How many times did you complain about /.'s lack of unicode support last year?

For the fourteenhundredth time, please use a log scale. Something like
0 (=Cowboyneal)
1
2-3
4-7
>=8

Back in those days when I had a crappy internet connection, I downloaded all video files. Sure, I had to wait some time until it was done, but at least I didn't have to wait every 10 seconds while watching the video. It's much cleaner, you can fast-forward, go backwards, watch the whole thing a second time, with no delay whatsoever. And no Flash.

I never really understood why video sites don't have a download option. It would make watching videos over a small internet connection so much better. (Then again I guess they don't want us to leave their site and watch videos without their annoying ads)

The basic premises most people have is:

a) human interests have to be considered when weighting different options of actions

b) non-human animal rights & interests do NOT to be considered in an equal way as human interests

These premises lead to the conclusion, that there must be a fundamental difference between humans and non-human animals. Throughout history, philosophers have searched for such a distinction. Long story short, they failed.

Take "the ability to talk" for instance. Long believed to be an uniquely human feature, we now know that at least some other animals communicate as well (using a different language of course).

Take another example, the ability to do complex math. Fine, non-human animals can't do that, but neither do all humans, right? When we're saying that only humans can do complex math and therefor deserve to be considered, doesn't that mean we should not give rights to those, who are unable to do that? You might respond that every human (e.g. a child) being may evolve to someone who can do complex math, but that's simply not true. There are serious illnesses which disables some children to do math for all their live.
So, what's that magical difference between humans and animals? Many modern philosophers have came to the conclusion, that there isn't such a big difference after all, and that we should consider animal interest's equally to human interests.

It should be obvious, that factory farming greatly violates animal interests not to be tortured.

I recommend reading Animal Rights by Peter Singer; unlike popular belief, Slashdot comments are not sufficient to give philosophical debates the space they deserve.

Yes, of course. What makes eating meat unethical is the support for factory farming, in which animals greatly suffer. (I recommend reading Jonathan Safran Foers Eating Animals)

If there is no animal, there is no pain, and everything is fine (except that we're already eating so much meat that it's unhealthy).

In fact, PETA promised One Million Dollars for the first commercially viable growing of artificial meat.

This slide pretty much sums it up.

The Wikimedia Foundation is extremely efficient in its server operation.

Wikipedia and WolframAlpha would beg to differ.

More interesting though, there is an parallel to the Interesting number paradox: If there is an uninteresting natural number (or day), there must be a smallest (earliest) uninteresting natural number (date), which would make it interesting of course. Therefor, all natural numbers (days) are interesting.

The question is: Can a software that doesn't even know what's Viagra spam all the time claim to take over sorting important mail for you? Filtering important emails sounds much more difficult than filtering the usual spam: One one hand, spam usually comes in bulk; it is distributed to millions of addresses (which provides a way of detecting it) with little variety in regards to content. On the other hand, spam messages do have much more in common (because there are few authors with a handful of different content types) than "important mail", which is created by many different people with a huge variety in regards to content.

That actually happens. See this story and this infographic.

Initial letter from FBI and response by Wikimedia Foundation
  Wikipedia article in question, image in question.
  New York Times story (login). Britannica uses the logo

In my school, one student who wrote his own little programs in Basic and didn't want to loose them due to an exam, wrote another program that faked the normal UI and displayed a menu where you could 'reset' the calculator even though nothing really happened. You could only tell by one small detail (a tiny bar on the upper right corner, indicating a program was currently running) that it wasn't the real deal. None of the teachers realized that.

And that was done with a normal Basic program. I guess if you code directly in Assembler, you can do much more.

Yeah, and what about coal? Fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest ways of getting / storing energy. (I recommend reading "Physics for future presidents", which lists and explains the reasons for our "love" of oil/gas/coal).

I'm not arguing that we should use coal, but rather that a free market is inherently not (always) in line with protecting the environment. Sure, in the long run fossil fuels will become more expensive and "green energy" more affordable. But in the meantime, the government has to make sure that the industry doesn't destroy the environment. International treaties (Copenhagen, I'm looking at you) would have been a first step.

In the USA, all government works are in the public domain, which leads to NASA images and others being usable by the public and due to the copyright status, also by Wikipedia.

In Germany, a different concept was chosen. The general idea is that mostly private corporation want to use works by the government, e.g. publishers of books, maps, etc. In order to give a bit of the money spend on the works back to the taxpayer, everyone who wants to use those images has to pay royalties. This results in slightly less costs for the taxpayer, which is exactly the goal of that concept.

However, this approach is no longer viable. In the digital age, everyone is a potential user of works by the government, including works like maps and satellite images. NGOs like Wikimedia Deutschland (the German chapter of Wikimedia and supporter of the Wikipedia project) are lobbying to free those images. But the laws are, as usual, at least 10 years behind the technological and sociotechnical development.