It's not lens flare, they're diffraction spikes. They're not completely useless, as a rule of thumb, something with spikes = a star, without spikes = a galaxy.

HFCS is not only fructose, it's also part glucose. 55/45 is the most common mix according to Wikipedia. There is very little difference between HFCS and table sugar: both make you fat.

If I buy a software project from you, I need assurance that I can keep using that project and doing maintenance on it no matter what happens to you or your business. If you die tomorrow, I will need the source code and the ability to modify it as I see fit for the contract to not carry a significant business risk for me. Signing over rights (apart from authorship and other inalienable rights) to your software should be a standard part of any development contract, in case this is not done and you keep ownership, I also expect free maintenance on the code and significantly lower costs(as is common when licensing general use software, such as MS Office, etc). If this piece of software is critical for me, for example part of a contract I made with a client of mine who needs assurance that the software keeps working then it is not possible for me to allow you to keep ownership, sorry.

There is a 3rd option, don't buy the license, but include a decoder such as ffmpeg anyway, just don't allow the feature on copies of Firefox used in countries which enforce software patents. Not being able to watch YouTube might just nudge the average American to at least get informed about the issue. Codec licenses make no sense, it's a license to use a mathematical equation. Licensing specific implementations is fine, there are free alternatives which don't use any of the copyrighted code available.

The economic impact of half of your workforce being sick for a few days is far worse than a few deaths. At least from the government's point of view.

The hadrons go on a strike when they pass over to the French side?

You mean this won't end well for Apple, surely? Apple doesn't invent anything, it just takes technologies others have invented and puts them in shiny boxes.

Also, bar fights would be a hell lot more awesome!

Resources don't have an intrinsic value, value is entirely subjective. Probably the best example of this is the only truly limited resource: human labor. Let's say you work for 1 hour, you gain both expertise in the field and possibly even create something to make your work in the future more efficient(if it's a tool, an algorithm or a computer program, doesn't really matter). Now the next hour of your work has a higher value than the previous hour had, since you are more effective in what you do. Is the current market system able to fairly distribute wealth which arises from creating value? Hell no. However the logical principles of a growth-based economy are sound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test If you have a chinese room which you can't tell apart from a genuine person, then it is for all intents and purposes a genuine person. Metaphysical arguments can stay in the rubbish bin where they rightfully belong.

I keep seeing this thrown about every now and then that everyone should be able to understand the laws. This is complete nonsense. Most people can't even understand their dishwasher manual which is a much simpler machine than that which is governed by the laws. Additionally, natural language has a really low information density and is rather ambiguous, neither are qualities you would want for describing laws. This is the reason legalese exists for in the first place, it's not just lawyer job security. You wouldn't want computer programs written in natural language, would you? You also wouldn't expect everyone to understand the programs.

Just replace the damn power supply already and stop wasting your time testing the cpu and the mobo.

Credit card details are actually surprisingly cheap on the black market. Credit card companies are doing a pretty good job at fraud detection and transaction authentication considering how insecure the cards by themselves are. Both your identity information and your World of Warcraft account are probably worth more than your credit card details.

Because your WoW account is much more valuable than your bank account on the black market. While someone that steals money from your bank account can be immediately tried by criminal law, it's much more complicated for someone that hacks into your wow account. The risk is smaller and the gains are nearly equal.

To put things in perspective, there are more historians who deny the holocaust than there are climatologists who deny anthropogenic climate change. So yes, I think it's safe to say you've missed a few meetings.