It's like virtual particles. Particle (cash) and anti particle (debt) pairs can spontaneously pop into existence. So all we need is a black hole to swallow the debt and cash is the equivalent of Hawking radiation apparently emitted by a black hole. I surmise that the worlds current financial problems are due to the black hole(s) finally evaporating.

Unmoderating.

But it should. There are two principles. One is that if the copyright owner is refusing to sell someone a copy, then they are not losing anything by that person making a copy. The second is that distribution agreements are restraint of trade.

Interesting, but I don't quite buy this as a definition of religion or as a restriction on the scope of science. The study of how things should be seems to me like moral philosophy. Religion generally (always?) includes some belief in the supernatural. I would argue that claims that a system of moral philosophy are divinely inspired is actually an impediment to greater moral understanding.

Also, science can have something to say about morality by conducting experiments on how people behave when faced with moral dilemmas. True this doesn't tell you how things "should" (in an absolute sense) be, but it does tell you something about what it is to be human. A female spider eats the male after mating. This is unacceptable for humans. No one criticises the spider. What is moral for a spider is not moral for a human. Ergo, what it moral for a human is in the nature of humans and the nature of humans is discoverable by science.
       

That is pretty much the "product which makes the company money, and a lot of customers experience the bug, and it is serious" case I mentioned. So yes, I do see.

Actually I do agree that is probably the case and I never said I didn't. What I don't agree with is your claim that this one anecdote somehow proves the general case and your dismissal of the one study cited as being less relevant than your opinions on human nature.

What you've missed is that the developers of proprietary software move on too (sometime the individuals, sometimes the whole company). Generally the customer does not pay the developers. The developers company pays the developers, and they will only pay them to fix your bug if there is nothing of higher value to the company for them to do. Yes, if it is product which makes the company money, and a lot of customers experience the bug, and it is serious, then it will probably get fixed. Otherwise maybe not. The way bugs get "chosen" to be fixed for FOSS software is different, but it is not clear in general whether it results in more buggy code. Unfortunately, "common sense" about these things is often wrong, which is why people do studies and try and get objective data.

Fixing FOSS yourself is an option, so is paying someone else to fix it and so is complaining, waiting and hoping. Granted, these approaches all have problems: requiring skills and application; requiring deep pockets; or are unlikely to be successful. With proprietary software, you are pretty much restricted to "complaining, waiting and hoping". You might hope that your complaining will have more effect, but that is really only true if you are a big customer or there are lots like you.

When I was young I proudly identified a bug in a proprietary compiler. The company I worked for hadn't bought the support contract. I naively thought that the vendor would want to know that their compiler had a bug (with a nice test case) but they wouldn't even take the bug report without a support contract, let alone fix it!

China's growth rate can't continue forever. But, China only needs a per capita GDP of 1/4 of the US GDP per capita to be "the worlds largest economy". There is a strong possibility (but of course no guarantee) that they will continue to have rapid growth until at least that point.

Prob'ly its hard to bring down a dam with a pocket knife.

There is no such thing as "explicit 3-D information to the brain." All our brains get are what our sensors perceive. What people call 3-D is really stereoscopic display (and the associate perception process is stereopsis) and it is just one cue to depth (the third dimension). Others are accommodation, occlusion, perspective and colour saturation. With moving objects there is no doubt a complex interaction of these effects and the presumed kinematics of the object. Stereopsis is not even the most important. At anything past middle distance, stereopsis is of diminishing importance (because the images received by the two eyes don't differ enough. When you see floating mountains in "Avatar" with a pronounced stereoscopic effect, they have been rendered with an exaggerated eye separation (or alternatively as if you were looking at a micro-world close up).

Two cues which are not implemented either with mono or stereoscopic displays are accommodation (where the eye must focus differently according to depth) and parallax (where if you move your head, things in the foreground should move relative to things in the background. Inconsistencies in these cues are presumed to be what gives you headaches as your brain tries to resolve the discrepancies.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception.

There is opensource software available: http://elettrolinux.com/Analyze-Visualize/hantekdso-support-to-dso-2150.html. I use HantekDSO. I found a few bugs which I fixed and reported (no idea if they have been adopted).

Unfortunately, that is not good enough if you use it for multiple sites/systems. Site A knows the answers to your questions. They may also be able to guess or discover other sites you use. Unless you trust everyone at Site A, what it to stop someone from there using your answers to get to your account on Site B? Unfortunately you need to tell a different lie to every site, and that is hard to remember!

Actually it the the momentum which is roughly equal (the difference going into the gas). Most of the energy goes into the bullet. The smaller the ratio of the bullet mass to the gun+shooter mass, the higher the proportion of the energy that goes into the bullet. The bullet may decelerate much more quickly than it accelerates though, resulting in the bullet applying a much higher peak force to the shirt than the peak force of the gun's recoil.