Here's an excellent source of mathematical fiction... Alex Kasman's curated list of mathematical fiction! I highly recommend it.

Also, a story I discovered through this list, which was truly spectacular: Ted Chiang's "Division by Zero". Freely available here.

As a note - sorry, yes, I know better, but I failed to edit before posting - sci-fi doesn't provide prior art, but CAN be used to prove obviousness to the standard of the law. (It's the reason no one could patent the water bed - Heinlein described its functioning in detail in Stranger in a Strange Land.)

Huh. This is DEFINITELY one of the cases where anyone who reads Sci-Fi knows there's prior art, in the sense of published material describing a system operating in essentially this way. Patent was filed on January 31, 2008... Anyone want to help find stories that mention volumetric printer DRM pre-2008? Cory Doctorow's used the point in several stories - but Makers, at least, wasn't published until 2009. Anything pre-dating? Also, I think I've read an old classic short story that described people surviving a war by use of a synthesis device where they'd disabled the mechanism that prevented the creation of various goods... anyone know what I'm talking about?

Mr. Bakke, please explain how submitting the note "All content owners have reviewed your video and confirmed their claims to some or all of its content" is possibly acceptable when no one's reviewed it? This makes your company look awfully bad.

Alternatively, if someone did review it and sign off on that reply, then I hope this will reflect properly on that individual and their career at Rumblefish, as I'm pretty sure that this at least makes your company rather vulnerable from a publicity point of view, if not a legal one. If you're outsourcing this... then really, I hope your company can learn its lesson QUICKLY.

It's a LOT more complicated than that, actually. Check Wikipedia... but most states don't recognize common-law marriage, and proving common-law marriage is a real pain.

It's possible. On the other hand, what happened if the man claimed abuse?

The problem is that sales taxes are inherently regressive, not flat. It sounds ridiculous, I know. But - if you live paycheck-to-paycheck, then by definition, you're spending all of your money buying things. If you have income high enough that you're putting away savings, then you spend a smaller fraction of your money - and thus a smaller fraction of your money is subject to the sales tax. Therefore, a nominally flat sales tax actually taxes the poor more harshly, percentage-wise, because the poor find it necessary to spend a larger fraction of their money. Same logic applies to almost all consumption taxes, save specific luxury taxes (which I disapprove of on entirely different grounds).

You mean, like the Enigma machine? Remarkably simple code... breakable with sufficient processing, or with improper use of the protocols, it's true. However, for all intents and purposes it required a highly-specialized bank of mechanical computers to break the code, and it generally took quite a while if the encryption was being used properly.

This is supposed to be an improvement?

First, we need serious candidates to run... otherwise, we'll just be voting in similarly problematic candidates.

Wrong breakthrough, I'm sorry to say. That one was an analysis of a protein that all retroviruses (including HIV) have - this one is an actual (albeit in vitro) treatment method. This paper is in a completely different direction, and arguably one step further along its path... and no, FoldIt was not involved in this particular breakthrough. Both are cool, but not the same work.

Yes, yes, yes! I almost wish they'd make this part of contract law... it would eliminate a LOT of problems in negotiation.

IANAL, but I don't get it. On a brief reading of the claims, and contrasting them with what I know of how BitTorrent works, I can't see how BitTorrent violates any of the Claims. Specifically, all of their claims include Claim 1, which is as follows:

Claim 1: A media distribution system, comprising:
a media file database configured to store media files, wherein one or more of the media files have been compressed prior to storage in the media file database;
a computing device configured to receive user requests for delivery of the one or more of the media files stores in the media file database, the computing device further configured to: (identify average network throughput between computing device and the requesting users; and route the user requests for delivery of the requested one or more media files to a distribution server capable of servicing the user requests based upon at least the average network throughput;) and
a distribution server coupled to the media file database, the distribution server configured to simultaneously deliver a single copy of the requested one or more of the media files identified in the routed user requests to the requesting users in less-than-real-time, wherein the distribution server automatically adjusts delivery of the requested one or more media files to the requesting users based on current average network throughput between the distribution server and the requesting users.

That isn't quite BitTorrent. Specifically, I don't think BitTorrent shapes its routing from the server-side based on "average network throughput between computing device and the requesting users". Nor is the system attached to a database configured to store media files - at least, I hope filesystems in general don't count.

Out of curiosity, how much did that cost you? A ballpark estimate of startup cost, I mean - the lessons to get your license, and the airplane components. Ongoing costs would be interesting too, I confess, but that's more easily researched.

Beautiful trick. There's exactly one point where the problem is introduced, and it's one of the subtler ways you can go wrong with solving an equation algebraically... Hint: Consider the problem, step-by-step, in the complex plane. Every quadratic has either two solutions or is a perfect square. This one's not a perfect square. At one point, we turn it into a cubic - which necessarily has either three or two solutions. This one has three. Where'd the extra solution come from?