That's only because we're morons who keep making ethanol from corn. We'd come out way ahead with switchgrass.

Once you notice a big chunk of that landmass is useless islands in the Arctic Ocean, the comparison for hydroelectric purposes gets a lot closer. Also make sure you're not counting internal waters in whatever numbers you're using -- Hudson Bay is friggin' huge.

They didn't say "reasonably" until the world exploded around them.

Contracts are contracts. In the US (where Dropbox and probably most of its users are based), courts rarely do anything but follow their express terms. It's a fundamental aspect of the common-law heritage of our legal system that virtually anything is subject to contract under virtually any terms. Exceptions are few, and aside from contracts calling for manifestly criminal conduct, most of the exceptions come from either express law forbidding certain terms (itself rare and sometimes subject to constitutional challenges -- I'm not kidding, contracts are explicitly mentioned in the US constitution) or actual fraud. Neither applies in this case.

The best you can hope for is that it is declared a "contract of adhesion" and fails the closer scrutiny due such contracts. It's quite rare to even get a contract recognized as a "contract of adhesion", however, particularly when the contract involves a highly competitive field with a low barrier to entry where consumers have a wide variety of easily-made choices, and even once the determination is made, actually convincing the court not to enforce its terms is still difficult.

No, they can do whatever THEY think is necessary. It's no different than a clause reading "in our sole judgement".

As an outsider looking in, I'd say the island of Ireland is probably a lot more cohesive, culturally and economically, than the large and incredibly diverse country we call India, much less the whole Indian subcontinent.

Bail conditions are pretty routine in the US these days, though rarely very creative (surrender passport, stay away from victim, blah blah blah). A condition like this would definitely raise constitutional questions, though. Pre-trial confinement and bail are supposed to be preventative measures to ensure appearance in court and, in extreme cases, protect society. Taking away the kid's xbox is clearly punitive.

Neither KDE nor Gnome are worth using anymore. Their ongoing decline is part of what made me a Mac user in 2005, and it just keeps getting worse. One has no clue what "stability" means, and the other is actively and proudly user-hostile.

Real-world experience? The douchebags that generally staff boards of directors and upper management don't give a shit about anything but this quarter's numbers and their own golden parachutes. Corporations have to have someone in power to counter that. Opera no longer does, and their focus will become the same as any other typical corporation: quarterly profits above all else.

Linux is and has always been about practicality. BSD is and has always been about an academic-purity wankfest. It's hardly surprising companies would gravitate to a project focused on solving real-world problems instead of one that demands adherence to 40-year-old concepts of correctness.

iOS was probably dealt with as part of the same deal. It's also not really that annoying -- only a relatively small portion of even the technically-inclined population has any clue what Cisco IOS is, and context suffices to disambiguate. It's not even a significant search problem -- if "IOS" plus other relevant keywords aren't getting the right thing, throw in "cisco" or a model number and you're pretty sure to get what you're after.

Mere registration does not establish priority, you must actually be using the name in commerce. Objecting to an application is possible, but not required. If iCloud Communications _actually_ used it first (or _possibly_ if they continued to use it when Xcerion did not), iCloud Communications wins. (I have no idea if this is actually the case here, though.)

That said, I expect the lawyers on both sides are currently wrangling over exactly how many zeros will be involved in quietly dropping the case.

Thanks for the imagery, but what is it that makes you think you can't _already_ claim any random person wrote something? Do you think the normal non-tag text in an HTML document is under a magic spell that present misattribution?

You are so wrong it's utterly pathetic. My point isn't that they should have added a cleaning system, my point is that they never should have been in the position of choosing between a 90-day mission lifetime at a cost of $820,000,000, or reengineering the rovers. If they didn't look at a possible dust problem in advance, they were negligent (we've known about Mars dust storms for over a century). If they did, and pressed ahead anyway, they were stupid. Either way, somewhere along the line they got the 90-day number, and it was STILL WRONG.

It's just another symptom of NASA's criminally negligent management. What I favor is the dismantling of NASA and the exile of everyone to have ever worked in management there from the entire aerospace industry (or, really, any job above flipping burgers, though I'm sure they'd screw that up, too). A few of them I want prosecuted for manslaughter, if not murder. It is a broken organization and so long as it exists, it is going to keep wasting ridiculous amounts of money while getting people killed.

Funding my ass, they spent $820 million on the hardware, launch/transit, and 90-day operations (this during their era of chanting "smaller better cheaper"), and less than $125 million on continued operations since. On a budget that was already almost a billion dollars, you're going to tell me their primary motivation for pulling 90 days out of their ass was to save a few million on ground operations? No. Just no.