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Comment Re:How Will They Get Them Up? (Score 2) 42

They've used 3 Falcon 9 launches so far and contracted for 10 more. SpaceX is happy to launch them. Remember, SpaceX developed Starlink in large part because they were short on customers for Falcon 9, because it can launch so often. This way, they became their own best customer by monetising a huge constellation. Having Starlink competitors launching with them too is icing on the cake.

Comment Re:Transmission lines not power plants (Score 2) 213

That's literally the dream scenario for a power plant because for many types of generation having to ramp up and down is more costly than delivering a fixed amount of power.

Unfortunately, it's the dream scenario for the old kinds of power stations that we want to be moving away from, like coal, gas and nuclear. Solar and wind like loads that can adapt to their inherent variability because, otherwise, expensive storage is required.

Comment The earth's rotation spec up (Score 2) 50

after 2016, when we had our last leap second. The next leap second might need to be negative. I wonder if that's related. I'm talking about the rotation of the crust, but conservation of angular momentum would suggest that a change in the core's would require an equal and opposite change in the rotation of some other part of the earth.

Comment Re:Pretty ballsy for a US District Judge (Score 3, Interesting) 67

every member country must extend the same copyright protections to the creations of those in other nations as though they were their own citizens

But member countries don't have to extend the same copyright protections as the US. Just because Anna's Archive is infringing copyright doesn't mean that the .se registrar is. Sure, a .se DNS record assists Anna's Archive in its activities, but different countries disagree on whether that's grounds for forcing the registrar to take the record down.

along with a minimum set of standards such as no illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted works

And maintaining a DNS record doesn't meet that standard; it's just a directory listing telling people how to obtain infringing copies.

Comment A legal but over-righteous stance (Score 2) 46

We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful.

This isn't the burn they want you to think it is. It's like saying that a bar isn't a good place to find alcoholics that need help because you might increase the bar's profits. On the other hand, bars have every right to tell people from AA to take a hike, just don't expect us to respect them for doing so.

Comment Re:Not a sure thing. (Score 1) 177

There are all sorts of mechanisms for handling this, starting with extradition treaties

Extradition treaties require that the alleged offence be a crime in both countries. If the UK tried for extradition in this case, 4Chan's lawyers would have it laughed out of the US court which has to decide whether to allow the extradition.

Comment Re:Phtotoshop feature complete (Score 1) 41

Software does require on-going effort to remain in the market, even if no new features are added: security vulnerabilities come to light; bugs are fixed; support for new or updated operating systems and other software and hardware is added; etc. In fact I'd prefer that developers spent more time fixing existing issues rather than adding new features because, inevitably, adding new features adds new bugs, often faster than they can fix the old ones. It sounds great to say software shouldn't have any vulternabilities or bugs, so the vendors should fix these for free, but let's be realisitic.

So I don't see software subscriptions models as being inherently bad. The problem with Adobe is that the price is so extremely high. It seems like they're trading on their dominant market position to extract all they can from their customers, rather than charging what it costs to maintain their products plus a fair margin. They're breeding competitors and eventually it will bite them.

Comment Direct-View Cinemas Required (Score 1) 162

Projected cinema is incapable of matching the high dynamic range of modern TVs and modern movies. Most cinemas are still only 2K, but their lack of HDR is much more obvious and important than their lack of 4K. The home viewing experience is substantially better in every way but screen size, and this is reducing the incentive to patronise cinemas. Apparently there are a very few cinemas with huge, direct-view LED screens which are expensive, even by the standards of commercial cinemas. There needs to be a faster shift in this direction if cinemas are to survive.

Comment Re:Lost Media (Score 1) 75

One of the big problems is that the live action was filmed at 24fps but the CGI was created at 30fps. This makes it very hard to merge the two without one or the other stuttering. It didn't look so bad on TV when everyone (in NTSC countries) was used to films being shown with 3:2 pull-down but the Blu-ray version instead badly converts the original CGI to 24fps.

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