You may not be able to get the full text of the copyrighted work, but Google can and has. Google are profiting from an unauthorised copy made of a copyrighted work. If google are allowed to do it, why can't I? I only want to make one copy of each book from the library. I don't intended to sell that unauthorised copy to anyone, heck I don't even intend to let anyone else see even snippets of it. What's the difference? Why are Google allowed to make copies for their own purposes but I am not? Is it because they are a rich company who can afford lawyers to override copyright laws?

Personally, I believe copyright terms are far too long, but if you're going to have them then you should respect them in all cases. It can't be one law for the rich and one law for everyone else. If the term of copyright is too long and causes all these problems with orphaned works, or works being lost to the public domain because there are no copies left when the copyright term expires, then the problem is with the copyright term and we shouldn't allow exceptions for rich companies to circumvent the problems with the law.

Decades only at current prices. Prices having been increasing significantly over the last few years and that trend does not seem likely to change any time soon. If for EUR 20K you can lock in your energy prices for the life of the system (also measured in decades), then you are very likely to make significant savings over that time.

For example, according to UK Department of Energy and Climate Change figures, electricity prices have risen by 63% since 2005, and by over 250% since 1987 (considering 25 years being the typical life of a solar PV installation).

Except that no-one is going to replace a perfectly good vehicle with an autonomous one unless there is a benefit to them. It will be that pepole just move to an autonomous one next time they replace their vehicle. More likely the trend will actually be more and more automation in "normal" vehicles each generation so that everntually the majority of vehicles are autonomous (or capable of being autonomous).

Alongside that will the people who actually see an economic benefit from an autonomous vehicle. If it means that they can spend more time with their family or doing things that are more productive during their commute/travel then they'll buy an autonomous vehicle.

So it's not just the saving from the purported reduction in accidents that makes the economic case for autonomous vehicles, it's the whole equation

The autonomous car would be able to quickly decide whether coming to halt in its current lane is safer or if manoeuvering into other spaces to avoid the child/dog is safer - and probably much more easerly than a human driver who can freeze in panic at an unexpected situation. Additionally the computer can potentially make the cold hearted decision that breaking but still hitting the obstacle, because there is not enough stopping distance, is ultimately the least bad thing to do - for example if there is heavy traffic in the on-coming lane and pedestrians besides the road.

It could also, for example, automatically sound the horn to alert people and perhaps enable the child/dog to notice and get out of the way. A human on the other hand is more likely to be still be evaluating the situation and reacting by slamming on the breaks and not have the foresight (or the co-ordination) to do this.

When considering whether someone thinks they are better than average in driving skill you should look at this study

Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, 93% of the US sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50% (above the median). For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.

You do know that the problem they are trying to solve is accessibility for blind people? Presenting images isn't going to help there.

You seem to have ignored the problem of generating the millions of natural language questions that would then require natural language processing to solve. It's easy to come up with one or two as a human, like the George Washington question above, but unless the majority of questions posed as a replacement for CAPTCHA are unique then all that will happen is that the spammers will use a human to solve the relatively few questions and store the result in a lookup table.

We can see how difficult it is for spam bots to generate to natural language posts so why do you think it would be easy for a computer to generate meaningful natural language questions?

So to paraphrase you: now every web site would need a Watson-class supercomputer to stay in business, being a site operator suddenly doesn't seem very lucrative anymore...

Errm, that's exactly what waterfall is. You have a big upfront specification phase (essentially your user manual from your example) followed by a design phase followed by development etc.

The problem is that users truly don't know exactly what they need, and even if they did, those requirements will change over time in response to the market changing. So by the time that you've spent months writing a spec, 50% of what you specified will not be what is actually required. Worse you've now spent months writing out of date documentation and have NO software to show for it and opportunity to start getting back any of your investment - paper specifications are not a business asset. Then you spend still more months writing code against that spec, meanwhile another 50% of the remaining correct spec is now out of date meaning that by the end of development you've actually only delivered 25% of what the customer really wants and 75% of what you've developed is wrong. And you've still not got any software into production to be returning on the investment you've made.

