"popular support" != "not totalitarian"

Getting oxygen out of lunar soil and rocks isn't difficult, though you have to set up some equipment. The problem is that there's hardly any hydrogen. In fact, for the most common element in the universe, it's annoyingly scarce in the inner solar system.

That's regulation not totalitarianism

That's a distinction without a difference. What it is, is government telling you what to do in an arbitrary and unreasonable fashion under circumstances where such restriction is often completely inappropriate. There are many totalitarian regulations in this area, from the erection of antennas and flagpoles to restrictions on homebuilding and property management where such actions by the citizen have no effect upon any neighboring property or structure. It's classic government out of control, just writ small, as opposed to the wars for profit, the care and feeding of the oil and military industries at the expense of everything else, the pervasive (and illegal by definition) surveillance, etc.

(re shooting family pets) No idea what you are talking about here.

Oh. Not paying attention again, then. Let me Google that for you.

You need to stop with the overbearing rhetoric like "shooting family".

Oh, do I?

Pirates have never enjoyed a technological advantage over legitimate publishers. There is no technology that pirates can use which publishers can't (though some may be stubborn or stupid enough that they won't), and publishers also have the advantage of generally being able to work openly, while pirates often (though not always) have to be more surreptitious or at the very least lack some of the advantages of legitimate publishers like early access to the MS and the imprimatur of the author for marketing.

And in fact 18th century printing was much easier than pre 15th century hand-copying, if you wanted more than one new copy.

That literally makes no sense.

Yes; better literacy rates, improved artificial lighting, improved paper and ink making, better printing processes, greater leisure time, etc. are all factors other than copyright that have aided authors.

I think that it is reasonable for copyright terms to last for a set period of time, and for there to be a set number of renewal terms available (if sought), and for copyrights to be transferred as if they were ordinary property of a decedent's estate.

But beware of the infamous widows and orphans argument. The value of a copyright is a total crapshoot. Most are worthless. Of the few with any economic value, most of them will see most of that value realized very shortly after publication in a given medium.

Leaving copyrights to the survivors of an author is like leaving them a big pile of lottery tickets. Most are worthless, a rare few get lucky, and it's just plain financially irresponsible unless you already knew which ones were valuable. If you're worried about the survivors, encourage authors to spend wisely, to get life insurance, to make sound investments, and to support governments that create and maintain good welfare systems as a safety net just in case. Besides, helping only the families of authors is unfair to everyone else in dire straits, so copyright is really not the place for widows and orphans.

The creation and publication of more original works is only one of the goals of copyright, but it is neither the only one nor the most important one. Copyright also seeks to enlarge the public domain as rapidly and as fully as possible. Beyond some optimal point, we get into a situation of diminishing returns. And if copyright gets too long and too onerous, it can actually be worse for society than not having it at all.

I don't think there can be too many works created and published either, but some works do come at too high a cost. If I would only create a particular work of art in exchange for a perpetual copyright and mandatory royalty payments from everyone, all the time, we can probably agree that while it would be nice for my art to exist, society will be better off overall not paying so much, even if that means the art doesn't get made.

Right now the closest we're seeing to that are the multi hundred million dollar blockbuster movies. If more sensible copyright law meant that they were no longer profitable to make, well, if rather have the law. Much as I might like the spectacle, we know we can all live with lower movie budgets.

I agree (provided that you mean that authors' right to try to profit is granted by the public for public purposes) but with one caveat: copyright exists to serve the public interest (specifically the public interest in having the greatest possible public domain) and should be fine-tuned so as to not merely fulfill that interest one way or another, but to do to the greatest extent possible. If, and only if, abolishing copyright would result in this public purpose being advanced more than in any other way, it is right to abolish it.

We should not take abolition off of the table. When it is unnecessary, there's no need for anti-abolitionists to fret, and when it is the best option, not considering it would be wrong.

Well, authors got no such thing until copyright was invented in the wary 18th century, and even then it took quite some time (with a helping hand from colonialism) for it to become widespread. But new works were still created, from antiquity on.

Copyright is an incentive to create a work, but it is not the only one, and it is not always even the most important one.

A totalitarian government that objected to soda would just ban soda you wouldn't have light regulation in a few cities.

Oh. You mean the way they ban pot and various other recreational drugs. The way they tell you how many windows your home has to have (and where.) The way they monitor your bank account, your communications, your travel. The way they shoot your family pets. And your family. The way they lie about the government's goals. The way they step all over the document that gives them the right to exist -- our constitution. Yep, I agree. It's not the soda bans in a few cities that made this land into the corporate oligarchy is it today; it's a whole bunch of other things. All of which are well in play.

We just don't flex our muscles as much.

You think not? (and remember, those are just the raids known to be "botched")

Will there be any optical drives left in the wild by the time such a beast makes it out of the lab?

I imagine that the comparatively strict board size limit forces you to use the densest NAND packages to achieve reasonable capacities, and also limits the number of independent NAND chips you can have running in parallel behind your controller chip, so you may have to use faster NAND than some of the physically larger drives.

Aside from that, and maybe a couple of extra PCB layers, I think that it's mostly a question of volume.

I don't think that anybody has defined a special, application-specific, 'flash slot'; but pretty much all the non SATA/SAS drives (that you'd see in a server, things like this eMMC chip not so much) are just PCIe cards, and those are common enough, and often not otherwise occupied.

It is true, though, that servers specifically built around the mechanical requirements of shoving a bunch of PCIe cards in are markedly less common than ones build around the mechanical requirements of shoving a bunch of HDDs in (and I don't think I've ever seen a server system built around the notion of using miniPCIe SSDs; that would be brutally expensive; but those things are only about the size of a DIMM, so even a 1U could accommodate pretty alarming capacity without using a proprietary form factor or socket...)

It's really the 'trivial honesty check' bit that surprises me. I have no reason to expect that they'd care much, at least a few years out, about the details of her alleged PhD process; but I would have expected exploitation of a nearly automatic honesty test. Even if they are otherwise competent (if anything, especially if they are otherwise competent, since they'll probably be better liars), liars are a rather dangerous breed. I would have (naively) assumed that trivial fact checking, even of facts that aren't themselves of much importance, would be nearly ubiquitous as a truth assay.

Nothing professional, just some hobbyist fiddling with 3d printers, a bunch of background reading spurred by frustration over comparatively lousy results compared to injection molded parts, and a good, wholesome, upstanding, fondness for testing to destruction.

I certainly shouldn't be treated as any sort of real authority; but it's something that interests me, and I've poked at it at the dilettante level.