Why wouldn't a black hole a big star on the inside?
Because the gravity is too intense for even the neutrons to support its weight and there's currently no other known force or mechanism known that can stop the collapse. You might be right, but something new would have to be discovered or theorized to allow for that possibility.
As for legalizing highly addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin, I don't see how decriminalizing them [could] possibly be a good idea.
As someone else pointed out: as counter-intuitive as it might be, the data is in since Portugal ran the experiment.
How about I choose women to have personal responsibility? Why does them having sex instantly mean I have a bill to pay?
The hard reality is that it's never going to be 100%. So what do you do? Let the kids starve to death? Or force the mother into doing crimes or prostitution just to feed her kids?
And the idea of putting it in parking lots is even dumber. Yeah, parking lots where cars are parked on it during the day (this blocking the sun) and empty at night (where there's no sun).
But if you want to donate money, go right ahead.
If I had a black box wherein you fed in paper tape encoding data on one end and different paper tape with the data compressed came out the other end (thus taking less tape), that would be a data compression machine. Certainly, if the black box had no software at all but was instead a bunch of gears and such, i.e., totally mechanical, you'd have to agree that the machine would be patentable.
But it's still the type of machine that's being patented (a data compression machine). The preferred embodiment as described in the patent is just one way to do it. Now if instead of gears you had a computer running software, well that doesn't change the functioning of the machine -- the tape output is the same for a given input. Therefore, the fact that a particular embodiment just might happen to use a computer and software rather than gears is irrelevant.
... Bill Gates' home from the 1990s
... so how'd Apple get that patent, anyway?
Patents last for 20 years. Hence, something patented by Microsoft in 1990 would have expired in 2010.
A list is only as strong as its weakest link. -- Don Knuth