dotwaffle

You're assuming copyright exists to protect studios first. No, it protects everyone equally. A studio can't take a 20 year old story and make a blockbuster out of it without licensing the story. That is precisely what would happen with a short-term copyright system. It won't be that studios will wait 20 years, they'll just look predominantly at 20 year old publications to see what just became available.

> You only would license something that’s already successful.

That's the point. Someone finds something not successful, sees that they could make a lot of money off it, takes it for their own, has copyright over their new content. The labels you're talking about would gladly just mine what was released ${term}+1 years ago.

The point is that everything is copyrighted by default, unless you release it into the public domain.

> Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.

And that's right. Why should someone else get to make money off someone else's work without compensating them for it, if they haven't released it to the public domain?

You're assuming that copyright protects the big labels -- it protects your creations too. The most famous case of this is Charles Dickens: https://foleyhoag.com/news-and-insights/blogs/making-your-ma...

20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee. You ideally want it long enough that someone can benefit from their work, without being so long that society is unduly prohibited from creating derivative works.

If you look back at what was created in the past, 30 years seems like an absolute minimum, 50 years seems about right -- perhaps with a registration requirement for the full term so that works with an unclear publication date and ownership can be easily traced. That would mean the film Logan's Run would just be leaving copyright protection now.

For context, I believe in the UK, there is a 50-year term for broadcasts, computer-generated works, Crown Copyright (125 years or 50 from first commercial publication if within 75 years of creation), and certain classes of films. There's a schedule here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-...

I'd have loved to come to this, but I can't make the date work. Have a wonderful time!

Not just AWS. IIRC, GCS and ABS are slightly cheaper for storage but more for egress. To be fair to them, their reliability is pretty much second-to-none, whereas many of those at the very cheap end pretty much just ran a Ceph/RADOS cluster and then wondered why they were having lots of problems with reliability -- but with things like RustFS becoming more and more popular, the object storage racket is long overdue a shake-up!

> the cost per GB is shockingly cheap

Huh? We're talking about the same S3 right? At list pricing, 1TB is $23/TB to store for one month, and about $90/TB (plus request fees) to send it out to the internet.

While hard drive prices are roughly 3x what they were a year ago, the price per TB of a new hard disk averages around $30/TB -- assume 2x overhead for other hardware and extra space for parity etc, a disk pays for itself in less than 3 months and lasts 5 years or more.

If you assume it takes 1 month to download that 1TB (about 3Mb/s) that's $29.16/Mbps. When I first started buying internet transit in Europe back in 2008 I think I was paying under $10/month. It's now under $0.10/Mbps pretty much anywhere in the US or Europe at the big datacenters.

None of the "big" object storage services are cheap. They're somewhat reasonable if you only access the data from within the same region, but absolutely insane if you ever want to ship that data outside of that cloud vendor (or to another region etc). The pricing of storage and egress has not changed in a decade (I believe AWS last lowered the price of either in 2016) and in fact it costs even more now due to things like NAT Gateways etc.

It's definitely not "shockingly cheap". It's just cheaper than $80/TB of gp3 or $45/TB of st1, and while sc1 is $15/TB it has a baseline performance of only 12 MB/s. There's quite a few companies out there that have $6/TB/month object storage plans with similar performance, rising to about $15-$18/TB/month for SSD backed storage with far lower latency figures.

Anycast is hardly unique to Cloudflare. It's been around since the late 80s (before BGP), and has been used commercially for much longer than Cloudflare has existed. In fact, the root nameservers have done anycast for about 25 years or so and they're much more critical infrastructure.

Hence why in financial markets, a 10^9 billion is called a "yard" (from milliarde)!

Ironically, the cheapest phones available all tend to have Dual SIM Dual Active, usually because (in Europe at least) many have a second SIM card specifically for international calls.

So yes, it's "too expensive" because it's higher than $0, but it's not "too expensive" as in it would cost a lot.

Dual SIM Dual Active phones are under £100 in the UK, I imagine under $100 in the US.

Dual SIM Dual Standby (two or more SIMs, one radio) is cheaper, less battery, less space, and usually good enough. It's literally a few dollars, not 200-300.

Well, there's kind of a precedent at least...

> Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite.

> Yet IPv6 hasn’t been adopted. For decades.

I'd argue it has, but that's not the point. IPv4 is pretty much mandatory for most users of the internet. Yes, individual users probably neither know nor core whether they're on IPv4 or IPv6, but it's so difficult to run IPv6-only that you just wouldn't bother.

