And the moon has massive effects on the tides, yet somehow seems to avoid getting blamed for causing cancer. Likewise, music makes your ear drums vibrate, yet where is the commission looking into rock 'n' roll 'n' cancer?

The reason it would be "retarded" to think those cause cancer is because there is no mechanism by which they could cause cancer. Likewise, there is no mechanism by which non-ionizing radiation can cause cancer. It is orders of magnitude to weak to have any effect.

It's not a blanket statement, it is a reasonable position to hold in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.

Finally a real use for Segways!

If you're hoping for it to disappear completely it won't happen anytime soon, the official MP4 container format is based on the Quicktime format.

Perhaps he means greeting cards printed on e-paper that wirelessly stream annoying musical greetings and show choppy washed-out videos of kittens line-dancing?

Not necessarily, the decoder/encoder royalty fees are pretty cheap and could be sold at a good profit as an add-on for less than a buck.

The thresholds for encoders/decoders are based on distribution quantities, not revenue thresholds. Below 100,000 units, there is no royalty fee owed. Between 100,000 and 5 million units, the cost is 20 cents per unit. Above 5 million, the cost is 10 cents per unit.

The maximum royalty fee owed is currently capped at $6.5 million.

Part of the license agreement specifies that the fees can't increase more than 10% per 5 year period (2011-2016 is the current period). The max cap can go up more than 10% per period, but that only affects the biggest distributors.

Mozilla can certainly afford it, the Foundation brings in over $300 million in search engine fees alone. Smaller open source projects would probably fall under the 100,00 units. The ones most affected will be popular projects that lack an income stream like Mozilla Foundation has.

Perhaps they aren't complaining because the guarantees do exist. You didn't read the second page of Bott's article you link to.

There he explains that the agreement includes guarantees that the per unit fee will not be increased more than 10% at each 5 year renewal of the agreement. So the maximum increase for royalty fees is 10% every 5 years, which is a pretty reasonable increase.

The only "loophole" is that the maximum royalty fee cap isn't covered by that guarantee. However only the largest distributors would be affected by that cap limit.

But if I don't have my fiat money, how do I run my Fiat car?

He wants to open America up to a Bold New $0.95 menu!

You, sir, are a very cheap date.

Oswald Avery (born in Halifax, NS) was the senior member of the Rockerfeller team that experimentally verified that genetic information was encoded in DNA rather than as previously thought in cell protein. The Avery-MacLeon-McCarty experiment set the stage for Crick and Watson's discovery the helical structure of DNA.

But I'm nowhere near the advertiser's eyes and ears!

Hard to imagine it but the combined market cap of Sony Corp. and Nintendo (about $60 billion depending on market and currency fluctuations) is only worth about 90% as much as Apple's reported cash-on-hand ($65.8 billion).

Weirder still, Apple increased it's cash-on-hand in the Q2 alone by 10% of the value of the combined market cap for both Sony and Nintendo.

Interestingly, the Four Yorkshiremen was actually recycled from "At Last the 1948 Show" (also starring Graham Chapman and John Cleese): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA

Maybe he should have switched to lion taming.