Nope, but they're more than willing to use that cracked copy of MS Office their nephew installed for them.

Do some research, what little info there is implies most UAV attacks are on bad/limited intel, other wise the "war" would be over.

The decision to go to war is always held in a small number of hands, those who decide, those who initiate are the few, rid the situation of them and there is no war.
The average citizen isn't interested in war, only the greedy and insane are.

But then all the lawyers would resubmit millions of applications every year. You also have to limit the number of submissions per inventor or apply a tiered pricing program (first three applications cost $200 each, next 10 cost $10,000 each, after that $30,000 each). That way small inventors could compete with large corporations without totally swamping the system.

You have a valid point about "pointless consumption", but resources are resources never the less.

Parts of everyone's families have died in someones "pointless" war.

If making sure my country has resources makes me a dick, that's fine. If making sure my country stays above the above the mean in the balance-of-power game, that's great by me. There's only 3 kinds of people....

So you are think about Afghans coming the America and grabbing a hand full of dicks, huh? To each there own.

Well, I suppose it's nice that someone finally ruled you can't patent the genetic code itself, but the net change will be practically nothing.

If they can still patent every single technique and tool involved in examining, testing, or isolating the gene then who gives a crap if they pretend they own the code? We'll still end up reinventing the wheel every time we'd like to look at any known gene; either that or we'll pay thousands of dollars in patent fees per procedure. I suppose it's nice that some district court judge finally made the biggest No Flipping Duh ruling of the genetic age, but I think it changes very little in practical terms.

Microsoft do exactly the same. Microsoft's contract with Facebook allows them more access to info than Google's does, so they can flood your bing.com results with even more social crud than Google does at the moment. Both have similar or equivalent access to Twitter's stream. Both have similar access to LinkedIn. Google has slightly better access to MySpace than Microsoft, but no where near AOL in that regard.

But in the end, everyone is doing it. Bing, Google, AOL, Ask.com and anyone else that has products in the search result market. And to my knowledge, Google and Microsoft both allow you to disable live/social results in your search queries quite easily (and I'm guessing the others must also.)

I was worried about getting sued by one of those patent holders. As much as I copy these genes, they could have sued me for all the money in the world.

ah, but Ballmer threw the chair across his office to hit a table. Using round numbers, assume a ballistic lob with starting height of 1 meter to peak of 2 meters high to table 5 meters away also of one meter height with 20kg Aeron chair in 10 m/s gravitational field. chair will fall that one meter vertically in sqrt((2d)/a) =~ 0.5 seconds, so up and down in 1 second. And that's the time the horizontal travel must take, so horizontal initial velocity is 5 m / second. Vertical initial velocity is a*t for half the lob = 10 * 0.5 = 5 m / s also. Vector sum is sqrt(25 + 25) = 7 m/s. BallmerChairEnergy (BCE) is thus 0.5 * 20 * 7^2 =~ 500 joules.

in other words: we pointlessly hoard crap that we're not planning to ever resell, because we'd rather it go into a landfill than to actually sell it to people for what it's actually worth. I mean seriously - every game store I've ever seen has a huge stack of games they wouldn't give two bucks for if you brought them in, sitting in a bin, unsorted... and still priced at $30 each. I think they need to learn the meaning of the word "clearance".

This is precisely what gets my ire. I'd love to leave work today and pick up an original Xbox to mod and turn into a MythTV frontend for $15-$20. However, the sticker prices are nuts even though they have no fewer than 30 of them behind the counter at my local Gamestop. What sane business manager decides this policy? I reckon the only way it would make sense is if they determined that by selling one for $75 they reap a greater net profit due to invested costs than if they'd sold five for $15. I doubt that's the case but it leaves me scratching my head.