Trying to teach someone about how to use ULA vs. GUA only leads to headaches. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the reason why the internet became so ubiquitous was because of NAT -- static internal addressing is pretty much fundamental to an easy-to-use experience. Having multiple addresses on a host only makes things far more confusing, so people don't bother, because IPv4 just works.

When I worked at OpenConnect (Netflix's CDN) there was a lot of Python too, and I started porting a lot of the tooling to Go. By the time I left (2019), Go was really starting to take off outside of OpenConnect too -- but yes, there's historically a huge amount of Java there.

A single PCIe-3 nvme drive will saturate it on a sequential read load.

Needing to list an "executive sponsor" (an individual, not a role or a team) for each and every item in a service catalogue seems like mindless bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, having "custom properties" attached to each repo feels very much like administering JIRA, and schema-less YAML blobs that pervade the GitOps world.

Is it just me, or isn't the glaringly obvious solution to this an actual database and API, rather than just tacking on random bits of metadata that have no real-time validation etc?

Traditionally, that was the email address for the NTP service at various organisations, in the same way that postmaster was for the mail service.

That's a good point about LTE/5G. Thanks!

I could be wrong, but I think DAB uses DQPSK (which can be thought of as a special version of QAM 4 if you squint a bit) and not anything like the higher QAM constellations because it's deliberately designed for mobile (road, train etc) where you don't have a steady signal, it can vary a lot with motion, so QAM 64 wouldn't really be possible.

Though I did a quick check and apparently DRM+ uses QAM-16, so perhaps my knowledge is far too out of date :S

... Did you replace them with pringles tubes?

> so for peak loudness (someone shouting or the loudest spike in music) it can take an extra 50% power to create the upper and lower sidebands

Some people save energy by turning their appliances off at the plug rather than leaving them on standby. Clearly Radio 4 chose to avoid having Brian Blessed on too frequently instead ;)

I hope you mean updated... Otherwise we're about to find out what's in the letter of last resort they have onboard! ;)

Before Radio 4 LW was renumbered in 1988, it was 200kHz. And before the early 70s it was referred to as it's wavelength... 1500m :P

Not entirely true. There's quite a bit of error correction applied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting#Err...

DAB+ uses EEP (and RS) which was deliberately chosen to give better signal quality all the way to the point of losing reception. Old DAB used UEP which degrades faster, but instead of having no signal, it went to a muddier / warbling kind of sound that characterised early DAB receivers.

And technically while some people do call it MPEG2, it's actually MP2, also known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2, an audio codec in the same family as MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3).

I imagine that today they'd probably use something like Opus and a fountain code or similar, yes... But you can't expect everyone to replace their radio every 10-15 years ;)

The phrase "if I were to hazard a guess" should tell you all you need to know. All I did beforehand was update my existing knowledge by reading the Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#2027_and_beyon...

Starship isn't a proven manned transport vessel yet. And Boom was founded in 2014.

If I was to hazard a guess, the BFS concept is 2035 at the earliest, most likely 2040 -- and it'll be at a much smaller scale than previously advertised.

Boom is planning to operate at Mach 1.7 (approx. twice that of current aircraft) with a range of about 4250 nautical miles (4900 miles, 7900 km). Over land they're only going to fly at Mach 1.3 to reduce sonic boom effects.

That's not enough range to do London - Sydney, it's not enough to do Los Angeles to Sydney either, or Los Angeles to Tokyo, it's basically a replacement for trans-Atlantic flights only because even US cross-continental Mach 1.3 is only about 50% faster than a 737 (3h vs. 5h)... It's pretty much geared to the prestige market only.

Under an hour to anywhere on the planet, meanwhile, is absolutely someone would be a premium for -- and they'll do it for most/all long haul flights if it was available.

All markets are finite. But you're thinking too finitely -- remember that there was a proposal to use Starship (BFS?) as a point-to-point method of people transport too (London to Sydney in under 50 minutes I seem to remember).

You also have other services: Starlink is an obvious one they're pursuing now, but there's many other things that they could branch into with no effective competition right now, from harvesting resources such as Helium-3 to Rare Earths (ironic name), to... (thinks for several minutes) banishing people to the Phantom Zone?

But you get what I mean, it's not just about rockets, it's about the things cheap and reliable rocketry enables.

I genuinely worked somewhere that used the term API to mean "a person in India". The same company had someone order me not to use the term "postmortem" as part of the SRE function. I did not stay long after that.

The use of the word "chore" in many users of conventional commits has always riled me. I've always tended to favour the "linux kernel"[0] style of commit subject, which thankfully gets a mention here.

[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v7.0/process/submitting-patc...