You have to accept some moderation is done by mouth breathers. I put a full technical explanation of why something would not work in a national newspaper comment and got more downvotes than almost every other comment I had submitted combined.

Only a few short years ago (well about 1000), your average Swede would have been giving their children nice shiny longswords, placing them on a boat and encouraging them to tour the world and kill people....

Instead of polluting the oceans with these huge cables, we should attach fricken lasers to sharks.

At this point you might think I am going to do another tired re run of the Dr Evil comment, but if you had the imagination that he did you would realise that by also fitting optical detectors on sharks you could have a point to point internet mesh across all sharks in the ocean. SharkNet would not have a single point of failure as like the internet is supposed to do it could find another route in the event of the loss of any shark node.

I humbly submit that Dr Evil was a visionary who was simply ahead of his time and should be canonised into the pantheon of saints alongside Saint Steve of Jobs

It's been ages since I read Stroustrup or Kernighan & Ritchie, as I have largely moved on from embedded/Unix programming into Web based systems but I seem to recall one of the arguments for using C++ was that it could always do things as efficiently as C and possibly more so.

C++ is more or less a superset of C (give or take a few minor issues), why has regular C continued to thrive?

It is not how much explosives it takes to blow up a bus, it is how many buses you can take out in one mission. :-)

...carry 8,000lb+ of bombs to target as your typical modern F-16 can. Also I'll take a 20mm Vulcan cannon with LCOS over 8 machine guns any day.

Anyway if you're going to bounce rubble, do it properly with a BUFF and clean up anything left with an A-10!!

The closest thing at a similar stage of development is the PAK-FA T-50, which looks as though it will get flying before the F-35

Terminator 2 called and claimed the patent rights on killing...

Well in a roundabout way of thinking, its one of the simplest tests you can do to see if the phone can be accessed over the intertubes. All phones will have a contacts list/address book, so this will be supported by all Android phones.

Of course, when you think about it however, you realize that its more than a little absurd and creepy.

Technically, one could see the various software modules as "works protected etc.". The module is effectively a "key" granting access to the work. By creating this device, you are circumventing a technological measure.

It's a bit of a stretch, but you can probably sell this to a judge.

No I think it was a Norwegian Blue, but I'm not sure we can af-fjord any more references to that sort of thing

If a court did throw out all the evidence, and as a result they had to return all the Sold Bitcoin?

A quick Google reveals Microsoft got 8,500 design patents and a license to 30,000 (!) utility patents

A number of factors could have changed since 2011, apart from the possibility of patents expiring.

Samsung could have had a cross licensing agreement with Nokia, meaning Microsoft was getting paid twice. Also the US IP law has become more hostile to abstract patents, which probably form the bulk of Microsofts patent portfolio. Ironically Microsoft has probably picked up a bunch of Nokia patents, which may be much more useful in a patent slinging fight.