Tom Insam

[T]he space station consists of multiple modules and other pieces (called “elements”) under the registration of the United States, the European Space Agency (ESA) consortium, Russia and Japan. The agreement governing the ISS makes it clear (in Article 5) that the applicable laws, including those governing IP rights, depend on which part of it an astronaut is in. This is most relevant when astronauts conduct science or write accounts of their work, whether for public or private parties, although equally true during their off hours.

The Economist explains: How does copyright work in space? | The Economist

It’s funny! Because the list is really really long and of course Apple can’t release all of that, it would be ridiculous! hahaha.

But I’m increasingly coming to believe that this is, in fact, the problem. Apple have one developer event a year, at which they do pretty much all their releases. (Sure, there are other events. But this is the big one.) Because there’s a limit to the amount of stuff you can put out at one conference, Apple are limited in the rate at which they can release new things. It doesn’t matter how fast they can make stuff internally if the culture of secrecy and big announcements means that it never ships.

They don’t need to release everything on that list, but it would all be nice, and if something on the list doesn’t happen next month, do we all have to wait another 12 months in silence and maybe not get it then either?

Everything Apple Needs to Introduce at WWDC to Appease the Internet

Netflix, Reed Hastings Survive Missteps to Join Silicon Valley’s Elite:

The master copies of all the shows and movies available to Netflix take up 3.14 petabytes of storage space. (In comparison, Facebook uses about 1.5 petabytes to store about 10 billion photos.)

This is presented to make the point that “Netflix use a lot of space”. But I see it more as “Facebook is already 50% the size of all of Hollywood’s output ever”.

Defense Distributed seems intent that their invention will somehow disrupt gun regulation. They keep ending their posts with epitaths like “Whither gun control?” This is a category error, the same mistake as the DeCSS advocates made when they believed that by revealing that the DMCA’s slicing between code and speech was absurd that it would make the law go away, as if the legal system was a rampant AI that you could shut down by shouting a paradox.

Controlled by Guns, Weird Future
  • 1: If the group that the narrator meets is assumed not to be travelling to St. Ives (this is the most common assumption), the answer would be one person going to St. Ives; the narrator.
  • 2802: If the narrator met the group as they were also travelling to St. Ives (and were overtaken by the narrator, plausible given the large size of the party), the answer in this case is all are going to St. Ives; see below for the mathematical answer.
  • 2800: If the narrator and the group were all travelling to St. Ives, the answer could also be all except the narrator and the man since the question is ambiguous about whether it is asking for the total number of entities travelling or just the number of kits, cats, sacks and wives. This would give an answer of 2800 — 2 fewer than the answer above.
  • 2: Two is also a plausible answer. This would involve the narrator meeting the man who is assumed to be travelling to St. Ives also, but plays on a grammatical uncertainty, since the riddle states only that the man has seven wives (and so forth), but does not explicitly mention whether the man is actually accompanied by his wives, sacks, cats, and kittens.
  • 0: Yet another plausible is zero, once again playing on a grammatical uncertainty. The last line of the riddle states “kits, cats, sacks, wives … were going to St. Ives?” Although the narrator clearly states he is going to St. Ives, by definition he is not one of the kits, cats, sacks, or wives, and based on the common assumption that the party was not going to St. Ives, the answer is zero.
  • 2753: The sacks are not a person or animal and therefore cannot be in the calculation. It was not the number of things, but of “persons” the narrator met. 49 adult cats 343 kittens per wife of whom he had seven (7 × 392) = 2744 plus the seven wives 2751 plus the man the narrator → 2753 persons and animals.
  • 9: There are nine people involved, who may be going to St. Ives. The animals are all in the sacks, so they, as well as the sacks themselves, are “being taken”, rather than “going”.
  • 7: There are nine people involved, who are the only ones who may be going to St. Ives, all the others “being taken” there. But since the question is limited to “Kits, cats, sacks, wives”, this excludes the man and the narrator, leaving seven.

Wikipedia, being useful

Cinemetrics

“Much like martial arts, or like poetry and music, cinema is the art of timing.” A lovely database of movies with average shot lengths. Kinda noisy data, but interesting nonetheless.

Cinemetrics