rings around those carriers to attack them. Carriers aren't invulnerable but carrier battle groups are much tougher targets than battleship based forces in WWII.

If carve-outs like Section 230 were removed I don't think it would make Facebook unprofitable but it would make all smaller players unprofitable. Without section 230 any site displaying user generated content would be considered the "publisher" WRT liability. That puts small forums (like /.), wikis, mailing lists, and even collaborative sites like GitHub on the firing line.

Facebook can afford an army of moderators and a machine learning auto mod system. They can afford the lawyers to help them skirt regulation and the lobbyists to help craft or blunt it for their ends. Some small fan wiki or FOSS mailing list archive can't afford those things. So either small sites drop all user content, in some cases ceasing to exist, or implement heavy handed moderation that just pushes away users.

Facebook and their ilk need some sort of additional oversight if not regulation. If nothing else an expansion of warning labels for public posts. If people want to have batshit crazy private conversations they can have at it. But if they want a megaphone they can carry just the tiniest bit of personal liability. Big social media companies are the perfect demonstration of John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

The main problem regulation wise if social media companies have several functions. They facilitate one to one and one to few communication but also one to many. They want the protections and lack of liability for one to one communications and for that to extend to their one to many. Section 230 wasn't written with the social media model in mind and social media companies have taken advantage of that fact.

Holy shit this is manifestly stupid. First and foremost, when the Earth was warmer in the past it didn't have eight billion humans depending on agriculture and industry. The warming and cooling trends also occurred over thousands of years so floral and faunal responses were gradual.

We're seeing climate changes now on the scale of decades. Besides humans and animals not having a lot of time to adapt there's a number of ecological problems tied to temperature. We're already seeing rapid thawing of permafrost in the northern hemisphere. These permafrost melts are turning into methane spewing bogs, methane that's a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Greenland's ice sheet's melting is also accelerating. It will end up disrupting the Atlantic Conveyor which will drastically alter the climate of Europe and the US not to mention effects on already depleted or damaged fisheries. Increased atmospheric CO2 also increases CO2 in the ocean increasing its acidity. Increased acidity is already affecting marine food chains.

While humans as a species and plants will "survive" increased atmospheric CO2 levels, current industrial civilization was built with 1850s climate and ecology in mind. The next century will see hundreds of trillions of dollars spent trying to adapt to the environment we fucked up. Hundreds of millions to billions of people are going to displaced because where they used to live flooded or dried out or is just uninhabitable. We'll be able to do some geoengineering to put a band aid on things but for every success we'll likely also end up with more Aral Sea disasters.

Humans as a species surviving global warming isn't a question, it's human civilization surviving that's the real problem. Lots of agriculture and industry is sited for climates and ecologies that no longer or will cease to exist in those locations. It doesn't matter if plants can use CO2 if there's no water or it's too hot for them to grow.

The fundamental problem you're ignoring is that objective facts exist. Not everything is subject to opinion. If your opinion is contrary to objective facts you're not a free thinking literati, you're just wrong. If you make up "facts" with no legitimate evidence then they aren't facts.

It's an objective fact the Earth is a roughly spherical globe spinning on an axis in orbit of a giant ball of nuclear fusing hydrogen and helium. You can opine all day long that it's a flat plate but you're just wrong.

If you go on Facebook et al and say "I think the Earth is flat" people might tell you that you're wrong but Facebook (or whomever) is likely to take any action. You're wrong but the only real implication of your statement is that you're a gullible idiot. You're also clearly stating an opinion. There's little possibility of harm coming to you or anyone else because of your statement.

If you go on Facebook et al and say "COVID-19 is a hoax" not only are you objectively wrong but the implication of what you're saying endangers yourself an others. It's the literal equivalent of falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater. Whether you're an idiot or an asshole your claims are likely to harm people. Facebook should at least flag your post as misinformation.

Facebook and others are no obligation to amplify any statement made on their platforms. You're free to be wrong and stupid but not dangerous. Your freedom to be wrong and stupid ends at its impact on the wellbeing of others.

It just means the luminiferous ether is more energetic as one approaches the crystal firmament.

Programming is the entirely wrong thing to foist upon most students. Programming doesn't itself teach any of the skills you mention and it requires a level of computer literacy most people lack. It's the computer literacy that should be the main curriculum with programming being the elective.

