Unfortunately, ATSC 3.0 won't support native transmisson in formats like 720p50 in the US, so we're STILL stuck with ugly, lurching judder when watching shows shot at 25 or 50fps.
AFAIK, ATSC *also* declined to require the ability to seamlessly change formats on the fly (so they can't broadcast a football game in 1080p60, then seamlessly switch to 2160p30 for a primetime TV show). Apparently, the blame lies with HDMI... as of 1.4a (not sure about 2.x), switching modes triggers HDCP re-authentication & blacks out the screen for several seconds every time there's a mode change. So requiring support for on-the-fly switching (or at least, actually USING it) would break support for older TVs (or at least, cause you to miss several seconds every time there was a mode-change).
Basically, this means broadcasters are STILL going to pick one mode and force everything to use it... so forget about 1080p120 sports and 2160p30 TV shows on the same channel. And 24fps content will STILL be 3:2 telecined to force it into 60fps, even if the TV is perfectly capable of showing it at its native timing.
TFS is also full of shit. Your current TV will work with a cablebox-like external tuner just fine. The TV's INTERNAL tuner will be useless, but you can just ignore it.
In theory, an external ATSC3.0 tuner can use the HDMI CEC stream to implement features like "turn the TV on in an emergency"... but it probably will require 6 hours of online research, an hour or two of configuration, and enough luck to have a TV whose mfr. DIDN'T botch its implementation of things like HDMI-CEC (the way AVR mfrs. TOTALLY fucked up HDMI audio passthrough and sold dysfunctional gear advertising support for it for 2-3 years, circa 2009-2012, before finally getting it right).
Shows will be broadcast with a default ad, but if your ATSC 3.0 tuner has internet connectivity and it can fill an ad customized to your interests, it'll download the ad over the internet, then seamlessly replace the default ad with the targeted one.
So, opt in & connect, and see ads for videogames (or whatever else you're into). Do nothing, and see ads for tampons.
All at once? Of course not. Over the span of several hundred years? Yes.
Over time, "Lake Okeechobee" would become MULTIPLE lakes... Okeechobee, defined by its current dike... a new freshwater lake comprising what's now the "everglades" portion of Broward & Palm Beach counties (let's tentatively call it "Lake Seminole") connected to the original lake via canals, a new brackish-water lake between Tamiami Trail and I-75 (let's tentatively call it "Lake Miccosukee"), Florida's new Caribbean Coast (so named to disambiguate it from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts) occupying western Dade, eastern Collier, and basically all of mainland Monroe county, and another new freshwater lake north of Lake Okeechobee (let's call it, "Lake Kissimmee", because it would occupy most of what's now the agricultural part of the Kissimmee Valley... and point out to non-Floridians that it's a "valley" only in the sense that Floridians call an area where the terrain is 10 feet higher than the surrounding area "a hill").
The four lakes would get most of their water from direct rainfall. None would be particularly deep, but they'd get plenty of water because they'd span a geographically HUGE area that gets massive amounts of rain. They'd just dump less of that rain into the Gulf & Atlantic than they do now.
Plus, rising sea levels will happen slowly enough that most urban areas will get raised by redevelopment long before it becomes an existential threat to the area.
I'd argue that higher water costs will perversely drive INCREASED development in Florida... as water becomes more expensive, agricultural users will start selling off their land to developers, who'll build new condos, neighborhoods, office parks, golf courses, and discount retail outlets... the new development will drive up land prices, and induce even more agribusiness owners to sell out to developers. To a residential customer, a $10/month difference in the water bill is gripe-worthy, but not the end of the world. To someone like ConAgra, a $20,000/month difference in the water bill could mean the difference between oranges and office parks.
It really CAN'T be any other way. Florida's biggest single industry is its own growth. It might not be "sustainable" in any way that respects the natural environment, but that doesn't mean it won't continue for centuries until the entire state of Florida consists of 3-6 megalopoli sitting on terrain that's about as "natural" as lower Manhattan (there's actually a swampy island buried underneath the concrete, though post-9/11 was just about the only time we actually got to SEE evidence of its existence).
"Overturning an election result" would never happen... it opens too many potential cans of worms. Even judicially-invalidating an election's results & holding a new one sets the stage for future abuse of the process.
The best we can do if an election gets pwn3d is to start impeaching from the top down until the only officials left are those who didn't participate in the pwnag3, then follow the established procedures to fill the vacancies created. And revise election procedures to try and make sure it can't happen again. Anything else just sets us up for BIGGER problems later.
Aquifers are the current best source of cheap, good water... but they're not the ONLY source. Dade, Broward, & Palm Beach counties ALL get quite a bit of water from Lake Okeechobee. They PREFER aquifer water because it needs less processing (i.e, it's cheaper), but all 3 counties could get all their water from the lake if necessary (though it might require expansion of their water-treatment capacity if they had to use lake water for everything).
If sea levels rose 100 feet, Florida would raise the lake the same way as everything else... by raising the levee around it, and dumping limestone fill into the lake to raise its bottom if necessary (though I think the weight of the lake water alone would probably be enough to keep the saltwater out... I'm pretty sure osmotic pressure isn't a major concern).
The key point is, none of this will (or needs to) happen overnight. We're talking about *centuries* here. There's plenty of time to raise Florida's terrain 5-10 feet at a time as part of the natural cycle of building redevelopment. Florida has plenty of usable limestone & annual rainfall to satisfy both needs over the long term.
Just to emphasize, Florida does NOT use levees and dams to hold back ocean. It can't, because the limestone bedrock is too porous. The weight of the water on the "wet" side would eventually push it under the levee and up through the ground on the "dry" side.
Florida DOES have levees and flood-control structures, but they're purely for handling transient flood events (ie, storm surge or days and days of rain from a "slow, wet, and sloppy" tropical storm. They only have to hold back the water long enough to give SFWMD a few days to dump it in the Atlantic, Gulf, or Florida Bay. SFWMD normally dumps water slowly to avoid causing huge offshore algae blooms near Fort Myers and Port St. Lucie... but if push comes to shove, SFWMD can throw open the gates and dump several FEET of Lake Okeechobee into the ocean within a matter of days.
For all intents and purposes, urban South Florida is basically the biggest large-scale land reclamation project in human history. If rising sea levels make the ground increasingly soggy, we'll just dump MORE rock & dirt on top as areas get demolished & redeveloped over time. And most of that crushed limestone will come from what's now the Everglades.
So... years from now, South Florida might very well be two peninsulas with 70 miles of open water between the western edge of Miami-Fort Lauderdale-WPB and eastern edge of Naples-Fort Myers-Cape Coral, and both metro areas might be sitting on 50+ feet of limestone mined from what used to be the Everglades, but I'm quite confident they'll both be quite dry, and even MORE densely-populated than they are now (insert fantasy of Naples with 80+ story skyscrapers rising Shanghai-like along the Gordon River at the site of what's now the city's airport, and Miami/FtL/WPB having a line of skyscrapers along their new western coastlines at the edge of what used to be the Everglades.
