Without doing research, I see two possibilities. Either:

a) The relevant patent has expired. Or
b) They have prior art.

This has been going on in one form or another for >20 years. This means that regardless of whether the patent was filed, it is either expired or invalid.

Look. We have to pay for the stuff we use. We can either pay the government, or some other entity. It doesn't matter. Paying the government for roads, etc. is generally a good thing, because people don't want to be nickel-and-dimed every time they drive down the street. Large corporations in general don't want to be nickel-and-dimed for each segment of shipment they make. Police aren't privatized and we don't have "legal insurance" because that would be annoying. Education isn't privatized, because we like the idea of equal opportunity.

But we still have to pay for it all, and that's where taxes come in. In general, someone smart noticed that people who make more money use up proportionally more of the resources: they buy more things, so they use the roads disproportionately more; they have more things stolen from them, so they use the police disproportionately more, etc. Megacorporations do the same thing to an even greater extent. This is why we have a progressive tax. A "flat tax" would be completely unfair to the poor, as they are the ones who use the least amount of resources, and have the least means to pay for what they do use.

The total income of the US is somewhere around $6.8 trillion (via wikipedia, mean household income * number of households). 10% of this is not enough at our current spending rates.

However, all this is beside the point. The point is that we're taxing the thing we want to encourage: making money and spending it. Making money and spending it is what drives the economy, and we're discouraging it by taxing it. That's a bad thing. We shouldn't have an income tax, or a sales tax, or a consumption tax, or a transaction tax (although if we want to discourage HFT, that might be a thing to look at). We should have a savings tax. Of course, saving for retirement is different, but if you're just sitting on money for no reason at all, other than your fear of losing it, you're hurting the economy. This is the behavior we want to discourage, so we should tax the hell out of it. This has the benefit of the poor who make just enough to get by not paying much, if at all, and the rich-beyond-all-belief being taxed the hell out of IF AND ONLY IF they're not doing anything useful, largely making it a progressive tax, which is a Good Thing (tm). After all, if they're not going to do something useful with their money, why let them keep it?

That said, of course there are flaws in this system that need to be fleshed out, but it's at least something worth looking into.

What's the difference? 250GB in 31 days is 783kbps. Sure, you might get higher burst speeds, but if you can't supply 6.4 terabytes of data every month, you shouldn't be allowed to advertise 20Mbps speeds.

Dude, he's a Brit. He understates things. It's supposed to be read,

Except that it's impossible to know what page will actually be loaded without actually fetching it from the server (i.e., if it tries to fetch another link on 404), and it's not possible to do that without potentially changing state on the server (not every website respects GET vs POST semantics).

Not sure if troll.

Pipelining doesn't affect latency, only throughput. And the throughput increase is reflected in the increase I'n frequency. 3GHz still means that you can only perform 3000 instructions in a us.
And that assumes none of the instructions trip an interrupt, which requires waiting while the pipeline flushes, and then continuing an interrupt handler; and none of the instructions cause a TLB miss, and none of the instructions cause a cache miss, and all instructions are effectively independent of each other (Hint: none of these situations actually do). Multiple issue and multiple functional units help with getting more out of the pipeline in the case where you have enough instruction independence and you suffer cache and TLB misses. Interrupts, however, still require you to flush the pipeline to guarantee proper operation. Now imagine what happens if every 20th instruction is an API call which triggers a system call by means of an interrupt because it requires privileged access to the GPU.
I didn't RTFA yet, but that seems to me like the gist of the problem.

And releasing the middle mouse button over a link after scrolling. That annoyed the bejeezus out of me and was the reason I switched back to Firefox. It basically made ad- and link-ridden sites unscrollable with the middle mouse button.

Silly people. I can prove it for arbitrary N! Just so long as P is zero, that is.

Excellent description, and it helped me understand it, but I have a minor correction.

The plane that cuts the three pieces (or the nth-dimension generalization that cuts n pieces) isn't necessarily unique, specifically in the case where the three points are colinear (or the nth-dimension generalization thereof).

Nucular?

Wind power as we know it is not yet renewable. We still have to get stuff out of the ground (metal ores for replacement parts, and chemicals for batteries) to maintain the system. Once we get to the point that it really is renewable (we recycle the scrap from broken-down parts to create new ones, using only the energy generated by the system), with no waste and no resource requirements after being set up, except for the sun in the sky, then the energy will cost only as much as the land costs. Same goes for solar, and other energy systems that have the potential to become renewable.

IANAL, but I think that in most jurisdictions, behaving recklessly in such a way that a death can reasonably foreseeably result from your actions (such as waving a loaded gun around with the safety off) is enough to get convicted of at least some degree of murder if said death actually occurs, even without intent.

I think it's called "reckless indifference".

You're confusing choice on the part of comely producers with choice on the part of consumers. It would be amazing if all content were available I'n every conceivable format, but it's not. Providing a patent-encumbered codec that works on only one platform will lead to the situation we had with the ActiveX debacle.

You sunk my battleship!