Sounds like we found the explanation for the Norfolk issue:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/17/196230/Time-Bomb-May-Have-Destroyed-800-Norfolk-City-PCs-Data

If the US starts printing a lot of money, the value of the Greenback will plummet. Investors in the US dollar will sell up and buy Gold, Euros or similar. This will cause the value of the US dollar fall even further. Suddenly everything in the US gets expensive to buy with the now worthless dollar and you have got nowhere.

In some ways the US is extremely exposed because many foreign players have a lot of US dollars that they will sell at the first sign of trouble (some are already doing so).

It sounds like the developers choose to use the fastest and most reliable Windows version available for development.

It was both super cute and super annoying when my little 1 year old "drove" his Cars DVD around on the floor, complete with "brrrm brrrm" noises.

Usually with these devices, there are losses in the primary coil due to the current rushing around, but much less than you might expect - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductor#Stored_energy.

As for the load on the primary increasing as secondary coils are added, see the First law of thermodynamics.
"
The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings.
"

Secondary coils drawing power are causing the primary coil to do work.

The way this stuff works in practice is that the primary coil makes a field that adds power...to the primary coil. This feedback loop reduces the power consumption of the primary coil. Secondary coils make this field weaker (by drawing power from it). The primary coil then has a lower positive feedback from its own field, so draws more power. This is the principle that makes electric motors draw more power when stopped / under load.

[nitpick]
How do you connect the superconductor to the grid? Is that connection also superconducting?
[/nitpick]

@2gravey - the impedance of the cord is nothing to the impedance of the transmission mechanism (those power pylons and transformers)

Electric toothbrushes can be charged using inductance, as they are incredibly close to their base station when put down. A simple solution would have the brush dropped into a plain circular hole in the base, with no exposed contacts, just a drainage hole. The base has a wire-wrapped core wrapped around this hole. there is matching coil in the brush. The two create a transformer when the brush is in the socket, transmitting the electrical power.

What is special about this system is the long range. I am sure it trades off efficiency, size and manufacturing complexity to get it. Long range is a very very compelling feature.

Where are mod points when I need them

That could be financial ruin for a company built around one artist's output. Say I create art and sell it. If I have a gallery that sells my art, the day that I die the gallery is financially in jeopardy. Maybe a 6 month grace period would suffice.

Which artist counts when a creation is a collaborative effort (i.e the LOTR movie)? Death of every single participant?

Obviously too many people comparison shopping.

Indeed. A perfect search engine would return one and only one result, and it would be exactly what you were looking for every time.

I like to think of all programming languages as a way to translate our requirements into a highly explicit form that the computer can understand. We then choose how explicit we want to be (assembly -> C -> Python (say) -> ?)

It is easy to create a single worker thread that does some offline processing, say creating a document to print. It is harder to split a task into n threads where n scales over time (years after your program was shipped) to match the number of available cores in the machine. Harder still to ensure that all these threads are kept busy with low synchronisation overhead.

I argue that a program gets more "Parallel" as it becomes more scalable in the sense I just described.

Still not stealing.

In this case you are acquiring access to classified data. You are not stealing it (i.e you are not physically walking off with blueprints).

Imagine I took a photo of a bomb. Did I just steal it?

Do you know for sure that you wouldn't have done as well or better without this sort of punishment?