For Florida, rising sea levels aren't an existential threat, they're a business opportunity of unparalleled magnitude with the potential to DOUBLE South Florida's beachfront coastlines by replacing the Everglades with a new Gulf.
It would if the land were in its natural state... but it's NOT. It's been DECADES since Florida has had anything vaguely resembling a natural coastline or terrain. South Florida wasn't "developed" so much as "terraformed".
How to envision Florida:
1. Dig deep lakes and lots of canals.
2. Dump the excavated rock and dirt to raise the level of the surrounding terrain.
It's the city of Weston, Florida (approx. 10 miles west of downtown Fort Lauderdale). The area north of I-75 is literally underwater (though it's only a foot or two deep)... from a car driving west along I-75, the Everglades north of I-75 looks more like "Lake Okeechobee" than the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee ITSELF does.
Look at the satellite photo of the area, and realize that 30 years ago, the area south of I-75 looked EXACTLY like the area north of I-75. Notice how the developer dug the lakes as long linear canals to maximize the amount of new waterfront property AND minimize the distance that the excavated fill had to be hauled before dumping.
The area further south (Pembroke Pines, Miramar) is similar. Notice the STAGGERING number of linear lakes everywhere throughout the area. The big rectangular lakes are former limestone strip mines... they're HUGE, deep, and considered highly desirable to have in the back yard because, unlike natural lakes, they're generally crystal clear, blue, and are too deep and rocky for things like aquatic weeds to grow in (so they don't stink from rotting vegetation the way natural lakes do). Environmentalists HATE them, homeowners love them.
The area between Weston and Pembroke Pines (Southwest Ranches) LOOKS a lot more "solid" and less watery than the areas to the north & south, but that's mostly because THAT area was originally developed a lot earlier... the average yard height in Southwest Ranches is a few feet lower than the average yard height of homes in Weston, Pembroke Pines, and Miramar because the developer didn't have as much dirt to spread around, and it was spread around a lot more evenly across the entire area (instead of concentrating the excavated fill in a smaller area surrounded by deep, large lakes). The houses themselves in all the areas have first floors that are approximately 10-16 feet above base flood elevation, regardless of how high or low the rest of the yard might be, but yards in Southwest Ranches tend to end up submerged under an inch or two of water for a few days if we get an extended period of heavy rainstorms.
zOMG! 10 whole feet in 150 years! Run for the hills!
300 years is longer than the United States has existed as a country.
The oldest surviving structure(*) in the ENTIRETY of Miami is only 160 years old [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ]... and it's been badly-damaged by hurricanes so many times, it presents a genuine "Ship of Theseus" problem to historians because there's almost nothing LEFT that was actually part of the original house. The oldest surviving structure in Fort Lauderdale [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ] was built in 1906 -- it's barely 111 years old.
Between hurricanes and wrecking balls, I doubt whether the majority of buildings in South Florida under 10 stories tall that exist today will even still be AROUND a hundred years from now, let alone 150-300 years from now. If current development patterns persist, Miami International Airport in 2167 will be sitting in a canyon between two Coruscant-like plateaus of skyscrapers stretching from the beach to (what's left of) the everglades.
(*) Technically, there's a 12th-century Spanish Monastery that William Randolph Hearst bought, had disassembled & shipped to Miami, and reassembled in the 1920s, but I think we can all agree that it doesn't count.
Newsflash: sandy beaches don't occur naturally (or at least, don't consistently exist as wide expanses of white, sparkling "sugar sand"). The fact that we HAVE wide, sandy beaches in Florida AT ALL is due to all of that "moving sand from the ocean". If Florida beaches ceased to be constantly rebuilt, within 10-20 years, most of them would revert to either mangrove swamps or foot-deep water washing up against a concrete seawall (like in Key West).
Beach erosion isn't some new thing... it was happening DECADES ago. Back in the early 70s, the Bal Harbour/Surfside/Sunny Isles area had practically no sandy beach left... according to my parents, if you wanted to go play in the sand at the beach there, you HAD to go at low tide, because the rest of the time, it was constantly washed over by every incoming wave, or under at least a few inches of water. The wide sandy beach that exists there NOW is an actively-maintained 100% artificial triumph of geotechnical engineering.
What, exactly, does "the science" disagree with me about? The series of water control structures and "freshwater to saltwater gradient" plans aren't some dark, secret plot... South Florida Water Management District and the Army Corps of Engineers have always been pretty open about their priorities and plans. Their unambiguous missions are, in descending order:
1. Prevent urban land from flooding (and create new developable urban land wherever possible)
2. Secure a reliable supply of cheap fresh water suitable for drinking and bathing
3. When possible with limited resources, and without compromising on goals #1 and #2, make a few token efforts to preserve the natural environment... especially the parts tourists (or legislators in Washington) care about.
FEMA might repeatedly pay to rebuild, but it still requires mitigation against future flood events. So flood #1 might destroy your house, but flood #2 will probably just destroy your car and everything in the garage (because FEMA would have required that your repaired/rebuilt house be raised on new pilings or a higher foundation). This is EXACTLY what happened in the coastal parts of New Jersey that were destroyed by Sandy.
Likewise, if your basement (but NOT the first floor) gets flooded in a state like Missouri, FEMA will force you to move all infrastructure (furnace, water heater, etc) so it's above the likely flood height, and the city will officially de-classify it as "basement"... so you won't be able to claim "basement" as a feature if you go to sell the house in the future, you'll never be able to get a legal building permit to turn it into a bedroom or home theater, and anything stored in that basement going forward will be totally excluded from coverage.
It's important to point out, most of Florida's NATURAL terrain might have once been low-lying, but 99.9% of the buildings in Florida aren't sitting on natural terrain, nor are their ground floors anywhere close to sea level (let alone below it). Most actual buildings sit on several feet of engineered fill dirt, dredged from manmade lakes & canals.
As far as I know, it hasn't been legal to build habitable buildings that are LITERALLY "below sea level" (or even "below floodplain level") in Florida since the roaring 20s, and has NEVER been regarded as a viable way to build anything you intend to survive more than a few years.
Florida isn't going away, no matter HOW badly eco-warriors might want it to happen. If anything, sea-level rise will probably cause a new Florida land boom that takes the state's population to 50 million. If the southern Everglades became an extension of the Gulf of Mexico (flanked by the new Miami and Naples peninsulas), Krome Avenue would become Miami's new equivalent of Ocean Drive, and you'd see "flocks" of cranes building skyscrapers there to overlook it. Florida's leaders would celebrate the doubling of the state's coastline, and every remaining trace of South Florida's original natural environment would cease to exist.
Lake Okeechobee would become a series of lakes surrounded by water-control structures extending diagonally to the area north and west of I-75 & the Sawgrass Expressway, designed to form a progressive gradient that keeps outright salt water south of Tamiami Trail, and brackish water south of I-75 (so Lake Okechobee and its new clone in Palm Beach County would be immense freshwater reservoirs).
