I'm not criticizing the proposal. It is obviously good for the public welfare. I'm just curious as to whether the cost will be large enough that the companies will resist, small companies perhaps go out of business, prices to consumers go up significantly, generally speaking, what the consequences may be.

Anyone know how much this will cost the companies?

By your thinking, airlines ought to be allowed to operate using experimental aircraft and stock aircraft that are not properly maintained. It's one thing for an inventor to be reckless and kill himself. It's another when you take paying customers.

There was little opportunity to prevent Stockton Rush from operating an unsafe vessel outside of a totalitarian environment we wouldn't want. However, when you start offering rides to paying customers, things change. That should and can be regulated. It is hard to hide. Furthermore, Rush fired staff who pointed out the problems. A better whistleblower system might have made their voices heard.

You don't need government approval for each trip in your car. That's a major difference between what China is requiring for drones and US driving laws.

Four hours is about halfway from NJ to Barcelona. I'm not sure I see the point in turning around.

The ability to convert a spectrogram to sound has long been known in the speech research community. In 1950 a device known as the Pattern Playback was built at Haskins Laboratories. You would draw an artificial spectrogram and feed it to the machine and it would play back the corresponding sound. It was used to perform experiments on the acoustic cues for speech perception. The original machine was last used for research in 1976. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Supporting Windows XP means modifying it to deal with changes in hardware and patching bugs, especially security problems. That requires on-going effort on the part of Microsoft, so it is understandable that they will not keep at it indefinitely. (You would, I imagine, justifiably feel ripped off if a year after XP came out Microsoft dropped support.) Keeping a game playable in the sense required by the bill just requires the publisher either to keep the server running or to distribute a version that allows players to run their own server. Neither of those requires the kind of ongoing effort that continued support for an OS would.

Granted that Obama and Biden were foolishly soft on Iran, Trump has not done a very good job of stopping Iran from developing nukes. Almost all of the serious damage to the Iranian nuclear program has been done by Israel, not the US.

In one version of the story there's an additional factor, namely that Microsoft wanted to pay a fixed, one-time, fee for the license whereas Kildall wanted to follow his usual practice of getting a royalty on each copy.

I used ZIP drives extensively in the 90s. I still have a drive and some disks. As far as I know they still work though I haven't tried them in quite a while. They were a huge improvement for people like me who had relatively large files (speech data).

This is interesting but it is only half-true that the use of consumable chemicals has been the barrier to the creation of scent emitters. The other problem is that no orthogonal basis for olfaction is known. In the case of color, for example, we know that you can combine red, blue, and green to form any desired color. There is nothing comparable for scent. We don't know that you can use, say, rose, bitter almond, and sandalwood to create any desired scent.

The article mentions the state's tax revenue as if it would lose it if liquor sales were privatized. Really? States manage to collect taxes on all sorts of privately sold products. As far as I can see, privatizing liquor sales need not mean giving up any tax revenue.

That's already the case. The so-called National Security Law is used against any kind of political dissent.

Agreed. This sounds like a useful feature for me.