No. Big companies buy up huge defensive patent portfolios, then when they end up infringing each other's IP, they just work out cross-licensing deals with each other; as long as a company has a big enough portfolio of relevant IP, they are pretty safe. It's all very cosy.

Who isn't safe is any new player trying to enter the market, who might as well give up, or at best hope to be bought by one of the established players rather than sued into oblivion.

According to the chart on this page (direct link to chart), we (UK) are in third place behind the USA and Mexico. It is a big jump up to US levels though, but we're working on it.

Nah. Google should just redirect French users to Bing if they search for Max Mosley pics.

What do you mean by "support"? Use? Because if you want pay TV in the UK, for example for decent sports coverage, then you basically you have to be a customer of one or the other. And that being the case, buying your broadband from them in a package deal is very cost-effective, and while they may be "awful", so are some of the biggest competitors (BT, TalkTalk, EE).

The people that are sending the messages aren't people? Maybe I find it rude that people think just because they happen to be in my personal space, that they automatically deserve my undivided attention?

The Veyron costs like 5 times as much.

No, by burning coal.

Good point :).

It's a shame. I've never been to one, I don't think the exist here in the UK, but I can see some reasons why they would be cooler than a standard cinema. My car is much more comfortable than typical cinema seating, and I guess you're not forced to buy overpriced snacks, since I can't see them trying to police what people have in their cars. I guess people dicking around or using their phones would be less of an issue. If they broadcast the audio on an FM channel, so you could use your in-car audio rig to listen to the sound, that would be great. If there was such a thing near me, I'd definitely give it a shot.

What size of cinema are you running with your projector?

+1 Informative, but boy, would I have liked to see a rocket the size of an aircraft carrier!

So true. I don't understand why this keeps coming up. Just because Who happens to have the regeneration plot device, which would make it possible for him to come back as a woman, doesn't really make the why of it any different than any other long-running series with a male lead. Should the next James Bond be a woman? I'm a big fan of sci-fi with female lead characters; Buffy, Lost Girl, the Underworld movies, Resident Evil. You do not need to screw around with a series with a male lead character if you want female leads.

Dunno, could it be referring to this bit previoulsy covered here? I imagine there may have been a few such incidents at that trial.

There was a failed attempt to put a link to this page into that post.

They did try, the company was called Radiata, founded by ex-CSIRO employees; it was purchased by Cisco, but ultimately failed to come up with any commercially successful products and was written off.