Because under the current system, you can sue anyone who is "doing business" in a location. As long as you accept online sales, you are doing business anywhere. Add to that the attractiveness of bringing in lots of court fees, and some politicians in Texas got the idea to appoint judges that would be extremely patent friendly. They then brag about the high rate of settlements/favorable judgements and the speed in which the court will hear your case

Bottom line: marketing and politics created a forum for patent trolls to get a court to back up their extortion. Texas rakes in the court costs, the trolls rake in the settlement/judgement money, and everyone is happy....right? :P

You say you aren't interested in persistence, so I don't see any reason why the data needs to be personally identifiable. Whether your index is John Smith in Albany,NY or User #71829382 doesn't matter for usage analytics. Even demographic information can at least be stripped of things like name and phone number.

If you REALLY need to tie this information to a particular instance, then use a hardware key from the mobile device and not a user's information. A hacked phone is easier to deal with than identity theft.

As someone else mentioned, work from the assumption that anything you save will end up being hacked and used for nefarious purposes. Make the data as useless as possible to a hacker and THEN design the systems and storage to be a hackproof as you can.

Sure, if it's a criminal case. That's rather the point of district attorneys and attorney generals; only someone in law enforcement can bring criminal charges to court.

The Lanham Act added the concept known as "trade dress". Trade dress seems to be defined as "If I take random Joe off the street and ask him what this is, does he reply that it's my product?". I don't think it's formally defined as copyright OR trademark.

A lot of places won't even consider you if they think you're overqualified, since they believe (perhaps rightly) that you will jump ship as soon as you get an offer that matches your experience.

Essentially, they claim the really thin (~0.03mm) layer of air between the stationary plate and the rotating heatsink is thermally conductive and agitated by the rotation, so no static boundary layer.

I don't think that one is useful, either. You have a slider at the bottom to adjust consumption rates, but there's two different scales (-2 to 5 and -1 to 4) AND a confusing note below that. Since the sliders are at 0%, is that assuming no increase, or should you adjust the slider to match the average increase listed? (which would make all 3 run out at roughly the same time)...who knows? There's no context to work with, just random sizes and shapes that pretend to be data.

Not really. Any time they display or send your content to another person, that's copyright infringement. So they need a license from you, it needs to be worldwide (since anyone can access the website), you WANT it to be non-exclusive, they don't intend to pay you to use their service so royalty-free, sublicenseable to the extent that if they use akami or some such to host the content, then akami doesn't comment infringement..

Time duration's about the only piece of the typical grant that is questionable. Since Dropbox is something of a temporary service, theirs makes sense.

Does anyone really think this cycle is any different? We're pretty much at the mid-point of the console cycle: PCs are flexing their muscle (again) and developers are reluctant to design just for PCs. But, as always, more will jump back on the PC bandwagon as it becomes obvious that the PC is the place to be for graphic quality (and the market loves eye candy). Eventually the console makers will decide to release new hardware to try to coax them back, and we'll repeat this cycle again.

So what's changed?