But you can patent an apparatus (like a chamber with a boron pellet and two laser apertures) that produces DC current. You can also patent a process, like a process to produce hydrogen and electricity using lasers. Speaking as an engineer with a couple of patents.

The City of Ember. Great flick--It's goonies meet Fallout. It even has Bill Murry in it. I didn't hear anything about it until I watched it on a long flight.

Why do we care if DRAM makers can't manage pricing in their product? This results in lower prices for consumers and it benefits everyone except the manufacturers. Are you suggesting a price fixing scheme that flips that around? The darwinian economic principal in play here is that suppliers will either adapt or go out of business to be replaced by someone who can manage their capacity. Price fixing syndicates are "unnatural" selection and are bad for consumers and the industry at large.

I agree with the other posters that say there isn't enough surface area on a car to generate meaningful power. I've always wondered about 18 wheelers and things like city busses and mail or fedex delivery trucks. It seems to me that since they have a pretty large surface area exposed to direct sunlight, wouldn't this at least make a hybrid solar/gas powered vehicle very attractive from a fuel cost perspective?

Youtube has some great content for kids. The above being said, there are two major issues I have with the service--First is that they only support the YoutubeKids on Google devices--I have Rokus and my kid uses the regular Youtube app--with all the non-kid cruft that goes along with it. In addition to the good kids content, there are videos that mascarade as kids content but in reality are just long product placement adds. "Gummy Gator" is always going to McDonalds to get happy meals. In fact, I don't think I can count how many different videos featured someone going to get a happy meal from McDonals. There are other videos as well that have people opening toys and playing with them. While I don't mind that those videos exist (free speech and all) there is no way for a parent to filter those videos out. No parental controls, no ability to block a particular channel, etc.

I worked designing avionics in commercial aviation for 15 years, working mostly on Airbus, but also Boeing avionics. I was completely blown away by the fact that a single sensor was being used to engage an automated flight maneuver. When I was working, there was at least double redundancy (at least two independent sensors or systems agreeing on the maneuver) and for flight controls it was usually triple redundancy. For reference, the flight controls in Airbus aircraft use 3 systems, all developed by separate teams using different hardware designs and different software platforms/languages. At the time I was working (the 90's and early 2000's) Boeing used similar types of redundancy for critical systems. Hearing that a flight critical system was being directed by the input of a single sensor is frankly shocking.