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Data Centres Are Now an Electricity Story, and the Grid Is the Constraint
The International Energy Agency puts data-centre power use at around 415 terawatt-hours in 2024 and expects it to more than double by 2030. The binding limit on artificial intelligence is turning out to be transformers, transmission lines and permits.
The Outer Space Treaty bars national appropriation of outer space: what a satellite operator actually holds is a frequency assignment recorded by the ITU, and a seven-year clock to use it
The 1967 treaty states that outer space “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”, and no instrument consulted here confers title to a point 35,786 km above the equator. What exists instead is a queue run under the ITU Radio Regulations, in which priority is fixed by the date a filing is received and lost if a satellite is not brought into use in time.
An air crash report is not a verdict, and the rules that govern it forbid it from becoming one
The international rulebook for accident investigation, now in its thirteenth edition, states that apportioning blame or liability is not the purpose of the exercise. The organisation most people assume conducts these inquiries almost never does.
World Time Has Been Adjusted Twenty-Seven Times Since 1972. In 2022 the Metrology Conference Voted to Loosen the Rule Behind Them.
Leap seconds keep Coordinated Universal Time within 0.9 seconds of the Earth's rotation, and every one of them has been an insertion rather than a deletion. In 2022 the General Conference on Weights and Measures resolved to raise that tolerance in or before 2035 without deciding what the new value should be, and asked for a plan to be drafted for its 2026 meeting.
There Is No Such Thing as a World Patent. Nearly 276,000 Applications a Year Are Mistaken for One.
The Patent Cooperation Treaty produces a document called an international application, filed at a single office and effective in more than 150 countries at once. It grants nothing. What it actually buys is eighteen extra months, a search report nobody is obliged to follow, and an irreversible publication of the invention at month eighteen.
Every Phone, Plane and Satellite Obeys One Rulebook. It Is Rewritten Once Every Four Years.
The Radio Regulations — a four-volume treaty covering 8.3 kilohertz to 3,000 gigahertz — mark their 120th anniversary this year, and the edition currently in force took effect on 1 January 2025. The next revision will be negotiated in Shanghai between 18 October and 12 November 2027. This is how governments divide the invisible resource that everything wireless depends on.
Almost Everyone Now Lives Under a Mobile Signal. Two Billion Still Do Not Use It
The ITU's latest edition nowcasts 74 per cent of humanity online, yet only about 312 million people live beyond any mobile broadband network. The distance between coverage and use is now the harder problem.