Just mixing unusual ingredients wouldn't be enough for a patent though. You would have to come up with some new process of cooking, like freeze drying or liquid nitrogen baths or infusing the food with liquid oxygen and lighting it at the customer's table so it cooks in a few milliseconds and spreads itself around the room a bit.

If you could put the ribbon down the side of the screen then I wouldn't mind it so much. My screen is far wider than it is tall, so vertical space is precious whereas the sides of the screen are usually filled with wasted blank spaces.

This is just a report from a parliamentary inquiry and is not being proposed as a new law. Personally, I can't see it making it through the system even if it does get proposed at some point. There are many more important things that are actually in the process of being made law that we should concentrate on.

This is part one of the process of introducing a draconian and unpopular new law. First you come up with something completely over the top and unacceptable. Then, over a few months you water it down here and there, chopping little bits, amending others, until you end up with something that is draconian and unpopular. But it'll be accepted because it's not as bad as the original plan which, by then, will be falsely seen as the alternative. It's a flaw in human logical thought that has been exploited by politicians since they first crawled out of the sewer.

You are missing a major and insurmountable reason why FRAND can not be used by GPL products - by its very nature any GPL license is automatically carried forward from user to user, transferred down the line from whoever originally writes the code through each redistributor, to whoever ends up using it. This is not possible with a FRAND license because it requires an explicit license to each distributor. This means that FRAND is utterly incompatible with FRAND and there is nothing that can change this.

Common sense is very often wrong. I'd rather have some data to work on than just making a vague guess based on an emotional response to a situation I don't know enough about. "Common sense" has been responsible for some very bad decisions, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Spock#Sudden_infant_death_syndrome

You are one of the 10% then. Most people use their PCs to look up the lottery numbers and make barely literate posts to Facebook.

I think tablets ARE the way of the future - they do everything that about 90% of people use their home PCs for. I'd love to have one so I don't have to traipse off to the PC every time I want to use the web but while my PC works it's just a waste of money to fork out £££s to replace something that works perfectly well. But in the current climate, I'm not spending money on things I don't need. I'm sure I'm not the only one and I think this is the reason they aren't selling like they should.

None of the thermostats I've seen (not that I've looked that hard) have the one feature I want: a button that raises the set temperature by 2 degrees C for 30 minutes and then lowers is back to normal over the next hour. It would please the ladies who want an instant blast of heat while not annoying the chaps who don't want the house heated to tropical levels all day when it doesn't get turned back to normal.

What he did in the past doesn't change the fact that he seems to have turned into a troll, repeating the same untruths over and over again like a broken record.

He's not much of a "patent expert" if he can't tell that this case is not about patents. Maybe "clueless troll Florian Mueller" would be more accurate?

... "another expert, who actually knew how computers worked, was unavailable for comment - he was laughing too hard to speak coherently".

You could go further and not actually bother to release the film. There's no need to go to all the trouble and expense of actually getting it in cinemas or on DVD. Just allow a copy to leak onto a torrent and sue everyone who has ever seen it.

We could use the generated electricity to power desalinisation plants.

Mine has been around for 800 years now. Hopefully it'll last at least 25 more until I retire.