Depends on what you mean by usable. It immediately prompts a study of human populations to identify how certain defects can impair it's function which will likely lead to the development of gene therapies to correct those defects, and if beneficial variants can be identified, could later lead to general purpose gene therapies to slow the rate of aging. It may also lead to studies for the development of drugs to modify it's action, but thats probably farther out than basic gene therapies for those with defective instances of these genes.

Cheap solar powered very high altitude unmanned platforms that are cheaper to produce than the missile needed to shoot them down, just sitting up there until their payload is needed, be it a bomb, rocket, jammer, communications relay or recon.

That is really odd, as my local B&N was still carrying 2600 last time I was in, and there are similar articles in every issue.

Equitable and promissory estoppel: Sun helped project Harmony and was deeply involved in it's creation, to the extent that it infringed, it had permission to do so. Sun definitely received benefit from this arrangement as parts of Sun's own implementation were contributed, as a result of Harmony, by Google.

Everything Google 'copied' (really, re-implemented) was released under the Apache license as project Harmony.

Not quite. Most credit card merchant agreements require the merchant to accept returns. That said, a refund to a credit card is a bit harder to abuse (though not impossible).

This has been in use in sci-fi since the dawn of space opera. It gained sufficient use that it was internalized to the point that it's rarely mentioned anymore, you could even say it's why most sci-fi expects a reliable knowledge of location and date even in the face of miss-folds and unplanned time travel.

Already available, Mechwarrior: Living Legends

Stock Split: No capital gains, you didn't sell/buy anything (value of a share was halved, quantity was doubled)

Credit card: No VAT, the VAT is on what you used the credit card to pay for (at least, in every country I've been in that had VAT).

Sold Home: No capital gains (capital loss, in fact) for the given example.

I don't remember any of my passwords. They are muscle memory. If I don't use them, in a week or two they are gone.

Now consider that they took the laptop away from her, preventing her from using it...

My back of the envelope calculations put 10^17 J as a low ball for how much it's expending per year simply lifting it's cap against earths gravitational field.

Only relative motion matters, aka, in the inertial frame of the source when the leading edge of the beam was emitted, how much has the target moved by the time the leading edge of the beam reaches the detector.

At two points opposite each other on the equator, that distance would be less than 2.3 meters, with only 730km separating the source and target, that distance is only a few centimeters (the source and target have nearly the same velocity)

Physics (and velocities) don't work like that, you can't simply sum them.

If, in a third reference frame, 2 objects are observed to be approaching each other at .75 c, co moving observers in the frame of either object would calculate their respective closing velocity as .96 c

The velocity addition formula is:

s = (v + u)/(1+(v*u/c^2))

In the old shell style http://www.free-x.ch/pub/FreeBSD-IPFILTER.html (look for warning banner)

Also, curse you lameness filter.

Depends on the state, it's at least supposed to be the case, in Washington, Texas and several other states, that there is no "Duty to retreat"