In addition to this, the idea that $50 to rent or $150 to buy a general chemistry textbook is a "very low" price, as mentioned in the article, also suggests cartel-like price hikes from the textbook makers.

If you read the older article linked within the article for this story you will see that the woman who was electrocuted was using an iPhone 4, not an iPhone 5 as was first reported. So this was indeed using the older connector.

Member of Parliament

Well, I don't know about stupidly low, but a big discount is what this writeoff represents. The estimate of 6 million Surface tablets comes from the $900 million writeoff and the $150 discount which they started offering to educational buyers last month, and are now offering to the general public.

There are a few other people with my name, and now that the internet is more ubiquitous, some of them actually have some meaningful online presence. Since I don't post on Facebook much, the Facebook result that comes up in the first page of Google results is somebody else. Still, though, more than 80% of the first several pages of results on my firstname+lastname are about me. It was more extreme 10 years ago, when there was the small insurance company that got one result, a college football player with a couple results, and pages and pages of nothing but me.

James, you wanted to hear about what the real problems with the patent system are? One of them is the continuation patent.

Back in 1996 you filed for a patent which issued in 2001 as U.S. patent 6,199,076. This actually sounds original for the time; it seems to be a system for providing hyperlinks that could be followed while listening to an audio program, along with a way to jump back to the previous program. Of course, we had those features already in web browsers; whether doing the same thing in an audio program was sufficiently innovative enough to deserve a patent is debatable (and presumably was debated a bit, since it took 5 years for the patent to be issued).

However, that patent in no way describes podcasting, which involves an ability to subscribe to a recurring series of audio programs, including ones not yet issued. That is instead covered by patent 8,112,504, which you filed in 2009 as a "continuation" of the much earlier patent application, one which had, in fact, already been issued as a complete patent for 8 years. Podcasting generally does not (and as far as I know, never does) include the hyperlinking-within-audio-programs feature of the '076 patent. (Yes, each item in a feed includes a hyperlink to where the audio file can be retrieved, but there aren't hyperlinks within those files to other podcasts - not unless they are spoken and you have to type in a URL yourself.) The features of that patent that podcasting programs do include - the ability to select one or more of a set of audio programs to listen to, possibly setting them to repeat, and with the ability to interrupt and redefine the sequence - were available in programmable CD players that already existed when the '076 patent was filed. And none of those features are features of the podcast, but of the podcasting program or hardware device.

The ability to go back and rewrite your old patent to include new features, and claim you invented them back when the old patent was filed (even if, as you noted, you're limited to collect damages on activity after the new version of the patent is issued) is one thing that is broken in the patent system. You basically saw something that people were doing, found an old patent which bore a little similarity, but which didn't have any claims against that activity you could enforce, and rewrote it so it covered the activity, after the fact. This should not be allowed.

Now I realize that there are legitimate reasons for continuations being considered a part of the original application. But you shouldn't be able to introduce new concepts outside the scope of the original patent application in a continuation. This sort of thing should either be rejected outright, or treated as a new application with priority date set to when the new concepts were first filed.

Actually, this is an error in the summary. The article says that it doesn't change state in response to light, but with an applied voltage. It's read with light that doesn't change the polarization state.

You say that, but exactly this situation has occurred with inventions as original and important as the telephone (1876).

As an example of going after customers, see the story about patent trolls extorting money from business who use scan-to-email functionality. There are more recent stories on this subject, but this one from January is what I can find right now.