Courts around the country are being flooded with mass copyright lawsuits. In a typical case, the owner of a pornographic film sues dozens of anonymous defendants in a single lawsuit, obtains their contact information, and then tries to extort a four-figure settlement from each defendant before the case reaches the courtroom. The potential embarrassment of having one's name publicly associated with pornographic works gives even innocent defendants a strong incentive to settle.

But we only finished paying off our student loans—check this out, all right, I’m the President of the United States—we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.

This, I take it, is what many readers meant when they said, in a tone of triumph, that science works. Yes, it does, but so does literary criticism (it settles interpretive disputes, at least for a while) and so does therapy (it enhances the ability to socially interact, at least sometimes), and so does religious faith (it gives meaning and direction to life, at least for some people).

Artists build on top of science.

Renaissance painters used Cartesian geometry to invent perspective. Nineteenth century photographers' adapted industrial chemistry into the photographic process. Contemporary filmmakers shoot on cutting edge cameras made possible by the latest in sensor miniaturization. Each generation of artists turns the knowledge of their time into new creative tools.

People who learn things independently develop strategies and infrastructure to get all the things they would get if they were going to school.

Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.

With Martin's system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone's card for the card in next day's compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.

The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players—designers, graphic artists, editors—stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the "Electronic Information Age," these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses.

Despite the fact that 78.1% of the air we breathe is nitrogen, the gas is relatively unavailable because it is so unreactive: nitrogen molecules are held together by strong triple bonds. It was not until the early 20th century that the Haber process was developed to harness the atmospheric abundance of nitrogen to create ammonia, which can then be oxidized to make the nitrates and nitrites essential for the production of nitrate fertilizer and explosives. Prior to the discovery of the Haber process, ammonia had been difficult to produce on an industrial scale.

The Haber process is important today because the fertilizer generated from ammonia is responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population. It is estimated that half of the protein within human beings is made of nitrogen that was originally fixed by this process, the remainder was produced by nitrogen fixing bacteria and archaea.

How is it possible the mid-tier Android vendors cannot eke out revenue growth with that kind of global Android unit explosion still going on?

The most likely explanation is the rapid expansion of the low-cost Android phone vendors, particularly ZTE and Huawei. In 2010, Vodafone and Orange decided to give these Chinese companies a shot at becoming mainstream vendors in Europe. The experiment was a wild success

Some say they are in a “Debt Trap”, and indeed they are– a cycle where debt piles on debt and becomes difficult to escape. The average household debt in just credit cards is over $15k and the average interest charged on this debt is over 13% per year[1]. Debt payments absorb between 11% and 24% of people’s incomes, depending on what is counted.[2] But if we pull back, there is a game, a “Debt Game” if you will, that has winners and losers. A well-designed game makes the winners think they deserve to win, and the losers feel that if they just try again they might just win. But it is important to know it is a game, because games have rules. These rules are made up, they are an invention, and so, in theory, they can be changed.

Just as New York Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane is concerned whether his newspaper is printing lies or the truth, we here at V.F. are looking for reader input on whether and when Vanity Fair should spell “words” correctly in the stories we publish.

I bought a WebOS device and went to Taiwan. Now I understand why the Web on Mobile is a pretty big deal.

The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism... A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months in the future.

The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making such six-month predictions for a period of two and a half years, on at least fourteen different occasions, starting with a column in the November 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times.

It’s a pretty shallow insight to say that a comedian who has a special named Shameless creates his comedy about shame, but I never noticed. Louis CK has jokes because he is ashamed of his body, ashamed of his thoughts, his culture, his whiteness, whatever. Every joke seems to be about shame in some way. Ashamed of the things he doesn’t do that he knows he should. Ashamed of the things that he does do that he knows he shouldn’t. Ashamed of his privilege, and ashamed of how he doesn’t do anything to help others who don’t have it.

Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph.

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Many people seem to assume that the Web will one day become the one and only client computing platform on Earth, therefore it must not be controlled by anyone. This is a dangerous assumption. The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript triumvirate are just another platform, like Windows and Android and iOS, except that unlike those platforms, they do not have an owner to take responsibility for them.