Your entire elaborate argument is based on a false premise.

As I said, the road damage is exponential with the weight. It is proportional to the axle weight to the fourth power.

Fuel economy is roughly linear with weight, or even less than linear (big rigs get much better MPG per ton than smaller vehicles). Therefore, fuel taxes don't begin to recover the extra costs of heavier vehicles.

Who has made the stupidest argument you've ever heard now? You might look in the mirror.

These aren't just slightly confidential, state of the art spy satellites is top secret business. They'll be worrying that a SpaceX employee can plant something to steal technology, reveal capabilities, damage or compromise the satellite once the payload is installed. I'm guessing you need just a microscopic amount of C4 if it can hook into the antenna and wait for a self-destruct signal so that when you need them the most they go boom and the screens go dark.

And the developer generally means game engine developer, not game developer. If you want to write your own engine that's a pretty big job by itself.

Just a technical nitpick, old articles eventually get archived - I'm assuming to prevent spambots making replies and modding them up to get into Google results since there's no real moderators around anymore - so he won't be able to.

Depends on the nature of the relationship between the one who released it and the owner. Most likely it would go under "agency by estoppel" which means that the principal is bound by the actions of their agent as long as a reasonable person would believe it is within the agent's authority. There would be no reason for anyone to believe that the original release was unauthorized, so nobody is liable for copyright infringement even though Nullsoft lacked actual authority. Whether you can stretch this into using it as if it were properly licensed in perpetuity despite notices to the contrary is more questionable, besides not all jurisdictions may have the same estoppel laws as the US. But it wouldn't be an unreasonable claim that you found a code snippet apparently under the GPL and used it in good faith that it was authorized by Nullsoft.

This would not apply if some random employee decided to post the source code though since it's clearly outside his scope of authority, nor would it apply if hackers released the code with a fraudulent license since there's no principal-agent relationship, so in practice you might still become liable through no fault of your own. Making a process to declare something public domain won't change that, since it would be just as false as licensing it under the GPL. Or like buying stolen property, even though you had no reason to believe it was stolen it won't matter if the owner shows up and proves it's his. But not if you went to his store and bought it by a clerk who didn't have the authority to make that kind of sale.

Your hypotheses that road damage is caused solely by the pressure on the top few millimeters of the road is highly questionable. The Prius is not going to be pounding down through the structure of the concrete nearly as much as your super-duty pickup hauling a huge boat.

I do agree that big rigs should be paying drastically more in fees than they do. However, industry lobbyists will always trump common sense.

Nobody uses these names, but technically the IUPAC systematic name for ammonia is "azane", and water is "ozane". (Google says they're a Star Refrigeration subsidiary in the US and an exterminator business in New Jersey.)

I'm imagining Slashdot stories like "Fracking Fluid Contains Significant Amounts of Ozane", "Ozane Responsible For Rising Sea Levels", "Guantanamo Prisoners Tortured Using Ozane", "Oncoming Ozane Crisis Threatens Civilization", "Weak Beer Found To Contain Excess Amounts of Ozane", "Linus Torvalds: Ozane Has No Role In Linux", "Ozane Layer Disappearing Along East Coast", "Tesla Motors Introducing Ozane-Based Fuel Cells", etc.

Since road damage is exponentially proportional to vehicle weight, heavier trucks *should* be paying more in fees.

Yeah, Babylon 5 just didn't give a shit about casual viewers - there was only a very few episodes that had a recap of past event. The first time I was tipped about the series I saw an episode in the middle of the series and was just wondering who, what, why since there was absolutely no way to get into the series. It really wouldn't have hurt them to have a 30 second "Previously on Babylon 5" to give you the essentials.

Why? There's a hundred ways I could die in the next year, but there's no problem aggregating it so I don't see why the clock can't represent total risk. Besides, it's probably going to cascade anyway. If Russia pulls the trigger in Eastern Europe then NATO will get involved, China probably don't want NATO forces on their borders and at least somewhat back Russia and might decide the time is right to take back Taiwan and those Japanese islands and it all goes down hill from there. IS has openly stated their goal is to wage war on everyone until it's one caliphate. If shit hits the fan in the Middle East you know the US will back Israel which will drag NATO into it and the oil would bring everyone else. Same with North Korea, it could easily become a proxy war between China and the US that turns into a true war. I'm not exactly sure how an India-Pakistan war would escalate but an all-out war there already has 1.5 billion people involved. And that's just where it sparks, if you could guess that the rise of Hitler would lead to the attack on Pearl Harbor your crystal ball is good.

Remember, the world is a lot more connected than it used to be, with floods in Thailand the price of hard drives worldwide doubled. No matter where war breaks out it's going to have a lot of impact on US companies and US markets and there will be a lot more incentive to protect US economic interests around the globe than there used to be in the 1940s. Even when it's not cold war power plays it's going to be a lot harder to dismiss as not our problem.

Whether the GTX 970 has 3.5 or 4 GB effective it's still more than a standard GTX 780 Ti with 3 GB, so I'm guessing you have to run some rather extreme resolutions and AA modes to see a practical difference. In fact the latter will generally beat a 970 whether single vs single or SLI vs SLI at UHD (3840x2160) resolutions.

What I do know is that my 2x970 totally trashes a single GTX 980 at a 20% price premium as they do have 2x13/16 = 26/16 the shaders, both cards shut down the fans at idle so it's extremely quiet and even at full tilt both cards together pull just 2x145W = 290W. I'm kinda surprised nobody's done a single card version yet since it's still under the 300W ATX limit.

It runs games at 3840x2160 on a Samsung UD590 beautifully, even though it's a 1ms TN panel it's not for twitch gaming as it's 60 Hz on DisplayPort with no fancy sync options and 25ms input lag but it looks extremely good. And at monitor distances you can definitively see the upgrade over 1080p while the TV benefits are more dubious. There are better setups, but for being such a high-end system the price/performance was extremely good.

Having been dredged into that market by no choice of my own, I can tell you this.: Picking a solution that works well in every browser is damn hard, even if you try. IE6 was the worst, but it did't look right in Safari either. I'm pretty sure Firefox and Opera was correct, but it doesn't really matter to th end user. You use an obscure client, it's your problem. It's only quite recently it's become their problem.