THIS is the real future of the Everglades. Most of "the Everglades" between Miami and Naples (along Tamiami Trail) already looks more like a big unkempt vacant lot than vast, untamed wilderness. The area along I-75 is a wetter and swampier, but the area around the rest stop about 20 miles west of Weston looks like they could build a sprawling outlet mall next door without anybody batting an eyebrow. When I was a child, Alligator Alley felt like a dangerous packed-gravel cowpath through the wild, untamed jungle. Now, it feels more like I-75 through Davie, Pembroke Pines, and Miramar did back when it first opened 30 years ago.
It's not good, and it's not bad. It just "is". Fifty years from now, Florida won't be an underwater sandbar, it'll be jousting with Texas and New York for the title "second most-populous state in the nation".
Or, we could compromise, split the difference, and redefine EST as UTC-4.5, CST as UTC-5.5, MST as UTC-6.5, and PST as UTC-7.5
If we had to, we could rename our timezones to something like ECT, CCT, MCT, and PCT ("x Compromise Time"), though I suspect Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean would follow us anyway (in fact, I think Canadian law actually defines DST by referencing US standards, just to make it automatic & avoid the mess that would happen if Canadian DST had different dates than the US).
Here's the thing: people tend to have more discretion about their "leave work" time than their "go to work" time. In the summer, office workers look outside at 5, see the traffic jam, say 'fuck it', and work another hour or two (thereby spreading their traffic over a longer interval of time). When DST ends, those same people run for the door at 5, causing INSTANT gridlock that persists until 7:30 or 8pm (which reinforces the 5pm race to the door... waiting only makes the drive even worse, vs summer when working an hour later can shave 30 minutes from the drive time).
In contrast, morning traffic starts around 6am, peaks around 8, and falls off rapidly after 9, REGARDLESS of whether or not there's light outside.
The One X is a step up from the One S, just like the One S is a step up from the One.
Microsoft doesn't arbitrarily limit the One's output resolution. If somebody wants to write "Pong4k" (and manages to not get sued by the trademark's current owners) and sell it to people with a first-gen Xbox One, it'll run just fine at 2160p30. I fully expect a slew of retro games that emulate the look of a color vector CRT, or use the higher resolution to emulate CRT color masks, misconvergence, and NTSC color artifacts.
The main thing the S and X add is the horsepower to do FPS-type games with better T&L and/or higher glitch-free framerates (and enable FPS-type games at 4k resolution & some reasonable framerate without excessive Z-clipping or low-quality T&L to exist AT ALL).
Going forward, we'll see more and more games that can technically limp along at 720p30 on a first-gen XB1, but NEED a S or X to do 1080p60 at maximum quality (even IF you don't care about "4k".
The thing to remember is that modern hardware has few "hard" constraints compared to the "vga era"... it's more like you have a finite bucket of resources to spread around however you see fit. You can stream h.264-encoded video (or Asteroids, or Tempest) at 2160p60, you can do realtime raytracing at 480p60, or you can do any sensible permutation that involves triangles, filtered textures, and lighting in between.
Autonomous driving on limited-access highways is relatively easy to do well, because even HUMAN drivers have their movements constrained by the road's design. The Tesla accident you're referring to happened on a non-limited-access rural highway with cross traffic... a scenario even the most enthusiastic Tesla owner will concede requires some degree of special vigilance, regardless of what you might be able to get away with doing on a freeway or in gridlocked traffic.
And Tesla DOES value the lives of their consumers and those around them. Musk is honest enough to admit that people likely to buy a Tesla with autopilot routinely drive in a profoundly-distracted state ANYWAY, and did so long BEFORE they even GOT their first Tesla, so even an imperfect autopilot with known deficiencies is a net safety improvement for them. Other automakers bury their heads in the sand and totally ignore the reality of how people actually drive.
E-readers totally SUCK for reading multi-page technical documents where you have to rapidly flip pages & view multiple pages at once. They're just too damn slow... slow rendering, slow updates, and even slower UI.
One simple improvement the e-ink industry could make to improve performance: split the page into 2-16 chunks that can be updated in unison, just like how dual-scan LCD displays made passive LCDs semi-tolerable until TFT technology became affordable.
COULD someone build something like a bound e-ink book with a few hundred bendable double-sided black+white+red e-ink pages that can rewrite itself, but otherwise be thumbed-through like a real book? Probably. But so far, the industry hasn't been interested in use cases besides "reading fiction in a page-sequential manner".
At the moment, if you want a car with level 3 autonomous driving capabilities (at least, on limited-access highways and gridlocked stop & go traffic on city streets) that doesn't require silly hacks to trick it into being useful (like hanging two water bottles from opposite sides of the steering wheel using springs to trick the steering-wheel hand sensor), you basically have three choices: Tesla, Tesla, and (...drumroll...) Tesla.
The fundamental with net neutrality is not all traffic is equally cheap or expensive to transport.
Suppose I have VDSL2 with AT&T U-verse, and so does my friend who lives in my neighborhood (served from the same VRAD). If we open a peer-to-peer connection with each other, our traffic could theoretically run through the VRAD's local switch fabric without even touching its fiber backhaul. We could fully saturate our upstream connectivity to the VRAD without having the slightest impact on anybody else.
Now, take it up a level. Friend #2 is also a U-verse customer, but he's a few blocks away... served by a different VRAD, but both of our VRADs run fiber through the same central office 3 miles away. In this case, our traffic might have some impact on others sharing our respective VRADs, but it's still running entirely over AT&T's local loop, whose raw capacity vastly exceeds anything individual users could even fantasize about doing.
OK, now take it a level higher. Friend #3 is a U-verse customer who lives 10 miles away. Our P2P traffic goes from home to VRAD to CO, from CO to AT&T's regional NOC, to CO to VRAD to home. At this point, it might have a meaningful impact on other customers, but it's still likely to be trivial because it's still traveling entirely over AT&T's own local backhaul.
Time to get a bit more complicated. Friend #4 lives across the street, but gets his internet through Comcast. Our P2P traffic goes from house to VRAD to CO to AT&T NOC, then somehow gets to NAP of the Americas in Miami, where it gets passed along to Comcast, who relays it to THEIR regional NOC, sends it to my friend's neighborhood, and sends the final few thousand feet over coax. In this case, NOTA will pile on some charges of their own to exchange traffic between AT&T and Comcast, but they're still fairly low.
Now, let's assume I'm streaming video from Netflix. Netflix pays to bring their own fiber into AT&T's NOC and probably colocates their own server to further reduce and cache the amount that has to be backhauled from minute to minute. From AT&T's perspective, this isn't much different than the scenario with friend #3... Netflix has their own network connection into AT&T, so the only AT&T backhaul that gets used is from NOC to CO to VRAD.
Finally, let's suppose someone starts their own guerrilla VOD streaming service with a name like "Voogle". Voogle's datacenter is in Kansas City, and their network service provider has to either peer privately with AT&T (and Comcast, since my friends with Comcast watch them too), or they have to find some other mutual interexchange point. As I understand it, public exchange points (like MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST) no longer exist, and all exchange points (in the US, at least) are now privately peered & leave it up to the networks to negotiate their own traffic carriage agreements. So... Voogle's NSP has to negotiate peering and transport arrangements to AT&T and Comcast (because both are big enough to say, "you need us more than we need you"). If Voogle's traffic is light, their NSP probably won't charge them much. If Voogle is streaming 4k video to thousands of customers, their NSP is likely to charge them quite a bit.
