Merit should always consider strictly value.

Such a low slash ID for such a young child.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.

do programming languages count?

Yep, Thunderbird. It's awesome, and one of the few OSS projects I've actually donated to.

This isn't news. Look up the history of the Rothschild family and now how their private banking interest was tied up in just about every war in Europe from the 1770's on.

"The very point of intellectual property laws is that they protect only against certain specific kinds of appropriation....All creators draw in part on the work of those who came before, referring to it, building on it, poking fun at it; we call this creativity, not piracy.... Intellectual property rights aren't free; They're imposed at the expense of future creators and of the public at large.... This is why intellectual property law is full of careful balances between what's set aside for the owners and what's left in the public domain for the rest of us....It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of a creator's labor may be used by others without compensation. But this is not some unforeseen byproduct of our intellectual property system; it is the system's very essence. Intellectual property law assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely on the ideas that underlie it. This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate: It is the means by which intellectual property law advances the progress of science and art...."

- [Vanna] White v. Samsung Electronics America, Inc., 989 F.2d 1512 (9th Cir. 1993) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing).

Children? Really? You accused me of being a bot. It would be childish of me to accuse you of being an ESA shill.

Creators are under no obligation to seek statutory monopoly protection from the state either.

It is *literally* part of the patent bargain, and implicit in the idea that copyright terms are limited.

I'm finding fewer and fewer of your posts to be factual at this point.

Why constrain this to games? Why not software as a whole? The entire internet (and technology as a whole) depends largely on open source code, unencumbered protocols, and standardized, royalty free document formats.

Would the internet exist if only IPX and NetBIOS were viable?

A monopoly is literally the antithesis of a free market. A statutory monopoly doubly so.

What is the marginal cost of reproduction of information?

But it's ok for creators to loot the public domain and selectively make them part of their statutory monopoly? Are you arguing some sort of practical position, or a morality argument?