Because your client will want new plugins every week, gets tired of asking you everytime, and wants you to set up the permissions so that the GUI plugin installer works ("what do you mean not a good idea? the last site I had worked that way and I never had any problems with it"), then proceeds to install all the plugins he needs to make his blog on cats and other larger-than-life stuff buzzword compatible.

Here's my idea: require the company to define the value of the patent (i.e. how much inventing it cost) with the patent application. And the patent application processing fee is 10% of that value. The patent owner can only sue for damages up to the patent value.

If you actually used a billion to make that invention, then 10% of that is a small price to pay for protection of the investment. If you're a troll, you need to be a troll with very deep pockets. And hopefully some part of that 10% fee can be used to properly review patent applications and establish a court that specializes in handling patent disputes so that lawsuits can be streamlined.

Won't help with already issued patents though.

I don't know about Italy specifically, but in most places you do not need a piece of paper with hand written signatures to have a contract. Paper contracts are used for "important" stuff because it offers a simple way for proving afterwards that there indeed was a contract and what it's terms were.

If a written contract was necessary, how would two illiterate people agree on things?

There are cities that can get flooded when there's an unusual amount of rain. Not sure if that would cause large scale power outages though.

Also in northern Europe (Scandinavia + Finland), rural areas suffer from outages caused by trees falling on power lines. Those can take days to get fixed if the "storm"* hits a wide enough area.

* A strong wind + rain/snow associated with it. We don't have stuff like hurricanes up here.

Next time when you start a program from Windows start menu, watch closely your computer. You can see that there are no elves taking the old computer and bringing a new one. So it's still the same computer.

However, if the software being started is a truely remarkable, almost magical software such as a Strong AI (brought to you by Strong AI labs, patent pending), then who knows, maybe there will be elves.

I think we need a disorder classification for people who are obsessively trolling the internet.

... still waiting for that success though.

It's not really that complicated, take shovels and brooms and go dig them up. The world's population is still increasing, there won't be a shortage of manual labor.

The generation gap would have to be handled by the same system that takes care of nights. Or alternatively, non-critical functions of the society will stop for a moment. Office slaves will have a day off from that cold white LED glow of their workstations, and will get some time to enjoy the company of their families and friends. Temporarily running out of electricity won't be the end of humanity. Until/unless we get usable fusion power, we may just have to adapt.

Too bad any potential alternatives will mean giving more money to Microsoft. And it's hard to beat the evil of MS tax.

A question about applying this to the subject of the day: If someone assaults my demographic (not me directly), with (a) me being the only person of that demographic there, (b) there are N other people representing that demographic at the location (with varying values of N); am I allowed to take a stand for my demographic and demand them to stop?

No. If it were her fault, that would mean he did something that had warranted him getting fired and she was just a whistleblower, pointing out a good reason why he is not fit for his job. Is that what actually happpened?

Now that we're asserting blame, I think the company the man worked for is to be blamed for him losing his job. If a non-PR employee tells a dongle joke in a crowd and someone gets upset, isn't firing him a bit over board? I'd imagine that the proper non-overreacting response would be to ask the guy to explain himself (of course there is a slight chance that this happened and he told his boss to f- off), then tell him to watch his mouth at public events.