In my case, I was wondering if somebody would mention if the lack of a "permanent" energy source like the Sun would spell the death of our planet anyway, if the dying, expanding Sun didn't get rid of it first after all.

After what I saw on X-Men 3 I considered myself sufficiently warned and thought people who cared about the comics would be too.

I would expect something in the likes of:

- For 10 years, the R&D departments of companies A, B and C would not touch technology X due to its patented situation since the individual or company who owned the patent did not want to license it or the license made the investment prohibitive. [hinder example]

or

- Companies A, B and C did not fret to develop over patented technology X, creating innovations 1, 2 and 3. [no effect example]

or

- Company A came up with technology Y one year after technology X, previously patented by company B, developing over the idea behind X with a much better approach. It did so because it did not want to deal with the patent behind X. [innovation example]

Wouldn't such examples, provided they can be proved beyond reasonable doubt, be non anecdotal?

If I understand your argument well, you're saying that because software advanced so much in 40 years with patents, then patents must be great for innovation of software.

If that's the case, how come other patentable things like car parts didn't advance as much? WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR?

Seriously though (wait, was I joking? Anyway...), I can't help but imagine two situations:

First, if we were still using punch cards and/or software had not advanced as much as it did but still advanced, how would we be able to tell that it could not have advanced much more without patents?

Then, how to tell if all this advance we did have would not have happened in 20 years instead of 40 if there were no patents?

Maybe it's time to do some real science and show examples where patents helped or hindered innovation so that the argument can continue.

They must be taking Steve Ballmer as role model...

Screw it, I'm going to Mars.

And voters in Canada, who finally put those funny guys in majority power, are doing what exactly?

Except for Quebec voters, which broke their long tradition of voting for their own local interests and went massively for the NPD, the rest of the country clearly chose the government they have today.

And there's no excuse of the "I didn't know" sort. This same government which is now majority has been announcing all what it's doing now in the past minority-years. It's going exactly according to its promises.

The only problem with this line of thought is that Kyoto is expiring ANYWAY. It doesn't need to be sabotaged to be replaced.

In the mean time, Canada puts itself next to the countries which chose to be part of the problem instead of the solution.

You mean, like "you're a grammar-nazi"?

It's bad business model to support everything forever. It makes each new version more expensive than any predecessor due to the extra validation, maintenance and support. What customer wants to buy new software that costs ever more than the predecessor?

Show some successful companies that keep support for everything they ever made as API, or please stop trying to win the "discussion" by repeating the same thing over and over until we agree just to stop the torture.

Hmm... that's not what I understood from the summary. That is, I didn't understand that the article talked about how galaxies with closer arms rotate faster than galaxies with stretched arms and why.

Instead, what I understood is more like when you stretch your arms, they keep your elbows and hands rotating around you with the same orbital velocity, regardless of this common velocity being faster or slower for the entire body. But since there are no real arms linking the galaxy's elements, the orbital velocity of an object far from the center should be slower than that of a nearer object, I guess making galaxies look like discs instead of stretching arms. Yet, that's not how they look.

The article then tries to explain it with gravity from faraway objects as opposed to dark matter.

I could of course have misunderstood it entirely.

Only if it's dark.

For some reason, I don't get the impression that someone going through the trouble of polling all this money for such a bogus treatment will ever realize their mistake. I bet the quack thinks the same.

Thank you for your contribution. I wish you a bright future with a more mature mind.

I use a pocket note book as a diary, a small ziplock as a card holder and for some time soap bars instead of shampooing. I would still not consider note books to be part of the "diary" category, nor ziplocks part of "card holders" or soap bars as "shampooing".

Until smart phones, video games and such are commonly used as and called "computers", they will still be just smart phones, video games and such, regardless of how *you* use them.