Pump in coal ash and you can call it carbon sequestration.

Researcher: press that lever, you rat!
Rat: I realize that command does have its fascination, even under circumstances such as these, but I neither enjoy it nor am I frightened of it. It simply exists, and I will do whatever logically needs to be done.

A small shop can not afford to take a case to court even without paying the defendant's lawyers. An IP lawsuit costs millions of dollars to pursue; more money than any normal person will make in his entire working lifetime. The courts are for the big fish. For the rest of us, any involvement with them leads to bankrupcy.

And the clueless MBAs strike again. Business school graduates forget that the basis of capitalism is capital, not short term profits. You build capital when you care about the company sticking around for a long time, when you intend people to buy your products because of the reputation of your brand, and when you genuinely care about making the world a better place one awesome toothbrush at a time.

MBAs on the other hand, only care about the company's survival until the next bonus time, believe that people will only buy something if they are tricked and brainwashed into it, and have no interest or knowledge of what the company actually produces.

And when you do not care about the products you make, why would you want talented employees to make them? If quality is irrelevant, all you need is a bunch of cheap warm bodies to make whatever garbage marketing can sell. It is amazing how fast you can ruin the economy when you only intend to stay on your job until the company dies, rather than until you retire from it.

Thinking FTW.

The 70s called

The question "Is there an invisible pink unicorn?" is just as relevant. Also, logic works only in formal systems, such as mathematics, and mathematics doesn't make any statements about the real world. Of course, you can use mathematics as a language for a model that gives predictions about what we will observe in the real world, but confusing the real world with math is like confusing the territory with a map.

Even simpler: sign up with fastmail.fm for only $4.95/year, and nobody will rummage through your emails. If you are not willing to spare this miniscule amount, have you any right to be incensed that Google tries to extract some value from you through ads on their totally free service?

Side channel attacks only work when you can physically access the target. The chance of you being able to sniff the power usage of my PC while I'm sitting at it and typing my password is basically zero. Direct physical attacks on the computer inside the user's house never happen, due to extremely low reward/effort ratio.

Instead, store your password on a TPM chip, from where the hash can not be stolen and where the attempt rate can be regulated. This way even 7 character passwords can be quite secure.

I'm a graduate student in computer science. Nearly every paper I want to see is available for free, generally hosted on one of the authors' sites. When I ask authors for slides because I want to present their paper, they generally make them available for free. It seems to me that researchers want their papers read, presented, and discussed, and if making the papers freely available will accomplish that goal, they'll do it.

That's just a case of inventor hubris. No, your idea alone will not produce a great product. No, your idea is not so great that everybody will want to steal it. In fact, until you prove that your idea is great by reaping a lot of profit from selling your innovative product, you'll have to shove your idea down people's throat to get venture capital, shelf space, loans, etc. The truth is that nobody wants your idea. Yes, they will steal it eventually after you prove that it's good, but proving may take a long time. Perhaps even 20 years.

Don't worry: the rope is automatically freed when you are terminated.

Poor Richard...

One very good reason to use a license is its liability disclaimer. If you release your software without one, there is always the danger that some idiot will find a way to use it in such a way as to remove all his files, consequently suing you for damages. With the astronomical costs of litigation in the US, a lawsuit, whether you win it or not, is a financial death sentence. It is worthwhile to take every measure you can to defend yourself from this.