I have the same setup, and did this one time working with a small company on the East coast.

They freaked out and cited copyright/trademark/whatever they could saying I had to change my email address or they would sue me.

(facepalm)

I knew someone would trot out the "rights" argument.

"to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)

Your statement doesn't include the "limited times" component. That is crucial to the balance of 1) the author, to motivate them (not guarantee!) to spend their time to write down ideas and stories and to be compensated for it, while 2) society at large can then grow from that and take it new directions after that.

If #2 doesn't happen, then whey did society at large agree to #1? The constitution is by "we the people" not "we the publishers."

Patents have the same terms as in the 1700's because it is good for business to be able to leverage the ideas of competitors (after limited times) to then invent/produce new goods that would not have been thought up and invented and created without this symbiotic relationship. Since it's a win-win for business, nobody wants to change the times.

Some exclusive time to make back the money invested, while after that society can use it to go down new paths and avenues that the author never dreamed of.

But, with mickey mouse, the publishers (not so much the authors) want to tip this scale over and have exclusive control - forever.

When will "we the people" say no to this abusive rebalance of the scales?

Interesting fact: When the original copyright term was set to 28 years, guess how long it took for information to double in the world? 28 years. Now, it's doubling every 13 months. I would argue that copyright term should be tied to the rate of information doubling. The most basic solution that I can suggest, to avoid this whole "extension" mess, is to not print in a book what year it was published (which leaves the date it enters the public domain up for after-the-fact changes) to have works indicate the date it was first published and what the date will be when it enters the public domain, based on the publish date at that time. Then, it can't be extended. it's already determined at the first publish time. A person can pick up a book and know if it is in the public domain or not. Today, legally, it is such a mess to try and determine if a book is in the public domain, that nobody even tries if it is after 1978 (~45 years ago)

Without any skin in the game (ie paying some token part of the tuition at least), abuse or waste is guaranteed.

Wealth redistribution at its finest.

will develop a reusable mini-launcher to compete with the likes of Elon Musk's SpaceX

And here's a problem. They aren't doing it to provide a cheaper alternative 'servcie'. They are just competing with the man, the myth, the legend.

It isn't to solve problems, or to meet a grand goal, or do it for the betterment of what mankind can do.

Nope. Compete with Musk.

Nobody can top his tweets!

I love the text editor Textpad, and it has a Wordstar keyboard shortcut compatibility baked in.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.

Oops. To continue: I'm just not seeing that it is so hard to access. But then, I use a Linux desktop, which has always come with a proper PDF renderer, there has never been a need to download "Acrobat".

Web pages use SVG to render vector graphics. It uses the exact same imaging model as PDF and is implemented in all modern browsers. The web in general has taken a lot of lessons from Adobe because Warnock and Geshke, in the PostScript Red Book, got so much right about how to build an image model that many GUI developers are still learning today. If you start with a PDF, it should be possible to machine-translate it to SVG and present it as a web page.

PDF exists because it is trivial to generate it from the document renderer meant for printing. Although I have once in a while run into an improperly scaled PDF meant to be printed 8-up, I'm just not