The ones he insists don't exist because the Guardian article is all lies?

If you're going to issue a denial, you should at least get your story internally consistent.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.

Fantastic, but Silicon Valley remains inside the United States. Therfore Silicon Valley companies are still subject to US law.

That's not nearly enough. I need three orders of magnitude more than that to power my flux capacitor.

Let me preface this with the fact that I'm an intellectual property specialist. I bill $450/hour, and still have lots of time to work on my startup without having to take venture capital.

I thought about some educational answers for your questions, but the insult at the start of your comment rubs me wrong and I decided I don't owe you anything. So, I'll save them.

I completely agree in principle, but in practice, the more software that is using the current version of the code, the more things will break when you change the design. That has the effect of making the code less malleable, proportional to the number of its dependents.

So for a function that is used only by your own program, it's no problem at all. For an in-house library that is used in several programs across your company, it's a bit of a hassle but doable. For a new computer language that is being used by a small number of devotees, it can be disruptive but worthwhile. For a library that is used worldwide by thousands of corporations, it has to be managed extremely carefully. And finally, for a ubiquitous computer language (e.g. C++) that has billions of man-hours of code that needs to keep working, breaking backwards compatibility might not be practical at all, no matter how great the benefits might be.

I think the moral of the story is: rewrite and redesign your code to make it as awesome as possible before it gets too popular, because afterwards you'll be stuck with it. :^)

... and even in that other 0.01% of the time, it's likely that your compiler will optimize the pretty human-readable code into the cool-but-cryptic bitmasking trick at the assembly level anyway. There's no need for the human programmer to do that sort of obfuscatory wizardry at the source code level, when the compiler can do it for him -- and likely do it more reliably as well, since compiler writers pay more attention to what is strictly language-legal vs what-seems-to-sort-of-work-today.

The first symptom of a new but incomplete understanding of patents is gold fever. That is when you have an idea that what you are holding is extremely valuable and that you must protect it from others at all costs. People tend to get irrational about it.

So here is some reality: The fact that you have even published your video (which is "use in commerce" under patent law) invalidates future patents that you might file on that same art. Then there is the prior art (including art you are not aware of), and the recent court finding in Alice v. CLS Bank that invalidates most process and method patents which describe software. These all work against the potential that your thesis is going to make you rich through patent licensing.

You can get a patent awarded, perhaps, that you can use to hoodwink an investor, but forcing an automotive company to pay you? Much less likely and it will cost $10 Million in attorney fees to get there.

Probably your school wants 51% of the revenue and your grant funding sources (and those of your college department) may have their own policies on patents.

Ah, good old "probably". A sure indicator that the poster hasn't bothered to actually research what he's claiming, but rather is just making something up that would support his pet conspiracy theory, if it were true.

While there may not be any dramatic breakthroughs, wind-turbine technology is become more cost-effective through good old economies-of-scale: bigger turbines, and larger production runs.

The new thing to phase in would be economical wind-turbines (as opposed to the smaller, more expensive-per-watt turbines of previous decades). And arguably, it's happening now (at least in places where conditions are favorable to wind)

I've got $50 that says they will break their oil addiction, at some point. (of course, that point may be only when there's no more oil remaining to be extracted... ;^) )

Power companies may or may not be dumb (YMMV), but like any large institution that manages expensive infrastructure, they are slow to react.

It's not like the day after wind power becomes cheaper than coal power a million windmills will spring up. More likely the power companies will operate their coal plants until it's not longer economical to do so (or until they are forced to stop, whichever comes first) and gradually phase in renewable power instead of building/upgrading their existing coal infrastructure.

i.e. Just because it would be cheaper for them to build windmills now than to build a coal plant now, doesn't mean it would be cheaper for them to build windmills now than to keep using the coal plant they already paid for.

There, fixed that for you.

Any predictions on when renewables will be cheaper than coal even when coal's externalities are not factored in?

(No snark intended; I'm interested because if/when that happens, the case for renewables becomes much easier to make, as the motivation is no longer group-interest but self-interest: by continuing to burn coal, electricity producers would be literally throwing money away)