But that does not prove your point - sulphur oxide pollution is just a very small part of what cars emit: CO2 is the main greenhouse gas that cars emit, and US cars emit several orders of magnitude more CO2 than just 15 container ships ...

Nice trolling in any case.

That's a reasonable observation but this would bring an end to almost all lawsuits in the US, not just patent suits: the fact that an attacked party must still pay legal costs (and has to do that for years at times), even if he wins the lawsuit, is a form of unreasonable seizure in itself.

The judicial system is not about fairness, it's about applying the rule of law. If you want our laws to represent (your version of) fairness, talk to your fellow citizens and make sure that the congressman you elect represents you.

I don't think we disagree about executives.

A good executive, while not having expert knowledge in every field he supervises, will have a much better idea about what his limitations are, and he won't "simplify" the world and believe that this simplified model is reality .

Instead he'll use a simplified model to make decisions, in full knowledge of the risks that this brings with it. He'll trust good experts around him to tell him when he messes up - but he won't (and can't) expect the experts to be able to produce (nearly) the same rate of average-to-good decisions that he can do.

A good executive will also generally have pretty good emotional intelligence - there's many forms of intelligence and not all are well recognized.

So an executive is in stark contrast to what the general population does when it comes to understanding the world and making decisions.

Also, did you mean to suggest that I insulted someone with my last paragraph? I think it's a factual statement and it's not really shaped (or intended) as an insult.

This is a civil case not a criminal case, there's no presumption of innocence.

Btw., his motivation is probably financial: he wrote bits of the Linux kernel networking stack and for years he not written any new code but has been suing companies via GPL violation lawsuits, which is probably a very lucrative business.

If Google is not using his specific code he perhaps sees Android as taking away his standing to sue, and hence it takes away his livelihood. It is in his direct financial interest to see Android go down.

Just speculating.

He mentioned the prediction in his post: a Quebec type event every 10 years (a week of blackout coupled with a few hundred deaths) and a 1859 type event every 100 years (a month long blackout coupled with tens of thousands of deaths and after-effects for years (in addition to a big recession)).

Do you need a specific date and precise position for landfall to convince you that it's worth protecting your house in a hurricane affected area, or are past precedents enough for you to protect yourself pro-actively?

The current expansion of the universe is faster than the speed of light.

Distances between the out-most galaxies at opposite ends of the universe is growing faster than the speed of light and current models suggest that this process is accelerating.

Some quick (and hopefully not totally bogus!) back of the envelope calculations: the latest value for the Hubble constant is 71 km/sec (with about 5% of accuracy), which means 71 km/sec expansion of the universe, per megaparsec of space. Given that the current size of the universe is about 28,000 psec, this means that the universe is expanding about 2 million kilometers per second. That's moving opposite boundaries away from each other more than 6 times faster than the speed of light. (which is 0.3 million kilometers per second)

That does not mean that any physical matter can move faster than the speed of light, sadly.

That was my point - see the "it's wrong" in parentheses :-)

All three statements are "common knowledge" but are false: medieval people were not so stupid to think that the earth is flat, the universe expands faster than the speed of light and hackers were not criminals originally.

How do you know he didn't share it? Maybe he shared it and people still believed in the simpler story.

This happens all the time.

• - Did you know that medieval people thought that the earth was flat? (It's common knowledge and it's wrong.)
• - Did you know that there's nothing faster than the speed of light? (It's common knowledge and it's wrong.)
• - Did you know that hackers were always criminals? (It's common knowledge still it's wrong.)

Fact is, 75% of people have around average or worse intelligence and they prefer to simplify what they know about the world they live in. Do you belong to that group?

FYI, your reply does not answer what I said, you need to try to stay on topic, liar.

For the record, here's your recent Slashdot history:

  You lied about commodity shortages.

  You lied about US purchasing power.

  You lied about 19th century US economics.

  You lied about taxation levels of the country you supposedly live in.

  You lied about 19th century depressions.

  You lied about the current level of inflation.

  You lied about the consumer price index.

You are not improving!

To understand how the US got where it is today you need to understand one important detail: up to around 1950 the US was a strongly immigration driven economy - unlike any of the other major economies.

If you look at key "US inventions" before 1965 resulting in a Nobel prize then virtually all of them were invented by people who were born and taught elsewhere (mostly in Europe) and then emigrated to the US . If you look at the list of Nobel laureates there's barely anyone born and educated in the US in that time frame - only immigrants.

If you were right then that list would be full of US-born Nobel prize holders ... but it isn't.

So, without realizing it, you actually support the grandparent's point: countries with historically strong public education lead in innovation. And yes, countries can also brain-drain capable people from other countries and can thus bridge their lack of good public education - but I'm sure that's not the point you wanted to make?

So you finally admitted the obvious, that commodity prices go up in an unprecedented way when unprecedented weather hits key production areas, and when there's unprecedented demand for them? So having admitted that why are you still linking the price increases to 'money printing'? You have not proven the link - in fact you have just weakened that argument by admitting that a much stronger channel exists: old-fashioned supply & demand forces.

Apparently there's a fine distinction between minting 'silver rounds' and minting silver coins with "$20" on them.

Also, he was apparently found guilty of money laundering as well. Could it be that they took the other cornerstone of libertarian ideology too seriously, the "We do not owe civilization any stinkin' taxes for the infrastructure we used!" bit?

That's not easy (half of the commodities are weather affected, most of the others are under heavy demand), but there's such a commodity: iron ore - it is largely decoupled from the weather and from financial speculation.

Check the price of iron ore: it even dropped in price during much of the bad weather period during early and mid 2010 - when it started going up on higher Chinese industrial demand (and increasing Chinese stockpiling).

But yes, in the long run most commodities will gradually increase in price - would you expect anything else on a slowly warming planet with limited resources?

You are trying to change the subject once again - why are you talking about the days of communism and the Pravda?

I'm talking about the year of 2010 when a record heat wave hit Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe. You started with this bold-faced lie:

I gave you the link: here it is again ("Russian wheat export ban threatens higher inflation and food riots") . That article predicted food inflation before last year's big run-up in food commodity prices.

Here's more pictures from that record heat-wave ("Wildfire Pictures: Russia Burns, Moscow Chokes") , unprecedented in Russia's 200 years history of meteorological record keeping.

The year 2010 was also the hottest year on record, with record low Arctic ice early this year ("Arctic warmth: Sea ice at record low levels in January [2011]") .

Can you read, liar? Can you think? Do you really think that with major wheat production areas on fire or hit by record draught and with population growing ever faster wheat production is just business as usual and prices will stay super low?