Good point. Also - without knowing how many flights? There are hundreds of thousands of car crashes every year - but there are millions upon millions of miles traveled by car every year, so crashes are relatively rare. If there were 1000 drone flights and 400 crashes the article would have a point, but there were probable hundreds of thousands of military drone flights in the last 10 years.

Also, Military aircraft do tend to crash very often around the world. see Wikipedia List of accidents and incidents involving military aircraft (2010–present). Note the string of fatalities caused by those crashes.

Same - on a year I filed a tax return. They gave me several credits I did not claim after an audit, paid me back quite a big chunk of cash.

At least he has openly declared that he "is not a dingo."

The law school I am familiar with leaves the choice of text up to the prof. Some of them will avoid these textbooks because of the ethical challenges, some won't. Of course, my school also ran its own bookstore and probably made quite a lot of profit off reselling used books, so there's that too. On the other hand $200.00 is not very much for a law school text.

Wait -- back up. You know that one of those two things is actually on-the-books against the law and the other is not, right? I hope. Please?

Sounds like you probably aren't from the southern U.S.

Nature is a big fan of brute force solutions to complex equations - it just does shit and reports the result.

Let's stick with the laws I know, which are Illinois - so here is Illinois' mattress law - that's in addition to the regulations that come out of our executive branch: http://www.ilga.gov/legislatio... (but hey, I'm just a lawyer, wtf do I know, right?)

The use cases for google glass (overlaying information ontop of really - i.e. augmented reality) and Oculus Rift (a VR display that supplants and replaces your view with a different view - i.e. virtual reality) are entirely different. That would be like buying a car manufacturer to help catch up with SpaceX in building heavy launch vehicles - yeah, both are things you catch a ride in - but the technology that powers them doesn't cross pollinate.

This is why it is illegal for states to regulate anything originating from outside their borders, like flammable mattresses and poisoned baby food.

Can't tell if serious or successful troll.

Marijuana is still illegal, right? I mean, it's it a conspiracy theory if I can point to the status and rules at issue?

Good News! It's already implemented.

I have a better bright-line rule to suggest: no method patents - ever.

Patents should be restricted to the implementation of physical mechanisms - machines, circuits and widgets. Not pseudo code - like the one you linked. What you linked is an idea - an abstract concept of how to solve a problem. The specific implementation could be subject to copyright protection (for the code) and trademark protection (if the slide style became a hallmark of the product) but a patent? No way.

You're not allowed to patent an obvious advancement.

But patent law is offensively fucked up. Basically, it's a war of money. Both sides line up patent lawyers (one of a very few formally recognized specializations for attorneys in the U.S.) and burn money until someone gives up. This case will almost certainly wind up before the Supreme Court eventually - unless Samsung folds and pays to make apple go away. Fortunately, Samsung is sufficiently profitable that it can saturate the process with more money than required and write it off as a margin cost for continuing to compete in the smartphone market.

Apple's patents are offensively bad. There *is* enough there to require a jury verdict to nullify them rather than a summary ruling by the Court (preferably one where the foreman doesn't lie about having a personal stake in proving that software patents are nearly always valid - like the last trial between these two) but in a sane system of patents there would be no question that "slide to unlock" is a variation of long established design concepts - i.e. a latch.