Sounds suspicious. Oh I bet it's 'perfectly safe', but you start out on math and who knows where you'll end up? Smoking crack out of rolled up nonstandard analysis theorems in a gutter in cambridge? It's a gateway drug, I tell ya.

This just says that if you (attempt to) sue someone for using WebM, you don't get to use it anymore. Like the GPL for patents. Ooooh, scary.

http://qntm.org/pointnine

Indeed, we're not going to be doing this anytime soon, but I don't expect never. Perhaps a few hundred years should be enough to refine our techniques to the point where we could do this without introducing any defects whatsoever. "Opens the possibility" is just the start..

Our governments just love to sell off vital infrastructure, don't they?

I won't pretend to speak for the GP, but I feel I should point out that a loved one and a corpse are different things. If you really believe that the person you loved is gone when they die, there is no real reason to have feelings about the shell left behind.

No one claimed the cart could move in zero wind. "Faster than the wind" in this case means some multiple of the wind speed. So it just sits there in the still air, as expected.

Conservation of energy doesn't prevent this from working. After all, with a turbine powering the wheels, a cart can travel faster than windspeed into the wind anyway.

In this case, a plain sailcart (with no propellor) reduces the velocity of the mass of air that is pushing it by a bit --> reduces the wind's kinetic energy. This enables the cart to move forward (the energy is transferred to the cart) until it's almost at windspeed, where it has a negligible effect on the velocity of the wind.

If a fan is then added at windspeed, it starts to push air back, reducing the air's kinetic energy again. This energy has to go somewhere, either as heat or the kinetic energy of the cart. Since most propulsion systems are not 0% efficient, I'd bet on the cart accelerating (to a speed faster than the wind).

So you see we're not getting free energy from anywhere. Kinetic energy is proportional to the mass involved, and there's a very large supply of moving air available.

Couldn't care less, please, unless you mean the RIAA actually do care about getting money from her. Say what you mean, not the opposite.

you will not attain it?

— Miyamoto Musashi (The Book of Five Rings)

Doesn't "going postal" usually involve guns and mass murder? Dammit google, you were meant to be subtle about doing evil things.

I fail to see why you're so surprised. If you're pissed off at how much you're being taxed, reducing how much tax you have to pay is kind of the obvious thing to do. *shrug*

If the point was that a pile of DVDs ought to have a lesser total sentence than robbing a store at knifepoint, then I don't see how it matters that you can break the sentence into 20 "counts". The point stands that 60 years is too much. 20 three year counts is just explaining how the situation came about.

"Paying for it or trading for it"

Did you know you can download things on the internet for free? Apparently it costs music producers a trillion dollars a year in lost sales. Maybe if we got everyone to pirate every child porn video on the internet at once, we could put these people out of business!

Here we go again, implying that AIs won't work until they have feelings.

You might fairly refute the "emotionless reason" of Mr Spock, but I don't think that means you need emotions in order to think. It just means you don't have to lack emotions. There's a difference. Emotions give us (humans) goals. A machine's goals can be programmed in (by humans, who have goals). A machine doesn't have to "feel sad" for the suffering of people to take action to prevent said suffering - it just needs a goal system that says "suffering: bad". 'S why we call them machines.