Bell Labs invented the transistor because the low hanging fruit of vacuum tubes had dried up. Some low hanging fruit is always dried up. That never stopped progress.

While true, the pace of the Next Big Thing is not necessarily constant.

They had to say it that way, because the more accurate statement is that the dealership law unfairly advantages existing automakers. It's not about the dealerships being good or bad, it's about the fact that setting up a dealership network takes a lot of time and money and requiring it is a good way to keep new competition out.

The correct term is "regulatory capture". Private businesses use the power of the state to protect, subsidize or otherwise benefit them and harm competitors and potential competitors. It's extremely common and the more pervasive the regulation is, the more common it is. Red tape and government procedures benefit entrenched players who have built the institutional structures and knowledge to deal with them.

This isn't to say that all regulation is bad... but a lot of it is. There was never any consumer benefit to banning direct sales. All regulations should be thoroughly scrutinized for their effects on the market, direct and indirect.

into place to protect their oligopoly. Some blame it on "socialism" when it's really crony capitalism.

I thought exactly the opposite. I think Rocky is far too "human". I didn't mind it, though, because a lot of the humor would be lost if Rocky was properly alien.

I think that's necessary. Providing explanations of depth comparable to the book would require a 10-hour movie. Squeezing the story down to feature length requires cutting a lot of exposition. In many books there's a lot of description that can be replaced with visuals, but it's pretty hard to do that with a lot of the science.

Every time Hollywood sells a movie as 'realistic', it's turned out to be bullshit. The trade mags and entertainment reporters repeat the lie, but that doesn't make it true.

I'll be watching this movie soon, it looks fun. I will not expect them to get physics anywhere close to correct enough that someone with a decent high school physics class under their belt won't see where they got it wrong.

I'm sure you'd have said the same about Y2K. It's a good thing that some people have more foresight.

Zork the Cockroach: "What the fuck is 'rick-rolling'?"

When credit cards and bank accounts are given to children, a parent signature is required. If phones and ISP's are paid for through such venues, then they are automatically age-checked. If a parent is allowing a child to use a device the parent pays for, they should be required to opt in the device to allow the child to access mature material.

Minor grammar fix: "the low-hanging-fruit of solid state electronics R&D has dried up."

I don't believe it's because of the tax-breaks, for they still exist, but that the low-hanging-fruit of solid state electronics R&D have dried up. Software has replaced hardware for many functions of machines, and software needs less "big lab" R&D since it can be done in pajamas. Corporate hardware labs just stopped being able to pay their way.

If say quantum computing started spewing innovations, a similar "gold rush" of R&D may appear again. This is not saying "everything has been invented already", but rather that technology doesn't progress at a steady pace. The AI boom (bubble?) has produced AI labs, but I doubt its lab boom will last as long as the solid state boom.

That's the opposite of how that works. It's LGPL 2 or later. That means you can follow the terms of redistribution from either license. Either. Or.

It will do the same jobs. Most of the software on which we depend predates the GPL3 and/or uses an even more permissive license without an anti-tivoization clause.

Was it the monopoly that made the difference? Or was it simply management smart enough to not only not kill the goose, but also to feed it? They had wins, they got more funding, they had more wins, repeat until they no longer got more funding and stopped getting wins. What's probably more important than why they succeeded is what happened at the end.

If you're a Debian derivative user, it's called Devuan.

Otherwise...*

* Note: Removing systemd from a systemd-based system is madness. There's a reason Devuan exists, and it is that simply changing the init system on Debian results in a lot of breakage, which best illustrates the biggest problem with systemd.