I really don't think trademark and copyright are mutually exclusive. Please provide evidence.

And here is the problem in a nutshell. Some women are pictured because they achieved something significant, and some idiot immediately derails the conversation with comments on how attractive they are.

I find it fascinating that "The Giver" rates #11 (1990-1999) and #23 (2000-2009) on the ALAs 'Most Frequently Challenged' lists (for (very mildly) discussing sexual arousal in adolescents) and yet, when it gets made into a movie, it gets championed by some as advancing conservative values. (I've read the book but not seen the movie, so I can't comment on how reasonable this view is.)

I'm thinking they wouldn't like my take on the story.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

I interpret it as an allegory for the Garden of Eden story. The Community (with its absence of pain and want) can only maintain itself by evil means (e.g. infanticide and involuntary euthanasia) but to have citizens performing evil acts would also destroy its 'idealness'. The way they reconcile these contradictory requirements is by denying their citizens knowledge of good and evil. Jonas attempts to give them this knowledge, which, if he succeeded, would effectively expel The Community from their Eden, hence he is playing the role of the serpent.

... would be if you walked into the company's hospitality suite at a conference, put on the VR headset, looked around you ... and couldn't tell the difference.

An alien landscape is very cool and photogenic, but might be hiding flaws because we don't know what it is supposed to look like. It is a fair demonstration of immersive game worlds, which will be one of the big initial uses of VR, so the demonstration is not invalidated by this.

Scenario A:
Notch sells Mojang to a respected community friendly company for a reasonable price of a few hundred million. Mojang's employees and customers are reasonably happy.
Scenario B:
Notch sells Mojang to Microsoft for $2B. Mojang's employees are very unhappy. The customers are fairly unhappy but if they get too unhappy there are clones out there to migrate to, or they can just play the current version without further updates.
Scenario C:
Notch sells Mojang to Microsoft for $2B and gives each of his employees $1M as a present. Notch is still way richer than in scenario A, employees are happier, customers still have the migrate or no updates options.

If I had a cheap effective cure for malaria and a company I didn't trust offered me 10 times what I thought it was worth, I'd likely not sell. But for a smallish computer game company, I can do more good with $2B than any plausible evil that could come of the sale.

However, I am going to download the latest Minecraft development snapshot tonight so as to not miss out on slime blocks should I need to abandon updates.

I've expressed this sentiment as: you should be allowed to patent (non-obvious) solutions, you should never be allowed to patent a problem.

However, my expression of the issue is poorly defined as the problem/solution boundary is not clear. Is the problem "reusing rocket hardware" and "landing at sea" the solution, or is "reusing rocket hardware which is naturally coming down into the sea" the problem and "guiding it to the landing platform and securing it" the solution?

You use "concept" and "implementation" where I use "problem" and "solution", but the boundary issue will still exist. (Which is not to say that we shouldn't try.)

Changing your landing point is very easy - you just slightly change the attitude of the rocket during its retro burn, changing the horizontal component of the acceleration. Changing your landing point to where you want it to be is harder, but the SpaceX people seem to be making good progress on this. (Except that they just blew up their test vehicle...)

I've been interested in this for some time. Here are some solutions I've come across:
Something like a standard battery
Flow batteries, where you store liquid electrolytes in tanks, and energy capacity is proportional to the capacity of the tanks
Salt/Liquid metal batteries. Take the process for smelting aluminium, and make it reversible. (The metal used need not be aluminium.) There is a good TED talk on this.
Fixed volume compressed gas storage: pump gas into a pressure vessel or abandoned mine
Fixed pressure compressed gas storage: pump gas into a bladder deep under water. This works well for off shore wind farms, as they have the deep water right there. Otherwise you need a convenient lake or flooded mine.
Elevated water reservoir. Needs the right topography and hydrography, so doesn't work everywhere.
Variable output hydro power: similar to the above, but instead of pumping water uphill you just increase/decrease the downhill flow that already exists, to match you output to the production shortfall of the time variable generators. If you already have hydro power, this is very cheap, possibly free. At worst you need to increase peak capacity by adding turbines.
Heat storage: store energy as heat in a large thermal mass, extract it with some form of heat engine.

