It seems quaint, doesn't it? A central authority trying prohibit a language from evolving by pronouncing the occasional fatwa against a loan word, a foreign coinage, etc. However, there's a good argument that such a preservation effort will be needed far more over the next 100 years than it was over the last ~400.

Alors, au cours du présent siècle où le monde se rétrécit chaque jour, je souhaite la meilleure des chances à l'Académie Francaise.

They're gonna need it.

My children are at this same age, asking similar questions.

To 'explain copyright', first you will need to know your own goal.

Are you trying to teach your son how to comply with the law? Or, are you trying to teach your son how to recognize when a bad law is being used to make society poorer?

You're kidding me, right? The national air forces of the world have been sending people up for extended patrols for something like 8 or 9 decades and there "hasn’t been much research done" to study personnel performance reduction as a function of time, altitude, air pressure, oxygen, etc?

I must respectfully disagree. Violence is violence. Speech that advocates imminent violence (or that plans or coordinates violence) is suppressed because it leads to violence. Not because such speech _is_ violence.

It is entirely possible for speech advocating imminent violence to be valuable speech, but the cost of allowing such speech is too high. We are guaranteeing the right to talk, not guaranteeing the means to plan the fighting.

How about a quote from The American president, while we're at it?

We forbid censorship precisely because we believe that good ideas will displace bad ones when every viewpoint has a chance to be heard. If we didn't believe that, the only sensible course would be to repeal the 1st Amendment and get busy building the Ministry of Truth.

But, I still believe. And, I stand against any power (government or otherwise) that attempts to forbid a viewpoint* being expressed.

--
*Speech expressing a viewpoint is not the same as speech planning and coordinating violence, which should be prevented.

Whither NetFlix?

Indeed. I haven't looked for any stats, but I'm gonna take a wild guess that the cord-cutters overlap pretty strongly with the eSports-watchers. Hmm. If the people exiting cableTV are the ones that watched less sports, then the remaining viewership of cable becomes more sports-ish. Which makes me wonder why I'm still hanging around in a wasteland of pro sports, reality shows, and . . .

Actually, I'm not sure there is any third thing left on cable TV. It's long past time I, too, took ship at the Grey Havens.

Let us not forget that the relatively young are much more easily sold to by marketers than those who have already chosen and settled into their rut. Even if the 35-60 crowd or the 61-80 crowd has more money, it is much harder to sway those people to shift their spending. Plus, sports has probably already captured as much of the 35-80 crowd as it can reasonably expect to get. This is not to say that the 17-34 crowd are dumber spenders than older folks, but rather that they remain undecided spenders. They are the better opportunity for marketers.

"The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded."

Hear, hear! Mod parent up.

"Unique" cannot be modified in this way. The phrase David is looking for is "very rare." No one who has claimed the title of "editor" should be making such a mistake.

Additionally, that collection of words beginning with "So" and ending with a period could be improved by editing it into an actual sentence.

Adding rat brains can make AI smarter, huh?

I guess that explains why the Borg kept wanting to assimilate humans.

In other news, Minecraft software running on users' devices is estimated to spawn a new instance of ZOMBIE every 10 ticks, projected to total 26 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds x 200 ticks x 1 zombie /10 ticks x 1/24 average play time x 100,000,000 copies sold = 187,200,000,000,000 ZOMBIES by the end of the month.

How can we worry about a few million malware at a time like this?

Leviathan Wakes
Caliban's War
Abaddon's Gate
Cibola Burn
Nemesis Games

All in the last month. Can't put them down.

Thanks for the informative response. A couple of thoughts:

So, Shilshole and Elliott can both be "bays", but when it comes to Pluto-Charon (or any system with 2+ self-rounding bodies) only one of them is a "planet"? Hmmm.

At this point, we could consume some time exploring Fishing Bay on the Chesapeake, but I think we'd soon conclude that terms like bay, sea, etc. have been applied pretty loosely and might themselves benefit from a debated and voted definition. My point, though, was this: we want the definition of planet to readily identify a class of objects that are of interest to discuss. Happily either a size + orbital circumstances definition or a size-only definition would do that.

Now I see how "most prominent" is a better formulation than "has cleared its orbit" was. As least under "most prominent", one of the bodies is likely to get labeled as a planet.

Well, if they do adopt a definition of planet based upon orbital circumstances, I can see that I'm going to need to find myself a word to describe planet-sized objections irrespective of where they are found. That is, ________: a planet, moon, or other object of similar mass.

What does 'prominence in its orbit and neighborhood' gain us with respect to making the word usable in discussions?

If we drop that criterion, it seems quite wieldy to me to discuss, for instance, binary planets or sibling planets when multiple bodies of sufficient size occupy an orbit. In the same way, we discuss Shilshole Bay and Elliott Bay as two bays in the same neighborhood rather than claim that they aren't bays because they are too close to each other.

Keeping it requires us to say that bodies that look like planets aren't planets when there are two or more of them. Would we rather say, "I'm sorry, Shilshole, you're very bay-like, but until some one backfills Elliott or sinks Magnolia below sea level, you don't qualify as a true "bay"?

So, here is the question: If we keep the neighborhood prominence criterion, what do we call the following object?

Misread that as Iuz. Which, I guess, isn't much farther fetched than what did happen.