unbefugtem öffentlichen Zugänglichmachen über eine sogenannte Tauschbörse

That translates to "having made publicly available without authorisation over a so-called exchange forum". The key is "Zugänglichmachen", i.e. they must upload something in order to be prosecutable.

When I lived in Germany, I remember colleagues telling me of acquaintances who received similar letters (for generic filesharing, typically movies), who then caved in and paid. This is however not so common and no one told me they actually received these letters (and most people did download TV series and movies, by their own admission). I still believe these letters are sent randomly, hoping to intimidate people who are likely to have downloaded something.

But you sought to disguise that fact in your comment. You also need very clean water, which is not free.

Aside from the fact that I did not disguise anything, water is absolutely not a significant cost. You just need a simple deionising unit. Compared to the rest of the plant, it's peanuts.

Electrolysis is terribly inefficent, if it was worth doing, that is how we'd get our hydrogen.

Huh, no, electrolysis is actually very efficient, 70-90%. The problem is that you need to provide the electricity yourself instead of using a energy-rich feedstock (natural gas).

We already have natural gas cars and they are good, but not nearly 10 times better than gas cars. You sure aren't going to get further improvement beyond that by using hydrogen.

Incorrect, you are going to get a significant improvement with hydrogen. Hydrogen can be converted with current fuel cell technology with 50% efficiency into electricity (and from there mechanical power), natural gas or gasoline cannot come anywhere near that, mostly because they need to go through combustion.

I am a researcher working in hydrogen & fuel cells, so I'll just spill the beans:

And the hydrogen probably takes up more space than a gallon of gas (a guess --- does someone know?).

It does, but not so much. Storing H2 at 700 bar requires a hefty pressure tank. They are fairly safe but that doesn't make them lighter. That's why hydrogen is suited for larger vehicles (family wagon, SUVs, long-range trips, trucks etc.). Short range is better served by batteries.

What are we destroying to make the hydrogen?

If you have cheap electricity, then it's water. You electrolyse it at the station and do not need to ship hydrogen around or build a gas network. You can also reform natural gas, which is cheaper, but then you need to clean the hydrogen really well: requirements on purity are 99.99% hydrogen, and other components are very severely limited (e.g. sulphur down to 4 parts per billion). It is debatable whether the purity standard is really necessary, though, it may be unnecessarily strict.

Main reason not to use electricity directly, as in batteries: batteries are heavier, and if you want to double energy storage in a battery car you need to double the batteries (which is not going to double the range—the batteries are heavy too). If you want to double the energy storage in a hydrogen car, you only need to double the hydrogen storage, the fuel cell (the expensive part) is still the same. And hydrogen storage is not nearly as heavy as its battery equivalent, also factoring in that fuel-cell conversion is about 50% efficient.

Why is investing in a new infrastructure -- hydrogen distribution --- a good thing?

As I said above, a good alternative is not to have the infrastructure, but to produce and compress hydrogen locally at the station. The idea is that even with all the losses (hydrogen production, compression, fuel cell) the system is still more efficient that oil (drilling, extraction, transport, refining to gasoline, transport, combustion engine). More importantly, hydrogen can be produced starting from anything: natural gas, oil, solar, you name it. Gasoline comes only from oil (or coal if you want to go Fischer-Tropsch, but that's not really efficient and has large emissions).

Does this process change the net amount of water in the ecosystem in a way that would have impact in 50 years?

No, the quantities are minimal compared to the oceans. Any day you will have far more water passing through your shower than out of your exhaust. 100 km of travel in a fuel-cell Mercedes B-class (yes I drove it :-) produce about 9 kg (i.e. 9 liters) of water. Besides, that hydrogen was produced from water from the biosphere anyway, so no balance is disrupted.

No, no, no, you don't understand what we are talking about here. First, this is hydrogen, a gas with a molecule so small it can diffuse through steel. I have never seen a rubber hose used for hydrogen and I think I know why it would leak like the sieve it would be. In the appropriate conditions hydrogen can leak through steel so fast it can sustain a continuous fire (which by heating only promotes more permeation). Natural gas is a very tame fuel compared to hydrogen. Second, a flammable gas, like hydrogen or NG, in an environment with lot of electronics (none of it ATEX-certified I presume) generates a mother load of safety issues I can't even begin to grasp the magnitude of. No data centre currently has to deal with gas explosions, and if nothing else the insurance costs will go through the roof. This would be only an enormous risk for no gain whatsoever.

