I think you are wrong. In Europe, for example, a software algorithm is only patentable as part of a physical method and only as far as that physical method is concerned. So you can patent an algorithm that imitates a servomechanism to keep a motor from stalling but that patent only applies to the physical system it is embedded in. I can freely use the same algorithm to, say, control the pressure of a boiler, if it is appliable.

That is, unless I have misread or forgot something.

Are all video games banal? Are any banal video games socially positive?

"... there is a whole world of socially positive and banal applications for drones that are yet to be discovered."

I find it a bit difficult to understand that something banal is socially positive. Then again, maybe I am just not too social.

I am completely amatteurish, and I don't know which one is better.

Not to karma-whore, but actually almost nothing is mirrored: the gears usually handle the same way (which makes it easier for right-hand driving since the shorter gears are nearer to the driver), the dashboard is just moved around, and even the starter key hole is on the right of the driving wheel. Then again, I also know of English cars (a Land Rover to be specific) which had the starter key hole on the left, which is almost unheard of in the rest of Europe.

It's just you being crabby.

Not to raise your paranoia, but your "dumb" phone isn't as dumb as you think it is. While it is acting as cell phone it needs to keep the towers appraised of its location so you can receive calls and it can roam from one cell to the next.

Not anymore, it seems :)

I actually preferred the traditional rickroll.

It seems it does. My excuses. Now I need to check whether my workplace's firewall allows me to connect to IMAP...

Some of us like being able to check our "old" mail even if there is no network connection available. YMMV though.

Many wrong ideas have entered popular culture. So what? That only means that popular culture doesn't care much about truth or correctness. The same way the spinach iron content myth has been busted (as early as 21 years after the initial wrong experiment) and has even begotten a new myth (the decimal point myth) to explain busting the old one. And yet popular culture doesn't care about it that much. So don't try to use popular culture as a fact checker.

The point is that science THOUGHT it is impossible

The point is that a scientist doing back-of-the-evelope calculations from wrong premises concluded that the bumblebee could not fly, and someone decided that he accounted for all "science" ;)

I must insist that solar (dependent on the surface of the building, with a square growth law) doesn't scale with the volume of the building (cubic growth law). Above a certain surface/volume ratio it is not possible to fulfill the building's energy needs with solar systems alone. This, actually, is not a specific problem of buildings: trees have the same problem, animals have the same problem (though in this case it is related to the muscular strength/weight ratio) and so do birds. This problem can be partially solved by improving the building's efficiency, but it just moves the limiting ratio further away.

As I have already written before, I don't consider this a matter of exclusion: you can have solar and wind power generators, and using building's surfaces to get more energy is a good option.