IANAL, but in the US if you know about a patent and infringe upon it then that's considered "willful" infringement and they can triple the damages against you. Therefore many people in your position don't look at any patents whatsoever so they can plead innocence if a patent infringement occurs and minimize any potiential settlement. If you start looking for and reading over patents to try and cover your ass, you may end up digging a deeper hole later on. Given the huge number and scope of some patents, even if you do look you may miss one or think that one doesn't apply when a lawyer/judge thinks otherwise. If you start pulling in large amounts of cash, keep a good laywer on retainer and pray none of the big guys with large portfolios decide to come after you.

I've been trying to get on Pirate Bay this morning and most times my connection either times out or I get an error page about connecting to a caching server and only after mashing the reload button many times do I actually get a page.

Then again this could just be the effect of everyone reading news stories about it being down and trying to "test" if the site is up, thus overloading and taking down the server for real. Hooray for self-fulfilling prophecy!

I don't know much about finance (IANACA) but wouldn't "an exercise in finding numbers that do not match" be something a computer could do rather easily and quickly to even large amounts of data?

So instead it should say that iPad owners who use Facebook and like online surveys are selfish elites? Glad we cleared that one up cause almost nobody ever uses Facebook anymore (add sarc mark here).

What happened to the Open Sarcasm website? I can't open it so I have no idea how to add that sarcasm mark to the end of this question asking why the site is down!

I hate to be a cynic but if you take the cost savings on cutting safety corners across all their operations (rigs, refineries, etc) for the time the company has been operating them, I bet they still came out on top and BP wouldn't change a damn thing about how they operate short of some regulatory body (lol MMS) forcing them to.

If you RTFA:

"According to the patent application, users could also choose to access the advertisements when they choose, delaying an ad by 10 minutes, or choosing to watch one immediately. This would help to ensure that the ad is not overly intrusive, appearing while the user was in the middle of an important task."

You're right they aren't "randomly bombarding users with ads" they are "regularly bombarding users with ads".

While I agree that a single test wouldn't account for any variance and thus isn't very accurate as one system may have just "gotten lucky" that day, Google Navigation along with many other high-end sat navs pull traffic data to avoid congestion due to local traffic, car accidents, or adorable families of ducks. This is why each system probably recommended different routes instead of the geographically shortest route which you'd except to be fairly consistent.

Damn imagine how much Apple could've raked in if they had of named it eMac, ePod, ePad, ePhone... Those poor saps using "eMail" would never stand a chance in court! They should've picked a different name after all, sheesh.