Efficiency of conversion for gas (any gas) compression and expansion is pretty poor, and requires turbomachinery for high yields (which are not so high). In addition to that you would need strong piping for the compressed air (the FC gases run at atmospheric pressure), and you open the gates to a whole new class of problems with high-pressure equipment.

Really, electricity is the most efficient and convenient way to move power around. Efficiency is essentially 100% with proper cabling and safety is well understood. I have no idea what advantages one might harvest from using fuel cells in that context.

Mind you: I am a researcher in fuel cells. I lead a multi-million project in fuel cells, dammit. There are lots of good applications for fuel cells, this is not one of them. This is as stupid as fuelling a vibrator with gasoline.

I'm sure you've read several dozen articles by now about how various data centers were built in various parts of the country due to low electricity costs, only to find that once they had built it, the utilities and local municipalities decided to jack the rates up.

And how are they not going to do the same for natural gas, or any other form of energy? The one you describe is a regulatory problem, not a technical one.

The article does not mention it clearly, but those fuel cells are likely natural-gas powered. They are either very high-temperature cells (800 degrees C) or low-temperature cells (70-120 degrees C) with a reformer somewhere that converts natural gas to hydrogen. In the former case you would need to handle fuel at insanely high temperatures close to a bunch of electronics (you can guess what happens at the first leak), in the second you have to handle a hydrogen distribution network, and hydrogen is a nasty gas to work with (see for example hydrogen embrittlement); nothing that cannot be handled, but providing it to single servers or even racks? Hydrogen-proof piping is expensive, and even worse are the valves.

In any case, gas piping is never going to be as practical as power cords. You cannot bend it, coil it, join it easily, and you will need also piping to collect exhaust gases: since this hydrogen comes from natural gas, it travels with CO2, and you don't want it to accumulate in the data centre. You may also need another line to provide oxygen if the data centre ventilation is insufficient.

The argument that one would do away with power supplies is foolish: simply provide a network of DC power instead for all required voltages. FCs produce DC power, but their output voltage is unsteady and needs to be converted to the right voltage; and there are several voltages that a server requires anyway.

So, if FCs have to be, they need to be placed outside the data centre, and function as their power stations. At this point, one wonders, why should we ever consider to install FCs in power stations? Simply build a FC power station and export to the grid.

The main driver for FCs in power generation in the US is the low price of natural gas due to high shale gas production.

I am soon going to New Orleans for a conference, and the hotel charges $14.95 per day for WiFi. Knowing that hot water is not metered, that's what I plan to do:

1. Assumption: hot water is produced by natural gas, temperature 50 kelvin above environment. Tap capacity 10 L/min. Natural gas cost: ca. $12 per 1000 cubic feet, equivalent to one million BTU.
2. Cost of energy is $12 per GJ, or 43 cents per MWh.
3. Power for heating of fully open tap: 10/60 x 4150 x 50 = 35 kW
4. Cost of fully open tap: 0.00042 $/second, or $1.51 an hour

Therefore, I will let hot water flow free for about 10 hours (every night, closing it at breakfast) and offset the profit they make on WiFi.

It was only later that the climate cooled, and they were forced to change their lifestyle, and finally leave Greenland.

My favourite author, Jared Diamond, had an entire chapter on the Greenland Norse in his book Collapse. They are remarkable because many factors impacted them at the same time, and their demise was due to climate, international politics, and their own stupidity.

Climate did get colder, but the Norse also lost their most important export, walrus tusks, because the Muslims started trading elephant tusks again with the Christians after several centuries of embargo: no one wanted walrus tusks anymore. Also, the Norse had apparently a phobia for fish, which for some reason they were unwilling to eat (or were unable to catch). They were also horrible diplomats and could not have friendly relations with the Inuit (who arrived in Greenland after the Norse), who eventually displaced them. Also, they were a very religious and conservative society, using relatively enormous resources to build a cathedral that could rival that of Nidaros in Norway.

