The subject says it all... smartass reply to the wrong post.

Now I'm afraid to take that new intelligence test.

It's what you do to dogpooh on your porch.

I thought patents did not prevent research that uses the patented material.

At any rate, allowing patents on discoveries (vs. inventions) is just stupid.

Except idiots like you decided to take it to the next level in the UK. There are now people agitating for the banning of useful kitchen knives. Much like a rifle, a useful knife seems strange and scary to the ignorant. Such people are likely to form most of their opinions from movies like Psycho and Halloween.

You mean building with wood turns your home into an E-Z Bake Oven, right? In Europe we like to build our external walls with an autoclaved aerated concrete core because that stuff is great at thermal insulation. Add some proper (ie. double- or triple-pane) windows with insulated frames and appropriate doors and you get a house that is a lot more resistant to outside temperature than one made out of wood. There is a reason why A/C is much less popular in Europe than in the States: It's simply not as useful if the house stays cool on its own if you lower the blinds and only open the windows briefly to let in fresh air.
Of course AAC isn't as strong as regular concrete and it probably can't be reinforced. Even if you go with normal concrete, though, you should be able to acheive superior insulation and thus less need for A/C during summer by using appropriate doors and windows. And even if the concrete has greater thermal leakage you can always add mineral wool. It's not like thermal insulation is a poorly-understood black art.

Or you could go with a hobbit-style house: Take a dome-shaped concrete shell and put earth on top. Sow grass. Use double- or triple-pane windows as appropriate. As far as I have heard the result is very good at thermal insulation. Concrete dome shells (aka monolithic domes) are quite storm-resistant. Even geodesic domes are fairly good at it. You need to make sure that the local building code allows it, though.

Sure, that's all much more expensive than putting up a few wooden beams, nailing boards across them and calling the result a wall. But then again you have to expect increased power consumption due to A/C and decreased building survivability in case of disaster if you decide that what's cheapest in the short term must be the best possible solution.


In short: Concrete walls aren't hot during summer (not if planned and built properly) and if you decide to build a house that can't withstand a severe storm in an area known to be subject to severe storms it's your own fault if your house collapses.

Jon Stewart had a comment along these lines back when the police raided someone's residence over the loose iPhone prototype (or whatever it was):

"What happened? Bill Gates is curing AIDS in Africa, and Steve Jobs is kicking down people's doors in Palo Alto!"

It used to be so simple to keep track of who was the good guys and who was the bad guys...

What the market will bear.

(IOW, how willing people are to be screwed.)

Part of "residential" use is arguably taking advantage of cloud based services. Those can involve a lot of data. It doesn't matter if the "server" is hosted at a place of business or a residence.

No. This is just a blatant attempt to soak a certain class of customer based on some arbitrary label. Many of "the little people" are fine with this as they believe that it doesn't impact them therefore it's all good.

"Cloud backup" would be the first thing I would do with a high bandwidth connection.

It's early yet.

Did you expect Slashdotters to brag about penis size and whether it indicates their worth as a person?

Their recruiters tell everyone that nerds always get the hot chicks.

If you're a supermodel, you don't need anything to wear for the occasion.

exactly in the "flying car" thing you would put the control to enable flightmode

1 Inside the GloveBox
2 require a special key THAT MUST BE PURCHASED SEPARATELY be inserted (and the key burns out after say 18 hours)
3 require that the car be accelerated to say 70 mph (in first gear)
4 have special warning lights light up (maybe aircraft style red and blue? strobish things)

in short make it so that Legal is satisfied that flightmode will not enable by accident

Extreme in this case is like OverKill (just ask the folks at schock mercenary about that one). besides i think the low end of YHBS is certified mail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_server

"YOU HAVE BEEN SERVED"

If you have a messenger (of the court) drop the notice at the office its going to be very hard for them to claim otherwise