Actually, I thought the whole idea of the "Goldilocks universe" was that life could develop anywhere without the need for a star at the right distance (otherwise there's no advantage). The problem then is exactly as you pointed out. There's no way for life to extract energy, no matter what the temperature is, because everything is at thermal equilibrium. The only way to get energy is through a star. And if you have a star, then having the microwave background doesn't help and is just likely to just make your planet too hot.

I use "nuclear fission" as a sort of "technological landmark". But I was thinking both in terms of "actively" wiping itself out (i.e. wars of some kind) and "passively" destroying itself just like we're currently doing by polluting everything and depleting resources at an insane rate.

A few things to consider here. First, I don't see a way any of that life at T+15M would have become intelligent before the background got too cold. Second, we do not know if it's even possible for life to actually colonize other star systems and even if it is, what's the percentage of intelligent civilizations that achieve that. Of course, the really interesting question is how long an intelligent civilization can last before either destroying itself or depleting all its resources. Personally, I would suspect the half-life of a civilization is less than 1000 years after discovery of nuclear fission.

Most of these diets just make eating inconvenient in some way. Either because there's half the stuff you can't eat, or because you can't eat X with Y, ... I'm sure the "eat anything you like as long as you're up side down" diet would work too. The problem is that you can't keep doing it for years.

about the fact that vaccinated children indeed have a slightly higher risk of having autism... because those that aren't vaccinated have a higher risk of dying before they're even old enough to be diagnosed with autism.

Sure, this was originally Skype, but Microsoft has continued to work with us even after acquiring Skype.

You will just need to update the firmware on your cables if you want to maintain optimal RDF (reality distortion field).

Now... what about a chimpanzee fetus?

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).