When it was that warm in Greenland, it was certainly warm in Canada and Alaska.

That's a way too bold statement. Latitude is not the only predictor of temperature. I live at the same latitude as Anchorage, AK, but out temperature average is 5-10 degrees Celsius higher because we are exposed to the Gulf stream. Climate change does not have the same uniform effects in every spot.

For an individual to benefit from that corporate income, at some point it has to become their income.

Uh, no. Have you ever heard of fringe benefits? The firm (that you incidentally own) gives you a car, a house, a myriad of services whose exact quantification is to a degree arbitrary. For example, a luxury car or a private jet may be appropriate for representation in a large oil company; but who is going to check exactly the private and work-related usage quota? The IRS is not the NSA and does not have the resources to monitor everyone.

As soon as you remove corporate tax, there will be a rush among small enterprises to buy their owner's house, car etc. If anything, corporate taxation should be levied on income, not net result as it is done today, since it is all too easy to set up a fake company in the Cayman island, sell them a bead for $1, buy it back for $1,000,001, and presto! you have $1,000,000 less net income and thereby taxable dollars.

I honestly believe that the Chinese should switch to some sort of romanization like pinyin, even if it does not have100% of what the Chinese characters provide. I understand the heritage and cultural proudness of having your own characters, [...]

I also honestly believe that English (and French) should reform their horrible spelling. But how would you react to:

Ay ålso änestli b'liv ðat inglisx (ænd frencx) sxuld riform ðer hårib'l spelin. Bat haw wud yu riakt tu:

(Used sx and cx for s and c with accents, Slashcode can't digest UTF8 yet)

This will look ridiculous to most people, because they are not used to it, even if it is a superior way of writing. There is even a famous quotation by Mark Twain on the subject. Note that the irregularity of English spelling is not without real-world consequences, since irregular spelling causes the effects of dyslexia (note: dyslexia is genetically transmitted, but its effects manifest only when dealing with an irregular orthography. Same person who is dyslexic in English may not be in Spanish or Japanese).

And yes, English spelling is just as difficult as Chinese characters or the Japanese mixture of Kanji and Kana. Only, Chinese characters do not cause dyslexia (not to the same extent as English at least).

Britain, France, Spain, all have massive chunks of the globe speaking their respective languages as an outcome of colonialism

More than teaching the locals their language, what they did was either exterminate the locals and repopulate with their own people (as Spain did in Latin America and the UK with Australia), or put together an administrative region so diverse that they have to use the colonial language to talk to each other (e.g. India, Nigeria, most African states...), since choosing one local language may be considered a violation of other ethnic groups' status. Pakistan tried to force East Pakistan to speak Urdu instead of Bengali, so East Pakistan seceded and changed name to Bangladesh. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam were all colonies of European powers at some point, and none uses the colonial language anymore, because they have a strongly predominant local language.

And English cannot distinguish between "light" the radiation, "light" as not heavy, "light" as not dark. Seems people manage fine anyway.

Pay special attention to the whereas lines. They lay out the official reasons we went to war and to the best of my knowledge, the only one that has turned out to be untrue was the continuing WMD programs and stockpiles.

You may have hoped for a massive TL;DR response, but I read some of it. Several other lines were untrue: Al-Qaida in Iraq (it came during the war to support the insurgents, was not there to begin with), the fact that 9/11, I quote, "underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations" (a few knives are hardly a WMD; if anything, 9/11 underscored how easy it is to pull off a terrorist plot with simple tools and some out-of-the-box thinking), the possibility that Iraq would use WMDs in a surprise attack against the US or pass them to terrorists.

If you think the WMDs were made up, then ask yourself why the government would lie to get us into a war and not put WMDs in the sand somewhere to keep it's citizens trusting of it.

I asked myself, and I answered myself that the sheeple would not care if no WMDs were not found after the war was started. Who started the war needed an excuse to get it started, not to justify himself afterwards. No WMDs were found, yet I don't see Bush, Rumsfeld and all other war criminals (because that's what they technically are) being brought to court and sentenced to death by hanging (which is what was normally dished out for the crime of war of aggression at Nuremberg).