This is actually current fee table. www.uspto.gov/curr_fees
While no single item costs the $10,000 i quoted, there are separate fees for application filing, extra claims, more than 100 pages etc, search, examination, issuance and most importantly maintenance fees which are quite high over period of the patent(applicable only of course if awarded). I didn't want to get into the details, but believe me it will cost you in that range easily.
My point being the current fees system is carefully designed to prevent people from abusing with sheer load. If there is load it is generating enough money, USPTO is simply not hiring enough people to handle it, that is merely a execution problem not a system design failure.

I am not a fan of the current patenting system, but this is BS, a patent application costs $10,000, if the patent reviewer is overworked it has nothing to do with the abuse of the system, even considering a cost of $200,000 to the USPTO per patent reviewer including all the overheads a reviewer has to only review 20 patents a year to make the system viable.

Perhaps you did not pay it directly but if you bought the device then you did pay the fees for the patents, along with the illegal pollutants in it, the Chinese sweatshops making it for you. The minute you pay for it, It is your endorsement of all the things behind making that product.

no your assertion was they are not illegal, which may as well be, but that doesn't say anything about requiring training.
Just cause legally training is not mandated does not mean training is not required. I don't need any special certification outside being an engineer to run say a power plant but that doesn't mean i don't need loads of training to do it.

Shooting some for anything is never justified

The trademark for "apple" itself is not really owned by apple, but licensed from the company that owns the Beatles music collection and was started by them, and was contentious for couple of decades, as recently as when itunes launched..

'It is the foundation of most of the world's religions. ...

Last I checked neither India nor China follow any of the Abrahmic religions dominantly. They constitute at-least 40% of world population? (even back in '68)..

I m not a security expert or a systems architect, this is purely from a layman's perspective but this is what i would do

Log everything, every file access every read and write call, some one with root access may clean up the logs you might say, then integrate it into the file sytem architecture, still really talented hackers might circumvent the File-system and directly access it. Even better built into the hardware of the storage devices to make it really tamper proof. Once you do log everything, it is not too difficult to setup alerts on suspicious patterns especially for large scale theft.

If some of the above it too disruptive, too costly, too difficult to implement then alternative is to simply have peers review your access in sensitive systems. Meaning every time some one needs root access to those system, other sysadmins preferably needs monitor/approve etc, sure it creates more red tape and bureaucracy and decrease in productivity, but better than the loosing data of national importance. In general more the people having monitoring information access, less chance of theft, as it then requires more people to collateralize on your wrong doing making it statistically less probable.

Finally I would suggest encryption at multiple levels, I don't know what exact role snowden actually performed, but I cannot visualize many cases where he needed access to the contents of a file or object to do sysadmin work. Even if it required such decryption, NSA could easily setup dedicated servers which will decrypt file and of course log the requests.

These are crude ideas and are probably full of holes, but any with serious experience and sufficient time and thought can design robust systems making it much harder to steal. No system is perfect, but it could been made far harder and amount of information leaked could have been minimized far better.

I think this more a symptom of the american security apparatus rather than a problem with the NSA only, look at how easy it was for Manning to take information, he was no techie, not particularly given special access.

Far more than spooks collecting data I am worried at how badly they are securing it. To clarify I am not supporting this invasion of privacy, but merely saying that this data can end easily up in the hands of people who will do far worse than what NSA will do.

what makes you think that foreign Governments didn't have already access to the information?,

if Snowden could get access so easily to so much without getting noticed, what makes you think any state couldn't have just easily bribed any other sysadmin and kept getting the same info?

You should really question the NSA security policies, for an organization which infiltrates networks regularly to have such poor security is appalling.

Surprisingly that doesn't seem to come up in this whole dialog about Snowden leaks. Everyone seems to think NSA is some all knowing efficient organization, the perfect big brother.

To me it seems they are woefully incompetent in even keeping basic access control policies in place.

Before anyone starts explaining about how it is difficult not to give root access to sys admins etc, it is not exactly rocket science to have peer reviewed access control polices even for sys admins, and alert systems in place depending on the amount of data being accessed over a period of time etc. if I think of 5 different measures of the cuff, I am sure any serious security consultant worth his fees should be able to do much much better.

I cannot stress this enough if a company losses data like this as happening fairly frequently these days, while worrying, I can on some level understand that it is not their core business, and perhaps they didn't spend enough on security and missed a step or two, but for an organization whose main objective is to do break into networks, this is plain stupid.

it is supposed to be London-based Datawind said it will begin selling"... As in TFA, poor summary as usual

To put this in context I develop applications for asynchronous video conferencing primarily targeted towards low bandwidth environments in developing countries, where regular video chat is simply not possible.

It is not that difficult I am sure there are plenty of ppl out here who have done better than me but here is what i do I routinely work with 56K, with latency hitting 800-1200ms(extremely poor ISP). Just need to adjust your browsing behavior accordingly. Unless I absolutely must, almost always have images and plugins are disabled. I prefer using links as a browser for reading news and blogs, by and large these sites do not require JS for the basic functioning. As a bonus, it is probably as safe as using noscript stringently, and also perhaps protect against the obscure img hacks? Also if possible i avoid using browser based applications when i can use desktop applications using appropriate protocols such mail clients, chat apps etc, or use apps that really use web storage properly, so you don't really feel the speed issue. By and large I find more than speed it the latency is this bigger problem. Of course i enjoy normal speeds like everyone else when i return to civilization so to speak.