The books go into public domain in 20 years. Now that Christopher Tolkien is out of the way (who tended to block a lot of stuff, for better or worse) , the current heirs want as much out of it as they can.
20 years might sound like a lot, but that’s about as much time as between the Peter Jackson movies and now.
I wouldn’t cite LTT for much, but IIRC, that was only true to a point. The NHD-15 is great, but a lot of cases can’t fit one. Same with many other high end air coolers. It might also cool to the same temperature, but is also running the fans harder to get there.
Back in the 90s, I was asked to critique a local business web site. I noticed a picture wasn’t loading correctly on Netscape Navigator when it was working fine on IE. Turned out, the designer had stuck in a 5MB BMP image. This when a whole lot of people were still on 56K modems.
It’s known that the original guy mined a whole bunch of coins to start with and has never cashed them in. He doesn’t seem to care about money much and just wanted to work on something interesting. Bitcoin is really a garage project that’s gotten out of hand.
Now, everyone who picked it up after that on a Greater Fool theory, sure, absolutely.
Yup, that’s their whole outline of the end days. Supposed to happen in the lifetime of people alive in 1914, and there’s a whole thing about how they’ve managed to extend that deadline.
Out of curiosity, I ran through some sample quizzes of the A+ exam a while back. Managed to pass, but I had to dig out a lot of my old knowledge about IDE master/slave setups and COM port settings and the like. That may be partially due to A+ being a silly, meaningless cert, but it’s pretty clear there is a need for that crap still.
Most of the criticisms that come from the right are solvable problems, such as lack of chargers, electricity coming from dirty sources, or lithium mining. We pretty much know how to solve all those at this point. Just a matter of doing it.
Criticisms that come from the left tend to be more fundamental. Things like car-based cities being too spread out, infrastructure costs spiraling out of control, or having the average person operate a 2 ton vehicle at speeds over 60mph and expecting this to be safe. None of those are specific to EVs, and are only solvable by looking at different transportation options.
I have a relatively new house (built 2006). I came to the conclusion that the extra money spent on triple paned windows would be more effectively spent on improvements elsewhere. Like a heat pump or hybrid water heater.
In the end, we weren’t able to swing the windows at all, but did replace our crappy doors.
That reminds me of an old paper about how to create a compilable C program out of old game ROMs. Decompile to assembly. Implement a bunch of #define statements that implement all the ASM statements. Now compile it to a native binary on whatever platform.
Won’t likely be faster or more accurate than regular emulation methods, but it’s a neat idea considering that the source code on all this stuff was lost a long time ago.