Unlike most currency, these bitcoins can forever be traced back to their seamy past, allowing owners to potentially extract value from their history.

This is one more tricky aspect of managing software or any other creative/analytic project. You can start with the smartest, happiest people in the world, only to have your schedule blown because one of them is going through a messy divorce or a loved one gets cancer. The bad vibes can drag a whole team down. I forsee a huge market in happy pepper-upper pills for programmers. Oh, wait. That's what coffee is for.

How did they power down that experiment? If they let the temperature rise until it drops out of superconductivity, it'd explode. Or did they just load magnetic field until it burst and chalked up the maximum as a new record? That's almost enough to make magnetic munitions - shells that explode on impact and also pack an EMP wallop.

So we don't build it out of concrete. The Yellowstone supervolcano will eventually blow and wipe out most of civilization sometime in the next few millennia, unless we do something about it. We can't simply drill a hole to the top of the magma, since that would set it off. What we have to do is tunnel down deep, to the lower part of the magma column, where the density is much higher and the pressure much lower. From there, we can allow the magma column to bleed off pressure gradually, providing us with a constant stream of incandescent magma that can be used for whatever we like. Then all we'd have to do is come up with a high-temperature insulated conveyor belt to transfer all the fresh magma to wherever the current end of the casting is. We could build 1000-foot walls, cast castles, create huge canals or reservoirs, whatever we like. So long as we keep coming up with good uses for a never-ending stream of white-hot magma, we're set.

Finding enough talent is getting nearly impossible now. As an employee of an up-and-coming Silicon Valley startup, let me assure you - the form factor of the meat package of a prospective developer has zero influence on our decision to hire.

Not only is space big to us, just imagine how much vaster it would be to an intelligence that thinks several million times faster that we do. Our civilization has only become 'visible' through RF radiation for about a century. That is a brief eyeblink of time on a cosmic scale. Our communication is already moving away from radio, toward optic fiber. Our intelligence is already making the leap from biological to non-biological substrates. It is not unlikely that a century from now, the bulk of intelligence in our region of space will be non-biological, and operating at several million times the speed of neurons. Such an intelligence will experience a human lifetime of contemplation in the span of an afternoon. Lightspeed lag will be very perceptible to this intelligence. Accordingly, such intelligence will wish to become as densely packed and interconnected as possible. Space, as it turns out, is filled with many variations on the theme of rocks that we are already familiar with. But to the fast, dense intelligence of the future, it will be several million-fold further away. By the time such an intelligence can fork off a chunk of itself and send it into space, even to the moon and back, several millennia of experience and evolution will have occurred. This, along with the fact that all they are likely to discover is more rocks, leads such intelligence to stay put. So the reason we don't see any advanced intelligence spreading through the universe is that shortly after they figure out computation, their communication drops RF and their intelligence implodes into a black hole of dense, tightly interconnected navel-gazing. Perhaps a literal black hole.

Offer a bonus and recognition to any employee whose computer doesn't get hacked by the hired pen tester. Publish tips on how to avoid being hacked. Compliance rates will soar. Also, knowing they are being targeted by an actual human translates an abstract notion of why security practice is important into something concrete.

We should develop a drug that gives them a liking for the taste of their own kind while disliking the taste of humans. Maybe call it ouroborosin?

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.