Get clamping, Clamps.

Or, to make the obligatory joke... Wait, watt?

Easy. 1000 hours. Wait, what?

I like to explain it in terms of humans. A watt is an instantaneous unit of power. It represents a resource that is available to do work at any given point of time. In much the same way, a company has employees. They are resources that are available to do work at any given point in time, and each employee can do roughly a fixed amount of work in a given period of time. If a company has ten employees working during the day, assuming an eight-hour work day, it gets eighty employee-hours of work done. If it needs to get more than that amount of work done, it must either increase the number of employees (the wattage available) or increase the period of time over which it does the work (longer hours).

Sadly, this explanation fails to account for folks who reply that they can also make the machine more efficient so that it does more work per watt—work smarter, not harder, and all that—at which point most people end up working longer hours and fudging the hours on their timecards. But I digress.

... it's not about finding a magic bullet, it's about helping cut back on (not eliminate) the need to use coal or nuclear power.

Only up to the point where all the daytime power needs are covered by solar. Given the slow ramp-up/ramp-down times for nuclear plants, they're pretty much suitable only for providing base load (24x7), so either you're using it all day and all night or you're not using it at all. In other words, solar power, if deployed broadly enough, could make nuclear power economically infeasible.

Why buy now when you can wait six months and buy a controlling stake for less than a burger and some fries?

Actually, ESPN forces cable companies into an all-or-nothing situation: either all their customers pay for ESPN, or nobody gets to watch it. They are doing the same thing to ISPs, so it is not as if moving everyone onto the web will somehow help us escape this practice.

Yes. And when advertising dries up and it costs $200 per customer, the cable companies will nearly simultaneously tell them to get bent. They can get away with it now (barely) only because the cost is not insanely high.

Meanwhile, years ago, I lived in China. I bought a DVD copy of the latest start wars off the street, two weeks before its release in the United States. It was over year before they released it in the theaters in China. By then, anyone that wanted to own a copy, had one in their living room for at least a year.

Even better, you probably only paid about $1 to find out what a horrible movie that was, while we suckers in the USA had to pay full ticket price!

Bingo: I think Netflix is the answer here. Why should I bother using BitTorrent to download some 20-year-old movie when there's a 75% chance that it's on Netflix's instant play selection? Netflix is much easier to use than BitTorrent, and for stuff that isn't super popular, it's far faster (it can take days for something to download on BT if there aren't a lot of seeders, maybe weeks if there's only a few people who have it), since it's actually "instant" as the name says.

Of course, there's still a fair amount of stuff Netflix doesn't have on Instant Play, which means you have to get the DVD, but there's Redbox for that, or the Netflix DVD service if you want to wait a couple days. And then there's a small amount of stuff that isn't on Netflix at all, though it's doubtful that's on BitTorrent too, but it's a possibility.

As people have been saying for ages, people don't resort to piracy nearly as much when cheap, legal options are available. Netflix is less than $10/month for all you can watch out of their Instant Play selection. But Netflix isn't available outside the US (except Canada, I believe), so of course people in other countries stick with BT.