The legislation appears intended to cause potential plaintiffs to reconsider, with the secondary benefit of codifying an already-implemented tactic.

I agree with you in that the legislation should be unnecessary, but perhaps it's needed as a deterrent.

6 ‘‘ 285A. Recovery of litigation costs for computer
7 hardware and software patent
8 ‘‘(a) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding section 285, in
9 an action disputing the validity or alleging the infringe-
10 ment of a computer hardware or software patent, upon
11 making a determination that the party alleging the in-
12 fringement of the patent did not have a reasonable likeli-
13 hood of succeeding, the court may award the recovery of
14 full costs to the prevailing party, including reasonable at-
15 torney’s fees, other than the United States.

The language allows the judge presiding over the case to effectively determine whether the case was a frivolous case, meaning there's a decent chance that this won't deter legitimate patent suits. That said, only time will tell.

So this was... legal malware? Can someone clue me in on the history of this utility? As far as I can tell, this looks like proof-of-concept/research malware designed to be used for testing purposes, but that's the best I can gather.

What if Netflix doesn't consider the deaf to be its target audience and specifically indicates this fact? Why can a private service which requires people to pay before viewing content be forced to accommodate people who may not be their target market?

By this same token, a duochrome-colorblind person can petition for color-adjusted films. A blind person can request a specific voice feed that describes the actions of the characters in a film, and so forth. Why not just let some other service create closed captions for deaf viewers to subscribe to?

via c|net:

On many days, the San Francisco courtroom where he presided was more like a computer science classroom. Alsup acknowledged during the trial that he had learned about Java coding to better prepare for the case, and it showed. On a daily basis, he would deftly query the lawyers and expert witnesses on the structure, sequence, and organizations of APIs to assist the jury in understanding the key facets of the copyright phase of the trial.

This is why I have respect for Judge Alsup. In order to apply the law in a complex engineering-related case, he worked to learn the subject matter in order to properly apply the law to the material. That's how I expect every Judge should apply the law rather than just sit and "trust the experts" per-se.

things such as debug logs during testing.

Does Apple have no such thing? This leads me to think that Apple either has no development lifecycle or, in case they have one, only half-heartedly obey it.

Old Dominion University did this nearly a decade ago and filed a patent for it. I see no reference to them in the article.

http://www.odu.edu/ao/research/ip/PlasmaPencil.pdf

Worthy case for small claims, actually.

How much stronger would a field have to be to protect a hypothetical ship the size of the space shuttle from solar winds and other non-EM ionizing radiation in interplanetary space?

If 100 tesla is achievable now, then I can imagine it wouldn't take long before a field can be generated which would be powerful enough to provide a buffer against most ionizing radiation a la Earth's own magnetic field, but I could be way in the realm of science fiction with this thought.

Google, Bing, et al. will just stop linking to sites which enforce this.

Who thought this was a good idea?

That's precisely what hyper-accurate atomic clocks allow you to correct. The distortions manifest in less accurate clocks. The more accurate your time, the better your algorithmic corrections between the ground and the satellites.

Although perhaps not for daily use, the technology could prove valuable in science experiments

You kidding me? The prospect of GPS-guided bullets accurate to the millimeter will have the US military pursuing this in next-gen GPS satellites as soon as the technology is viable. Hell, this'll be the most valuable update to military hardware in decades.