In any case, the "Voogle" case is no worse than the scenario with friend #4... Voogle's traffic originates on NEITHER AT&T nor Comcast, and it's up to Voogle to figure out how to affordably GET their traffic to the regional datacenters of AT&T and Comcast (or at least, to network exchange points into which AT&T and Comcast have their own abundant connectivity). From the perspective of AT&T and Comcast, it's more expensive than the "Netflix" scenario (because Voogle isn't big enough to peer with them directly), but it's no WORSE than a peer to peer connection between an arbitrary AT&T customer and an arbitrary Comcast customer.
Things get messier with international traffic (say, between a Comcast customer in Miami and a server farm in London or Bangalore), but dependin
"safe design life" has an entire range of meanings. A module that was built to be safely habitable by human occupants might cease to be safe for that purpose, but still might be useful as a storage area. Kind of like how a damp basement might not be suitable for a bedroom, but is perfectly OK for use as a laundry room & place to store nearly-worthless junk for decades.
Maintaining things in low earth orbit costs money, but it's NOTHING compared to the cost of getting stuff up there in the first place.
NASA has official plans to deorbit the ISS if it loses funding because it's required by law to have such plans.
Russia would never, EVER allow NASA to actually go through with it.
If NASA sent a demolition crew up to the ISS to start taking it apart, Russia would promptly evict them & announce they were taking over the station.
The US would bitch & moan, compare it to space piracy, and threaten retaliation. Russia would roll its eyes and point out that we were planning to junk it anyway.
After a week or two of tense negotiations, the presidents of the US and Russia would hold a press conference to announce their deal... the creation of a new commercial space resort, transfer of the American modules to it in exchange for partial ownership of the new venture, and an agreement by Russia to maintain it going forward. A few already-wealthy Russian oligarchs become even wealthier, the US declines to cash its dividend checks, space tourism becomes a reality (driven by the acquisition of a prohibitively-expensive asset for free) and the space station continues in orbit for another hundred years.
The fact is, Russia would be insane NOT to do it. Even if the US side became completely derelict and ceased to be habitable over time, it would STILL be valuable as a source of recyclable raw materials already in orbit. Or even just a place to store shit that's halfway between "garbage" and "stuff that might be useful for something, someday".
Actually, I'm pretty sure the US doctor was saying, "ummmm... I suppose it's not inconceivable he might benefit, but I'd have to examine him to know for sure" before he personally examined the baby... then, after flying to England to examine the baby directly, pulled the parents aside & told them, "erm... perhaps I was a bit over-optimistic. Frankly, at this point, it's hopeless. Really. It is."
That said, I think Charlie Gard's parents SHOULD have been allowed to take him to the US at their own expense right from the start. I don't think it would have mattered much to Charlie himself either way (good OR bad), but would have probably helped his PARENTS deal with it better by making them feel less personally-powerless & spared them from the international media circus.
The fact is, when a child with a rare, horrific condition survives against all odds, it's almost ALWAYS because his or her parents refused to give up as easily as doctors following conventional wisdom. Because by definition, if your child has a condition 47 others are known to have had in the past 100 years, there's simply not enough data, and there IS NO "wisdom", conventional or otherwise... every single one of them is an extreme outlier.
Some parents can find peace by deferring to authority, religion, whatever. Others will never know peace unless they know beyond doubt they've exhausted LITERALLY every possible option. By any definition, Charlie's parents did everything that anyone could have done.
I was a die-hard m68k fan... but in retrospect, that's because back in the early 90s (right before DOS4GW), writing programs in anything besides realmode assembly was damn-near impossible.
I remember how I discovered (sometime around 1992 when I was in college) that every x86 from the 386dx onwards HAD orthogonal registers & could do flat addressing... then went in literal circles for MONTHS trying to find anything that resembled documentation or development tools.
To this day, I have no idea whether published books about the topic even EXISTED circa 1992, or whether MASM circa '92 could actually DO protected mode. I basically gave up after someone on Usenet disillusioned me... basically, protected-mode (circa '92) meant no BIOS calls (DOS extenders didn't quite exist yet). No BIOS calls meant you couldn't even output characters to the screen without knowing more about the inner workings of a VGA card's CRTC than any 18 year old could have hoped to know at that point (the first meaty books explaining videocard programming weren't readily available yet... they technically existed, but if you didn't already KNOW their titles & author names, your likelihood of discovering them was basically "nil" unless you were rich enough to blindly order expensive books from B. Dalton's or Waldenbooks sight-unseen based on their titles alone... and wait 6-8 weeks for them to arrive. Information-wise, it really WAS the Dark Ages compared to now.
Pre-Google, finding stuff about esoteric subjects was *hard* -- even as an undergrad at a major research university that HAD internet access... you'd post to Usenet, but if you missed seeing a reply, it was *gone* forever (as far as you were concerned) a few weeks later (from what I recall, the university's admins purged Usenet posts after ~1-4 weeks... 1 week for alt.binaries.*, 4 weeks for comp.sys.*). The library had computerized indices, of course... but you still had to try and FIND the bound journal. Half the time, it was missing. The other half of the time, it was in limbo (the journals for that year pulled from the shelf for hard-binding, but not actually BOUND yet). And if you weren't a professor or grad student, the library staff had zero interest in tracking missing resources down for you.
Come to think about it, the "good old days" actually sucked pretty badly.
Post-Irma, at least half of the GAS STATIONS in South Florida were closed for at least a few days. Why? No (working) backup power. By law, they're required to have generators, but apparently the state doesn't require them to test, maintain, and certify them as operational. So gas stations grudgingly installed generators after Hurricane Wilma, then didn't do jack shit to maintain them for the next 12 years. Irma came & went, and lots of those generators didn't work.
For Dade & Broward counties, Irma side-swiped us as a weak category 1 hurricane. Our power grid & stores were dysfunctional to some degree for a week. If we'd gotten directly hit by a *major* (cat-3 or above) hurricane, we'd be in AT LEAST as fucked as San Juan is now.
The REAL danger in future storms is going to be people who remember what happened to gas stations after Irma, and to make sure it doesn't happen to them again, go into the next storm with 20 5-gallon cans of gas in their garage. Guaranteed, we'll have at least one news story of a *horrific* fire caused by someone storing EGREGIOUSLY unsafe quantities of gas in an even MORE unsafe location.
As a matter of public safety, local governments need to MAKE SURE that gas will be abundantly and readily available at most 8 hours after the last hurricane-force winds, convince the public that gas WILL be readily available, and actually pull it off. Otherwise, people will do *really* unsafe things because it seems like a lesser evil compared to being unable to buy stuff they need.
