How about put up X amount of money for the review period? Some fraction (half?) of what the alleged infringer expects to make in that period. You get your money back if patents are upheld, otherwise, you pay for your false allegation.

I would love to see them use that money and make a commercial that say: "Buy Samsung, because the other guy is a complete doushbag."

A physical object that is commonly-agreed upon medium of value change. That's cash by definition.

By artificial scarcity. Quote from Warren Buffett:

Right, because moving a couple hundred pounds of the stuff for any substantial purchase can easily be kept secret...

Until one day, they decided that your card is too old to support. By that point, nouveau would probably have decent support for basic 3D primitive, but by no mean optimized. For really old card that neither driver support, the user is screwed.

Is that base on your culture stereotype? In fact, in the Chinese education system, there is an explicit method of claiming that you are not good with math and science (and vice versa): in high school, a few years before the all-important college entrance exam, the classes are segregated into "wen-ke" and "li-ke". "Wen-ke" or literary class, emphasizes literature, history, political science and has a very light role for math and science. "Li-ke", logic classes, emphasizes the opposite subjects. Students are taught equally everything upto that point. Afterward, they concentrate on their area of studies. They even receive different consideration on college applications.

Indeed, there is a debate in the Chinese blogosphere now that some people, most journalists and authors who came from a "wen-ke" background, claiming that mathematics more advanced than middle school is useless and the blogs of scientist and engineers who claim the opposite.

I will tell you categorically this is not true. I have Chinese textbook from 1-12 from a few years ago. trigonometry is what they go up to. Now, some older textbook from the early 80's (right after the culture revolution) did include calculus, but that was dropped in the 80's.

What I think do make the point you are trying to make largely valid is that Chinese student teaches what in the state we called Advanced Algebra by end of middle school (equivalent to 9th grade here since they have 6 years elementary school). The three years of high school essentially consists doing a LOT of exercises and prep-exam in preparation for the "gao-kao", the be-all college entrance exam. Look at China, South Korean, and Japan is you wan to see what standardized exam will turn your education system into. It is horrific.

Check out this article (in Chinese, but the picture speaks for itself): http://bbs.gdou.edu.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=73378&do=blog&id=3436 The picture showcases a girl who recently finished her gao-kao with all the prep-exam she did in high school, every single one of which she kept. I think there are some rumor that the picture is actually a fake, but many on wei-bo (Chinese twitter) are echoing that it is not an exaggeration.

I agree with your larger point that the traditional lecture style education is not good for everyone.

We do. Some physics department, like the one from which I got my PhD, offers research in physics education as a PhD program. Student do research and gather data in classroom and apply the same statistical analysis techniques to asset the effectiveness of certain teaching techniques. Unfortunately, they usually do not get the same respect in the department as more traditional thesis topics. Usually there are a few (<5) faculties out of the whole department who actually care about physics education that they accept student in these topics. The APS is starting to recognize it as a specialty, but only treats it as a "special topic". We are getting there.

When I was TA-ing to pay my way through my degree, I recommend KA to many intro physics students. Then after talking to a lot of them, I find the result to be kind of mixed. Some find it helpful, other not and it somewhat surprised me that it did not correlated with grade. The worst case is that some thinks it's helpful when in fact it did not (and you can tell by asking conceptual questions that is only a twist of the problems covered in the video). Totally anecdotal. However, fellow students who actually engaged in physics educations research tents to agree that a one way dictation, abet using video, do not help student who lacks a good conceptual foundation to begin with. And this guy, who also did a PhD in physics education, also agree. I do think the world is better with those video than without though.

Then why do we pick them out to be special and give them tax exemption? Don't answer that.

From GP:

It is not inconceivable that the so-call god rewards conviction and the full exercise of the intellect that he bestowed as the ultimate virtue? The way I see it, religion, Abrahamic religions in particular, is precisely the kind of quick-and-easy way for a deity or deities use to rule out dumb and uninquisitive people . Promise people reward in the unforeseeable future and see how many people open their wallets. Not much different from your run-of-the-mill direct-marketing scheme. Probably what I would use if I were an omnipotent god. People who believes they are right without evident lost the ability to investigate whether it is so.

The diameter of the sun is 1e9 meters. The distance to the closest star, Alpha Centauri, is about 4e16m (40 lightyears)...Let's put that in context:
Suppose the sun is the size of a grain of sand, say 1mm (1e-3mm), the distance to the nearest grain of sand is 40 kilometer. So a collision between galaxies is basically collision between empty spaces...

So...it's foggy in the office?

A friend of mine is a phd student in a lab whose PI is very fond of accepting bright local high school students for summer stint then ask his students to "supervise" them (The PI likes to travel during the summer with no teaching duties, but it's not like he would spend his valuable time to supervise bunch of high school kids anyway). A few of them stood out and got accepted into the lab for having a high ranking in the Intel competition. Being a foreign student, she asked me what the competition was about. Then she goes on a rand about how she basically had to babysit some of these morons who did not seem to have spend a single hour in basic lab safety training. Can't tell the different chemical labels if it were flying straight toward their face. At some point, she basically had to relegate them to the office with computers because otherwise she cannot get any work done.

"Public transportation project found to spontaneous converge toward a centrally organized communist entity spontaneously, Liberal academia found."

I recently build an HTPC with a Zotac barebone with an NVIDIA ION GPU. The first player I went to was VLC, but I found that it cannot do GPU accelerated HD video. VLC has a checkbox for it in preference, but it doesn't play a 1080p H.264+flac mkv file I have and on a 720p file, CPU usage was high. After much experimenting, I find that smplayer/mplayer and Media Player Classic - Home Cinema will do GPU acceleration right out of the box. Both are free.

Side note. During my experiment, I got so frustrated with Windows 7, I installed Ubuntu 11.10. To my surprise, VDPAU pretty much just works with mplayer, especially mplayer2. I think both the nvidia (proprietary) and nouveau (open source) worked, but my memory is uncertain on this point. VLC under Linux supposedly support the competing VAAPI, which can use VDPAU as a backend, but it did not work. The only reason I eventually switch back to Windows is Netflix and its silverlight addiction, which, by the way, will also not use GPU to accelerate HD video.

Or Ubisoft coming up with Assassin's Creed -- the new millennium.