It's just not the case that evolution always leads to an optimal design. Evolution has a tendency to get stuck on "pretty good" solutions because some random decision early on limited the future solution space.

It's also not true that evolution is somehow finished with humans, having already figured out how to squeeze every ounce of efficiency from our brains. We are not the end product of evolution. For all we know, future generations may have more efficient brains than we have.

It is hardware running Linux. You can even install Ubuntu if you want.

Even if you have enough bandwidth, it's still a waste to download the entirety of Wikipedia when you only need one or two articles at a given time. In your hypothetical world where bandwidth is so cheap that you can afford to download the whole Internet constantly, you'd be constantly deleting massive amounts of stale data that you downloaded and never looked at before it got superseded by newer data.

Besides, while we may have more bandwidth in the future, there will be more data in the future too. Bandwidth will probably never grow fast enough to catch up. Cheaper bandwidth will also allow people to share more data, making the problem even worse.

You can download a copy of Wikipedia to your PC, but nobody does.

So why does the store's supplier give them a price break at 1,000 units, 10,000 units, 100,000 units, etc.? Large sales reduce transaction costs and mitigate risk. Would you rather sell $5,000 worth of fruit to one person or spend all day at the farmer's market hoping to sell $5 worth of fruit to 1,000 people?

If you've ever purchased anything for a business, you know this is the standard, not the exception. Excuse me if I don't believe that the music industry, that paragon of clear thinking and fair dealing, is the only sane business out there.

If you told the young Aubrey Drake Graham that someday he'd be making "only" $1 million a year as a musician, he'd probably be thrilled.

What are you talking about? Very few prices scale linearly with quantity. It's far more common to for the unit price to go down with quantity. At the grocery store, you can buy one piece of fruit for a dollar or five for four dollars. Buy a truckload of fruit and you'll get an even better rate. Is the business model of selling fruit "insane"?

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Sure, you can get humans to agree to a convention for describing positions. After all, that's what latitude and longitude are. But the fundamental reality of the universe doesn't know anything about human conventions or Greenwich.

Because an object's position in space and time depends on the observer, it doesn't really make sense to talk about the exact same spot at different times. (Likewise, you can't technically say that two events in different places happened at the exact same time.)

The only thing that makes sense is a continuous path from one position in space-time (x,y,z,t) to a different position in space-time (x`,y`,z`,t`). Maybe you take some shortcuts or a loop or something, but otherwise it would be just like traveling through space normally. Anywhere along that path, you'd know where you are relative to your surroundings, so you wouldn't suddenly "materialize" in the middle of empty space.

The US dollar is the only currency you can pay US taxes with and the only currency the US government issues debt in, so as long as the US government exists, there is a guaranteed demand for US dollars.

I know, I know, "But the US is about to implode any day now!" And if it does, the entire world economy will go with it. BitCoin depends on the Internet and the Internet depends on a functioning economy. BitCoins won't do you any good if your ISP and your power company are bankrupt.

So in any realistic scenario where BitCoins have value, so does the US dollar. However, it's entirely plausible that BitCoin will fail but not the dollar. Congress could prevent law-abiding businesses from dealing in BitCoins, shutting down the major exchanges and effectively isolating BitCoin from the traditional financial system. The illicit market would still exist, so you'd still be able to convert cash to BitCoins to buy drugs with... but most people will just buy drugs with the cash directly.

They can structure the files on their webserver however they want, but once they send those files to me, it's my prerogative to decide how (or if) I wish to render those files for display. If I hate your color scheme and want to replace it with a custom style sheet, I won't use your style sheet. If I use a text-only browser, because I'm blind or because I'm on a terminal, I may not even request the images that your HTML file links to. If I'm running a spider program that trawls the web collecting statistics on web design trends, your page might never be rendered for human viewing at all.

Option #3: The kid has a severe psychiatric disorder and fixated on a family friend when it just as easily could have been Jodie Foster or Gabrielle Giffords.

Often you need to learn the practical before you can get to the abstract. If this class didn't teach them how to use Microsoft Office, the job would fall on the first teacher who asked them to write an essay, taking time out of a more important class.

In the very first sentence of my post, I said it should be covered under fair use, even if the law says otherwise. I'm no lawyer and neither is the poster you linked to.

The bottom line is that this guy is trying to use copyright to stop speech he doesn't agree with. (Speech I disagree with as well.) If the law says he can get away with it, that's great for him, but that means there's a larger problem with the law itself.