This is pretty much exactly how trade secrets vs copyright/patent works - and has worked for centuries

The current setup really does allow the worst offenders to have their cake and eat it too

yes it does. There have been a number of prosecutions in the UK of drivers who were spotted by police climbing into the passenger or rear seats whilst the cruise control function was activated

Tesla need to sort this issue out. If the seat is vacated the car needs to pull over and any attempts at funny business (circumventing checks) need to be thwarted

yes, and they're fantastic at longer distance point to point linking. not so much if you want to pootle along and stop every 400 yards.

Public transportation needs to be a mix of modes. Look at how the Dutch do in Rotterdam for one example - you take a tram to a subway point, jump on that for a longer stretch and then get off/jump on the same tramline to finish your trip - or you can ride the tram along the entire journey but it'll take an hour longer

The moment you try "one size fits all" you're going to fail and fail hard. That approach is what begat the Space Shuttle and we know how that worked out in the end

It's even easier than this.

Telcos get revenue for terminating calls. Make the terminating telco jointly and severally liable for forged CLID calls and the problem will stop cold in a week

Law enforcement across the world are treating this as "too hard" and criminals are laughing all the way to the bank as a result

The problem is that if people turn to vigilante justice things could get very very nasty, very quickly

starlink has parked tanks on the front lawn with cannon pointed in the front windows

Yup, the answer to sea level rise is "People move and changes are slow unless you're foolish enough to try and hold back the tides."

There's a far bigger elephant in the room if CO2 levels keep climbing - there's a good chance of triggering an anoxic extinction event if methane clathrate beds start blowing out and the one in the Laptev Sea is has been showing increasing signs of instability over the last 5 years, following ~15 years of methane seeping out of the seabed

One blowout is tolerable (but bad news), two is a bad day. Three is likely a chain reaction underway.

People can move away from rising seas. It's much harder to escape global oxygen levels plunging to perhaps as low as 12% for a few tens of thousands of years (hint, most mammals can't handle it dropping below 16% and humans are badly affected at 18% or less - drowning in your own lungs is a nasty way to die)

"The mask mandate is by the Oregon government."

This argument was settled 115 years ago and reaffromed multiple times since then

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that individual liberty is not absolute and is subject to the police power of the state.

And by that, I mean that they are charging gatekeeping fees to articles that academics I work with have made freely available and WANT to be freely available

In a lot of cases the publishers in question are esstentially rent-seeking pirates anyway

An account that's just been setup and made one low value purchase shouldn't be able to submit reviews

There are a bunch of ways of algorithmicly spotting this kind of behaviour ranging from checking referrers to commonality of IP and credit card details. Scamazon don't do it because they do the absolute minimum necessary to comply with regulators - including paying to get regulations changed if that's the cheapest way out

It's been known for years you're more likely to get fake products on Amazon than on Ebay and I'm at the point where 'fulfilled by Amazon' is a warning label even for genuine vendors because of the indiscriminate stock mixing that's going on in the warehouses

Or not.

Half the commenters here seem to assume that there are unlimited quantities of solar/wind power available to extract from nature

Whilst the supply is never-ending, there are very real limits on the extractable POWER - to the point that to replace the UK's carbon-emitting electricity generation capacity would require putting solar panels on EVERY available rooftop, most farm fields and carpetting the country in wind turbines without regard to safety factors.

The same applies in the USA, despite the far lower population density - because the losses involved in TRANSPORTING the generated power to where it's needed tend to balance the larger areas available to generate electricity.

And that still only accounts for 1/3 of carbon emissions. The other 2/3 are not in electricity generation. Getting rid of those requires far more than "merely tripling" electrical generation capacity (transportation alone requires doubling-to-tripling electrical power generation)

Concentrating on "Renewables" is mostly a matter of rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. Yes, they CAN replace existing electrical generation capacity, but the requirement is to find 6-8 times existing electrical generation capacity, not merely 150% of it.

A bridge that only goes to an island 1/4 of the way across a river when it needs to replace a ferry service going from bank to bank is not going to see much use.

Regulatory capture is hardly a new thing in the USA.

"I suppose there is always the possibility that it has been hyped, and there is some major snag which proponents do not want to talk about."

The absolute major snag is that once running it does not require enriched uranium and once you have one running you can use it to start others up.

That means that the entire cost of the military nuclear program gets exposed rather than being able to fuzz the costs by claiming 80% of the operational expense is in supplying civil fuel - and it means anyone running uranium enrichment is by definition making nuclear weapons instead of plausible deniability, so makes enrichment plants vulnerable to SALT-style treaties

The secondary snag is that once proven safe, it immediately renders all existing water-moderated reactors (light or heavy water) as extremely dangerous radioactive steam bombs, highly inefficient rube-goldberg contraptions (Neucomen engines vs Watt engines) that suffer from vendor lockin on fuel supply (Gillette copied the nuclear industry model with its razors)

The US military actively opposed the things on the first part (although that's not how it was put to Nixon) and the civil industry has a vested interest in not being forced to shutdown/rebuild the existing plants

"I remember that molten salt has been tried in power generation and found to be crap. It causes corrosion problems and if you have to shut down it causes startup problems."

Citation required: You remember utterly incorrectly and are spreading erroneous bullshit

The Oak Ridge reactor was routinely shut down on Friday afternoons/restarted Monday mornings because nobody wanted to nursemaid it over the weekend

When it was partially disassembled after 9000 hours runtime, NO corrosion was found

The THEORETICAL corrosion path (tellurium) was fixed with a change to hastalloy formulation in 1971 "just in case"

It was _never_ tried in electrical power generation. Merely heat output using U235, U233 and plutonium. Nixon killed it in 1971 when applications were made for funding to go to the next step and setup an electrical generating version with thorium conversion blankets. That's when it was declared Beyond Top Secret, everything ordered destroyed, molten nuclear research made illegal via rules rewrites and Weinberg kicked out of the American nuclear program