Because "people being chauffeured around" represent such a small proportion of rush-hour traffic that basing a decision around this particular concern would be far more emotional than pragmatic.

you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

"They also hope to incorporate GPS data to adjust the direction of the headlights according to the lane that a driver is occupying, illuminating it more brightly compared to surrounding lanes."

I was all for the complicated but elegant solution until I hit that phrase. Considering how often GPS data sets can't even figure out that a road is one-way, this sounds like a solution that's going to behave very oddly when the data doesn't line up with the reality.

They've got lots of good ideas, but there are huge implementation obstacles with most of them. Give me lights that are smart enough to handle what they can actually see; I don't want lights depending on someone else's data set to get the job done.

It's very common these days for companies to allow universities to use their technology at the cost of tying the company into the university's patent revenue. And of course this is often publicly-funded research, so not only is the taxpayer paying for the development of patents used to sue that same taxpayer, the patents go directly to a company from academia.

The net effect is to feed intellectual property centered companies at the expense of the technology sector in general and small technology companies in particular.

Just think... in some universe, Hawking might be the lead vocalist in One Direction....

You think things aren't going right in YOUR universe... you should see the other one. At least you don't have to deal with invisible flying elephants.

I prefer Pratchett and Baxter's "The Long Earth" -- Fringe kind of devolved towards the end. Then again, with Pratchett dead in this universe, we've only got 3 of the 5 novels in the series; I don't see how it could be quite the same with just Baxter behind the keyboard. So it might devolve too.

Add to this that most farmed varieties of plants we depend on today for food stock are custom-bred for their zone, and would not survive in a 1500s climate. Thankfully, we've got seed banks and heirloom varieties still exist. Not in the quantities needed to feed today's world, but things tend to adapt to the environment, including food.

Isn't bitumen just a combination of kerosene, methane, propane and gasoline?

If they can make this synthetic fuel, they should be able to make the methane, propane and kerosene too, and then pump it back into the ground to use the earth's crust to re-combine them under pressure. It make take a while, but hey....

Maybe what they need to do is use this method to sequester carbon and then inject it down long shafts into shale deposits in the earth's crust... That way, enterprising future generations can drill for these deposits and use them for such things as powering their automotive vehicles and creating plastics....

Oh wait; what year is it here?

Or to provide more highly-paid jobs for designers of robots to perform the task without human labor.

You should be a little careful with ideas like that... you may end up hurting the people you're trying to help. In many cases, they'd rather have the crappy, exploitive job than starve while watching the machines do what they used to. The machines will come eventually, but taxes like the one you describe will accelerate the process. In general, taxes and other regulatory inhibitors that are intended to fulfill some social goal are viewed by the market as damage, and routed around if at all possible. That doesn't make them useless, but it does mean that you have to step very carefully.