Not animals. Insects. The distinction does matter.

I checked the sites you linked, and the McDonald's sandwich you refer to is 9.8oz, while the Panera sandwich you refer to is 14.5oz; they're both about 75 cal/oz. Comparing different serving sizes without mentioning that they're different is dishonest.

If they'd followed due diligence...

Actually, the way the patent system works is kind of perverse. No one ever looks for patents they might infringe on, because if you find one, then it becomes "willful infringement" and you could end up owing triple damages. And patents are so badly written, that if you're doing anything interesting there's probably a dozen overbroad, ambiguous patents that you could be infringing, but can't tell without spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to find out, and which wouldn't hold up in court anyways.

Ok, I spoke imprecisely. The problem is that not all nanotubes are equal, and the most desireable kinds can only be produced in trace amounts, generally by sorting through large quantities of mostly the undesirable kinds. A new process which could produce very long single-walled nanotubes would be immensely valuable; a process which only produced short nanotubes would be less valuable, and that's what's currently available.

The abstract doesn't mention any applications, but there's an obvious one. This brings us a tiny bit closer to being able to manufacture carbon nanotubes, which are very useful but currently impossible to make more than a trace amount of.

From the BBC article on the same topic:

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

So it sounds like fast charging has been developed, and it's just a matter of taking orders and tooling the factories at this point.

You're making a lot of assumptions about the wear leveling algorithm that while generally correct, aren't guaranteed. As for me, I find myself very uncomfortable knowing that the reliability of my data depends on a smart controller that uses tricks to extend the life of the parts by many orders of magnitude and that without such tricks, I'd start losing data in hours.

If the tiny chance of failure due to wear worries you, then spinning hard drives should terrify you. Flash disks wearing out is a theoretical problem that doesn't ever happen in practice. Mechanical failure happens all the time. There is always some risk of losing data if you don't have backups, but it's much, much lower with SSDs.

Here's an example. The US government probably prevents you from selling your open source software to Cuba or Iran. If I read section 7 correctly, that counts as a "condition imposed on you". So really you lose all rights to using that code?

You have misread this section. Having a condition imposed on you which prevents you from to distributing to a specific party does not prevent you from fulfilling the conditions of the license, because the license does not obligate you to distribute the program to anyone; rather, the GPL gives the conditions you must follow when you do distribute the program. Since US export restrictions do not prevent you from fulfilling the terms of the GPL when you export to a non-restricted country, the fact that there are parties which you can't distribute the program to is irrelevant.

Note, however, that only a government can enforce export restrictions; the GPL forbids you from taking on that responsibility yourself. So if you send a GPL'ed program to someone in Europe, they could legally send that program to someone in Cuba, and the GPL would forbid you from interfering. If the US were to pass a law which said that you couldn't export something that could possibly be re-exported to a sanctioned country, then that would be a problem for the GPL, but to my knowledge no such law exists.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

There's enough room under the streets, that we don't need monopolies.

Every time a company needs to install, repair or upgrade wires, it means digging up streets, blocking traffic, tying up local police, and jackhammer noise. For these reasons, cities and towns only give permits to the smallest number of companies they can. In the past, this meant two companies: one for telephone, and one for television. If a third company wanted to offer internet access, they would never succeed in getting permits; thus, a government-mandated duopoly. Now, some companies rent out their wires, so that you can buy internet access from them under different brand names. This creates the illusion of choice, without the benefits of actual competition.

Today, the same wires can provide TV, telephone, and internet access all at once, so there is no reason to have even two companies. Gradually, towns will go from having two companies with the permits necessary to provide internet access, to having only one. I want that company to be regulated in the same way that my water, sewer and electricity providers are.

Whoops, I messed up the pricing calculation there; the actual estimated rate should've been $150/minute, one order of magnitude less. That's still three orders of magnitude higher than the typical price for that kind of service, though, so the reasoning stands.

From the article, he was billed at 2 cents/kbyte, which is $20/Mbyte. Based on this rate, and the bill amount of $28,067, he used about 1.4GB of bandwidth. The article says he watched a single game of American football, so assuming that took about 3 hours, the connection speed is about a megabyte/sec, which means that it was billed at... $1,200 per minute.

Under common law, if you request a service for which payment is customary, you are obligated to pay any, even if you were not told that payment was expected or what the price is. The common example is that if you go to a restaurant and order food, you incur a debt even if you never looked at the menu. However, this is only the case when the price charged is "reasonable". A restaurant cannot unexpectedly give you a $1000 bill after you have ordered, even if that price was printed on the menu, and expect payment. While sellers have considerable leeway in defining what is a reasonable price, no court could possibly find that $1,200/minute was a reasonable price for consumer data service anywhere. Therefore, he is not obligated to pay, and if AT&T took him to court over it, they would lose.

Articles on the 'net and magazines are written by reporters, not scientists. If you want to examine the evidence, you need to read things written by actual climate scientists, which are published in academic journals. Most people (even reporters writing about climate change) don't bother, though, because real scientific papers involve more math and physics than they can handle. These people have nothing to contribute, and should not be talking about the subject.

I wonder why the command prompt use the Local Settings reparse point, but the shell can't.

Because commands typed in the command prompt are interpreted the same way as batch files, and many companies have old batch files which assume that Local Settings is a normal directory and manipulate its contents. The Explorer file manager can treat Local Settings differently than directories because it is used interactively, rather than by scripts.

The author of the linked article has completely misunderstood what this research is about. It is NOT about tolerating errors in the output of computations; that would be completely infeasible. It's about tolerating errors in intermediate values, by using redundancy. For example, three adders made out of unreliable transistors plus a control unit to have them vote, may be smaller and use less power than one adder made out of reliable transistors. However, you can't make everything out of unreliable transistors. In particular, the control unit, and the parts that compare results to each other, have to work reliably and can't be duplicated. That is what is meant by "some information was more valuable than other information", not the low-order bits of a numeric computation.

Suppose I witness a robbery or other crime. If I think I can photograph the perpetrator without drawing attention to myself, I will, and I'll give that photo to the police. On the other hand, if my camera makes a noise whenever it takes a picture, I won't, and the police will have one less lead. Catching actual criminals is more important than making life difficult for voyeurs, especially since they could easily find a workaround.