Just how many watts per square meter are capturable this way? Enough to power a small LED?

So it must be time to crank up the conspiracy theories.
Which is more (un)likely:

1. Someone would attempt to perpetrate such a huge and obvious falsehood
2. Vested powers, on hearing their castle is about to crumble, vigorously attempt to discredit the new theory
3. Big money who is outside the potential profit sphere of this discovery is attempting to delay it long enough to get a slight variation patented

Sounds like you have to talk your users into running native code on their machine. What could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, I hear the black market prices for simvastatin are astronomical.

Heck, even just having a nominal annual renewal fee would revert the majority of content over to the public within a few years. Say, $50/year. If the exclusive right to sell a work isn't worth $50 to the rights-holder, having those rights obviously can't be all that motivating. It should revert to the public so anyone is free to have a go at getting whatever value they can out of it.

Theft is depriving someone of access to or enjoyment of something they otherwise would have had. In the example you constructed, your boss would otherwise have paid you a salary. By not doing so, your boss commits theft. Similarly, pirated content is contingent theft - if the downloader would otherwise have paid for the content being downloaded, then it is theft. That is the difference.

I just checked my account. 85 orders in 2013. Comes to $.92 shipping per order for me. Heck, even at $99/year, I'd have paid $1.13 shipping per order. The free videos are a cherry on top of that sweet savings sundae. If you are a prime member who didn't wring that savings sponge dry, then I thank you for participating in this little wealth-shifting scheme.

You can calculate any arbitrary digit of pi in hexadecimal without calculating the preceding digits.

TFA says: "The researchers are considering whether the ever-growing number of nearshore “dead zones” – low-oxygen regions in the ocean with little marine life – would be strong candidates for pilot testing their system."

We don't have to produce intelligence artificially. We can just copy an existing one. If sub-synaptic connectome mapping and neural emulation can be made precise enough to accurately emulate the functioning of an entire human brain on a substrate that operates at several million times the speed of our natural biological wetware, we can quickly instantiate a population of human intelligence replicas that can each experience a lifetime of human cognition in an afternoon. I bet they would have the time and gumption to figure out how intelligence works. Given their ability to reconfigure their substrate, such intelligence would most likely transcend anything we're capable of understanding in a very short time. Those of us marooned in meat-time would then hope to become the treasured bonsai of these recursive, exponentially expanding intelligences. All it takes is full-brain MRI resolution down to, oh, 100 nm and the ability to accurately emulate the function of interconnected cortical neurons.

I find that music interferes with reading either English or code, but it helps me focus when I'm writing code. To me this suggests language input processing shares some of the parts of my mind used for listening to music, but crafting new code does not.

I pay Comcast for 17 mbps of downstream internet. There is nothing in my contract that constrains where I request this data from. The fact that so many of Comcast's customers all choose to fill their paid-for internet pipes with bits from Netflix means that Comcast has agreed to provide adequate infrastructure to satisfy the bandwidth requirements its customers have paid for. If Comcast is unable to provide the bandwidth they have sold to their customers, they are guilty of selling something they don't actually possess. I believe there is a word for this.

It isn't necessarily about frugality. There are many easily identified mushrooms that can grow in your yard that are quite delicious. Shaggy manes, oyster mushrooms, various boletes, morels, and chanterelles are all delicious mushrooms I've found in yards and eaten. If you're so inclined, you can easily grow your own.

On the plus side, salaries will be going up. (Because they'd have to pay people a whole lot more to put up with that).

It should be easy enough to fix. They just need to do what Doom did: add a constant frame around the variable content. Start with just a keyhole of 3D content in the center, then let the user gradually erode away the frame until the user is eventually viewing 100% variable content.