If your electricity comes from burning hydrocarbons, then using hydrogen is a bit silly since you get a loss in the heat->electricity process, plus in the electricity->hydrogen process.

People were saying the same thing about free software ~15 years ago. If software is free, how will developers ever get paid? Turns out there's now a lot of people that get paid for writing free software. I don't know what the model will be, but I'm pretty sure the same will happen for book/documentation authors at some point.

At this point, the two are mostly equivalent. For example, Einstein's original "cosmological constant" in the general theory of relativity *is* a form of dark energy.

Right now, the site has neither binaries nor source, but I'm pretty sure both will be available at the same time. The only point of the binaries there is that since they are served by Cisco, then Cisco can handle the patent licensing. The license is non-transferable (this is not something Cisco controls), so you can't download once and put it into your product, each product has to downloading it on its own for the license to apply. Since it's open source, anyone can also just build it themselves, then then obviously they're also not covered by the license.

I recommend reading Monty's Daala demos 1, 2, 3 and 4. We're not just building a similar codec, but making radical changes to many fundamental components of a video codec.

Legally, there's a reasonable limit on how long you can wait (6 years under some theories). That being said, indeed can can never prove non-infringement, and it's equally valid for free codecs than it is for encumbered codecs. Paying the MPEG LA tax does not shield you from trolls, or even from companies that participated in the standard and aren't part of the patent pool (usually, not all declared IPR holders are represented in a pool).

Beyond the official announcements, I strongly recommend reading Monty's comments on the issue.

I'm pretty sure the EULA will say that the car is only really good for going 5 km/h in your driveway and that going on public roads voids your warranty.

I always assumed the astronaut would be ripped apart by tidal forces long before reaching the event horizon.

Actually, in relativistic physics sense, the trades in Chicago where outside of the light cone of the Washington event (neither in the future cone nor in the past cone). That being said, since Washington and Chicago do not move at relativistic speed with respect to each other, the trades are still at a later time than the announce, even if there's no possible causality.

Except that the message this sends is "you're less likely to get a ticket if you wait for the green light before you start texting". Sure it may be against the law, but the problem I have with this sort of thing is that the focus is always on the least dangerous behaviour. Just like in my neighbourhood where the cops will stop people speeding on the big street where it's least dangerous while ignoring speeding in the residential area where you can have children crossing at any time. Enforcing the law where it makes the most money rather than where it's most important doesn't help safety.

The problem here is estimating the probabilities of failure. Assuming failures are independent and considering there's probably (I'm guessing, feel free to plug in other numbers) been somewhere between 10 to 100 similar incidents with one case where 3 safety mechanisms failed, then we can say that the probability of failure of any one safety is between 14% and 30%. From this, the probability of all four failing would be somewhere between one in 100 and one in 3000. That's way too high considering what's at stake here. I assume it's been fixed (hopefully not just patched) because there would probably have been an actual accident since then.

The vast majority of those diseases cannot be eradicated because they can infect other animals too. So unless you want to vaccinate every bird/pig/monkey/... (depending on the disease), the only thing that can be done is to keep vaccinating humans. The case of smallpox (which AFAIK only infected humans) is very rare.

They're called "weapons of collateral destruction" (WCD).

But you need to understand. They really needed that money so they could commemorate the 1812 war.