Never that simple. There's a good reason plasma weapons don't actually exist: The energy requirements to get any significant range are rediculous.

If you want a plasma rifle, I could probably build one, given enough money. It'd be just small enough for one man to lift - and attached to a power supply the size of a house by cables as thick as hosepipes.

What's obviously missing is a Mock App - something that will satisfy all those requests and provide them with the data they want - fake data.

Sadly, I don't expect Google - whose revenue stream is largely based on advertisement - would make that possible in Android.

Most of that is true. We have a principle called "flying court" in Germany where you can basically choose your court, based on certain circumstances. For Internet-related cases, those were usually true.

However, due to this being abused massively, courts have started to refuse cases from outside their own jurisdictions, so this practice is coming to an end.

Also note that contrary to the US system, our legal system is based on the "loser pays all" system. While this increases the risk if the other party does have a good case, it also means you can fight baseless cases and have a very good chance to get your costs back. This does reduce the number of total nonsense cases.

You don't get a lot of plasma for 40 watt.

Not entirely true. They also promote rap artists. Not the good ones - just the ones who like to sing about how rich they are, show off their collection of 'bitches' and use certain words I can't even type here at work without setting off the racist content filter.

We've got distribution covered. Small bands can set up a website for a little money making tracks available for download, and if traffic grows there is p2p to turn to.

Still to solve: Promotion and (optionally) monetization.

Music choice is social: People tend to see out the music they see their peers enjoying. On a large scale, this leads to a shifting series of fads.

I have wondered if the increasing importance of the music video was in some way a collective response by the majors to keep costs high. They must have realised that their production advantage would lessen as the cost of making music came down. How better to counter that than to popularise the music video, an extra that serves as powerful promotion and still requires a substantial amount of money to do well?

I got a kerbal stranded in orbit once, without any fuel left. Then I realised there is a simple way down: Jump. I used his MMU to provide the required delta-v to deorbit.

It was an eventful flight down. He made a perfect descent, right up until the point of landing at three hundred meters per second.

There's a fantasy shop somewhere in the UK that is supposed to be named in latin. The owners thought 'too the stars' a good name, so they named it accordingly: "Ad astrae."

Unfortunately they made a critical error: In attempting to pluralise astra, they didn't realise that astra is already a plural. The singular is astrum.

So what they actually called the shop is 'To the starses.' Or possibly 'To the altar.'

I know the film to which you allude, but the title escapes me. I saw it many years ago.

Making high-quality music used to require investment. Expensive instruments at a minimum - but if you didn't want to sound like Kenny, you'd also need high quality microphones, sound damped recording studio, mixing desk, specialist technician to operate it and several high-end recorders capable of syncronised operation.

That's all changed now. One person working on consumer, affordable equipment can - on a purely technical level - match that quality with comparative ease. It's down to the level where people can and do make music as a hobby, without any expectation of payment.

> Some folks need a paycheck

Yes. But there's no obligation on Mozilla to give everyone paychecks. If someone doesn't want to write free software for a competition, then don't enter the competition.

Mozilla should impose conditions and fund something useful.

(The values Mozilla should be following are already described in the Mozilla Manifesto. It just has to be put into practice more thoroughly.)

> In which way a bad move?

No one can reuse this code.

They're encouraging people to install and use non-free software, which doesn't help the campaigns for free drivers, video codecs, file formats, etc.

Mozilla could have used the money to encourage people to write free software.

Awful move.

With the exception of the "amateur" category, the games don't have to be free software. So Mozilla is paying people to write proprietary games.

Bad move.

You can stop reading there.

This particular court is the laughing stock of the german legal system, and its decisions are routinely overturned at the higher courts. They are famous for "creative" interpretations of the copyright laws.

Source: I live in Hamburg, Germany and I've been following copyright-related civil rights matters for more than a decade.