No, this isn't true. There's no conservation of matter anywhere. If you take 2 hydrogen atoms and weight them, then bond them together in a hydrogen molecule and weight that, the molecule weights less than twice one hydrogen atom.
There's no such thing as conservation of mass, mass and energy are convertible into each other. But in the real of chemistry that conversion happens on a ratio of at most 1e-7, so when it comes to the human body we might as well say that the weight that goes in must equal what comes out, and that's close enough.
> Airline standards are the direct consequences of vote with your wallet. No matter what some claim, 99.999% of people will buy the cheapest ticket possible.
For the airline industry, yes. This isn't true in all industries.
> I'm generally very sympathetic to anti-trust measures, but this strikes me as a situation where DuckDuckGo needs to stand on its own two feet. If your position is that privacy is more valuable to consumers, then you should compete in the auction.
If you're very sympathetic to anti-trust measures, then this shouldn't be decided in an auction. Obviously the most profitable companies will win the auction. And those are the same companies that you should be taking measures against (not because they're profitable in itself, but because by being profitable they can kill competitors).
So saying: "search engines should compete on a lawless free market" vs "search engines have to compete on an auction for users" is more or less the same thing. Anti-trust measures try to make the outcome slightly less sensitive to profitability.
Often we don't know the "practical" benefits that will come out of some specific line of investigation. But some people find it interesting to think about. I guess better than spending time playing with facebook.
Funny. I've been using Linux for 10 (?) years and I still don't know what mounting means. I just know it's something that needs to happen in order for me to access the contents of a disk. I don't really care about it either, I only care about accessing the data. Why isn't it automatic anyway? Windows does it automatically whenever possible, why can't Linux?