The problem with electric pianos is likely to be the speaker, not the electronics.

A nuclear reactor has a life span in decades, and needs more than a decade to pay itself back. There is no way anyone is going to make that investment when the business case involves something as speculative as tar sand. Tar sand is barely profitable now, who knows what it will be like in 2 or 5 years, never mind the 20+ you need to justify building a reactor.

Oil from a well causes considerably less CO2 emission compared to oil from tar sands. The tar sand does not boil itself.

More or less, yes. An actual extraction tax which would provide revenue (and replace harmful wage taxes) would be infinitely preferable, of course. However that is not on the table,

The difficulty of transporting oil away from the tar sands works as a tax on that oil. A tax which is applied right at the production of the worst kind of fossil fuel we currently have. Keystone XL will remove most of that tax. As it is, tar sand oil is right on the cusp of being economical, and therefore lowering the costs is going to increase production a lot.

What if the set of cost neutral solutions is empty?

This is not true. Both solar and wind can scale as far as you want. There are few places where at least one is not an option, and both can generate way more energy than the world uses (particularly solar).

Given the current construction times for nuclear reactors in the West which approaches a couple of decades from proposal to first production, nuclear is likely to be too little, too late. But by all means, build some nuclear power plants. Particularly if you are in a country which is fucked when it comes to solar and wind, like England.

Copyright does not work like that. If you AES encrypt something and end up with Star Wars, you are completely in the clear. Your copy of Star Wars is not copyrighted, because it is not a copy of Star Wars, it is just a bunch of random bits that showed up.

The latter.

Yes.

Limiting sales to smart people is not going to get the record company execs any yachts.

Automatic gain adjustment based on proper human hearing models would limit the volume of the range compressed songs, even the peaks. I.e. non-compressed songs would be allowed higher peak volume.

If you do an A B X test, people will consistently prefer loud over quiet, even if the volume difference is small. People still listen to songs on the radio, and if your song is not loud enough, it will not get popular.

This could be trivially avoided if the radio stations did automatic gain adjustment based on a proper model of how humans perceive sound.

I think it will be obvious to the reader which of us uses baseless smear without references.

As to Putin, I have made my views on him perfectly clear. Shall I compare him to Hitler again just to placate you? George Bush junior is no Hitler and not even a Putin, but that is damning with faint praise.

Leaving marks or not is a choice for any half-way competent torturer. Being brutal without leaving marks is something which was first developed around 1920 and which has been refined since then. England, France, and the United States have led the world in this, and various governments around the world have been quick to learn from their examples. The reason is, of course, to mislead people like you into believing that torture is not torture.

See Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali.

Optimizing one law to aid abuse of a different law does not sound like a good idea.

They could do all that, but really, would they bother? Just to save the cost of a frequency license? That sounds rather far-fetched.

Yes, it is a horrible idea to give those HAM guys more freedom. Every time we relax the rules for them, we get disasters of biblical proportions, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!