Sounds like Surgeon Simulator to me!

What about oversight? They say they're going to stop doing this and that, but how will we ever know whether they're being honest about it? How will we know whether the next president decides to turn the bus back around? Congressional oversight is a joke, as members of Congress (e.g,, Feinstein) are as much in favor of running roughshod over citizens' rights and allies' respect as Gen. Alexander is. FISC oversight is likewise pointless, and several of those judges have argued against even having an opposing side arguing for the privacy protections of the people. Short of another Snowden, there's no way to know.

Bill Clinton's staffers went around prying the W keys off the keyboards in the White House before George W. Bush moved in (among other things), but we don't automatically accuse Clinton himself of being petty and moronic because of that.

Oh, wait, you're talking about Google. For a second there, I thought you were talking about Slashdot Beta.

I'm not completely sure, but I think the SEC is talking about situations where a company avoids the traditional IPO process and instead "crowdfunds" the sale of securities in their company (either debt or equity). Kickstarter is generally different, because the return on "investment" is in the form of a set non-monetary reward that is more similar to a purchase than an investment.

What is needed, though, is some clarity in the rulemaking process to ensure that Kickstarter and other similar sites can feel comfortable that they are not at risk of being caught up in this net.

I'm pretty sure that legislation is still in the Senate. See also this.

Okay, in fairness, I went back and read TFS, and it looks like the real problem here is Soulskill's poor writing skills. A transitional sentence was needed to indicate that the "+/- 20 years" prediction was an old prediction, and that scientists did a new analysis in 2012 that suggested that a large earthquake was imminent (and which happened not long thereafter).

Seriously, this sounds like a math problem for a middle school math class:

Fred found out that an earthquake happened in 1850, 1900, and 1950. When should Fred expect the next earthquake to happen?

A. 2000
B. 1951
C. 2013
D. This is a bogus question because it makes unfounded assumptions as to how earthquakes work without any true understanding as to the underlying mechanics

Want to not sleep tonight? Read SCP-1981.

These records would seem to be responsive to a proper FOIA request, and if the government already has already-paid-for access to the records, they would be required to pony up those records at the cost of duplication (which would arguably get around the third-party fees this company would charge).

Why they didn't just give all this stuff to Google is beyond me. I'm sure they'd love to have a project like this, and they'd probably make it publicly available for the price of ads.

How do we know that the SCP Foundation wasn't already aware of this object, and the whole tunneling project wasn't actually a cover for securing it? Rest assured that whatever "it" is, "they" have a suitably mundane explanation already prepared.

Maybe they found the AllSpice.

The summary actually isn't spot on, because Lee was appointed as the deputy director. She will be the "acting director" until the President appoints a new director and the Senate confirms him or her.

There is actually a concern that this appointment is not valid, because the law requires that the deputy director be appointed by the Secretary of Commerce after being nominated by the USPTO director. We don't actually have a USPTO director currently, so it's not clear from where the authority for this appointment is derived.

Why are these pages even indexed? Wouldn't it make more sense to just expunge them from the database (perhaps by hostname or even domain name as appropriate) rather than keep them around waiting for someone to figure out a way to trick Google into retrieving them?

A preliminary amendment filed on the filing date along with the application can avoid excess claims fees. In other words, they filed a continuation that included claims 1-154 (because a continuation is supposed to have all the same stuff that the parent has, and this ensures that there is written description support for the parent's original claims in the child case), but then they amended the claims on the same day to cancel those claims and only present claims 155-175 (21 claims). So they owed us $80 for one excess dependent claim, which they paid.

Also, there are ways to submit third party prior art submissions into an application. You would have until 5/28/2014 (six months after publication) to submit such prior art. There's even a fee exemption if you file only one such submission and it has three or fewer documents listed. This is a much better idea than trying to contact the examiner directly, since they are forbidden from discussing the application with an unauthorized party.