how much the compensation will be? I wonder how much the space junk is worth and who gets to keep that? I imagine it will be given to a museum

It's definitely an overreach, not unprecedented though

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Animus fighting the viruses of my ancestors

https://imgur.com/gallery/QJuW... "These cows are small, but the ones out there are far away" - Father Ted

1200 people polled, 29 people strongly agreed with qanon. I don't think the poll was big enough.

I've been waiting patiently for a sign of the end of days. Microsoft as the heroes of open source and Google as the villains. Couldn't have imagined a clearer sign!

They tend to be able to convince themselves out of most problematic observations

We are looking for intelligent life broadcasting to us using a method we are currently able to detect. There are a lot of factors reducing our chances: If you look back before we discovered electricity, we would have no way of receiving the signals we are currently broadcasting at any distance! The luck involved locating a civilisation of appropriate age to receive this signal would be tremendous. Presumably, soon we will discover a new technology with which to communicate, and again the clock will be reset on how advanced the recipients of any message would have to be. Our thirst for knowledge is pretty unique on Earth, as is our egotism. Aliens would need to be advanced enough to pick up our signal and care enough to broadcast one back. Knowing what to look for is difficult. We see pulsars broadcasting quickly across the universe and presume they are a natural phenomenon, as we do with meteorites. Maybe they are communicating and we are missing it. For example, once we invented the light bulb, we might have thought to look for light to detect intelligent life. In truth, we have made our lights more efficient, broadcasting a narrower spectrum and reflecting the light going in unuseful directions, making them harder to detect. The number of alien races. If there are a lot of alien races, advanced enough to communicate, why would they bother contacting us if we are technologically inferior? What if one of these races goes around destroying all the other advanced races it discovers (Look at human history!) We have enough threats on earth already. Maybe any intelligent beings are content enough with what they have or wise enough to predict how hostile we are to each other and therefore go as far as to hide their presence from us until we reach an appropriate stage of development. There still exist tribes living in isolation in the Amazon, who throw spears at planes. We have decided to leave them to it, maybe aliens have decided the same with us? Maybe the natural formation of the universe is such that at a specific distance there is a block of some kind. Imagine yourself as a cave man. Trying to communicate to the outside world might consist of riding a horse to the furthest corner of the land you were born on. After that point you give up. The same once you work out you can traverse the sea and map the planet. Then you work out there is an atmosphere which changes as you go up with stars beyond. Maybe there is a barrier preventing communication. Maybe at some point in the past, our planet was seeded and they are observing us as an experiment which they don't want to influence by interacting with. To summarise, there are loads of reasons why we might not be receiving alien signals. My opinion is that it is ridiculously egotistical to assume that we are advanced enough to detect them because any intelligent life will be similar to us. I can only hope they are smarter than us and aren't bothering. Sorry for the formatting

I was an economics student. We are taught that one of the essential points of government is to address market failure. Everything has a cost. If I drive a car very loudly past your house every hour, and you try to sell it, your house is going to fetch you less money. Naturally, there is no way I directly pay you for the noise I'm creating. The payment of a fine to the government for noise pollution might reduce the noise I make and increase the value of your house. Alternatively, it might reimburse you for the inconvenience of living close to me. Some of the cost is obvious and borne by the producer. Others are to third parties who deserve to be compensated. Elon Musk is advancing technology, reducing global warming, reducing the need for infrastructure investment in the grid, reducing house prices (directly by providing cheaper roofing materials and by increasing land available to include that on mars potentially). All of these are valid uses of subsidy. The jobs created are also important so the welfare payments are reduced for the unemployment that would otherwise occur. Other motor companies benefit from a subsidy to gas prices, so electric vehicles need equivalent subsidies to level the playing field. These are some of the reasons you and I should subsidise Elon Musk's companies. I'm from the UK and I will also subsidise his company despite not benefiting as much from taxation of his company. I do still benefit from the positive externalities compared to the next best alternative (petrol/gas)

Or as the old adage goes, you get what you pay for?

Is it just me who wonders if such a thing already exists in a less draconian form? If our communications are being monitored, surely the first thing you'd do is categorise them so you can filter later? Using this system, it would be possible to track Christians, racists and vegetarians, without the explicit aim of tracking muslims. Secondly, the way the question is phrased, unless the BSD licence has a "not for muslim-tracking use" clause I've missed, several high profile open source companies would technically not be able to answer no. They don't ask how their tools are going to be used. Another example of badly thought through journalism to create sensationalist headlines. Not slashdot worthy.

I'm involved in a project that involves moving databases. We write each transaction to both the old and new structure using our data access layer, then export historic data and eventually, once we've verified the new system is working as expected, remove the old structure from the data access layer. This is the main reason data access layers are used.

Sounds like what intel have been doing to processors for years. If its cheaper to make millions of 1 better processor than more models but less volume of each, you need to differentiate on price to keep profit high and allow the people who would use the cheaper models still able to afford it. So they cripple some of the processors and sell them at reduced price. Its just the company taking advantage of economies of scale. If they couldn't, theyd have to increase the price of the lowest models to design them from scratch with reduced performance or reduce profits!

I'm an electronic engineer and I could have told you that the relationship between blade length and efficiency is non-linear. We learnt that at uni. People really need to get over their attitudes against the sight of large wind turbines. It is the only efficient way of doing this. Being a brit, large wind farms over here are a more difficult sell as we are quite limited for space, however several projects are being undertaken. In the states, you have the desert which seems a perfect area to locate your wind farms, dependant on wind levels. Get your hands off the oil :p