ckocagil

That's encryption for the state, not for us peasants.

If this isn't evidence of a monopoly, I don't know what is.

Going to Mars faster isn't a good idea, but I hope Nuclear Thermal Rockets will develop further so the payload can be greatly increased.

Releasing carbon is an externality that isn't taken into account because it doesn't immediately hurt you (in your wallet or otherwise). Taxing it is simply taking that externality and putting a price on it.

Once you tax it markets will immediately respond by finding efficient, low carbon footprint alternatives to everything. That is, if people can get into their heads that capitalism is a system (to be tweaked for the benefit of everyone), not a religion.

By the way rich people will be the least affected global warming.

How are you going to privatize infrastructure? There can be no competition in big infrastructure projects. What's a competitor to do, lay a new railroad next to the existing one? This is also why fiber lines should be owned by cities and leased to ISPs.

Nothing prevents patent trolls from becoming copyright trolls overnight: acquire companies, sue everyone.

Profit margins aren't a "the total shall be X billion USD" division across countries. Making less profit in one country has nothing to do with what your profit margin will be in another one.

Prices are always set to maximize profit, and what the customer is willing to pay you is the biggest factor in the equation.

Last time I checked Saudi Arabia was a fundamentalist, religious kingdom with many known inhumane acts and practices. Yet they control a ton of US companies.

All sorts of transportation are very fragile. Everyone with a driver's license is trusted with operating tons of steel that can move at enormous speeds.

Society's based on some amount of mutual trust. We can't lock everything down and treat every person as a potential criminal. That leads to an inefficient and dystopian country.

At a cursory glance there might be. However this restriction will force companies to experiment with other designs. Maybe they'll have to use proper gaskets. Maybe phones will end up being 1mm thicker. These _might_ be negative, but IMO it's still better than the status quo: right now we're not putting a price on the hidden costs of littering the earth and wasting lithium. Ignore these externalities long enough and they will come back to bite you, the prime example being carbon emissions and global warming.

Have you tried replacing a phone battery recently? It involves using hot air to soften the glue, a lot of manual labor, unplugging wires, and carefully replacing the battery. Then you need to glue everything back together and pray the device works.

There's a straightforward solution to this and the recycling problem:

1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery

2. Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents)

3. Pay the same amount back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant

There you go. This system has only one knob (the amount paid per battery) and by tweaking it you can adjust the incentive to recycle. You sit back and let the market sort out the details.

Not to mention that this would extend the lifetime of phones by making it easy to replace the battery.

You're saying unexpected but China has likely simulated this situation a million times and prepared a plan. I would bet China is constantly monitoring for such deployment and will react long before the troops set foot on Taiwan. AFAIK nearby island are already heavily militarized.

Also I'm not sure how people of Taiwan would react to such deployment. Neither Taiwan nor China recognize each other as a separate country. They both claim to be the righteous government to one unified China.

Big cloud companies can all chip in a few billions, like they're doing with Linux. TSMC fabs everything for everyone anyway. The big cloud boys have too much money to tolerate being screwed over.

>Regardless, one has a right to their body. It is their property.

To what extent? Does this principle apply to indentured servitude? How about work related accidents, should a company be legally required to prevent them? Should a mining company pay compensation for the lung damage sustained by their miners, even though that was not in their contract? How about the environment, does this principle imply I have a right to breathe fresh air? How about drinking water?

>Whether laws exist regarding private property (or the lack thereof), we can define a set of natural rights that any person has regardless of any local, regional, or global laws, constructs, or ideologies.

You can, but it doesn't mean I or anyone else will agree to them.

>We can all agree murder is wrong, rape is wrong, stealing is wrong, slavery is wrong

No, we can't. People used to think slavery was ethical. What changed? Raping and plundering used to be ethical for a victorious army. What changed? Today the majority of the world eats meat, and it is very possible that in a century we will be seen as primitive carnivores.

You are also not defining what constitutes these crimes. Is capital punishment murder? Is it murder to kill an enemy soldier? How about an enemy civilian? How about collateral damage? Is it slavery if a company destroys all your other options, forcing you to work for them on their terms?

Is it unethical for companies to collude and fix prices or wages? Is it unethical when workers do the same? Is it unethical when a company pays the local police to break a strike?

The thought that "you only own your body, and you have to earn everything else" falls down pretty quickly once you look outside that idealistic bubble and see historical or ongoing issues.

If no one is entitled to anything why did humankind abolish slavery? Child workers? Indentured servitude?

Think about it. Indentured servitude is nothing but a contract between two people. By your ideology it should be of no one else's concern. Yet, it is considered slavery and is illegal. Why?

Because it turns out life isn't as simple as "you're not entitled to anything". This same sentence has been uttered by people throughout the ages who profited by the status quo until the commoners got their heads, literally or figuratively.