Complementary to this, we can also try to time-shift demand:
Off-peak water heating. This has been around for many decades.
Off-peak heating/cooling using thermal storage (e.g. an insulated water tank under your house from which your radiators are fed.)
Off-peak charging of plug-in electric cars. (We can even use peak-hour extraction of power from the electric cars.) This is cheap in that those batteries are already there for other purposes. It does cost if they batteries have a limited number of recharge cycles (which currently they do.)

For most species, childhood is all risk, no benefit (where benefit = breeding), and so it is to be got through as fast as possible (or at least in time for next breeding season). If glucose shortage was the only reason for doubling the length of our childhood, there would be a huge evolutionary pressure towards kids who could metabolize much more food and reach adulthood in half the time.

There is an obvious reason why humans have such a long childhood - it is because we have so very much to learn. Little bodies can learn as well as big bodies, and cost less to maintain.

Yes, people with talent are overrepresented on TV. Most of us prefer it that way.

Some new game changing battery/supercapacitor breakthrough might be just around the corner. If so, all that investment in the battery megafactory could get wiped out. Ditto with investing in lithium mining.

So the megafactory might be still happily minting money 25 years from now, or it might be nearly worthless 5 years from now. Presumably this means we'll be paying a risk premium on lithium and lithium batteries. It seems to me that it would be smart for Tesla to be investing in the very technologies that might disrupt their factory, as an insurance policy. That way, if the fortune you've invested in the factory evaporates, hopefully you'll have a new replacement fortune due to having a stake in the new technology. However, this strategy requires that you have the funds for this speculative investment, and has you encouraging the very research which will ruin your factory investment. (Also, maybe you won't have invested in the right places and won't have a stake in the new technology.) In the case of Tesla, they are major consumers as well as (soon to be) major manufacturers of batteries, so there is an additional up-side to investing in the hypothetical tech breakthrough.

Is lithium mining expanding fast enough to feed this factory when it comes online?

From TFA:

“Now we’re going to give you what you deserve for meddling in our business and when we finish with you, you can sue the city for $5 million and get rich, we don’t care,” Lt. Dennis Ferber said, according to the suit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

It appears the police followed exactly your logic. However if that statement is substantiated, Ferber's boss would be seriously derelict in their duty if they didn't fire him for this. He's publicly stated that he doesn't care about knowingly causing a multi-million dollar liability for his employer. IANAL, but I expect that should these cops not get punished and pull a similar stunt again, the city would open themselves up for greater punitive damages, as they'd let employees with a known track record of rights abuse continue working where they were likely to abuse again.

It would be good to see criminal proceedings, but I doubt it will happen.

Wikipedia says:
While metallic gallium is not considered toxic, the data are inconclusive.
Pure indium in metal form is considered nontoxic by most sources.

Most metals are not ferromagnetic, and so are not held in place by magnets. I'm pretty sure neither indium nor gallium are ferromagnetic.

As they are good conductors, metals do develop eddy currents in a changing magnetic field, which heats them. (Try dropping a magnet through a narrow aluminium tube. The energy loss due to eddy currents will slow its fall considerably.) If you had this liquid metal inside you, having an MRI scan might be a really bad idea - I wouldn't rule out the possibility that the bits of you in contact with the metal could get cooked. This would be a considerable drawback in a cancer treatment. It would be no different than having metal inside you for other reasons - e.g. titanium pins used in surgery. Does anyone know how those react to MRI?

Aside from the risks of what happens to the liquid metal after it's done its job, you also end up with a big lump of dead cells inside the body, which can't be good. On the other hand, presumably successful radiation therapy has the same result, and the result doesn't have to be 'good', it just has to be 'better than having a tumor'. Would someone with actual medical knowledge care to comment?