Once the big game engines and physics libraries get generic support for GPU programming through OpenCL, this will all be pretty moot anyway. From what I can tell, the bullet physics library is already developing this, and I am sure closed source competitors are doing that as well. Relying on anything that will only run on a single vendor's hardware is just a losing business proposition (unless that vendor pays you for it, which I guess is how PhysX got going).

No, you need gravity to hold an atmosphere, much more than the Moon currently has. A strong magnetic field helps, but is not necessary, as in the case of Venus.

That number for drug R&D costs is described by some commentators as "9-digit fairy tale" (source article http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/180/3/279). It is true that you cannot market directly to consumers in many countries, the industry can and do market to doctors. Although the doctors are relatively few in numbers, the pandering they receive is far more expensive.

"If you own something then you can sell it."

There are lots of things you can own, but not sell. Some things you can only sell under certain very limited circumstances, other things not at all. There is an infinite variety of property arrangements, and trying to define property to be just one, simple (ideologically loaded I guess) concept is meaningless. Try reading a book about the philosophy of law and property one day. You might learn something.

Whose lawn?

<shotgun action="load" />

China does not want the existing regime to collapse, which would most likely lead to a mass exodus of millions of poor people across the border to China. But North Korea does not really have any friends in the international arena anymore. It is so bat shit crazy that it would be a liability to anyone associated with it.

Judging from the screencast, this looks just like what Fedora is trying to do with the revisor application. I wonder how fast it is, though. In the screencast, it looked like the image was created almost instantly, while revisor can take hours to complete, and it is so full of bugs and so hard to make working images with that it is IMHO nearly unusable. I have spent days trying to make revisor and then pungi create working images with a custom kickstart file, but eventually had to go over to doing everything by hand instead. I really hope SuSe deliver on their promises on this, it will make life so much simpler for people working with embedded systems and kiosk systems.

Every computer program can be interpreted to "improve the way a system runs", and therefore be patentable under this theory, which is exactly the point. They have been doing this slimy workaround the "mere program" rule for a long time, arguing that the invention is a combination of software and hardware components (because software has to run on hardware, duh), and it forms the very basis for software patents in the EU.