i have it on good authority that the answer to life the universe and everything is 42.

Who would want a six digit Slashdot ID? How dreadful!

i am bad at math, and i made a few mistakes. first off, i burned an ac adapter on my laptop. but more importantly i realized i can't run anything on the miner rig (my desktop) that is too intense while it is mining, so with problems fixed i am now mining 236khps from just the desktop. my desktop's motherboard only supports 2 gpus. i don't trust the internets numbers anymore, so i am expecting 600 khps from the new card. for a total of 836khps roughly. that should mean that i mine roughly $7 USD per day for just my desktop. which means before electricity i would make $210 a month, roughly and i am currently making a little over $2 a day. but the math isn't that simple and the risk is high, which is why i'm not going out and building a massive 5 gpu rig. buying 1 really fast gpu was the most i was willing to risk. my parents don't have money to risk doing much more than this either. plus the power bill... none of my math included power bill. but again i was originally going to upgrade my gpu around now anyways, so i am essentially just making money with computers that would have been bought in the first place. and don't mine with laptops their power bricks can short or likewise go out. mine was under warranty and i was lucky it only blew the ac adapter. oh and the longer you mine the harder it gets. so this really isn't for everyone, if you weren't going to leave a desktop running there is safer investments. and converting to real cash is not very easy either.

I believe that the episode you're thinking of was Time Flight. They put the TARDIS aboard a Concorde and flew 140 million years into the past.

Plus don't forget that the domestic telephone network exists nationwide. Even if airlines were magically exempt, telephones still could be regulated.

Hey, I'm totally happy with getting rid of as many jobs as possible through automation, so long as people still get paid enough to live comfortably. The leisure society is where it's at.

But ours are all stuck at the bottom of a big gravity well. Materials mined on the moon, or better yet, nearby asteroids, are not. They could be sent down to us as raw materials to be turned into finished goods here, but alternatively we could begin to industrialize space.

There are plenty of plans on the books for building solar power arrays that could send power down to us cleanly, for example. It's too expensive to build them with parts that come from the Earth, but it might be more practical with parts that didn't.

It has plenty of oxygen and aluminum, which would be useful. Near Earth asteroids are probably a better bet, however.

How could that have possibly happened, given that in 1994, a runaway planet hurtled between the Earth and the Moon, breaking the moon into two big chunks, unleashing cosmic destruction, and casting man's civilization into ruin.

And while it would be good to get rid of mining operations on Earth, replacing it with space mining, the main advantage of mining in space is that you do not need to use a giant rocket to get that stuff into space; it's already up there, and can be used for industrial purposes in situ.

unfortunately there is a word which describes what happens when someone broadcasts data they don't hold a piece of paper saying they have a right to distribute. it is called 'piracy' before the nets evolved and after radio was invented something called 'pirate radio' became real, because some people were charging fees to play music over radio, but that signal was able to be recorded and rebroadcast by pirate radio. there is still a thriving pirate radio, despite the cost of equipment and powering it with 150 stations today in the uk alone.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio_in_the_United_Kingdom
internet piracy is similar using equipment that is legal. while 'piracy' had a negative connotation it is not the same as theft and hasn't meant theft since pre radio era when nautical piracy was widespread. to some the branding of piracy makes the whole thing worth it. i make copies of files every day, the fundamental ability to copy files is essential for so many things if i spent $120 on dvds wouldn't i want to make some form of backup and store it at a friends in case my house burned to the ground? never mind if insurance can be purchased, what if it is simply impossible to replace the media at all as i purchased the last copy off amazon and it had been sitting in their warehouse for 6 years before they sold the last copy to me? there clearly isn't a market for pressing a new physical run. so why should someone tell me i can't make a copy (drm) or that i am 'stealing' because i mitigated the potential event of my house burning down, doing so with affordable real world tools.

furthermore isn't the whole point of existence to share the good times with others? what kind of backwards system is it that the 'good' things in the world are considered wholly by their value to make unlimited profits? piracy is a good thing it means there are people enjoying and sharing the best parts of life regardless of how miserable others are trying to make it.

Trademarks are fine, of course.

You didn't create the copyright. Everyone else gave it to you (via our servant, the government). We didn't do this out of the kindness of our hearts; we did it out of self interest. And being a deal made out of self interest, and with you having no real alternatives or bargaining power, it should favor us very strongly.

If you don't like it, don't create anything, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Of course there would be a canon. In fact, there might be several different ones. And fans could choose whichever they liked best. God knows this is already common with copyrighted materials.

Not to mention of course that even the Biblical Canon is not universally agreed upon, but somehow the world hasn't ended.

If you could make a DVD sequel to Star Wars in 1982 (remember, you can't use anything added in Empire!) then I'd say that you deserve to make it. Put those Laserdisc and Selectavision guys in their place!

Yes you could; the SPIDER-MAN trademark with regard to comic books and many other goods would become generic. I discussed this in another post in this thread.

It's copyrights that protect characters. Copyrights on the works that the characters appear in. Each trait of the character is protected in the work in which it first appears. So Spider-Man's basic costume, web swinging, origin, etc. all comes from Amazing Fantasy #15. But Peter Parker's sideline of bringing pictures of Spider-Man to J. Jonah Jameson doesn't show up until The Amazing Spider-Man #2, so you'd have to wait for that one to also hit the public domain to introduce that trait.