- Taking a picture of London's double-deck red bus: common place.
- Taking a picture of London's double-deck red bus in front of the Big Ben: common place.
- Doing selective desaturation with Photoshop: common place.
- THINKING about taking a picture of the red bus in front of the big Ben and selectively decolorizing the picture: common place (only takes a semi-professional photographer).
- But DOING it is now Copyright Justin Fielder, thank you very much.

[Insert your worst insult here] you!

Oh, ok then, keep your ideas to yourself. I'm sure you'll have lots of fun inside your head.

I'm sure the NASA people will be glad to hear that there is an infinite number of possible alternatives to the main Earth model of life. That is, considering they didn't think about that already.

Now suppose you had two possibilities:

1- Most life is Earth-like, anywhere in the Universe.

2- Most life is NOT Earth-like in the Universe.

Now, we're trying to find life in a neighbor planet. Which of the above possibilities would you think make up for a more reachable goal?

That's not what the patent grants either. If it were, it could have had a stronger ground...

I don't know specifically about hybrids, but in Canada the MPG rates are used quite openly with all models to brag about their better efficiency compared to their competitors.

When I failed to match the MPG announced for my Smart, all that the technical consultant from Mercedes had to say was that these MPG rates are unrealistic and are not to be taken seriously.

So I'm not inclined to pity the poor manufacturers for failing to have a realistic rating.

In my case, I was wondering if somebody would mention if the lack of a "permanent" energy source like the Sun would spell the death of our planet anyway, if the dying, expanding Sun didn't get rid of it first after all.

After what I saw on X-Men 3 I considered myself sufficiently warned and thought people who cared about the comics would be too.

I would expect something in the likes of:

- For 10 years, the R&D departments of companies A, B and C would not touch technology X due to its patented situation since the individual or company who owned the patent did not want to license it or the license made the investment prohibitive. [hinder example]

or

- Companies A, B and C did not fret to develop over patented technology X, creating innovations 1, 2 and 3. [no effect example]

or

- Company A came up with technology Y one year after technology X, previously patented by company B, developing over the idea behind X with a much better approach. It did so because it did not want to deal with the patent behind X. [innovation example]

Wouldn't such examples, provided they can be proved beyond reasonable doubt, be non anecdotal?

If I understand your argument well, you're saying that because software advanced so much in 40 years with patents, then patents must be great for innovation of software.

If that's the case, how come other patentable things like car parts didn't advance as much? WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR?

Seriously though (wait, was I joking? Anyway...), I can't help but imagine two situations:

First, if we were still using punch cards and/or software had not advanced as much as it did but still advanced, how would we be able to tell that it could not have advanced much more without patents?

Then, how to tell if all this advance we did have would not have happened in 20 years instead of 40 if there were no patents?

Maybe it's time to do some real science and show examples where patents helped or hindered innovation so that the argument can continue.

They must be taking Steve Ballmer as role model...

Screw it, I'm going to Mars.

And voters in Canada, who finally put those funny guys in majority power, are doing what exactly?

Except for Quebec voters, which broke their long tradition of voting for their own local interests and went massively for the NPD, the rest of the country clearly chose the government they have today.

And there's no excuse of the "I didn't know" sort. This same government which is now majority has been announcing all what it's doing now in the past minority-years. It's going exactly according to its promises.

The only problem with this line of thought is that Kyoto is expiring ANYWAY. It doesn't need to be sabotaged to be replaced.

In the mean time, Canada puts itself next to the countries which chose to be part of the problem instead of the solution.

You mean, like "you're a grammar-nazi"?

It's bad business model to support everything forever. It makes each new version more expensive than any predecessor due to the extra validation, maintenance and support. What customer wants to buy new software that costs ever more than the predecessor?

Show some successful companies that keep support for everything they ever made as API, or please stop trying to win the "discussion" by repeating the same thing over and over until we agree just to stop the torture.