Yes, and it's because it doesn't make sense that we immediately understand that it means something different.

When someone asks how cold it is answering with the temperature is a good answer, but that isn't really the precise answer to the question. It depends on context and when we aren't talking about heat engines and ratios of temperatures in Kelvin then we understand that that it's 'twice as cold as -10 C' means something like 'the rate of cooling of body at about 37 C in the present conditions is twice as high if were -10 C and there was no wind'. The only way to not come to such a conclusion when one thinks about it is to purposefully not understand.

I don't even believe that this is something that might risk causing misunderstandings about heat and temperature, because people usually have fairly good intuition about the cooling effect of the wind and arrive at this interpretation naturally as soon as they give it any thought.

The AC is making a serious error here and it almost seems as if though he imagines the US to be the entire world even weather-wise.

Meanwhile, here in Europe we have weather so unusually warm that it's almost unnatural. I live in Sweden and this time of year I can usually do such things as skate, ski cross country and engage other snow-requiring activities. However, today it's been six degrees Celsius and I'm seriously considering taking a short drive with the top down tomorrow provided that it's sunny.

This is of course kind of anecdotal but actual data (http://www.smhi.se/klimatdata/meteorologi/2.1353/showImg.php?par=tmpAvv) demonstrates the same thing. About five degrees warmer than the normal temperatures and probably much warmer during the warmest part of the day.

Well, I imagine that the total chilling effect on a human is doubled. Half the temperature reallly only makes physical sense in Kelvin though (i.e. "The hot end is at 600 K (326.85 C) and the cold end is 300 K (26.85 C), so the heat engine is at most 1-300/600=50% efficient").

It almost definitely isn't. I remember transforming plasmids with parts for tetracycline resistance into bacteria in highschool and I can't imagine that this would be allowed if tetracycline were something that one would want to use as an antibiotic for humans.

Also, people have debt in dollars, which therefore have actual value, since people need it to pay interest and to eventually pay them back.

It seems that combatants are defined as those who participate directly. I modify my previous statement, replacing 'combatant' with 'member of the armed forces of a party to the conflict'.

I do not believe that this is obvious.

By assigning him a special status the army does effectively incorporate him as a, possibly unarmed, auxiliarly. Not every combatant participates by directly participating in hostilities. Logistic support troops are a common thing after all.

Sorry, Lembke had an improvement of todays magnetic bearings, not today's magnetic gears.

It would be good if it weren't true that patents were something for the small inventor.

Among novel machines I've looked at recently, there one was invented by a university professor, Kais Atallah (whose invention was a type of magnetic gear, to which he obtained a patent, which got the whole thing funded), Torbjörn Lembke, whose invention was a magnetic bearing, who worked in industry, had an idea for an improvement of today's magnetic gears, wrote a PhD dissertation about it, patented it before publishing and is currently manufacturing it.

You might not call these real garage inventors, but I have a last example. Glenn Thompson, an Australian programmer, who, after what must have been quite careful thought, found a way to make a new kind of constant velocity joint (now called a Thompson Coupling). He patented this, having gotten the patent, got investors and has now, have now, having gotten funded, been manufacturing and selling these joints for some years.

If it weren't for patents these people would likely have obtained minimal reward for their work. If you have an invention, patents do protect it. You might say that they if they were "real small inventors" wouldn't have money to sue, but I imagine that such even a small inventor, with no money and only a good patent, would even in America, be able to take his case to court and win with enough probability to deter patent infringment. At worst such an inventor might be forced to find a lawyer to take his case on contingency.

Usually when one talks about civilians the warfare is such that civilians are clearly defined class, but if during a sustained occupation civilians from one side are granted particular rights, they do in some way become part of the occupying army even if they do not wear uniforms or carry weapons

Surely, for example, a farmer placed by the German army in Poland during the Second World War while a Polish farmer was displaced could not in any meaningful sense be counted as a civilian, due to the particular status he is given by the occupying army. One could think of him as a soldier, only with the somewhat curious rank 'farmer'.

They're certainly not environmentalists and while they are clearly arguing for the wrong reasons there are excellent environmental reasons to mix in ethanol in automobile fuel.

Specifically, the efficiency of a heat engine increases with the hot temperature (which increases with compression ratio). In piston engines this is limited by knocking, which in can be prevented by mixing in various things, some of the horrible or hard to produce, and among these ethanol seems a fairly good choice, it being available in volume and being generally harmless.

The solution to problems created by the goverment is usually to govern the goverment, a process excellently facilitated by democracy.

In this case it seems a bit fiddly, since the US is so large and has its particular voting system, but had this happened in a smaller country I imagine that there would be an inquiry followed, in a year or two, by new laws, banning this kind of government favour to companies.

I would however not be surprised if this kind of thing is not already illegal. How much government you can have strongly depends on how well-functioning a democracy you have. With multi-party system without campaign contributions you'd have fourth or fifth parties seizing upon this kind of thing almost before it ended up in newspapers, and without the campaign contributions the inventives to favour an individual company might not even be there in the first place.

While this might possibly happen (especially in America) this subverted protection might at least better than no protection at all.

Stronger obviousness tests would probably prevent the very worst examples of what you describe, and if you combined this with some sort of legal aid for inventors you could probably have a system which was quite fair.

Why would this be true? Whether someone doesn't have the right to manufacture something doesn't really have anything to do with the merit of his improvement, or with its novelty.

This is untrue as well, although less obviously so. Take the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator. At the time that it was invented there was still twelve years left on the patent for Baltazar von Platen's and Carl Munter's improvement of the gas absorption refrigerator which was manufactured by Electrolux at the time. While their idea had several advantages, such as avoiding poisonous gases then used in refrigerators, Einstein and Szilard probably never intended to start manufacturing refrigerators. However, not wanting some competitor to start manufacturing refrigerators, Electrolux bought Einstein and Szilards patents.

The benefit we get from this isn't that someone would start manufacturing novel refrigerators (because electrolux didn't), but in getting information about Szilard's and Einstein's idea. If they hadn't decided to patent it the design might not even be known today.

Einstein's an Szilard's design was an excellent one, and has significant merit (that no-toxic-gases thing). I don't think that there was any prototype built in eithe Szilard's or Einstein's time though.

Patents aren't meant to granted in return for manufacturing a product. They're meant to granted in return for releasing descriptions of how novel , non-obvious things work.

It might even be the case that the inventor doesn't have the right to manufacture his invention due to his invention being covered by another's patent. His contribution is then his nonobvious idea-- and the way that he is compensated is by that he's granted a monopoly on his improvement, so that someone who already manufactures the unimproved device would need to license the improvement from him.