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Unfortunately, ATSC 3.0 won't support native transmisson in formats like 720p50 in the US, so we're STILL stuck with ugly, lurching judder when watching shows shot at 25 or 50fps.
AFAIK, ATSC *also* declined to require the ability to seamlessly change formats on the fly (so they can't broadcast a football game in 1080p60, then seamlessly switch to 2160p30 for a primetime TV show). Apparently, the blame lies with HDMI... as of 1.4a (not sure about 2.x), switching modes triggers HDCP re-authentication & blacks out the screen for several seconds every time there's a mode change. So requiring support for on-the-fly switching (or at least, actually USING it) would break support for older TVs (or at least, cause you to miss several seconds every time there was a mode-change).
Basically, this means broadcasters are STILL going to pick one mode and force everything to use it... so forget about 1080p120 sports and 2160p30 TV shows on the same channel. And 24fps content will STILL be 3:2 telecined to force it into 60fps, even if the TV is perfectly capable of showing it at its native timing.
TFS is also full of shit. Your current TV will work with a cablebox-like external tuner just fine. The TV's INTERNAL tuner will be useless, but you can just ignore it.
In theory, an external ATSC3.0 tuner can use the HDMI CEC stream to implement features like "turn the TV on in an emergency"... but it probably will require 6 hours of online research, an hour or two of configuration, and enough luck to have a TV whose mfr. DIDN'T botch its implementation of things like HDMI-CEC (the way AVR mfrs. TOTALLY fucked up HDMI audio passthrough and sold dysfunctional gear advertising support for it for 2-3 years, circa 2009-2012, before finally getting it right).
Shows will be broadcast with a default ad, but if your ATSC 3.0 tuner has internet connectivity and it can fill an ad customized to your interests, it'll download the ad over the internet, then seamlessly replace the default ad with the targeted one.
So, opt in & connect, and see ads for videogames (or whatever else you're into). Do nothing, and see ads for tampons.
All at once? Of course not. Over the span of several hundred years? Yes.
Over time, "Lake Okeechobee" would become MULTIPLE lakes... Okeechobee, defined by its current dike... a new freshwater lake comprising what's now the "everglades" portion of Broward & Palm Beach counties (let's tentatively call it "Lake Seminole") connected to the original lake via canals, a new brackish-water lake between Tamiami Trail and I-75 (let's tentatively call it "Lake Miccosukee"), Florida's new Caribbean Coast (so named to disambiguate it from the Atlantic and Gulf coasts) occupying western Dade, eastern Collier, and basically all of mainland Monroe county, and another new freshwater lake north of Lake Okeechobee (let's call it, "Lake Kissimmee", because it would occupy most of what's now the agricultural part of the Kissimmee Valley... and point out to non-Floridians that it's a "valley" only in the sense that Floridians call an area where the terrain is 10 feet higher than the surrounding area "a hill").
The four lakes would get most of their water from direct rainfall. None would be particularly deep, but they'd get plenty of water because they'd span a geographically HUGE area that gets massive amounts of rain. They'd just dump less of that rain into the Gulf & Atlantic than they do now.
Plus, rising sea levels will happen slowly enough that most urban areas will get raised by redevelopment long before it becomes an existential threat to the area.
I'd argue that higher water costs will perversely drive INCREASED development in Florida... as water becomes more expensive, agricultural users will start selling off their land to developers, who'll build new condos, neighborhoods, office parks, golf courses, and discount retail outlets... the new development will drive up land prices, and induce even more agribusiness owners to sell out to developers. To a residential customer, a $10/month difference in the water bill is gripe-worthy, but not the end of the world. To someone like ConAgra, a $20,000/month difference in the water bill could mean the difference between oranges and office parks.
It really CAN'T be any other way. Florida's biggest single industry is its own growth. It might not be "sustainable" in any way that respects the natural environment, but that doesn't mean it won't continue for centuries until the entire state of Florida consists of 3-6 megalopoli sitting on terrain that's about as "natural" as lower Manhattan (there's actually a swampy island buried underneath the concrete, though post-9/11 was just about the only time we actually got to SEE evidence of its existence).
"Overturning an election result" would never happen... it opens too many potential cans of worms. Even judicially-invalidating an election's results & holding a new one sets the stage for future abuse of the process.
The best we can do if an election gets pwn3d is to start impeaching from the top down until the only officials left are those who didn't participate in the pwnag3, then follow the established procedures to fill the vacancies created. And revise election procedures to try and make sure it can't happen again. Anything else just sets us up for BIGGER problems later.
Aquifers are the current best source of cheap, good water... but they're not the ONLY source. Dade, Broward, & Palm Beach counties ALL get quite a bit of water from Lake Okeechobee. They PREFER aquifer water because it needs less processing (i.e, it's cheaper), but all 3 counties could get all their water from the lake if necessary (though it might require expansion of their water-treatment capacity if they had to use lake water for everything).
If sea levels rose 100 feet, Florida would raise the lake the same way as everything else... by raising the levee around it, and dumping limestone fill into the lake to raise its bottom if necessary (though I think the weight of the lake water alone would probably be enough to keep the saltwater out... I'm pretty sure osmotic pressure isn't a major concern).
The key point is, none of this will (or needs to) happen overnight. We're talking about *centuries* here. There's plenty of time to raise Florida's terrain 5-10 feet at a time as part of the natural cycle of building redevelopment. Florida has plenty of usable limestone & annual rainfall to satisfy both needs over the long term.
Just to emphasize, Florida does NOT use levees and dams to hold back ocean. It can't, because the limestone bedrock is too porous. The weight of the water on the "wet" side would eventually push it under the levee and up through the ground on the "dry" side.
Florida DOES have levees and flood-control structures, but they're purely for handling transient flood events (ie, storm surge or days and days of rain from a "slow, wet, and sloppy" tropical storm. They only have to hold back the water long enough to give SFWMD a few days to dump it in the Atlantic, Gulf, or Florida Bay. SFWMD normally dumps water slowly to avoid causing huge offshore algae blooms near Fort Myers and Port St. Lucie... but if push comes to shove, SFWMD can throw open the gates and dump several FEET of Lake Okeechobee into the ocean within a matter of days.
For all intents and purposes, urban South Florida is basically the biggest large-scale land reclamation project in human history. If rising sea levels make the ground increasingly soggy, we'll just dump MORE rock & dirt on top as areas get demolished & redeveloped over time. And most of that crushed limestone will come from what's now the Everglades.
So... years from now, South Florida might very well be two peninsulas with 70 miles of open water between the western edge of Miami-Fort Lauderdale-WPB and eastern edge of Naples-Fort Myers-Cape Coral, and both metro areas might be sitting on 50+ feet of limestone mined from what used to be the Everglades, but I'm quite confident they'll both be quite dry, and even MORE densely-populated than they are now (insert fantasy of Naples with 80+ story skyscrapers rising Shanghai-like along the Gordon River at the site of what's now the city's airport, and Miami/FtL/WPB having a line of skyscrapers along their new western coastlines at the edge of what used to be the Everglades.
