Hear ye, hear ye!

The thing that keeps me up at night is running out of affordable fuel. Without it, we can't run the tractors and combines to work the land, we can't run the trucks to transport the food to the cities, we can't maintain the electricity and gas grids, we can't maintain the flood control systems, we can't stock hospitals, etc., etc.

I don't have the brains or the means to develop an alternative to fossil fuels. But I can sure use the power of capitalism to encourage others to do so. And if that ends up being green as well as saving our civilization, that's a nice bonus.

IANAL, but I did have a law class at university where they stated that running software is in practice considered to fall under copyright, as code is copied to memory before execution.

Of course, this is a total perversion of all intentions behind copyright, but that isn't something that lawyers seem to care about...

Sequels aren't a problem at all (and I personally haven't heard any complaining about remakes). The problem is cheap sequels that don't add anything substantial, but which just try to make you pay twice (trice, ...) for the same damn game.

If you can get a hold of it, you may want to check out I-War. I have no idea if it's aged well or not, but back in the day it was pretty amazing. Very deep gameplay (including Newtonian physics, as in the game you're referring to), good story, and graphics that, at the time, were absolutely gorgeous. Had more fun with that one than with Freespace.

I'm not an accountant, so I may well be way off here, but maybe it also has to do with not upsetting shareholders with losses on ip.

As long as you have intellectual property, that's an asset on your balance. If you've arbitrarily valued your Steamboat Willy copyright at, say, $50,000,000 USD, that's a sizable loss when the copyright on it expires. A loss that you can avoid by having the copyright term extended. Easy way to keep the shareholders happy, even with property that doesn't actually generate any real money anymore.

Now, now. I think we can all agree that this is strong evidence for lack of morality causing magnetism.

Have you checked out something like XML DB? I haven't used it much myself, but it sounds like it may meet your needs. It comes bundled with the XE database, which is free as in beer. (But XE has some limitations that the enterprise product doesn't have, of course.)

Disclaimer: I work for Oracle.

Quite the opposite. The imperial units are the base 2 ones. After all, kilo means 1000, not 1024, both in the original Greek and in the SI system that most of the world uses.

The HDD manufacturers were right (albeit for all the wrong reasons, of course). Good for Apple and Cannonical for recognizing this. I hope the rest of the world follows suit and becomes (SI, IEEE, ISO/IEC) standards compliant.

Yes and yes. I can't read music either, even though that's another thing I learned in high school. Turns out that if I don't use it, I can forget pretty much any skill. Particularly if that skill was learned over a couple of weeks, and I never had to revisit it.

Do you really regularly use standard deviation outside of a professional context? What for, if I may ask? The fact that most people have never even heard of the concept suggests that it's really not all that critical.

(That's not to say that it isn't ridiculous that a doctor who bases his diagnoses on the concept doesn't have a solid grasp on it.)

Huh? I maintain code written by others, and unless you have a particularly incompetent developer, more LOC is almost always less complex. You may be able to condense 100 lines of java into 3 lines of perl, but I can both write and debug those 100 lines a lot faster than those 3 lines.