The use of “quantum leap” isn’t about comparing the absolute size of the change to quantum phenomena. It’s about the lack of a smooth transition. Quantum leaps in physics are instantaneous transitions between states with no intermediate. That’s the idea with the colloquialism: a sudden shift from one state to another without a smooth transitional period.
France, for instance, has a national policy against the recognition of domestic minority languages like Basque, Breton and Corsican.
Trying to give France the benefit of the doubt, but this just sounds like oppression. Is there a good reason France doesn’t recognize minority languages in its territory?
The main issue is that nobody is going to want to create new content when they get paid nothing or almost nothing for doing so.
This is the whole reason copyright is supposed to exist. Content creators get exclusive control over the content they create for the duration of the copyright, so they can make a living off of work that then enriches society. And for the further benefit of society, after 14 years this copyright ends and the works become public domain, where anyone can create derivative works that will have copyright on them going to their own creators and the cycle continues, further enriching society.
Large companies first perverted this by getting Congress to extend the duration of copyright to truly absurd levels so they could continue to extract wealth from works they had to spend very little to maintain (mostly lawyers to enforce their copyrights). Since only they could create derivative works for 100(!) years, they did not have to compete with other creators in society, giving themselves a monopoly on what become cultural icons. Now corporate America has found a way to subvert creation itself, but it requires access to effectively all copyrighted works everywhere simultaneously. So now they just ignore the copyright, since it is impeding their wealth accumulation.
And so now the creative engine copyright is supposed to foster dies, taking the social enrichment it was designed to facilitate with it. People won’t stop making art or generating what’s supposed to be copyrighted works, but when they can’t making a living on it, they have to turn it into a hobby and spend the bulk of their time and energy on work that will put food on the table.
I am astonished they didn’t spell it “rouge.”
Campaign promises from fascist populists are always made in a superposition of joke and serious. They only resolve to one or the other when they get in office, and most of the time as a supposed “joke” to humiliate the opposition or an exaggeration to “make a point” because on the campaign trail they say whatever they think will get them votes, not what they plan to do or even think is possible.
The most frustrating of the unkept promises are those that are logistically and practically possible, but never happen because the now-leader is a fascist and doesn’t do anything without personal gain, and they can’t figure out how to exploit the implementation for themselves. Not what’s happening in this case (there was never an actual path for peace with Russia, regardless of timeline), but has happened with other Trump promises.
I really don’t like the repeated use of the phrase “defy the laws of physics.” That’s an extraordinary claim, and it needs extraordinary proof, and the researchers already propose a mechanism by which the droplets remained stable under existing physical laws, namely that they were getting replenished from the nanopores inside the material as fast as evaporation was pulling water out of the droplets.
I recognize the researchers themselves aren’t using the phrase, it’s the Penn press release organization trying to further drum up interest in the research. But it’s a bad framing. You can make it sound interesting without resorting to clickbait techniques like “did our awesome engineers just break the laws of physics??” Hell, the research is interesting enough on its own; passive water collection from the air is revolutionary! No need for editorializing!