For Florida, rising sea levels aren't an existential threat, they're a business opportunity of unparalleled magnitude with the potential to DOUBLE South Florida's beachfront coastlines by replacing the Everglades with a new Gulf.
It would if the land were in its natural state... but it's NOT. It's been DECADES since Florida has had anything vaguely resembling a natural coastline or terrain. South Florida wasn't "developed" so much as "terraformed".
How to envision Florida:
1. Dig deep lakes and lots of canals.
2. Dump the excavated rock and dirt to raise the level of the surrounding terrain.
3. Repeat on grand scale.
Here's a great example -- https://www.google.com/maps/@2...
It's the city of Weston, Florida (approx. 10 miles west of downtown Fort Lauderdale). The area north of I-75 is literally underwater (though it's only a foot or two deep)... from a car driving west along I-75, the Everglades north of I-75 looks more like "Lake Okeechobee" than the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee ITSELF does.
Look at the satellite photo of the area, and realize that 30 years ago, the area south of I-75 looked EXACTLY like the area north of I-75. Notice how the developer dug the lakes as long linear canals to maximize the amount of new waterfront property AND minimize the distance that the excavated fill had to be hauled before dumping.
The area further south (Pembroke Pines, Miramar) is similar. Notice the STAGGERING number of linear lakes everywhere throughout the area. The big rectangular lakes are former limestone strip mines... they're HUGE, deep, and considered highly desirable to have in the back yard because, unlike natural lakes, they're generally crystal clear, blue, and are too deep and rocky for things like aquatic weeds to grow in (so they don't stink from rotting vegetation the way natural lakes do). Environmentalists HATE them, homeowners love them.
The area between Weston and Pembroke Pines (Southwest Ranches) LOOKS a lot more "solid" and less watery than the areas to the north & south, but that's mostly because THAT area was originally developed a lot earlier... the average yard height in Southwest Ranches is a few feet lower than the average yard height of homes in Weston, Pembroke Pines, and Miramar because the developer didn't have as much dirt to spread around, and it was spread around a lot more evenly across the entire area (instead of concentrating the excavated fill in a smaller area surrounded by deep, large lakes). The houses themselves in all the areas have first floors that are approximately 10-16 feet above base flood elevation, regardless of how high or low the rest of the yard might be, but yards in Southwest Ranches tend to end up submerged under an inch or two of water for a few days if we get an extended period of heavy rainstorms.
zOMG! 10 whole feet in 150 years! Run for the hills!
300 years is longer than the United States has existed as a country.
The oldest surviving structure(*) in the ENTIRETY of Miami is only 160 years old [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ]... and it's been badly-damaged by hurricanes so many times, it presents a genuine "Ship of Theseus" problem to historians because there's almost nothing LEFT that was actually part of the original house. The oldest surviving structure in Fort Lauderdale [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ] was built in 1906 -- it's barely 111 years old.
Between hurricanes and wrecking balls, I doubt whether the majority of buildings in South Florida under 10 stories tall that exist today will even still be AROUND a hundred years from now, let alone 150-300 years from now. If current development patterns persist, Miami International Airport in 2167 will be sitting in a canyon between two Coruscant-like plateaus of skyscrapers stretching from the beach to (what's left of) the everglades.
(*) Technically, there's a 12th-century Spanish Monastery that William Randolph Hearst bought, had disassembled & shipped to Miami, and reassembled in the 1920s, but I think we can all agree that it doesn't count.
Newsflash: sandy beaches don't occur naturally (or at least, don't consistently exist as wide expanses of white, sparkling "sugar sand"). The fact that we HAVE wide, sandy beaches in Florida AT ALL is due to all of that "moving sand from the ocean". If Florida beaches ceased to be constantly rebuilt, within 10-20 years, most of them would revert to either mangrove swamps or foot-deep water washing up against a concrete seawall (like in Key West).
Beach erosion isn't some new thing... it was happening DECADES ago. Back in the early 70s, the Bal Harbour/Surfside/Sunny Isles area had practically no sandy beach left... according to my parents, if you wanted to go play in the sand at the beach there, you HAD to go at low tide, because the rest of the time, it was constantly washed over by every incoming wave, or under at least a few inches of water. The wide sandy beach that exists there NOW is an actively-maintained 100% artificial triumph of geotechnical engineering.
What, exactly, does "the science" disagree with me about? The series of water control structures and "freshwater to saltwater gradient" plans aren't some dark, secret plot... South Florida Water Management District and the Army Corps of Engineers have always been pretty open about their priorities and plans. Their unambiguous missions are, in descending order:
1. Prevent urban land from flooding (and create new developable urban land wherever possible)
2. Secure a reliable supply of cheap fresh water suitable for drinking and bathing
3. When possible with limited resources, and without compromising on goals #1 and #2, make a few token efforts to preserve the natural environment... especially the parts tourists (or legislators in Washington) care about.
FEMA might repeatedly pay to rebuild, but it still requires mitigation against future flood events. So flood #1 might destroy your house, but flood #2 will probably just destroy your car and everything in the garage (because FEMA would have required that your repaired/rebuilt house be raised on new pilings or a higher foundation). This is EXACTLY what happened in the coastal parts of New Jersey that were destroyed by Sandy.
Likewise, if your basement (but NOT the first floor) gets flooded in a state like Missouri, FEMA will force you to move all infrastructure (furnace, water heater, etc) so it's above the likely flood height, and the city will officially de-classify it as "basement"... so you won't be able to claim "basement" as a feature if you go to sell the house in the future, you'll never be able to get a legal building permit to turn it into a bedroom or home theater, and anything stored in that basement going forward will be totally excluded from coverage.
It's important to point out, most of Florida's NATURAL terrain might have once been low-lying, but 99.9% of the buildings in Florida aren't sitting on natural terrain, nor are their ground floors anywhere close to sea level (let alone below it). Most actual buildings sit on several feet of engineered fill dirt, dredged from manmade lakes & canals.
As far as I know, it hasn't been legal to build habitable buildings that are LITERALLY "below sea level" (or even "below floodplain level") in Florida since the roaring 20s, and has NEVER been regarded as a viable way to build anything you intend to survive more than a few years.
Florida isn't going away, no matter HOW badly eco-warriors might want it to happen. If anything, sea-level rise will probably cause a new Florida land boom that takes the state's population to 50 million. If the southern Everglades became an extension of the Gulf of Mexico (flanked by the new Miami and Naples peninsulas), Krome Avenue would become Miami's new equivalent of Ocean Drive, and you'd see "flocks" of cranes building skyscrapers there to overlook it. Florida's leaders would celebrate the doubling of the state's coastline, and every remaining trace of South Florida's original natural environment would cease to exist.
Lake Okeechobee would become a series of lakes surrounded by water-control structures extending diagonally to the area north and west of I-75 & the Sawgrass Expressway, designed to form a progressive gradient that keeps outright salt water south of Tamiami Trail, and brackish water south of I-75 (so Lake Okechobee and its new clone in Palm Beach County would be immense freshwater reservoirs).