Every law we have, including the ones that allow you to have private property, private land and virtual property such as copyrights and patents are man-made and arbitrary.

This is absolutely the reason. So much was unknown at the time that a huge chunk of inventions and discoveries were completely accidental. There's no way a young adult can build a particle accelerator and play with it in his basement and discover something new. But countless people did it in the past with chemicals, electricity, pendulums, optical devices, and mechanical contraptions.

This is not a good thing. Eventually countries will heavily regulate satellites and then SpaceX will be the monopoly that keeps small players out. Instead of postponing the problem of getting rid of an evil monopoly, citizens should realize that last mile internet delivery is practically identical to water, sewage and power systems that can be owned by the city and leased out to providers.

The costs of installing and maintaining infrastructure scale down to nothing with population density. Also you can upgrade a switch but not if it's on a satellite. I am very convinced that the two approaches will complement each other in the foreseeable future.

One could argue that it would be bad for the consumer since their subsidized divisions have zero incentive to improve. It's nearly impossible to beat a free offering, so no competition will arise. Therefore innovation halts.

This is what Google's been doing for years. In a healthy market we could have incredible email providers, video hosting services, calendars and whatnot.

Even if that happens Epic still wins. Customers will no longer get their discount and will blame Apple for it.

Capitalism is fine, just don't treat it as a religion (looking sternly at you, HN crowd) and know that it needs to be fixed from time to time. We've been patching capitalism for centuries if not millennia: abolishing indentured servitude, environmental protection, public education, workers' rights, market regulations...

All that needs to be done is to properly mandate maximum work hours (no overtime even if the worker is willing).

Did you come across Datalog?

I'm not impressed for two reasons:

1. Anyone striving to build a better SQL should make a comprehensive list of common (but difficult!) database tasks for OLTP and OLAP workloads. This will expose the weakness of their language. SQL has had 50 years and myriads of improvements to cover all these common cases. This is not a fair fight, so come prepared.

2. It's not enough to be just "better than SQL" to replace it. SQL has such a huge momentum that a new language needs to be absolutely better _and_ it should have many features that SQL cannot possibly have. My nice-to-have list would contain predictable performance, lock ordering, ownership relations (for easy data cleanup), and a standard low level language which the query optimizer would output.

I don't understand how this is surprising or why this is a bad thing. Comparing a country's actions to ethical ideals is great, but it is subjective and does not achieve much. The only realistic benchmark is to compare one country to another.

There is also the aspect of hypocrisy that leaves a bad taste. Putin criticizing the lack of black rights in the US is just as hypocritical as the US claiming to take military action to promote democracy.

Generally, national academies of sciences are very highly regarded.

In the case of CAS, Wikipedia says that they've been the number 1 institute on Nature Index for years.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01230-x

Every single time this happens it's because there isn't much money to be made due to the low volume of sales, therefore no competition and no economies of scale.

They make very exotic and state-of-the-art products. Where else would you get stuff like LTZ1000 or AD797?

I do electronics as a hobby. I sometimes buy chips from very dubious shops in China for fun. Some of these sources are sketchy even by Taobao/Aliexpress standards. Then I decap the chip by boiling the package in acid and inspect the die under a microscope. More than half of them are genuine. I get some nice surprises because even the chips that I expect to be absolutely fake can turn out to be genuine.

So far I've seen a ton of fake audio op-amps.

For discrete parts like transistors things are much simpler. Just build a simple test rig and test a few parameters. If they fall within the specs they're probably good enough. Of course it's not worth it to do this for jellybeans like 2N3904, but when some parts get obsoleted without a replacement (or they're too pricey) there isn't much else a lone hobbyist can do.

50% doesn't mean much when the website itself loses its relevance:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=kongrega...

What was atrocious about Flash? AS3 was a decent language. Better, more open tools were coming along. Insecurity and privacy concerns were addressed by properly sandboxing it. The biggest downside of Flash is that it wasn't an open web technology, but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established. All in all I don't see what all that fuss was about.

If WebGL and Flash competed on an equal footing the WebGL tools (including Flash-like, newbie-friendly frameworks) would be forced to get better than Flash.

People said Flash wouldn't be missed. People said WebGL and canvas would bring us a much better experience. It's been nearly a decade since Steve Jobs declared war on Flash.

Where has the entire browser gaming ecosystem gone to? Kongregate had some of the most original games I've ever played. Kongregate shutting down doesn't just sadden me, it infuriates me: all vendors had to do was to sandbox Flash (which Chrome did!) and not autoplay it. Instead everyone followed the lead of an arrogant jerk who obviously knew everything better than everyone.

Communities like Kongregate, Armorgames, Newgrounds will never exist again. There will never be another War of the Web.