Even without a formal system of precedent, and treating prior cases as authorities to be cited, I'd imagine that the outcomes of past cases, and the various arguments and concepts employed, likely have an influence on future cases, at least those where the person overseeing them is undecided or has no particular opinion on the matter.

At least in the US, that seems to be a factor when(for some reason of how the courts are structured and arranged) a given court decision is not official precedent for the purposes of another court; but still has a decent shot at being cited if it framed the issue persuasively. It's not 100%, it might also be mentioned in the process of vehemently disagreeing with the decision of the other court and politely-but-brutally rubbishing their line of thought; but even without binding legal obligation to consider a given case, sufficiently similar past cases tend to help shape future thinking on the matter(as well as encouraging or discouraging prospective litigants).

I thought you were going to under-bus your governor for his FaceBook posting. The one in response to the SCROTUM decision that fell short of giving me legal cover to marry a horse. Chiefly due to those penguins being a bunch of hyper-conservatives and stuff.

Under what legal theory would it be forbidden to offer a product that blocks shitware? Even if we grant that this 'freemium.com' must be tolerated as legal-but-sleazy, rather than dragged out and hung from a lamp post; is there some sort of 'right to be installed' that software possesses that nobody told me about?

It seems about as silly as arguing that throwing away junk mail without opening it is abridging the spammer's right to free speech.

Indeed; that's why I included the "don't need bitcoins" case(already have euros in hand) and the "won't be helped by bitcoins"(nominal euro holdings are frozen in a bank or similar, and are at risk; but also unavailable to buy bitcoins with.)

I definitely suspect that somebody is going to be taking quite a bath on this; either holders of Greek state debt, or Greeks with cash in easy reach of the state, or both; but I just don't see how bitcoins outperform 'in-hand' euros, or dollars in terms of weathering the transition; while anyone who can't get their euros is probably in deep shit; but can't buy bitcoins because they can't get to their euros, so they won't be helped much by bitcoins.

I definitely wouldn't want to have money stuck inside Greece should it exit; but barring all but the most heroic border controls, not a historical strong point of the Greek government, just walking the euros out if you have them will be relatively simple(and, if doing so is illegal, so would getting the same euros out-of-country by buying bitcoins from a non-greek, the money needs to move either way); while anyone who doesn't have them may well be stuck; but also doesn't have cash on hand to buy bitcoins.

I realize that any instance of fiat currencies looking foolish is a happy day for the goldbugs, physical and virtual; but I'm not sure I follow:

Greece has been part of the euro zone for a while now, any remaining pre-euro currency is just a collector's item, and has no value now and no expectation of gaining value as the basis of a post-euro greek currency.

The euro itself will presumably do some fluctuating based on whether people are more nervous about the fact that the euro zone basically can't pull together when things look vaguely bad; or more enthusiastic about the fact that a weak member of the euro zone dropped out, leaving a stronger survivor group and establishing a precedent for (relatively) orderly drumming-out of any future weaklings.

In any case, greeks who currently have cash holdings either don't need bitcoins(if they just put the euros under their pillow they'll still be able to drive into the nearest euro zone country and spend them) or won't be helped by bitcoins(their euros are just numbers in the ledger of some deeply fucked bank that is imposing withdrawal limits or freezes, so they can't get them to hide under their pillow or to buy bitcoins).

A 'grexit' is actually more or less the opposite of the classic 'my holdings are in the dysfunctional currency of inflationistan; but capital controls are keeping me from expatriating them or buying dollars!' problem that bitcoin might actually be useful for addressing. If Greece drops out, all the greeks holding euros still have relatively hard currency, probably superior to whatever is introduced as a local replacement. They gain no obvious advantage from shifting euros into bitcoins, unless Greece bumps up their border controls into a veritable Berlin wall to prevent physical transport of currency; but continues to ignore online activity.

This story just seems orthogonal to bitcoins.

The design can be changed; but this design is as it is in large part because of how much surface area it needs to collect enough sunlight to sustain even its distinctly frugal operation.

Improvements are likely, with better solar panels, better batteries, or both; but you don't beat the fact that optimal insolation is 1366w/m^2; and real world values typically lower, at least on average. A liter of Jet A is 35.3 MJ, so ~9880watt/h. Even at peak insolation, a square meter of solar collection takes a little over 7 hours to amount to as much energy as a liter of jet fuel. Jet engines are, of course, hardly perfectly efficient; but you get some sense of perspective from the fact that a relatively modern design, aimed at fuel efficient operation, like the 787 still has storage for in excess of 100,000 liters of fuel, a big 747-400 more like twice that.

On the plus side, your sunlight supply doesn't weigh anything, or require any volume(though your batteries do, and barring major improvements their energy density is dreadful compared to hydrocarbons); but even given perfectly efficient solar hardware, there just isn't that much energy to work with, by the standards of hydrocarbon aircraft. Any possible design is going to reflect this through some combination of gigantic wing area per unit capacity and a flight plan that sticks relatively carefully to maximally efficient speeds.

That's why I expressed curiosity about pH, rather than temperature. We know that some amount of temperature variation leads to survivable bleach/recolonize cycles; but a shift in the direction of making calcium-based structures more expensive to build and maintain under water could be quite different in impact.

Chaos is coming.

It's pretty profoundly useless as a replacement for a commercial airliner or cargo plane(basically the wingspan of a 747; but transports a single pilot at a painfully tedious 50-100km/h); but suitably automated versions of the very-long-endurance solar aircraft concept have other uses. Longer life, and greater control, than balloons; but markedly cheaper to launch, and lower ping, than anything in orbit.

As a manned aircraft it's a pure novelty; but its performance is increasingly close to 'like a small satellite; but closer to the ground and requires only a large strip of pavement for launch and recovery', which could definitely find some takers.

We need to preserve the diversity of life to survive.

Right, but what if we engineered ourselves out of this necessity? It's completely conceivable that we could. Do we maintain diversity of living things just because human beings require a diversity of food? Or do species have a right to exist independent of the human need for survival?

I meant to. Tl;dr: gummints gonna gum.
Or, you seem to imply a foreign policy exceptionalism for the U.S. whose existence is uncertain.

Let me be perfectly clear. Christianity may be my personal life's meaning. It informs my church activities explicitly, my online interactions less so, and is mostly implicit in business activities. That is, I don't run around evangelizing on the job, for all my work activities are not in opposition to my faith.
Government is a wholly secular affair. Despite the occasional "In God We Trust" flourish, I'm quick to point out that "Christian nation" is an oxymoron. Christianity is not carried out at the national level, and the Carpenter didn't lay it down for the United States as such.
All of which leads up to my bewilderment at

Why wouldn't I? Christianity is like chess. It's all there, in plain view, the whole time. Countries are more like poker, bluffing and cheating like. . .governments.

The joke in all this is that what people react to are stories filled with misinformed hyperbole written by the media.

The punchline is that while all the fuss and ridicule are going on among the chattering classes, the legitimate AI researchers keep on plodding inexorably toward increasingly sophisticated and capable AI technology. It has always been thus. Sometimes the misinformed hype and backlash leads to funding boons or busts, but the plodding progress of those actually developing it continues, and the progress gradually speeds up, as discovery assists discovery.

The naysayers are going to be the most surprised when they are laid off by an automated human resources bot because their "knowledge worker" job is being outsourced to the smart cloud.

A.I. is really advancing very rapidly today. You can debate whether it's real or not til the robot dogs http://time.com/3703243/google... come home, but your philosophizing and wishful denialism won't change the reality on the ground, or in the clouds for that matter.

ISWYDT