THIS is the real future of the Everglades. Most of "the Everglades" between Miami and Naples (along Tamiami Trail) already looks more like a big unkempt vacant lot than vast, untamed wilderness. The area along I-75 is a wetter and swampier, but the area around the rest stop about 20 miles west of Weston looks like they could build a sprawling outlet mall next door without anybody batting an eyebrow. When I was a child, Alligator Alley felt like a dangerous packed-gravel cowpath through the wild, untamed jungle. Now, it feels more like I-75 through Davie, Pembroke Pines, and Miramar did back when it first opened 30 years ago.
It's not good, and it's not bad. It just "is". Fifty years from now, Florida won't be an underwater sandbar, it'll be jousting with Texas and New York for the title "second most-populous state in the nation".
Or, we could compromise, split the difference, and redefine EST as UTC-4.5, CST as UTC-5.5, MST as UTC-6.5, and PST as UTC-7.5
If we had to, we could rename our timezones to something like ECT, CCT, MCT, and PCT ("x Compromise Time"), though I suspect Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean would follow us anyway (in fact, I think Canadian law actually defines DST by referencing US standards, just to make it automatic & avoid the mess that would happen if Canadian DST had different dates than the US).
Here's the thing: people tend to have more discretion about their "leave work" time than their "go to work" time. In the summer, office workers look outside at 5, see the traffic jam, say 'fuck it', and work another hour or two (thereby spreading their traffic over a longer interval of time). When DST ends, those same people run for the door at 5, causing INSTANT gridlock that persists until 7:30 or 8pm (which reinforces the 5pm race to the door... waiting only makes the drive even worse, vs summer when working an hour later can shave 30 minutes from the drive time).
In contrast, morning traffic starts around 6am, peaks around 8, and falls off rapidly after 9, REGARDLESS of whether or not there's light outside.
The One X is a step up from the One S, just like the One S is a step up from the One.
Microsoft doesn't arbitrarily limit the One's output resolution. If somebody wants to write "Pong4k" (and manages to not get sued by the trademark's current owners) and sell it to people with a first-gen Xbox One, it'll run just fine at 2160p30. I fully expect a slew of retro games that emulate the look of a color vector CRT, or use the higher resolution to emulate CRT color masks, misconvergence, and NTSC color artifacts.
The main thing the S and X add is the horsepower to do FPS-type games with better T&L and/or higher glitch-free framerates (and enable FPS-type games at 4k resolution & some reasonable framerate without excessive Z-clipping or low-quality T&L to exist AT ALL).
Going forward, we'll see more and more games that can technically limp along at 720p30 on a first-gen XB1, but NEED a S or X to do 1080p60 at maximum quality (even IF you don't care about "4k".
The thing to remember is that modern hardware has few "hard" constraints compared to the "vga era"... it's more like you have a finite bucket of resources to spread around however you see fit. You can stream h.264-encoded video (or Asteroids, or Tempest) at 2160p60, you can do realtime raytracing at 480p60, or you can do any sensible permutation that involves triangles, filtered textures, and lighting in between.
Autonomous driving on limited-access highways is relatively easy to do well, because even HUMAN drivers have their movements constrained by the road's design. The Tesla accident you're referring to happened on a non-limited-access rural highway with cross traffic... a scenario even the most enthusiastic Tesla owner will concede requires some degree of special vigilance, regardless of what you might be able to get away with doing on a freeway or in gridlocked traffic.
And Tesla DOES value the lives of their consumers and those around them. Musk is honest enough to admit that people likely to buy a Tesla with autopilot routinely drive in a profoundly-distracted state ANYWAY, and did so long BEFORE they even GOT their first Tesla, so even an imperfect autopilot with known deficiencies is a net safety improvement for them. Other automakers bury their heads in the sand and totally ignore the reality of how people actually drive.
E-readers totally SUCK for reading multi-page technical documents where you have to rapidly flip pages & view multiple pages at once. They're just too damn slow... slow rendering, slow updates, and even slower UI.
One simple improvement the e-ink industry could make to improve performance: split the page into 2-16 chunks that can be updated in unison, just like how dual-scan LCD displays made passive LCDs semi-tolerable until TFT technology became affordable.
COULD someone build something like a bound e-ink book with a few hundred bendable double-sided black+white+red e-ink pages that can rewrite itself, but otherwise be thumbed-through like a real book? Probably. But so far, the industry hasn't been interested in use cases besides "reading fiction in a page-sequential manner".
> Also, since when are Tesla's cars "high tech".
At the moment, if you want a car with level 3 autonomous driving capabilities (at least, on limited-access highways and gridlocked stop & go traffic on city streets) that doesn't require silly hacks to trick it into being useful (like hanging two water bottles from opposite sides of the steering wheel using springs to trick the steering-wheel hand sensor), you basically have three choices: Tesla, Tesla, and (...drumroll...) Tesla.
The fundamental with net neutrality is not all traffic is equally cheap or expensive to transport.
Suppose I have VDSL2 with AT&T U-verse, and so does my friend who lives in my neighborhood (served from the same VRAD). If we open a peer-to-peer connection with each other, our traffic could theoretically run through the VRAD's local switch fabric without even touching its fiber backhaul. We could fully saturate our upstream connectivity to the VRAD without having the slightest impact on anybody else.
Now, take it up a level. Friend #2 is also a U-verse customer, but he's a few blocks away... served by a different VRAD, but both of our VRADs run fiber through the same central office 3 miles away. In this case, our traffic might have some impact on others sharing our respective VRADs, but it's still running entirely over AT&T's local loop, whose raw capacity vastly exceeds anything individual users could even fantasize about doing.
OK, now take it a level higher. Friend #3 is a U-verse customer who lives 10 miles away. Our P2P traffic goes from home to VRAD to CO, from CO to AT&T's regional NOC, to CO to VRAD to home. At this point, it might have a meaningful impact on other customers, but it's still likely to be trivial because it's still traveling entirely over AT&T's own local backhaul.
Time to get a bit more complicated. Friend #4 lives across the street, but gets his internet through Comcast. Our P2P traffic goes from house to VRAD to CO to AT&T NOC, then somehow gets to NAP of the Americas in Miami, where it gets passed along to Comcast, who relays it to THEIR regional NOC, sends it to my friend's neighborhood, and sends the final few thousand feet over coax. In this case, NOTA will pile on some charges of their own to exchange traffic between AT&T and Comcast, but they're still fairly low.
Now, let's assume I'm streaming video from Netflix. Netflix pays to bring their own fiber into AT&T's NOC and probably colocates their own server to further reduce and cache the amount that has to be backhauled from minute to minute. From AT&T's perspective, this isn't much different than the scenario with friend #3... Netflix has their own network connection into AT&T, so the only AT&T backhaul that gets used is from NOC to CO to VRAD.
