$5 seems a lot. I pay Amazon £7.28/month for DVD rentals. This gives me 3 disks at home at a time and unlimited rentals. I can usually return them at the weekend and midweek if I'm feeling lazy and watching a lot, or just once a week if I'm a bit more busy. Going with the second, that's 12 films a month for £7.28, or 60p (a bit under $1) per movie. TV shows typically come 2-4 episodes on a disk, so divide by 2 or 4 for episodes.

I'd happily pay £10-15 per month for a service that had the same range as a DVD rental service, provided DRM-free streams in a standard format, and had a reasonable download cap (maybe 30 hours per month for £10, 60 for £15, something on that order).

I don't want to pay for a movie, I want to pay for access to a large library of movies that I can watch however I want, on any device I want.

You didn't read any of the rest of my post, did you?

Well, in the UK, tipping the pizza guy is pretty rare - you're paying for the service already (and delivery drivers are covered by the same minimum wage laws so they get a salary that you can live on). Credit card terminals in restaurants typically provide a tip field so that you can add a tip on at the end.

Most of the people I'd want to send cash to are people I know and are already in my phone's contact list. If you live in a culture that is fundamentally opposed to paying people a reasonable wage or stating up-front how much things cost, then the solution would be to have a QR code on the box with a note saying 'Did you get good service? Send a tip here' and the details required to receive the payment. Rather than having to find the $2, you'd just wave the card in front of your phone, select the amount, and hit send. The driver wouldn't need to carry cash.

I'm personally happy to accept the benefits of an inflationary currency (incentivising investment, penalising cash-hoarding). If you're not, then I suggest that you go and live in a country with a non-inflationary currency for a while and see how you like it.

Paying a monthly fee for a bank account seems somewhat archaic. Let me guess: you live in the USA?

In the UK, Barclays has offered a system called PingIt for a while that lets you send money to anyone with an email address. There's now a system called PayM that most of the banks have opted into that lets you send money to someone using their mobile phone number. The receiver just needs to register their mobile number and account. I'm not convinced by the security yet, but it's more convenient than cash for paying people.

And all of the species that were dominant during the Triassic period did really well throughout the Jurassic...

It's also a market distortion if one locale doesn't regulate pollution and allows businesses to dump waste in communal resources (e.g. rivers), making them externalities. A tariff on imports of such goods can be a way of redressing that balance - manufacturers have to pay the costs irrespective of where they produce the goods if they want to sell them in a particular country.

The same is true in reverse too. I picked up quite a thick rural Normandy accent[1] when I speak French and discovered that everyone in Paris is a lot more polite to me if I speak French with an English accent...

[1] Cultural equivalents: For brits, think Devonshire farmer, for americans think deep south.

I took some with me when I moved about 10 years ago. I didn't the last couple of times I moved, because they're so cheap that it's not worth the effort to move them. I have had one fail in under 4 years, but most of the ones I installed when I moved into my last-but-one house were still working fine when I moved out 7 years later.

Only if you're damn sure that no one will find out. If they do, then the fines are a lot larger and it just takes one disgruntled former employee to report the incident...

You didn't read to the end of my post, did you?

Don't claim copyright on every video, this will make you guilty of perjury under the DMCA. Claim copyright on one video and then claim that every other video appears to be a derived work of that video. This is exactly the mechanism that the big studios use.

The perjury clause doesn't say what you think it says. If I own the rights on work A, to file a notice on work B, I claim that work B infringes work A. The perjury clause kicks in only if I do not own the rights to work A (or represent the person who does). If work B doesn't infringe, then that's a matter for the courts. This is quite annoying, but it does make sense. It's clear cut if works A and B are the same, but not in the case that B is a derived work of A. A court has to decide whether the use of A in B counts under fair use or not.

The counterbalance for this is that the DMCA does indemnify YouTube if they respond to a counternotice and reinstate the work. If you, the owner of work B, think it does not infringe then you send such a notice to YouTube. I then have no further recourse against YouTube and must take you to court directly.

The problem here is that it's very easy to automate sending takedown notices, but very hard to automate sending counter-notices. Mass-sending of automated takedown notices was something that the authors of the DMCA didn't foresee and the act probably needs amending to require the notice to explicitly state (under penalty of perjury) the person who has compared the works and their reason for believing that they are infringing.

In the UK, university research departments are assessed base on the Research Excellence Framework (REF, formerly the Research Assessment Exercise [RAE]). Each faculty member is required to submit 4 things demonstrating impact. These are typically top-tier conference or journal papers, but can also be artefacts or examples of successful technology transfer. The exercise happens every four years, so to get the top ranking you need to write one good paper a year. The only incentive for publishing in second-tier venues is meeting other people who might lead to interesting collaborations.