That's why people looked at other ways of developing software and why agile gained traction.

It's not a perfect approach, but IMHO it's the least bad approach that we've tried so far.

Not true. You can use "reasonable" force to defend yourself, up to and including lethal force. You will be arrested, but that's standard procedure for anyone who has killed another person whether murder or in self-defence. The definition of reasonable force is exactly that, what any reasonable person might think was reasonable at the time - including what in the cold light of day might be thought of as unreasonable, but in heat of moment, when in fear of the intruder, seemed appropriate.

I would expect that they'd suspend impartiality regarding spherical vs flat earth, or gravity vs intelligent falling too. At some point you have to decide that when the vast majority of scientists in the field support one conclusion that giving equal air time to the very few who don't agree is not appropriate. Otherwise you do a disservice to your audience.

You are correct.

No, it's a dollar that the government has to raise through other tax measures, such as the tax rate you pay (if you are an american citizen), or that the local companies in your area have to pay since they can't offshore their businesses and take advantage of these loopholes.

You know, maybe they get together so that they can be with like minded individuals who they have something in common with. Perhaps they want a break from socialising with people who frequently treat them like second class citizens and despise them for their lack of faith and constantly tell them that they are going to hell.

As far as I know, science does not yet have a solid theory for how this came about. There are some interesting hypothesises, for example one is that that the universe actually has a net zero energy state. The energy in the matter is balanced by negative gravitational energy - see this article. Of course this is just one hypothesis, there are others. However, just because we don't yet have a complete answer for the origin of the universe doesn't mean that it's acceptable to say "god did it".

Also the origin of the universe has nothing to do with evolution as taught in school and college. The origin of the universe is more properly part of cosmology and physics. Evolution is biology and ONLY deals with how organisms change over time, it doesn't even address how life might have come about in the first place. So if the argument is that we shouldn't teach evolution because science does not yet have a theory about the origin of the universe, you might as well say that we shouldn't teach ANY science at all. Should we not teach chemistry because we don't know where the matter came from, should we ignore physics as well?

So while it's true that science only goes so far as you say that is still not an excuse for not teaching it. Science it can only address topics where, by definition, the scientific method can be applied. Religions' claims are, again by definition, not scientific. One cannot apply the scientific method to supernatural claims - since no hypothesis can be tested; a god could always use its supernatural power to ensure any result it wanted.

Your first misunderstanding is that the reproductive system needs all of it's current complexity to give an advantage. Being able to combine DNA without having different sexes gives a huge advantage in terms of natural selection, and then once you have that then selection pressure will evolve fitter and fitter mechanism until one has the full complexity that we see today. The system evolved in very very gradual steps. If you are thinking that sexual reproduction is an example of irreducible complexity, then I suggest that you do a little bit of research into it. For example, a quick look at Wikipedia provides a useful starting point for the layman.

So if you discount all theories until there is full and fully defensible explanation, then I guess you discount gravity. That can't be useful at all since we don't yet have a full explanation. Oh wait, yes it's still useful to use Newton's equations even though they've been superseded by Einstein's, and it's useful to use Einstein's even though they don't work so well at the quantum level.

Okay, I'll feed the troll.

White people did "evolve" from black people as you say, however your complete misconception appears to be that evolution means "better", i.e. that white people are better that black people. Yes white people are "fitter" for an environment that it far from the equator. However, black people are "fitter" for an equatorial environment. That's it, that's the only conclusion that you can draw, nothing about any other traits. One cannot draw any conclusion about which is "best" from this evidence - except that black people are "better" for equatorial regions and white people are "better" for non-equatorial regions.

Also don't forget that the black population that remained near the equator also continued to evolve based on fitness for their environment, just as the population who moved away from the equator evolved paler skin based on fitness for their non-equatorial environment.