These collection societies are actually the opposite of the mafia.
They collect royalties on behalf of the composers. If the composer has a publisher, the royalties are forwarded there instead (so the publisher can take their contractual cut).
They are the only way to protect your work if you are unsigned (think struggling artists).
What if in the future we could examine the contents of a particular rock from space? Have instruments sensitive enough to detect the remnants of Vogon breath from their visit millions of years ago?
A pristine planet has value beyond 'I want this' IMO - it is an opportunity to perform experiments in an almost perfectly isolated test tube.
As a human, I also find it beautiful. As you say though, this is an anthropocentric view.
This mission is an incredible achievement. The images are as advertised (stunning) and I'm sure all the sciences - and even art - will benefit from the data.
What I find a little sad is that we seem incapable of doing this without leaving a particularly human signature wherever we go.
They should have explained that copyright belongs to every author and singling out one industry as being worthy of compensation works against the spirit of the treaty.
They could then explain how their content uses excerpts of copyrighted material to direct the curious to the source.
It should have then asked for legislation on what constitutes fair use in this context.
If the government insisted on fees, then they should have asked them why news businesses are more worthy of those fees than individuals.
I've used podman-compose for a few web projects.
Rootless means you can't bind to privileged ports etc. but after a bit of fiddling I can now spin up my choice of DB/server/mock pretty quickly - just like I could with docker.
The lack of 'cannot connect to dockerd' mysteries makes for a much-improved developer experience if you ask me.
True - and even with this tremendous waste, it pays for itself.
We have never looked beyond monetary return to justify the existence of anything and i fear we are doomed to stay that way.
Thankfully, renewables are becoming more profitable.
If we built enough, we could power the USA.
Imagine that.
All the bitcoin, teslas and visa transactions you would ever want, with no squabbling.
I think both the article and this comment miss the point.
If we generated power cleanly in the first place, there would be far less environmental damage everywhere.
The fact that Bitcoin now uses half the power of Youtube (from a terribly unreliable estimate) should not be such a distraction from the real problem IMHO.
If the goal is to educate the public on the scale of power involved, a comparison with a commonly used service would help a lot IMHO.
Something like 'Bitcoin consumes 14 times the energy of Google and half (according rough estimates) that of Youtube' would make things easier to grasp before hitting the reader with country comparisons.
FWIW here is my list of 'if a service were a country':
They collect royalties on behalf of the composers. If the composer has a publisher, the royalties are forwarded there instead (so the publisher can take their contractual cut).
They are the only way to protect your work if you are unsigned (think struggling artists).