Patents are basically intellectual land mines. Sure, they're 'defensive' in nature... until one day the war ends, the land changes hands, the maps are lost, and somebody builds a preschool next door.

Hey, shape up with that attitude or we'll put Amanda Knox on trial again!

Not only that, but an excerpt for discussion purposes would certainly qualify as fair use. This whole "copyrighted test" complaint sounds like a giant smokescreen.

What would be an example of college-level material on a 6th-grade test?

Of course it does. If you're productive, and people are actually using your code, then you're effective.

VB6 has enabled a lot of people to get a lot of useful stuff done. This is widely considered (on Slashdot at least) to be a Bad Thing.

Area man still remembers a couple of guys named Pons and Fleischmann.

If the USPTO actually applied the required standards of nonobviousness and nontriviality, these stupid patents would never have been granted.

Unfortunately, their incentives are diametrically opposed to common sense. There is literally no downside for a USPTO examiner to rubber-stamp everything on his or her desk. They get to go home early to beat the traffic, while productive society is left to deal with the legal fallout. The net effect is to devalue legitimate IP while rewarding the trolls.

This, I think, is what really needs to change. Somehow, the feedback loop has to be closed in a way that incentivizes the examiners to throw out vague, egregious patents on abstract concepts.

No, Christians aren't to blame for the acts of personality cults. It's just a different exploit for the same mental bug. Fix it, and both problems -- religion and totalitarianism --- will go away.

Communist personality cults aren't atheistic. The leader is an explicit God-substitute.

Try peddling atheism in North Korea, see how that goes for you.

Wikileaks like to market this as shining light on the truth but in reality they are just revictimizing a company that was the victim of hacking and theft.

Karma is a bitch on wheels, ain't she?

I see this as no different than someone wiretapping publishing a family's private conversations.

Yeah, the Gambino family.

A matter of opinion, but if you think driving is "fun", you're probably one of the people making roads dangerous

You're the second person in this thread to post this rather odd and specific assertion, more or less verbatim. Who's paying you guys to lay down all of this astroturf, and how can I get in on some of that action?

It's not unreasonable if you can convince a judge to sign a warrant.

Otherwise, yes, it's unreasonable. Consider how much trouble you'd be in if you attached a GPS tracker of your own to a police car.

"No longer available in the US," according to the page you linked to.

I will say that's a really cool-looking spacey X-ray phaser gun, though. Tres Marvin the Martian.

Says the guy with his own 4 GHz computer, without the slightest trace of irony.

That's like saying to a software developer that he/she doesn't need to understand what memory leaks and segfault exceptions are, and how to prevent/fix them, because it's the job of the compiler to compile code in a way such that software never crashes.

And in a sandboxed, garbage-collected language, that would be exactly correct.

It's time for HDL developers to hold their tool vendors to the same standards that software developers expect.