Yes, and someone suffered to bring you that video... just not the uploader. There is more suffering in a vapid Hollywood blockbuster than in a 3 minute homemade short, but the repeated uploading of the same blockbuster does not constitute new art.

You've never been involved in any commercial film production then: it's a long, arduous process. Or code development: it's also a long, arduous process. Perhaps in these cases it's the toolchain that's at fault, but at present, suffer you will. But there's nothing that you can do to stop your fingers hurting if you want to learn the guitar to a really high level.

YANAL. The DMCA states that companies must take reasonable steps to prevent reuploading. Designing a system with the express purpose of not being able to prevent uploading would be thoroughly illegal.

On the other hand, it could be argued by the same token that internet sharing and lolcatz-esque memes are actually a drug that latches onto that need, corrupting it and distracting us from the act of creation by giving us a false sense of achievement through constant sharing. If we take pride in posting other people's creations, we cheat ourselves of the urge to create something unique ourselves.

After all, why should I suffer hours of preparation to put something on the net and get a few dozen views, when for a few minutes work I can copy someone else's file and get a million views?

I suspect that they use more than just a plain hash. Even if you just use hash plus explicit filesize, you've narrowed down the chance of hash collisions massively.

Yes, scoping is very powerful, and almost all languages use it for very good reason. The point is that in JavaScript the easiest scope to use is the effective global one (yes, it's a property of the "window" object, but as far as the programmer's concerned, "window" is "main"). The easiest thing to use should always be the safest -- the programmer should always have to make an active choice to do something the more dangerous way.

"Environment variables" must exist, whether as a passed object (which my university lecturers favoured) or as bog-standard global variables. But as soon as environment variables are available, lazy programmers will use them as global variables. Attempting to engineer mechanisms to prevent this happening is a complete waste of time, and only makes programming more complicated. You can't just make the "wrong way" harder -- you've just got to make the right way a little easier than the wrong way. Grainger's Aurora seems to follow that principle quite well -- whereas functional programming tried to force you not to update values (destroying data) unnecessarily by making it practically impossible to do so, Grainger simply makes non-destructive data processing one step easier than destructive data processing: the only destructive action is an explicit update with the result of a non-destructive process.

The default "lazy" state is therefore the right one, so the appropriate behaviour is rewarded. Doing unnecessary destructive changes takes the programmer longer and makes the code less clear, so will naturally be avoided. But crucially, programmers are still able to do whatever they want, when they want.

A lightning collector would never gather enough power to offset the energy used in its construction.

Clouds are formed as water vapour condenses, so the local humidity decreases as the clouds form.

Hydro destroys river ecosystems. For an extreme example of the effects of damming on waterways, look at France. It's a mass of hydroelectric plants and drinking water reservoirs, and its major rivers have almost all been canalised, with a network of locks and sluices to reduce winter flow to ensure that the water level is high enough for navigation during the summer months. Fish stocks in the French rivers are dangerously low, with the Atlantic Salmon now all but unknown to French anglers.

All human activity has an impact, and there is no such thing as "clean" electricity.

Clouds are not made of water vapour, but of water. Liquid water droplets suspended in mid-air. Water vapour is a gas, and is indeed a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases allow certain infrared wavelengths through, but block others: specifically they allow the light of the sun in, but reflected/radiated heat from the Earth is kept in.

Indeed. The US car makers being well-known for their "gas guzzlers", so-called because of their wonderful efficiency ratings....

That's why proper art thieves always steal to order.

Or to put it another way, on the eleventh of September 2001, the world changed, and everything that was once "youthful indiscretion" is now the sign of a terminally warp mind that has as its sole aim the downfall of humanity and everything that is good in this world. It's not only the individual that suffers for this, but society as a whole - how many of the "greats" of the computer world broke systems in their school days? And now we wouldn't let them work with computers at all. No wonder technology's stagnating....

For that to hold, the company has to expressly forbid using the laptop for personal purposes, otherwise (as previous cases have ascertained), there is reasonable grounds to expect that the device will store personal information.