Sorry hit send too soon, replying to myself, bad form.

In my case when I had long commute times, I sometimes solved bug in my head that had eluded me all day pounding on the keyboard trying to find out what was happening. When you are forced away from the screen/keyboard and you must think for yourself without any help from documentation or debugger or anything else, your may realise that your assumptions had been wrong from the start and your design was not optimal, for instance.

Now I have a more academic job where sometimes I have to come up with mathematical proofs, or at least things like novel algorithms that are not linked to producing lots of code in an editor. More often than not, they form up by themselves in my head when I'm doing something mindless and apparently unproductive: taking a shower, driving, grocery shopping, etc. Mind you this only happens after a lot of work (on paper or computer or just thinking), but the final step often somehow clicks when not thinking about it.

So unstructured, *boring* time is essential for many tasks. Also having fun. Many people like driving.

Lots of ifs in your post, also assumptions. While I'm not disputing that driving is largely non-productive, setting aside some non-productive time in your schedule is also good. Be it driving (if you enjoy it) or staring at clouds, or walking, basically empty your mind in some way. Humans are not machine whose productivity is linear as a function of the time they can work during the day. It is likely that when your were driving to /from work you had some random thoughts that turned out to be good ideas, be they for work or for home/family. So it is not *entirely* wasted.

You are perhaps thinking of London, Singapore, Hong-kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney or Paris. These cities are criss-crossed with an effective public transport system (including taxis). However this mostly works for the downtown area. A bit further afield and you'll find that there are busses and trains but they don't run very often, and taxis become expensive and don't want to go there. So it is possible to get around without owning or renting a car, but not always easy or convenient. My experience is similar to that in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New-York, Boston, Chicago, and other North American cities with a non-ridiculous public transport system.

However it is mindset. My European friends tend to think of using the public transport first when they come for a visit wherever I've been. And most of the time it is there and it works (mostly). I many Asian cities it would be a very bad idea indeed to think of driving a car yourself. In North America, visitors tend to rent a car when they arrive and drive themselves around when they can.

Public transport develops as demand increases. European and Asian cities are by and large not well designed for car trafic, so developing a public transport system was a natural solution to the increase in population. It requires a lot of coordination between local governments, and a lot of investment over the years. In America cities are relatively easy to navigate and widespread so self-transport is a natural solution not requiring as much investing and coordination from local authorities.

If you read the Forbes article the parent linked to, you will see that in this case IBM behaved exactly like a patent troll.

Really ? if I had enough money (say 10 millions) to live on without requiring a salary, I would set up myself as an associate researcher in some famous university like Stanford or MIT, or probably a much smaller one, perhaps not in the US but still good with less turf war and less admin, propose a research prize in CS/Applied mathematics and fund a few bright kids' PhD every year. One a year every year works out to about 200k$ per year. Pretty cheap. No outcome pressure, no need for expensive equipment (a small number of fast computers, some offices). Bright and fun colleagues would be a plus. I could do that forever. The kids would have their own agenda and limited time, so research outcomes would probably just flow, in the right environment.

In research it is possible to get funding up to a few millions but you can't invest it, you can only spend it, and you have a limited time to do so. This is too bad.

Exactly. Thoroughly agree with you. Also to the list add failure to pay taxes (aka tax havens), hugely costly mistakes without repercussion (think subprimes).

Don't post anon, this is great ! Thanks.

I'm with you, I'll go with lucky.

I wasn't aware cancer was cured for the rich.

Except there is no real reason why it should continue that way. If you look around you, there are lots of anti-science movements, less interest in academia, less investment in long-term ventures. The "easy" problems are solved, and the hard ones are still there. Sure we should continue to make progress, but also we could face disasters like never before (cue global warming, energy crisis, new cold or hot wars, etc). Personally I work harder than ever before I and I see lots of unemployed people around me. Not a good combination.

That is certainly what it sounds like from TFA.

So let's summarize this. Some rich person think they are smarter than everyone else and that they have the ills of the world figured out. Namely: a cure for cancer is just around the corner (based on what evidence?), so they choose a diet that is totally unproven to do anything good or bad, they plan to live forever and they will retreat to some mystical artificial island where they can do what they want and not be bothered by anyone not of their own kind. So far so good.

What I don't get is why they think welfare is bad. Obviously they don't need it, they're rich. But not everyone can be rich, this would be the same as everyone being poor. So given that in any society there will be richer and poorer people, welfare simply ensures that even the poorest get some minimum access to services, typically health care. This does not prevent richer people to get better services. Explain to me why this is bad? Given that rich/poor status is mostly a question of luck, being anti-welfare has always struck me as being selfish.

It is already illegal to work more than 35 hours a week in France, but it hasn't worked out so well.

Verrrryyyyy slow for a perfect system.

What is important in wikipedia? Obviously the content. The content is essentially provided by volunteers. The pages design is nothing special. Google provides the search. What does the WMF do? They host the content, and they are making millions while essentially doing nothing productive. Sure they must pay for bandwidth and hosting the data, but this is really very little compared with the money they spend on other things. The pages are each very lightweight. The full content of Wikipedia probably does not exceed a few TB. In today's age, any large company would be happy to host WP for nearly free in return for the goodwill it would generate.

I admit I feel cheated by the WMF intrusive, blatant and disrespectful grab for donations.