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.

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.