In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

Hmm....only up to about $4 or so here where I live in the New Orleans area...maybe a bit more...I bought at Costco yesterday and didn't really look that close at the pump, but was in the $4 range...

You start out doing it to others; but the empire always comes home in the end.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

How about we just nuke the Congo?

CERN has a pretty big open hardware library. Have you looked through it?

You're being pretty disingenuous though. CERN is basically a facility that provides services. Most of the scientists who "work at" CERN aren't actually employed by it. They're employed by home universities in many countries, including ones outside Europe. Many of the people who actually do the work and make the inventions are grad students who may well be paying to be there, not the other way around.

Again, "publicly funded" doesn't automatically mean the public owns everything any more than your employer, public or not, owns you. Slavery is illegal, yeah? Many (most?) universities leave IP ownership with the inventors. It's an important part of academic freedom. It's also in line with typical public funding objectives which are:

1. do the most research as cheaply as possible

Sometimes there's a #2 which is:

2. commercialize as much as possible in order to stimulate economic development.

Open sourcing is typically done because scientists think sharing freely is an important part of science, and it's typically done with their own time, money and effort, often in conflict with their best career interests.

Realistically you need both

One of the criticisms of phonics is that reading comprehension suffers. You two don't need to reinforce that point quite so much.

All configuration options are under control of system administrator. Yet somehow there are still plenty of security issues caused by bad configuration.

To err is human.

Realistically you need both

If you're only ever exposed to phonics how do you know what words mean?

There are lots of people who have lots of different motivations. "Will" isn't usually a problem. "Ability" is. Or "capacity" is maybe a better word. The pattern repeats over and over and has been studied over and over, in exhaustive detail.

Yes, it gets in the way of all that delightful Victorian "the savages are savages because they want to be," manifest destiny, chosen people bullshit. Good.

Fortunately, that's highly unlikely. There has never been a confirmed case of airborne transmission between humans. Most transmission is due to insufficient and unsanitary health care facilities, due to lack of funds.

I had already received three Pfizer shots when I came down with the virus (confirmed, with a test that came up positive in less than a minute). However, I am absolutely convinced that the severity of my case was so minimal (sleeping under a blanket on the couch in my clothes for 3-4 days) because of the enhanced response of my immune system, due to the vaccine.

Correct. It's like a governor declaring a state of emergency ... for a flood that only affects one region of their state. These alerts are a call to action for officials, not the general public.

AI, huh? And here I thought the, uh, government might seize the opportunity to declare these companies illegal gambling that's rife with insider trading and other criminality, and shut them down.