It's much worse than that: I'm not sure that a medium-sized airline would even get a chance to spend their non-existent $2B. Let's suppose the carriers got lucky and there were no catastrophic accidents of failures from flying thru ash. There would probably be sub-catastrophic engine damage that would manifest itself over time. What's the probability of that? Nobody knows, we're talking a manly shoot-from-the-hip gamble.

What would happen if an extra 10,000+ engines from the entire European fleet prematurely came in for overhaul over the next 6-18 months? Engine overhaul capacity is a very finite thing, and so is turbine manufacturing. Overhaul facilities are already booked for scheduled maintenance well into the future. Overtime + existing parts stock definitely wouldn't cover this, and the necessary mechanics take forever to train and legally certify. Just replacing all those engines with new ones is a non-starter for many reasons.

The backlog would take years to clear. In the meanwhile, a big chunk of the entire fleet would be out of action for a long time. Could any airline survive that? Could the economy?

Branson's effectively suggesting that the entire industry should have taken a cowboy-style gamble on their entire future to save a week's losses, not to mention the broader economic and security consequences of such a disaster! Branson's never been a risk-adverse guy, but gambling the entire fleet...?!

Steve Jobs has done a pretty good job of giving Apple his face and his persona. I don't have any kind of Apple hardware, but have to marvel that they still has a passionate culture after all these years. Contrast that with your typical enterprise customer, say some typical insurance company.

To properly cater and market to faceless corporations, you have to become one. There are no shortcuts, it takes a machine to relate to a machine. Case in point, Microsoft started losing its juice when it got serious about enterprise. Those MS guys used to laugh at the "old" IBM; they howled derisively when the IBMers tried to become cooler by switching from blue suits to sport jackets. Now Microsoft have become them and the enterprise customers love 'em -- they're on the same wavelength. They made lots of money but lost their soul.

Again, "human input." That would be the end users making their queries in this case. They would seem to be the equivalent of photographers operating their cameras here, so I'd expect that the end users own the copyright on the output.

Reading http://laws.findlaw.com/us/499/340.html, it's clear that there's a "creativity" requirement for copyright, and that only tangible instantiations of a work are copyrightable -- not general principles or algorithms. Wolfram's system is on full autopilot and would seem to be the analog of a camera in this discussion, and my understanding of the current state of technology and law is that only humans are capable of creativity.

Wolfram's software is surely copyrightable, as are certain human-created elements (e.g. their logo) which are copied into the final output. The human user's formulated query is probably copyrightable "authorship." However, Wolfram's system has no humans in the loop and a mere mechanical process cannot change authorship, so it would seem that the user and Wolfram both own copyrights on different parts of the output. The user probably owns the "meat" of the results, much as if I would own the copyright if I rented Wolfram's camera to take photos.

Anybody can claim copyright on anything, but making it stick is another matter.

Machine-generated output per se isn't copyrightable, since machines aren't (yet) capable of original authorship. Of course, computer output is copyrightable if it also contains original, human-generated content, for example Wolfram's logo, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright, search for "authorship."

I have seen cases where patents are issued for "inventions" that were allegedly previously published in big-name publications (e.g. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory).

As a real-world matter, getting and abandoning a patent has a significant advantage over other methods of publication: if somebody else tries to patent your invention later, the Patent Office has a better chance of rejecting their application. The fact is that the USPTO examiners are pressed for time and usually only search their own patent and patent application databases for prior art because it's quick & easy for them. Anyone who's ever been involved in a patent application will remember that the examiner raises prior-art objections by throwing patents or apps back at you, not journal articles or websites.

Obviously, helping the USPTO to reject a patent in the first place is much better than the expense, time and anxiety of trying to overturn somebody else's patent later. Naturally there's no guarantee that the examiner's search will actually turn up your patent or application, but being in their data base improves your odds significantly.

Don't bother to RTFA, everybody here already knows everything in that article.

There's a much safer way of charging your EV from overhead power cables for free. People have been doing it to heat their homes (illegally, of course) in outlying areas of Canada for years: place an inductor under a 350kV powerline & run wires to your house. The powerline operators hate it because the inductance messes up their power factor, and the poachers eventually get caught because the powerline operators sporadically use a small plane to patrol their rights of way for inductors. But, a 10 minute recharge-and-flee time would make detection near-impossible!