You wouldn't jump right into teaching someone algebra if they had no real knowledge of basic arithmetic. You're unlikely to have students magically learn arithmetic as a byproduct of trying to teach them algebra. They wouldn't have a meaningful context to understand how arithmetic was being applied with algebra and would learn neither.

Most programming at the K-12 level is jumping into algebra without first teaching arithmetic. Most people don't know how computers work or what a program actually is or does. Without students having some fundamental computer literacy, teaching programming is just teaching by rote and certainly isn't going to confer problem solving, logic, or abstract thinking skills.

The focus for the general curriculum should be explicitly teaching computer literacy, problem solving, abstract thinking, and logic. Those things are useful by themselves just as basic arithmetic or reading are useful by themselves. If kids never program anything ever again they at least have some fundamental computer literacy.

Increased "competition" of Android app stores has done absolutely nothing to lower prices for consumers. Epic's in-game currency (over which there's zero competition) is no cheaper on Android no matter how you got the game.

Open source basebands aren't likely to be something you ever see. The radios in phones need to conform to transmission regulations. No phone is going to get FCC (or equivalent) certification if any unlicensed asshole can tweak settings in the radio baseband.

You overclocking your PC or hacking your Roomba isn't going to block your neighbor's 911 call about the numbness in their left arm and chest pains. Fucking around with your cell phone's radio can.

That was the marketing point for a version of the OS released before an SDK was ready. The first iPhone was impressive but it was painfully obvious from the lack of key features it was a rush to get it shipped. It's silly to pretend web apps were the permanent plan.

I see you're familiar with my work.

You mean the cops will catch you speeding with their passive receivers. I mean my car won't look like yours but they won't know that.

On the Inter^H^H^H^H^H freeway, no one knows you're a dog.

It'll cost somewhere between the cheapest broadband and the most expensive. It's a snarky answer but it's true. SpaceX can't put a premium price on the service because no one will sign up despite the interest. They also can't price it super low because they need to make their nut. It is Elon Musk though so every now and again a terminal will veer into oncoming traffic. That will likely be factored into the price.

Surely youâ(TM)re joking.

Yaarrrr!

One of NASA's biggest problems is they have to make multi-year plans but have a yearly budget. They also have to appease Congress people from fifty states. They are additionally bound by the whims of Presidential administrations. So they make plans which get tweaked by Congress and then have to fight for the money to carry out those tweaked plans.

Another huge issue was the Constellation program was just plain stupid and wasted a ton of money and resources within NASA. The original concept of the CEV was a design that could be launched on man-rated Atlas V or Delta IV vehicles. That could have gotten a crew vehicle in space not too long after the Shuttle was to be retired. Mike Griffin then came in with the ESAS report and screwed it all up. It was decided the CEV would launch on all new Shuttle-derived boosters. This spread the project around to states with Shuttle component contractors so Congress liked it.

The Ares rockets reused some Shuttle components but were different enough to be effectively new untested and unqualified designs. The five segment SRBs were problematic because you can't just make a solid rocket engine longer and call it a day. The Ares I first stage being a solid rocket was asinine as it necessitated a massive and complicated escape motor be attached to the CEV for every launch and then just discarded. It also had serious vibration issues that would have killed or crippled the crew on launch. The Ares V just turned into a megaproject due to its size.

The CEV design was also compromised in that it was designed to launch on the stupid Ares I. It ended up (as Orion) just being a fat Apollo capsule. This means a couple compromises. Instead of having integral launch escape motors it relies on a heavy disposable system. The Dragon 2 and CST-100 both use their maneuvering system as their launch abort systems. Far less wasted mass on launch. The second compromise is the Orion relies on its Service Module for propulsion and has a minimum ability to maneuver without it. The Dragon 2 can run with a minimal "trunk" attached when doing a crew-only launch like the Demo-2 mission. This all puts the Orion at a pretty high minimum launch mass which means it always requires a heavier launch vehicle.

The Orion is a stupid design with no extant launch vehicle because the program it was born from was stupid. A lot of this stupidity is from Congress requiring a piece of the NASA money pie be spent in their states/districts. Congress' whims effect a lot of technical decisions which affect schedules and feasibility of projects.