Napster did not charge for use of the service. That’s the fundamental difference that everyone seems to be missing. We can argue all day about copyright laws and piracy, but Napster and other peer to peer services are fundamentally different than a service that charges money for access to things that it does not own.

What would you call charging customers to distribute a product that you do not own the right to distribute?

That’s a particularly stupid way to frame the situation.

Gold is a relatively soft metal. Trump’s dietary fiber consists solely of hamburger buns and fried chicken breading. This toilet tragedy is extremely predictable.

Finally, an alternative to gray goo or nuclear armageddon.

There is no outside, or at least we can never know if there’s an outside. If we can measure it, it’s in our universe. This has got nothing to do with heat death, big crunch, or anything else other than geometry.

Because they didn’t find any weed, obviously.

Any time you can move from n=1 to n>1 you vastly increase understanding. Biological fields could see a revolution equal to that of Darwin’s if we found evidence of life that arose independent of Earth.

To continue your analogy- it’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave, except that we see no shadows of anything outside the cave. Everything we know about the cave suggests that we should see shadows, but we don’t. This suggests that either our assumptions are wrong or our understanding of the cave and its surroundings is…

How many of those residents also shot and killed an unidentified man?

Obviously.  I wasn’t disputing that.

Drainage isn’t the issue. There are entire neighborhoods built INSIDE the flood zones that were supposed to contain only rice paddies. The only thing that will fix Houston’s problem is either a massive public works project for a dike system or a massive buy-back of flooded property that never should have been improved…

Minding your own damn business is usually a pretty good strategy.

Thanks for the correction on my joke. It would be applicable had I actually said the idea for the light bulb was stolen. The joke is that Edison’s style is to steal ideas, therefore an “Edison style” bulb must be made from stolen ideas.

I will electrocute an elephant to prove how wrong you are.

Isn’t an “Edison style” bulb, by definition, supposed to be made of stolen ideas?

Never is a long time.  These are daunting obstacles that you list, but all of them are basically engineering problems that can be solved, not impossible physical limits that must be crossed.

Unfortunately, the Tesla owner happened to park in the exact spot that I discard all of my old screws and nails.

The low pressure system associated with said rain then swept into the Southeast and is now camping on the Gulf Coast of Georgia and Alabama

How much precipitation from a hurricane is actually water sucked up from the surface rather than evaporation? A more likely scenario would be flooding from contaminated water in the storm surge, but storm surge water is already salt water.