Get a room you two.

I agree. Switching to a vegan diet is about the most effective thing that one can do to save the planet. Ending the horrific suffering of billions of fellow creatures is an added bonus.

I agree. Alternative energy is great, but a huge amount of energy is currently channeled into animal agriculture. The planet is being deforested. Rivers of drug-laden animal excrement flow out to the sea.

50 years is already way too long. They should reduce it to 3-5 years. That would give the artist plenty of time to make a profit. Unfortunately, copyright as it is now implemented and enforced is entirely for the benefit of large corporate interests. It stifles creativity rather than promoting it.

Good points. Furthermore, the power companies are already making predictions about usage. See TV Pickup or tea time in britain. Local weather is actually relatively easy to predict.

If you buy a product from Apple, it's not really yours. Oh, you own the lump of hardware, but the apps, the content, the OS? No, you do not own any of that.

Several posts, mostly by ACs, suggest that solar panels are putting "dirty" power back into the grid. Is there any truth to that?
They also suggest that net metering requires some extra infrastructure on the part of the utility, which I know to be completely false.

Garden Mythbusters: Does Sunlight and Water Mixing Really Burn Leaves?
Two years ago, four Hungarian scientists published a paper called “Optics of sunlit water drops on leaves: conditions under which sunburn is possible” in the journal New Phytologist. Given the near-universal belief that water drops can scorch plant leaves on a sunny day (e.g. the RHS book How To Garden: “Under a hot midday sun, water droplets on leaves will act as miniature magnifying glasses and may scorch them”), you may be surprised — or you may not — that no one had previously checked to see if this actually happens.
First of all, the short answer is no.
Are there any circumstances under which water drops on leaves can cause sunburn? Yes, but only if the leaf has a dense covering of water-repellent hairs, in which case drops can be held above the leaf surface, allowing them to focus light on the surface itself.

The problem with gstreamer, and anything based on it, is that it is a single-process model. That's fine as long as all the processing elements play nicely, but one poorly written plugin can bring everything crashing down and then you have to sift through lots of rubble to figure out what happened. Also, it doesn't scale like a distributed architecture would. Also, gstreamer is only now starting to think about support for GPGPUs.
Still, gstreamer is the best open-source flow-based framework that we have for now.

Whenever you start talking about "the CRT in the other room", do your friends and colleagues exchange looks and get all uncomfortable? What else do you hear? Voices? What do they tell you?