Hello, Streisand Effect! The only way to not give publicity to someone is to ignore him. Not seeing a movie is one thing... but the vitriol against Card from "homophobephobes" is quite another.

Ender's Game was originally a short story. Maybe they should have based the movie on that instead of the book?

That's not how patents work.

The only thing that matters with patents, in the end, are the claims. That's it, end of story. So, let's look at the claims. Actually, there's only one claim, which makes this easy.

Simplifying a bit...

Notice there's not a word about advertisements anywhere in that. The patent talks about ads in the various descriptions, but there's not even a dependent claim relating to ads. Displaying ads is just a use case, not the invention itself.

Step 1 and 3 are quite obvious. So the real "invention" here is applying fuzzy algorithms to search.

For prior art, I hereby present the BackRub search engine, March 1996 (about a year before the patent filing date). That's right ... Google is the prior art for this patent. And I'm sure there's others.

Plausible. But before we go down that path, I say we try the more conventional means of explaining dark matter ... Occam's Razor, and all that.

Let me translate. "Great" in this case means "non-GPL" (YMMV, of course). If you want to link into the compiler code itself (rather than just calling the compiler binaries), you've just forced your IDE to use the GPL.

LLVM, on the other hand, has a more permissive license, so it's a non-issue. And it was built with this sort of IDE-compiler interaction in mind, so there's that, too.

For high-power LEDs, the failure mode is generally a reduction in light output, not a complete failure of the LED itself. If there is a complete failure, the power supply is most likely at fault. Again, the switching isn't the problem, but more likely exposure to the elements affecting the circuitry.

If I were to guess, New Orleans found itself with a bad batch of electronics or housings, and budget constraints forced the installation of cheaper-in-the-short-term traditional bulbs.

LEDs are more directional, meaning that more light goes down, instead of up. Do you think that would help any?

I have to disagree with you there. During the Reign of Terror, it was quite common for a beheading to turn into public entertainment.

Modern society has apparently developed quite an intolerance to blood and gore. This despite modern video games and how "desensitized" we're supposed to be now.

I would prefer a single weapon with 12 triggers. All jurors have to pull their trigger, or a life sentence is imposed instead.

This isn't about money. It's about votes. (Which is, in turn, about money I suppose...) The point being ... the TSA is all about politics and making the voters think the government is making them safer. Not flying won't change that one bit.

Even miles isn't very fair. I don't travel the same roads when I bike as when I drive, for example. Also, car injuries are not like cycling injuries, so you have to classify a bit better (deaths, life-threatening, serious, minor). Underreporting will heavily skew the minor injuries category, unfortunately.

Everything you talked about is already illegal. And dangerous for the cyclist to boot!

There's nothing about bicycles that makes cyclists act with this "holier than all other road users" .... you see the same attitudes in car drivers, motorcycle riders, and pedestrians. That's right: the cyclist that runs a red light has the same attitude problems as the driver that cuts you off. Stop this rant at cyclists: it's quite misdirected, really.

Now ... about those "equality" measures. The compact car weighs around, say, 3000 lbs. At 40 mph, it has about 218 kJ of kinetic energy behind it. A cyclist + bike weighs, say, 200 lbs. At 20 mph, there's a whopping 3.6 kJ of kinetic energy. That's 1/60th the energy.

There's a reason we require driver's licenses. A stupid cyclist is (mostly) a danger only to himself. A stupid motorist is a danger to everyone around them.

No ... equality means enforcement of the rules. Yes, cyclists blow red lights and go the wrong way down one-way streets. Ticket them, just as you would a car doing the same thing. By the way ... next time you're driving, pay attention to just how many traffic infractions happen around you (including yourself). Most likely, you've become quite desensitized to the stupid little things that all the other cars do.

And, just FYI ... most cyclist already pay their fair share of road taxes. Or did you think cyclists never own cars or pay income/property taxes? And what's a fair share? What wear does a bicycle do to the road? What percentage of the construction funds went into the (probably too narrow to be safe, anyway) bicycle lane?

Even better: the question you really want to answer is "If I replace a trip in a car with a bike ride instead, does my quality of life go up or down?"

Unfortunately, not everything in that question can be answered objectively. Your suggestion comes a bit closer (when I commute on my bike, the ride takes a while longer, but goes for slightly less distance) on the objective part.

But then things get quite subjective. How do you even compare accidents, for example? Well, deaths draw a nice, clean, objective line ... but less serious injuries are harder to pin down. By far, the most common cycling injury is a broken collarbone. In car crashes, it seems to neck and head injuries. I'd rather be injured in a cycling crash than a car crash, that's for sure.

I'm also willing to accept a small increase in my accident risk if it means a dramatic increase in my overall health. I've seen a difference in my own health since I started getting into cycling a few years ago -- it's totally worth it to me.

That's why I run /.*nix/ on my workstations.

It's time you learn how insurance works, it seems. Insurance is a zero sum game: someone, somewhere will have to pay -- you included.

1) You will pay a higher premium simply for owning said car, whether or not any accident takes place.
2) Premiums will be higher across the board to offset the additional expense of these accidents.

So, this particular hypothetical accident may not result in your premiums being adjusted directly, but remember that your premiums include the cost to repair your accident, and everyone else's accidents, too.

You're the type of person who thinks Obamacare is going to make medical costs magically go down. Insurance is designed to make the impact to few unfortunate souls more bearable, at a cost to everyone else. And since there's an insurance company in the middle taking out profit, society as a whole pays more. (Don't get me wrong ... Obamacare does do a few things to lower costs, but requiring everybody to carry insurance is completely wrong from an economic perspective, especially since lifetime limits, preexisting conditions, etc. are removed from the equation.)