It may surprise you to learn that there are countries outside of the USA, and many of them contain Christians. In fact, the majority of the world's Christians live somewhere other than America!

They'll fix dangerous bugs, same as they do now. It's called a product recall. On cars, it usually amounts to taking your car to the dealer and waiting while they replace a part. You won't get the software update that makes lane changes smoother on next year's model, but you'll get the bug fix for the issue where the car sometimes mistakes the ditch for the middle of the road.

You might want to read what you linked to - the levy doesn't exist on DVDs since it only covers audio. Download music in Canada, without making it available yourself (so no bittorrent), and you should be good. Download a movie and you can still be sued.

Important to realize here is that Ontario and Quebec, where engineer is definitely a protected title, represent about 60% of the population of Canada.

No, see, this is different because it's on a social network now. Take all the patents that were granted in the past 20 years that were obvious but had 'on the internet' appended and start appending 'on a social network'. That'll be the next 10 years of crap patents.

This may vary by area, but it's pretty common for the law to say that once your trash is on the curb it's abandoned and fair game for anyone to search through.

You're counting the cost of construction of renewables, and ignoring the cost of mining and processing the uranium for the nukes. Unless you know of some 0-carbon mining process the idea that nuclear creates 0 carbon is BS. Wind and solar are actually 0-carbon once built. This is +5 interesting why?

We built the LHC, a massive expense, for no reason other than basic science. There is, to my knowledge, no goal for the LHC that will directly justify its cost, but we built it anyway because basic science is important. This is no different. Maybe it won't work, that's fine. But we'll learn something in trying, we'll have a better understanding of what it required, maybe we'll figure out some new materials to get us closer to a working reactor, maybe we'll just end up with a lot more data to examine. If we don't keep trying what do you think will drive the other technologies required for fusion? Saying we shouldn't do it because we could put the money elsewhere is just as dumb as saying we shouldn't explore Mars because people are starving in Africa.

I didn't get that out of it at all. What I read was that she didn't want to be buddies with her censor. She understood that she would want to push back against the censorship at times, and that's a hell of a lot easier to do if you aren't going to meet up for dinner after work. You see the same thing in most companies. Development and QA aren't generally too close, or QA starts ignoring minor bugs rather than pestering Dev. Sales can cause huge problems if whoever is in charge of product requirements doesn't feel like they can say no to requests because they go golfing with the sales guy. That's not to say there isn't mutual respect and a common goal, just that the individual people need some professional detachment in order to do their jobs to the best of their abilities.

Is this how they're getting their predictions?

There's still some air up there - otherwise the balloon wouldn't be able to get there. There's not enough for a person to self-stabilize, but he had a chute that was set to go off automatically if he spun fast enough to be dangerous that would have been enough to stabilize him.

It's only unusual if you only consider it and Christianity. In fact, it would probably be more correct to say that the offshoots of Judaism are unusual for their interest in converting the masses and disliking nonbelievers. I've never known a Hindu to try to convert someone. Or a Buddhist. I've never met someone into Zoroastrianism or Confucianism, but I've never heard about them being pushy. I've talked to native Americans about their spiritual beliefs and they were happy to talk, but certainly didn't try to make me share their beliefs.

Since Japan, you mean? And Germany before that? It's a pretty well-established way of getting to an industrialized economy. The only question is if they will be able to make the leap from cheap imitation crap to cheap imitation quality.

The building is still usually metered, and whoever owns it has to pay. If people use more water they'll just raise rent on everyone.

That depends on the problem. I assume the CIA wants it for breaking encryption, which means they want it for factoring large numbers. That's a problem that is really hard for a normal computer to do, but really easy for it to verify. If factoring a 1024 bit number takes 10000 tries, and each try takes a second, you're still several orders of magnitude better than the current state of the art and you've rendered many of the current common encryption schemes useless.