People look at it and think it's just a type of cable, without realising that it's the infrastructure that the entire networking industry relies upon. I score this as a correct usage of the word. Also, people assume that things going on behind closed doors must be more complex than they understand, so they imagine there must be something more complex than ethernet under the hood.

Even though your question has been answered already, I'll jump on the Bandwagon.

The fact that you used to produce the product in question doesn't really factor into a troll or not. you say that you license them to other companies, and have taken action against infringment of your patent. While you may fall into some people's definition of a patent troll, I understand that you have not acquired a patent and let it sit on your shelf until enough it has entered widespread use before you took action against it. That means that in my book you are an awesome inventor :)

Some people have talked about bringing in rule similar to trademark rules, where if you fail to enofrce it for long enough you lose it, that may be a little harsh, but once something enters to common market, it really is too late for these trolls to come out and make their demands. People have built their lives around what they thought was an open technology, and now troll want to rip it away. As long as I didn't just describe you, you're golden.

They were already selling roadster, and had more people ordering them than they could possibly build. That's the perfect time to give someone a loan. How about you get one successful product line going first, then the gov't will give you a loan.

The government isn't as concerned with lining their pockets as a private investment firm. the DOE loans are not looking for a direct return on the funds, but a return for society as a whole. Bankrupted companies drag down the economy, non-bankrupt companies lift it up.

Let's look at the two possible options here:
1) The guys who built Fermilab don't actually know anything about physics
2) You are not actually an expert on magnets
Which seems more likely?

There will be a larger mob than you can possibly handle, unless by family you were referring to the troops housed in the same military base.

Hey, when you remove the likelihood of death a lot of things become fun. Swimming is only really necessary if you're on a sinking boat, but lots of people do it for fun. People who work offshore have to do a course entitled "Helicopter Underwater Survival Training", which is a lot of fun, but I can't imagine it's as much fun to do when the helicopter on which you were happily riding has just crashed into the Gulf of Mexico...

So Edison probably owns the copyright...

For the price of free soda your paycheque may go up but a dollar a week. Once you take into account the overheads it's a lot more cost effective to just give someone soda. (Please no-one interperet that as big-government making it too expensive to employ people.)

Also, money is nice, but I place a high value on a nice place to work. I spend over half my waking hours at work, getting a soda and a cookie isn't much but it makes me feel a lot better about coming.

Because, of course people only work late once per pay period... (I'm not against math, I'm just saying the assumptions used in this scenario are not realistic.)

Wasn't it IBM who predicted a world market for 5 computers back in the day. Looks like they're overcompensating, so on average they're estimates come out pretty close.

That's a bit unfair, most of the stuff I've just read seems more like they don't like what Google is doing, but enjoy seeing Microsoft getting some of it's own crap directed back at it.

It's a lot like the guys who always pop up in piracy stories: we know that you don't like the way media companies (or Youtube in this case) treat you as a consumer and try to place restrictions on you, that doesn't automatically give you the right to just take what you want, your options are to play according to the rules or not play at all. There are other video services, just because Youtube has everything you want doesn't mean you have to keep going back to them.

Look for "VideoCache" in the app store.

There is at least one app in the apple app store to facilitate downloading youtube videos. I use it to download them at home, then watch while I'm waiting without using the flaky and expensive mobile network.

Sometimes I get too far out with my humor, I apologise for making you feel that way.

is.41.aprimenumber.com has something stupid like that about a lot of numbers.