xenobioticants

Considering that bringing the resources to Earth would still require landing rights, I'd imagine such a cartel would be easy to break by the world's governments.

Actually, reading up on this: http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/spacelaw.htm...

shows that if you mine it, you own the ore but not the site. Although you are right that as long as there's no 'space police' there isn't really a way to effectively enforce policy.

After reading up on this: http://www.nss.org/settlement/nasa/spaceresvol4/spacelaw.htm...

It seems that the current US position (who will probably be the first to start large scale mining) is that the resource site itself will never be owned but that labor attaches ownership to the ore. As said on the site, this still doesn't deal with when a singular deposit of an element exists and how access would be shared.

Another interesting point that's raised is that if an asteroid is entirely consumed by mining, does that count as 'appropriation'?

Man the next 100 years are gonna be a reaaaallly interesting time for lawyers..

Those things are equivalent, only in the first case you do it retroactively instead of proactively. Hell, if gene modification becomes advanced enough you could even let people with hereditary diseases just reproduce and 'edit' the created embryo so it doesn't have said hereditary genes.

That automatically means no company can lay claim to stuff in space. When you read that Denmark, Russia, Norway etc. are laying claim to the North Pole (and more importantly, the oil underneath it), it pretty much means they are laying claim so they can offer the drilling rights to company X. However, since no one 'owns' space, it is impossible to grant rights. This does not mean that everyone can randomly lay claim to stuff in space, it means no one can. Although since no one can really effectively enforce the 'no-claim' part, there's no one to stop companies from doing so.

It'll get extremely interesting when a company of country A returns an extremely rare very useful element. Country A will of course lay claim to it, but according to the Outer Space Treaty all space exploration is done 'for the benefit of mankind', so other countries would be able to claim this extremely rare element (or its benefits) must be shared. That'd be hell of an interesting international law case.

> Signal is unusual because it combines cutting edge cryptography with consumer friendliness and is actually successful.

You do realize that since last year WhatsApp actually uses the Signal protocol?

What I've never understood about this: the Outer Space Treaty says "The treaty also states that the exploration of outer space shall be done to benefit all countries and shall be free for exploration and use by all the States.

The treaty explicitly forbids any government from claiming a celestial resource such as the Moon or a planet.[3] Art. II of the Treaty states that "outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means"."

This basically means that no one can lay claim to stuff in space. But say there is an extremely valuable metal floating around, and company A wants to mine it. They arrive and start to mine it. Now, company B arrives a year later and also wants to mine it but company A is in the way. According to the treaty, company A can't claim the resource so they can't tell company B to go away, and company B can't tell company A to get out of the way. How does this get resolved?

Or just keep Javascript on but install JS Blocker 5 and choose what scripts run. It quite amazed me how much sites try to fingerprint your browser, especially with canvas fingerprinting.

... that'll probably be as popular as ogg-vorbis. Compression algorithms simply don't benefit that much from outside scrutiny (like encryption does), so without major corporate backing, (open) standards are very unlikely to succeed.

People are angry that they pretty much took the 2015 Macbook Pro 13" base model and popped $300 on the price, and in the process gimped it compared to its more expensive versions.

Eugenics are not evil and would rid the world of many terrible, terrible hereditary diseases. However, the way to get it out of humanity should be done by the 'soft' way, not with violence.

That's only for America (and maybe Australia/NZ? I wouldn't know at least). Most houses in Europe are solid brick on the outside, and solid concrete walls on the inside. Not something you remodel in a day.

There's 'sweet, a promotion, I can finally afford that nice car' "greed" and then there's 'lets destroy 6000 people their jobs to make the shareholders happy so I can get a $1.000.000 bonus' greed.

If you inserted a CD, iTunes instantly offered to rip it for you, fully automatically. Didn't even need to fiddle with settings, it was literally just pressing 'ok'.

I'd say of the technically challenged there was a subset that used iTunes to buy maybe a few tracks or albums, and certainly not enough to keep them 'trapped' in the Apple ecosystem.

> leverage people's current ipod music investment into the iphone.

Yeah, no. Before streaming by and far the most amount of people didn't buy music in iTunes. They either torrented it or (if technically challenged) simply bought it physically and then ripped it to iTunes.

Didn't work out for Kodak, Blackberry or Microsoft. It's a very bad sign for tech companies.

Nope. A large part is being at the right place in time (and location), which is pure luck.

Here you go:

  # Privacy: don’t send search queries to Apple
  # Safari
  defaults write com.apple.Safari UniversalSearchEnabled -bool false
  defaults write com.apple.Safari SuppressSearchSuggestions -bool true
  # Spotlight
  defaults write com.apple.spotlight orderedItems -array \
     '{"enabled" = 0;"name" = "MENU_WEBSEARCH";}' \
     '{"enabled" = 0;"name" = "MENU_SPOTLIGHT_SUGGESTIONS";}'

Also turn off Dictation in System Preferences > Keyboard > Dictation. I'm guessing you're smart enough to already have disabled Siri.

Voila! More privacy.

Hasn't worked since Yosemite.

I think he meant bad as in this: http://geoff.greer.fm/vim/. 400 lines of code to wait for keyboard input.. sweet Jesus. Thankfully Neovim exists now.

Granted, that's a VIM example, but I can't imagine Emacs being much better in terms of code.

> What I'd really like is to be able to tip articles, posts, apps, and websites.

For articles, this already exists (at least in The Netherlands). It's called Blendle and lets you 'buy' separate articles instead of needing to get a full subscription. Works super easy as well.

But you can't compare Macbooks to $500 laptops. You need to compare them to ultrabooks like the XPS 13, where you'll see that the gap isn't so big.

Aka every Apple presentation ever. Those are filled to the brim with hyperbole ('magical', 'courageous', etc.) yet everyone somehow considers them the golden standard.

Was just about to say this. Whereas 3D Touch/Force Touch/Taptic (why does Apple have to use 3 names for the same thing...) is used a decent amount on the iPhone and Apple Watch, I've never really used Force Touch beyond quickly looking up what a word means on a Mac.

No idea, but Overgrive feels as fast on Linux as the Google Drive client on OS X does for me. Its also 5x cheaper, although the site is decidedly less professional (which actually comforts me in a strange way because that means its probably made by a Linux geek who cares jack shit about fancy UI = good core code)

> 3.) Dont let cheap idiots bring on carry on baggage and take up 200 ppl's time trying to jam it into an overhead bin

People with less money than you = idiots. Nice sentiment to have ????

In case people are looking for a Google Drive client that feels pretty well put together, I'd recommend Overgrive: https://www.thefanclub.co.za/overgrive

Truth, its especially commendable that most of their projects keep soldiering on well past EOL.

Considering NASA has a budget thats 3-4x that of ESA, I'd be a little less quick to judge if I were you.

Yes, but most of the mainland countries have multi-party systems. Hell, the parliament of the Netherlands at one point consisted of 16(!) parties.