Finally, let's suppose someone starts their own guerrilla VOD streaming service with a name like "Voogle". Voogle's datacenter is in Kansas City, and their network service provider has to either peer privately with AT&T (and Comcast, since my friends with Comcast watch them too), or they have to find some other mutual interexchange point. As I understand it, public exchange points (like MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST) no longer exist, and all exchange points (in the US, at least) are now privately peered & leave it up to the networks to negotiate their own traffic carriage agreements. So... Voogle's NSP has to negotiate peering and transport arrangements to AT&T and Comcast (because both are big enough to say, "you need us more than we need you"). If Voogle's traffic is light, their NSP probably won't charge them much. If Voogle is streaming 4k video to thousands of customers, their NSP is likely to charge them quite a bit.
In any case, the "Voogle" case is no worse than the scenario with friend #4... Voogle's traffic originates on NEITHER AT&T nor Comcast, and it's up to Voogle to figure out how to affordably GET their traffic to the regional datacenters of AT&T and Comcast (or at least, to network exchange points into which AT&T and Comcast have their own abundant connectivity). From the perspective of AT&T and Comcast, it's more expensive than the "Netflix" scenario (because Voogle isn't big enough to peer with them directly), but it's no WORSE than a peer to peer connection between an arbitrary AT&T customer and an arbitrary Comcast customer.
Things get messier with international traffic (say, between a Comcast customer in Miami and a server farm in London or Bangalore), but dependin
"safe design life" has an entire range of meanings. A module that was built to be safely habitable by human occupants might cease to be safe for that purpose, but still might be useful as a storage area. Kind of like how a damp basement might not be suitable for a bedroom, but is perfectly OK for use as a laundry room & place to store nearly-worthless junk for decades.
Maintaining things in low earth orbit costs money, but it's NOTHING compared to the cost of getting stuff up there in the first place.
NASA has official plans to deorbit the ISS if it loses funding because it's required by law to have such plans.
Russia would never, EVER allow NASA to actually go through with it.
If NASA sent a demolition crew up to the ISS to start taking it apart, Russia would promptly evict them & announce they were taking over the station.
The US would bitch & moan, compare it to space piracy, and threaten retaliation. Russia would roll its eyes and point out that we were planning to junk it anyway.
After a week or two of tense negotiations, the presidents of the US and Russia would hold a press conference to announce their deal... the creation of a new commercial space resort, transfer of the American modules to it in exchange for partial ownership of the new venture, and an agreement by Russia to maintain it going forward. A few already-wealthy Russian oligarchs become even wealthier, the US declines to cash its dividend checks, space tourism becomes a reality (driven by the acquisition of a prohibitively-expensive asset for free) and the space station continues in orbit for another hundred years.
The fact is, Russia would be insane NOT to do it. Even if the US side became completely derelict and ceased to be habitable over time, it would STILL be valuable as a source of recyclable raw materials already in orbit. Or even just a place to store shit that's halfway between "garbage" and "stuff that might be useful for something, someday".
Actually, I'm pretty sure the US doctor was saying, "ummmm... I suppose it's not inconceivable he might benefit, but I'd have to examine him to know for sure" before he personally examined the baby... then, after flying to England to examine the baby directly, pulled the parents aside & told them, "erm... perhaps I was a bit over-optimistic. Frankly, at this point, it's hopeless. Really. It is."
That said, I think Charlie Gard's parents SHOULD have been allowed to take him to the US at their own expense right from the start. I don't think it would have mattered much to Charlie himself either way (good OR bad), but would have probably helped his PARENTS deal with it better by making them feel less personally-powerless & spared them from the international media circus.
The fact is, when a child with a rare, horrific condition survives against all odds, it's almost ALWAYS because his or her parents refused to give up as easily as doctors following conventional wisdom. Because by definition, if your child has a condition 47 others are known to have had in the past 100 years, there's simply not enough data, and there IS NO "wisdom", conventional or otherwise... every single one of them is an extreme outlier.
Some parents can find peace by deferring to authority, religion, whatever. Others will never know peace unless they know beyond doubt they've exhausted LITERALLY every possible option. By any definition, Charlie's parents did everything that anyone could have done.
I was a die-hard m68k fan... but in retrospect, that's because back in the early 90s (right before DOS4GW), writing programs in anything besides realmode assembly was damn-near impossible.
I remember how I discovered (sometime around 1992 when I was in college) that every x86 from the 386dx onwards HAD orthogonal registers & could do flat addressing... then went in literal circles for MONTHS trying to find anything that resembled documentation or development tools.
To this day, I have no idea whether published books about the topic even EXISTED circa 1992, or whether MASM circa '92 could actually DO protected mode. I basically gave up after someone on Usenet disillusioned me... basically, protected-mode (circa '92) meant no BIOS calls (DOS extenders didn't quite exist yet). No BIOS calls meant you couldn't even output characters to the screen without knowing more about the inner workings of a VGA card's CRTC than any 18 year old could have hoped to know at that point (the first meaty books explaining videocard programming weren't readily available yet... they technically existed, but if you didn't already KNOW their titles & author names, your likelihood of discovering them was basically "nil" unless you were rich enough to blindly order expensive books from B. Dalton's or Waldenbooks sight-unseen based on their titles alone... and wait 6-8 weeks for them to arrive. Information-wise, it really WAS the Dark Ages compared to now.
Pre-Google, finding stuff about esoteric subjects was *hard* -- even as an undergrad at a major research university that HAD internet access... you'd post to Usenet, but if you missed seeing a reply, it was *gone* forever (as far as you were concerned) a few weeks later (from what I recall, the university's admins purged Usenet posts after ~1-4 weeks... 1 week for alt.binaries.*, 4 weeks for comp.sys.*). The library had computerized indices, of course... but you still had to try and FIND the bound journal. Half the time, it was missing. The other half of the time, it was in limbo (the journals for that year pulled from the shelf for hard-binding, but not actually BOUND yet). And if you weren't a professor or grad student, the library staff had zero interest in tracking missing resources down for you.
Come to think about it, the "good old days" actually sucked pretty badly.
Post-Irma, at least half of the GAS STATIONS in South Florida were closed for at least a few days. Why? No (working) backup power. By law, they're required to have generators, but apparently the state doesn't require them to test, maintain, and certify them as operational. So gas stations grudgingly installed generators after Hurricane Wilma, then didn't do jack shit to maintain them for the next 12 years. Irma came & went, and lots of those generators didn't work.
For Dade & Broward counties, Irma side-swiped us as a weak category 1 hurricane. Our power grid & stores were dysfunctional to some degree for a week. If we'd gotten directly hit by a *major* (cat-3 or above) hurricane, we'd be in AT LEAST as fucked as San Juan is now.
The REAL danger in future storms is going to be people who remember what happened to gas stations after Irma, and to make sure it doesn't happen to them again, go into the next storm with 20 5-gallon cans of gas in their garage. Guaranteed, we'll have at least one news story of a *horrific* fire caused by someone storing EGREGIOUSLY unsafe quantities of gas in an even MORE unsafe location.
As a matter of public safety, local governments need to MAKE SURE that gas will be abundantly and readily available at most 8 hours after the last hurricane-force winds, convince the public that gas WILL be readily available, and actually pull it off. Otherwise, people will do *really* unsafe things because it seems like a lesser evil compared to being unable to buy stuff they need.