Canada, save Quebec, is common law. (As I recall, New Orleans also has a Continental-based civil code like Quebec, both being former colonies of France).

In ancient times...
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a strange race of people... the Druids

No one knows who they were or what they were doing
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock... Of Stonehenge

Stonehenge! Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge! Where a man's a man
And the children dance to the Pipes of Pan

Hey!

Stonehenge! 'Tis a magic place
Where the moon doth rise with a dragon's face
Stonehenge! Where the virgins lie
And the prayers of devils fill the midnight sky

And you my love, won't you take my hand?

We'll go back in time to that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry and the cats meow
I will take you there, I will show you how

Oh!

And oh how they danced
The little children of Stonehenge
Beneath the haunted moon
For fear that daybreak might come too soon

And where are they now?
The little children of Stonehenge
And what would they say to us?
If they were here... tonight

Did they find that? I'm sure we all want to meet the doctor... ;)

The voice of navel-gazing stupidity has spoken!

I doubt one could even begin to count the ways that government helped Bell along.

A lot of basic research does not produce profits in anything like a marketable timeline, and yet, without basic research, marketable discoveries won't happen at all. You can't feed yourself on developments that might take years to produce results.

Possibly because the disappearance of the Franklin expedition lead to one of the largest maritime searches in history.

If I'd say I'm underwhelmed, it would be a big understatement.

Every major device announcement that Apple made in the recent years was always driven by one thing: It had a purpose. It provided something that was lacking in the world. Not a totally new invention in many cases, but a solution. Smartphones existed before the iPhone, but it is clear that the smartphone market history can be divided into "before the iPhone" and "after the iPhone" - just look at pictures of smartphones from those two periods.

iWatch? I know it was rumoured for two years or so, but in all that time I couldn't see which problem it solves and what meaning to life it has, and I still can't. It seems the Jobs spirit has left, because this is clearly a device that was made in response to the rumours about it, not because someone knew what he was doing.

For one thing that is a work of fiction, and there is plenty in there to give it away as something that will never be reality. Then there's also the fact that Minecraft is a poorly optimized Java game with graphics from the 1990s, not the foundation for some world wide universe.

But funny thing about money, people always want more.

Except Excel is less prone to errors and data loss.

Vancouver, BC has a very extensive trolleybus network, with 265 active trolley busses. The system works quite well, and the busses do have battery backup, so they can go off the wires for short periods of time (to go around road construction, accident, pass a parked bus, etc...). As for the wires being ugly? I dunno, they're just part of the fabric of the city. There are some intersections though with rather impressive spider webs hanging over them. :)

Off the top of my head DirectX, Visio, Internet Explorer, Bungie, and Wininternals all worked out very well for them. Not saying you personally like all the products there, but they were all commercially successful in a number of ways.

I mean seriously, why would you want Mojang? Minecraft itself has already made most of its money. You'd never make $2 billion on it going forward, it's big sales have already happened. So you'd be buying the talent/IP for future games... ya, about that. Mojang seems to have little or nothing at all in the pipe to speak of. 0x10c has gone all of nowhere, Scrolls has very little interest anymore and that's about it.

When you look at Minecraft, particularly what it started as, where it came from (Infiniminer) and how much has come form community contribution, it is fairly apparent that Notch is not some genius game designer, he just had the right idea at the right time, and got lucky that it went viral. Minecraft was not some amazing feat of design, it was a digital lego game that struck a chord with people. Fair enough, and he deserves his success, but that isn't the kind of thing worth buying in to, particularly given 0x10c's complete lack of development.

I can't see what MS hopes to gain. Maybe the Minecraft name? I guess, in theory, that is worth some money but I don't really think so. I think people will happily play a good builder game, regardless of title.

Just seems like a bad use of money to me.

There is a strong correlation between increased CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution and atmospheric CO2. This has been confirmed in enough different ways that I don't think it's useful to continue trying to claim otherwise (so can we all stop pretending that Mann's hockey stick graph is the only correlation point we have).

Since that correlation exists, and it's clear to just about everyone in the research community that higher CO2 emissions leads to higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2, then cutting emissions should make some difference to continued growth of said concentrations. Whether it is too late or not is a matter of some debate, though most of the reports I read suggest we still could expect some moderation of global temperatures by emissions reductions, though there will be a point in the not-so-distant future where the more severe effects will happen.