If we needed to power the world on uranium fission, we could extract uranium from seawater. There is an estimated 4.5bn tonnes of uranium dissolved in seawater - if we extracted 10% of that, that would last 5,000 years at current consumption rates and without breeder reactors.

Breeder reactors can take us to millions of years, by which point, we may well have perfected other forms of energy production, population may have shrunk enough to make completely renewable energy sources more than adequate.

With nuclear, we could even contemplate actively scrubbing some CO2 from the atmosphere, converting it into oil, and pumping it underground, effectively reversing climate change. In fact, instead of sending money to poorer countries to help address future climate risk impacts, if richer countries actually put money into reversing their own contributions to climate change, that would actually be a worthwhile endeavour.

I can understand the reasons behind this, but what happens if two artists / singers sound very similar. Does one get to stop the other performing depending on who was born first (and therefore has their voice automatically copyrighted)?

And I can imagine a whole host of other unintended consequences of such legislation if not drafted very carefully.

On top of that, the use of software evolves, and software that might not have been expected to be internet facing may one day end up on the internet, security issues and all. So it is good practice to ensure software is secure by default, even if it is being used on an air-gapped computer in the middle of some remote desert.

China didnâ(TM)t expect their manufacturers to pivot because their car industry was then much smaller and less invested in ICE. A modern ICE engine is a remarkable feat of engineering, and a lot has gone into refining it into what it now is. Those were huge investments and a huge moat if you were a traditional car manufacturer or component supplier. China didnâ(TM)t have that much to protect so could leapfrog the ICE era.

Western government should have seen the writing on the wall and also helped their industries more directly.

I would not disagree that there are greedy corporates out there who want to maximise revenue while minimising investment.

However, if you turned it around, if there are 2 out of 300 customers per node who are causing issues, then why wouldn't the company just want to get rid of those two customers and not have to invest more and actually have 298 happy customers and however many happy executive and shareholders. I am sure they would rather not have the other 2 as customers.

That being said, I would expect a company providing, say, a gigabit internet connection to not have a data cap that you could hit in 3 hours. So a gigabit internet connection with a 1TB cap would be silly. But a 10TB cap might be justifiable.

Thatâ(TM)s just forcing the receiver of the call to be rude. A phone call is an imposition - I understand why people increasingly choose to ignore phone calls.

Apple built WebKit on top of KHTML!

Is open source / free software. Itâ(TM)s not stealing

I suspect that YouTube, being a closed platform that is not quite as integrated into the web the way search is will not be as much of an issue as Chrome and Android.

However, I am not sure that forcing a divestment of Chrome will achieve much. That is one element that Google actually built from the ground up and did not acquire. It was just so much better than Internet Explorer and Firefox.

I can see a bigger case for divesting Android. I suspect that Google might ultimately accept giving Android given that it has largely achieved its core objective of preventing a competitor search engine gaining market share by being the default in most devices.

The other remedy is likely to involve not allowing Google to post Apple for default placement, which may not feel as much of a punishment for Google in the short term given that there is no real competitor to take its place on Apple devices. It will just be a $20 billion annual saving for Google.

If you have a steady supply, it is a heck of a lot easier to plan a storage system to store the excess when you produce it, than it is with an intermittent supply.

Nuclear may require a few hours worth of battery storage, Wind and Solar may require weeks worth of storage i.e. nearly two orders of magnitude higher requirement.

Google is not your memory. It is a service to find information that you are, or may be interested in.

If this change means that Google starts to rid its index of content farms and other not particularly useful sites, then it can only make Google better.

Also a shot across the bow for anyone who wants to demand money from Google for indexing their website.

You require a $99 per year account to allow you to load your apps onto your phone. The fact that you require a developer account to sideload apps makes my statement 100% accurate. 99% of phones out there do not have any sideloading, and their owners / users do not have developer accounts.

You don't get to disregard certain words in a sentence and then claim that I "really" meant something else. That is a really transparent strawman that you are trying to pull there.

Or they could argue that they are removing features which do not comply with EU laws.

Here is an example of something that is legal in one country and not in another. In the UK, it is completely legal for your GPS navigation to tell you where any speed cameras are, while it is certainly illegal in France. Thereofore, (I imagine) Google does not include cameras in French maps. I also doubt the French government could object to Google removing features for French users.

First of all, the parent poster did not suggest that there was an app store on the first iPhone.

Secondly, Apple has never allowed sideloading generally - on any version of the iPhone. Thei pitch, since they allowed users to download and install their apps, was that those apps would be from their app store.

What is to stop mobile providers from hanging the deal so that you rent the phone from them for a fee, and can buy it from them for a token amount at contract end date.

Can the government really force mobile phone companies to unlock their own property? (They probably can, but in the US this could be struck down by the courts if the carriers fight it)

The problem is not the assumption of perpetual growth, which is not relevant here. The problem is that we have an expectation that at some point, usually around age 65, we will retire to enjoy our last two or so decades. The implicit assumption in that is that there will be enough younger people (usually age 15-65, but now more like 18-65) to do all of those things that will allow older people to be largely economically unproductive. If the birth rate is too low, that means we will need to either work longer to expand that workforce to reduce the dependency ratio, or younger people will need to effectively give up more of their income to support older folk. or we will have to let older folk become poorer by devaluing their pension benefits.