The little rubber boot is not even remotely something that patents should protect. You are subscribing to the faulty, revisionist "dibs" model of patents.

The bargain made in patents is that society provides protection, in exchange for the inventor disclosing how their machine works. The alternative, as was the case prior to patents, was that guilds were very secretive about their processes and technologies, and if something happened to the guild, the technology disappeared along with them. The patent bargain was made to bring their technological secrets into the public domain.

In the case of a rubber boot on an ethernet cable, there is nothing to disclose. You can figure out all there is to it by looking at it for 2 seconds. There is nothing consequential for society to reverse engineer in lieu of a patent. Protecting a rubber boot with patent protection is a terrible deal for society.

Wasn't there a similar backlash over Spore, another EA title?

What I want to know is why people still give money to EA when they pull these sorts of shenanigans.

Best Buy is headquartered in Minnesota, an at-will employment state. They can eliminate anyone at any time for any reason, and don't need a bogus excuse to do so.

Hero did not "technically" invent the steam engine. He made a steam powered novelty yes, and is credited with making the first steam engine of any kind, but his aeropile still had a long way to go before becoming a device that could power industry.

The point of patents is not to protect anyone's investments. The trade-off of patents is disclosure. Prior to patents, trades often kept their methods secret, and if any trades died out, so did their technologies. Patents were created to incentivize inventors to share the secrets of their invention, for the public good. A monopoly on the technology was the bargaining token to encourage them to spill the beans.

Patents systems do not care about investments, it only exists to make disclosure a more appealing option than secrecy.

You could also fix your lock.

If sitting at a "Whites Only" counter at a restaurant typically yielded 35 years in federal prison, I think he might have had a different attitude on how to fight unjust laws.

You are still not understanding. Both 'to wound' and 'to kill' are incorrect. You shoot to stop the threat. That may result in the target being killed, sure. But if you fill a guy with five holes, he collapses onto the floor and lays there motionless, but alive, you are not allowed to finish him off, which is what your claim of "always shoot to kill" would say you do.

"Always shoot to kill" might have been acceptable for police because they are behind the wall of blue thugs.

Voight-Kampff Test - watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umc9ezAyJv0

That's not all that astounding of a claim, there are many such organisms that have not changed much for many tens and hundreds of millions of years. They are often called Living Fossils. Examples include the nautilus, crocodiles, horseshoe crabs, and the hagfish as in TFA.

They determine this by examining fossils from a wide range of geological time frames and see that present day organisms are virtually unchanged from whats in the fossil record.

There are in the scientific literature published algorithms that produce approximate results well in the "good enough" range, 2-5% larger than optimal, to be worthwhile. For large and small datasets, with millions of points.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter that the warehouse has millions of items, the complexity of the problem depends only on the size of the order, or the sizes of how many orders can be fit in your rolly bin.

It's wouldn't be objectively any nastier than the other toxic substances such as hydrazine that would be sprayed all over the place in an explosion. "Dirty bombs" are not something to be taken seriously. Blowing up an equal mass of mercury would be more dangerous than the uranium, and the damage uranium would pose is more that it is a heavy metal than due to it being radioactive.

There are people with empathy that can still make the hard decisions, as opposed to the psychopaths in TFA that consider only themselves. Not all people with empathy are blubbering idiots.

The ketchup comment was in response to Zare's 1996 claims of organic compounds on meteorites found in Antarctica. NASA's discovery is something different.

Not all policies, many will still payout on suicide. Sometimes there are conditions, like the insured has to have the policy for a certain amount of time before its in force, often 2 years, but either way, the claim "All life insurance policies become void in case of suicide" is false.