Innovation and improved technology isn't just about invention. An improvement in technology is an improvement in the techniques people use to do stuff. A marvellous new thing used by hardly anyone is only a very small innovation. So, if a law limits access to new inventions then the improvement in technology is also limited.

I suspect that 'new product not developed because its expensive' doesn't attract readers well enough. Besides, just think of how many more people would be using better technology if they could buy a better phone with the same money. Abolish all patents today and there'd be a jump in the technology people use - in the short term.

It all comes back to the core dilemma of intellectual property: the cost of reduced adoption of a new invention vs the cost of it not being financially worthwhile to invent.

That's a terrible definition.....even later in the same Wikipedia article it's redefined as 'an attempt to obtain economic rent', linking to the entry on economic rent itself, which has a section on monopoly rent which specifically mentions patents.

Economic rent is pretty much everywhere in some degree, because monopoly power is everywhere to some degree (nothing is perfectly competitive). And I think it would be wrong to just assume that it always causes a welfare loss just because it's become a (justifiable) mainstream-ish term of abuse, a correctly designed patent and copyright system being an obvious counterexample. Maybe in a perfect first-theorem-of-welfare-economics economy, but not in a real one.

I think that's unlikely, at least for most drivers. How many times have you experienced an emergency stop from 70mph? Or practiced regaining control from a skid? Or when sliding on ice, or aquaplaning? Most drivers will have no idea how their car behaves in those situations and have no idea how good their skills are because they've never been tested in those circumstances, or have only tested them once or twice. One would expect that a self-driving car's abilities will have been tested much more.

Or maybe there are more controlled environments - moving people around certain parts of airports springs to mind - which will be the first targets. Places where pedestrian and other traffic isn't allowed. Public and legal acceptance is far more likely there, and it'd be a better and eventually cheaper service than waiting for one of a handful of buses.

Indeed - specifically, in this case, people wanting the US constitution to apply to a European court handling a case brought by a Spanish man against a Spanish company, Google Spain. The data was collected by Google Inc, but for the purpose of allowing Google Spain to sell advertising in Spain.

Given that most of the anti-EU sentiment in the UK has been whipped up by anti-immigration types complaining that the UK doesn't control it's own borders, I think we'd have to expect new barriers to moving in and out of the UK. For many anti-EU people here, limiting free movement and kicking out foreigners seems to be the whole point of leaving the EU. I think a lot of the political mainstream would themselves want to pretty much recreate the EU membership in other treaties, but would be under a lot of pressure to limit movement from the anti-EU public and parties. And I'm sure the EU would be anxious to respond in kind.

The EU has a common tariff system, and EU members impose these tariffs on goods entering the EU. For example, it's 8.8% for knitted gloves and 7.6% for other kinds of gloves. Think, just for a moment, what this implies for someone wanting to move goods in to the UK from Ireland or France - or to/from Scotland if Scotland ends up independent inside the EU. Think of what's involved in enforcing that, in declaring goods, understanding regulations and handling the payments.

Mmm...I can't help thinking there's a hole in that somewhere. Couldn't they use the account to accept a bunch of payments for sales they don't intend to fulfil, transfer the money to themselves and then leave you with the chargebacks? Quite possibly PayPal will come after you if your account is negative.

There have been studies by linguists attempting to demonstrate that language comprehension involves acting out the meaning in your head. Something like this:

• Take a bunch of sentences, some meaningless, some implying movement towards the hearer ('Scratch your nose'), some away from the hearer ('Close the drawer').
• Split people in to two groups. Give them all a box with two buttons on it, one near to them the other further away. Give them the sentences one at a time.
• Tell one group to press the near button if the sentence they hear is valid. Tell the other one to press the far one.
• Observe that the 'far is valid' group takes longer to assess 'action towards the hearer' sentences as valid than 'action away from the hearer' sentences. Observe the opposite for the 'near is valid' group.

If language comprehension can interfere with planning physical movement like that then it's not hard to imagine it degrading driving skill.

Unfortunately, as a society we've developed strong social expectations that phone calls be answered immediately. Not just in cars - in casual conversations, and if you've ever been in a queue being served by someone also answering the phones you'll know that callers get priority every time. And once you've answered there's a strong social expectation that you'll pay attention and respond, and you don't get the usual gestures and situational awareness that politely indicate 'I really need to deal with this other thing right now'.

So I suspect that the best thing the original questioner can do is to establish a reputation as the person who never answers calls in the car.

As for legal responses.....people mostly wouldn't do it if they thought it would lead to so much as chipped paint or a $50 fine, never mind injury or enormous fines. The problem is that it almost always doesn't cause any of those things. Cranking up the fines probably won't help - it's cranking up detection rates that'll help. And it gives a good excuse to callers if fines are a common experience.

Now scale that. Or just lock it properly.

If you want simple, scalable and low sysadmin overhead and all you need are key -> value lookups then Amazon's S3 can be an excellent choice. You don't need to manage it, you don't need to work out how to add servers and its well proven at extremely large scales.

However, like a lot of other posters, I'm very sceptical that NoSQL is the place to start. SQL databases can do a LOT for you, are very robust and can scale very considerably. As your requirements grow you might find yourself wanting things like indexes, transactions, referential integrity, the ability to manually inspect and edit data using SQL and the ability to store and access more complex structures. You're likely to give yourself a lot of pain if you go straight for NoSQL, and even if you DO need to scale later combining existing SQL and new NoSQL data stores can be a useful way to go.

Poor sleep, too, IIRC. This is why I'm sitting in front of a 125W compact fluorescent bulb right now. The sort of thing people use for growing, err, orchids. Not sure that'd work if I didn't work from home...but maybe if I didn't work from home I'd be outside long enough each morning not to need it.

Hmm, for me I think it's not just the positive vs negative construction that makes it seem odd, although it certainly did leave me looking back along the sentence for the negative I'd missed.

Perhaps it's something like this. Compare 'I don't drink coffee any more' to 'I won't drink any more coffee' (both UK English as I would use it). Now compare 'calling me to join crappy companies anymore' to 'calling me to join any more crappy companies'. The first two sentences imply that I used to drink lots of coffee, and that I'm now not going to drink more. The second two seem to imply that I used to join lots of crappy companies and that I'm being called upon to join additional ones - any additional ones, not specific additional ones. That's not what the sentence is meant to mean and doesn't make pragmatic sense (why would a recruiter want me to join any additional crappy companies rather than a specific one? or possibly he wants me to join any one company which is more crappy than the current one, which is equally strange).

It seems that non-US-English speakers will need to treat 'anymore' as a new dialect word not related to 'any' or 'more'.

Also, for people who don't already have it installed, with Google Docs and pretty much anything else that's free you can just go right ahead and use it. No hassling the IT department to install stuff, and when there's no organization-wide licence available, no messing around getting access to the company's money.

Presumably there are other ways of reducing the pest population and ways of delaying resistance to this and to pesticides. Consider crop rotation, for example. Gardeners know that some plants shouldn't be planted in the same place year after year because the pest population increases over time (and because of the effect on the soil, and sometimes other reasons). I'm sure farmers know this, too. But if maize is the best paying crop and someone offers you these seeds as a way to continue to plant maize on a heavily infested area, what are you going to do?