The military budget isn't completely unlimited. Arguably if an opponent can convince us to shoot down their $500 drones with $1m missiles, they've already won.

And printing money only works up to a point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

No, Scotland and Wales don't have so much of an issue. I don't really know what the situation is in Northern Ireland but haven't heard much about shortages there. Scotland and Wales are wetter and hillier that England, and less densely populated. A good part of the English midlands actually gets their water from Wales.
Not to say that there's no issues outside England, but it's certainly in England that there's most concern.

That's not the same thing. While they vary their price, everyone still sees the same price. If there's a lot of demand, the price goes up for everyone, while if they need to fill seats the price goes down for everyone. The proposed pricing uses AI to work out how much each person is willing to pay and offer them a personal price. So they might offer me a seat for $400 because I'm broke and/or stingy, while charging you $1000 since they think you're well off and will pay whatever they ask.

To some extent it's not new - coupons and rebates are the same sort of idea, as people who aren't prepared to pay high prices will put in the legwork while those who don't care will just pay what's on the price tag. But there's nothing stopping someone rich jumping through the hoops too. The difference here is that if the AI thinks you're rich you can't jump through the hoop as they'll take the hoop away.

They think they're compliant. If you disagree, you're free to take them to court - though the legal bills will be huge.

They offer you the source code, and you're allowed to distribute it. They won't (and can't) take legal action against you for doing that, and they will honour all their contracts with you regardless. They won't do anything to you at all. They will just decline to do any new business with you in future. That's certainly against the spirit of the GPL. Is it against the letter? Well, that's what lawyers get paid big bucks for.

Yes, it might be. It's a peculiarity of the way sentencing works. Once a sentence is passed, it can't be increased (except by appeal in limited circumstances), so the headline figure is actually the maximum. You'll probably get let out sooner, but you're "on license", not actually free. If you don't behave - even if you're not convicted of a new crime - you're back in jail.

With a life sentence, unless you get one of the rare "whole life tariffs", you'll probably get released at some point. But you're still "on license" - forever. Misbehave and you're straight back in jail, even if you've been out for years. And the parole board doesn't have to let you out when the tariff is up - you could be in for your whole life anyway if the parole board doesn't think you should be released.

The Apollo missions were manually piloted (with computer assistance). Computers may be good but "land a spacecraft on an unmapped lunar surface" is still a challenge. Also Apollo was intended to take off from the moon so had a lot of fuel on board, which gives more scope for modifying the landing trajectory and even aborting the landing.

No, it's just ambiguous syntax as usual. Nikon is being described as "Japanese" and a "camera maker". Which is correct - Nikon is headquartered in Japan, and makes cameras. They're not claiming to be a "Japanese-camera maker", i.e. a maker of Japanese cameras, which they are not. To be precise, they're a "Japanese Chinese-camera maker" - a Japanese company that makes Chinese cameras.

The fundamental issue is that explosions aren't a very efficient method of excavation. A lot of energy gets expended moving earth that didn't need moving, or that falls back in the hole. And it tends to produces circular(ish) holes which isn't ideal for making a channel. That might not matter so much if the power source is cheap, but it does mean you're using quite big bombs in proportion to the useful excavation you get. And bigger bombs mean more fallout. You'd do better putting the nuclear material in a reactor connected to a generator driving an electric excavator.

Unicode is arguably the wrong tool for the job. It was designed to represent all human writing, across every language, living or dead. Even within one language, defining the character set unambiguously is difficult. Across multiple languages it's practically impossible. So Unicode goes for an inclusive approach - if something is plausibly a character of a human language, there's at least one way to represent it in Unicode. Possibly multiple ways, which is preferred over no ways. And uniqueness and identity of characters is poorly defined.

In contrast, computer code, including URLs, requires a robust definition of uniqueness and identity. Two URLs are either identical or not. And they're supposed to be human-readable, so non-identical URLs should not appear identical to a human. Which is impossible if URLs are allowed to consist of an unrestricted string of Unicode characters.

It's not "completely upended". It's currently perfectly legal for a human to read all the copyrighted works they want, learn from them, and produce their own works based on what they've read. It's not immediately obvious that a machine doing the same thing is contrary to the principles of copyright. Of course in either case if the output is too closely based on a small set of works then it's an infringement, but that doesn't mean that the training itself is.
That's not so say that there isn't an issue of course - a machine can read far more than a human could in a reasonable time, and has a much better memory with theoretically unlimited capacity, and at some point a change in quantity becomes a change in quality. The real answer would be for lawmakers to update the law to clarify exactly where the boundaries are, but most of them seem more interested in party politics and grandstanding than trying to actually solve issues.

Hmm, well I used the figure for car sales, but I guess commercial vehicles and motorbikes need to be added on. Then there's cars being re-registered from other states. Do cars get a new number if they're de-registered and re-registered later? And I guess some combinations are probably banned as they spell something offensive. Some numbers seem to have been skipped, and you need a bit of headroom to give you time to bring in a new system. So 45 years is about right.

Only assuming the number is completely unstructured. The current and new formats each allow 10^4 * 24^3 (assuming no o or i) which is 138,240,000. California has about 1.8m new cars a year, so this new format is good for about 76 years.

Yes but my hand is asymmetrical - it has a thumb on one side and not the other. Galaxies aren't - neither side is obviously the "top".

How often does that happen on Android, which has allowed sideloading and alternative app stores from the beginning? Microsoft apps are in the Google Play store, as are apps from all the main banks, government apps, etc. I've never yet come across any remotely mainstream app that requires installing an alternative app store.

There is. A Watt is 1 Joule per second. Or if you take it all the way to base units, one kilogram-square-metre per second per second per second. That enough time units for you?