He had a space shuttle model that he put together one time, and as far as know it still remains in the shape of the space shuttle. It didn't grow dinosaur engines, it didn't have wooden castle doors, it never had gears and shafts and pistons protruding from the wings, it just stayed a space shuttle model. The castle, on the other hand, was sometimes a tube, sometimes a fort, and sometimes a box, depending on what he was playing.

He's now 25 years old, and I don't suppose he's all that interested anymore. However, he's probably not too far from having a kid of his own to take it apart and remake it in the shape of a zombie tractor ninja robot.

The problem is that it's all the frickin' strike-on-box junk nowadays. Good old fashioned strike-anywhere matches are getting harder to find. You have to dig deep through grandma's junk drawer to find a box, and then you still have to sneak them out to the garage to see which of grandpa's mysterious cans of fluids are the most flammable.

I saw a video on Youtube titled "A magazine is an iPad that does not work." It featured a 1-year-old child tapping images on a magazine, expecting something to happen, and being somewhat frustrated that nothing does. There's a kid who may never throw a ball in his or her life.

Now I'm trying to figure out if that actually matters or not -- I certainly don't see ball-throwing as a necessary skill for life anymore, it's now strictly a form of recreation. We're no longer hunter-gatherers, we don't have to climb trees to get fruit or throw spears at boars to eat meat. We may be missing out on a lot of the experiences in the world by avoiding such activities, but we don't truly need them to survive in this age of McFood, Amazon, and Farmville.

The best Lego set we ever bought for my son was a castle set at a garage sale. It didn't have instructions. He just put together pieces and made castles, they didn't have to look like anything pre-made at all.

Had I been more forward thinking, I would have thrown away all his Lego instruction sheets and booklets.

I am too. And I agree with Stevens that it needs to be changed. I don't think the Constitution should be ignored because parts of it are no longer useful or fashionable. It should not remain some relic of a bygone era. It should be a living document that enshrines how we have grown as a nation and as a people; how we as citizens want to live today and in the future. I think that is what the founding fathers would have expected of us.

Unlikely. The video is exactly 10 seconds long, which is the default recording length for Glass. Now, is it possible she recorded for minutes and cut it to exactly 10 seconds? And those were the particular 10 seconds where she told them she was filming, rather than saying it during any other time during the recording? Sure... But Occam's Razor would tend to disagree.

The video starts with the patrons already attacking the Glasshole, so no, she started filming them after she was attacked. And frankly, filming people committing a crime is quite a reasonable response.

Unless you own the bar, you don't know that for sure.

That's also true for most people's blogs - no one looks at them unless something happens like, say, some idiot attacks the person with the camera and blog.

Here is literally the first result for a Google Image Search for "people texting". The three on the left are indistinguishable from people taking pictures. Flip through that search and I'd say about half of the photos have people holding their phone up in front of their faces. Point being that while some people text while holding their phone down at their waist, apparently just as many do it while holding the phone up to their eyes.

Fiction novels are relevant prior art that can be used to reject a patent application, but can only be used for the material they teach. H.G. Wells' story describes traveling to the moon by cannon: accordingly, it would invalidate a patent claim that recited "A method for traveling to the moon, comprising: being fired at the moon by a giant cannon." But it wouldn't invalidate a patent claim to, say, the space shuttle's main engines; or a method of calculating Lagrange points; or the timing sequence for your multi-engine startup system, etc.

Similarly, a fiction novel that says that contact lenses can include cameras would invalidate a patent claim that recited "A contact lens, comprising: a lens; and a camera attached to the lens, configured to take a picture when the user blinks twice" or something similar. It wouldn't invalidate a patent that claims how you make optically transparent CCDs, or determining proper focus based on relative distance to a second lens, or determining that a blink or sneeze is not actually a picture-taking command. The patent claim would have to include additional limitations that were not described in the fiction story.

It's a little more than that, though... remember the story with the Glasshole in the bar from last month who got attacked? That bar - along with most bars - have security cameras. Cameras that are casually pointed at people the whole time.

Taking a photo (with the flash off) can look exactly like the person is texting.

This is the real issue... Glass costs $1500, and many of the people wearing them are in places with huge economic inequality, like SF or NYC, where gentrification and high rents are pushing out people who have lived there for decades. It's not "there's a camera pointed at me", because there's that security camera pointed at you already. Instead, it's "that rich hipster 'entrepreneur' douchebag is pointing a camera at me, and he's supported by a multi-billion dollar company, and where does he get off coming into my neighbor and replacing my cheap pizza joint with his gastropub, and demanding free parking in charger spots for his Tesla? He wants to be Glassed? Well, I'll show him a glass to his face."

It's the same sentiment behind people attacking the Google busses, or the the SF cops that arrested and held a guy in solitary confinement with no charges after finding out that he was a startup founder.

He didn't. This is a patent application that was just published. Subby can't even blame the article - the headline notes that it's pending, and the article continuously refers to it as a patent filing.

Dealextreme is like BG Micro. Sure, they buy stuff to stock and sell, but much of what they sell is some crap that someone else couldn't sell, which they got for a song. Just because DX got a bunch of tablets nobody wanted to buy in a store for $20/piece doesn't mean someone will sell you new, supported ones for that.

I have the same experience with a Nexus 7 2013, but only since upgrading to kitkat.