Dean Kamen is also know for wearing the same outfit every day.

This also kinda reminds me of how Buckminster Fuller defended his sterile architecture by suggesting that its mass-produced homogeny would encourage people to differentiate themselves by what they do rather than where they live.

It's a vaguely communist-sounding notion that bland equality can make us more free. Perhaps this is why most public schools in the U.S. don't require uniforms.

I have a feeling that this will come to an abrupt end once he reaches bear country. The bears are really hungry where I live (in the southwest), which is kind of on the way to L.A.

Just cap the number of patents issued each year (to say, 2000), and develop a much more thorough review process to ensure that only the most novel, useful and non-obvious applications are approved. Every patent we issue represents an increased burden on our legal system and a roadblock to other inventors who need to worry about infringing upon it, so it makes sense that the government shouldn't be making an open-ended offer to protect everything that can be protected.
This also means we wouldn't have to continue the futile search for a consistent set of guidelines of what constitutes "novel, useful and non-obvious". Instead we can just settle for deciding whether one invention is more novel, useful and non-obvious than another invention, which should be much easier.

...would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force

No wonder my stocking had a big diamond in it this morning. It USED to be a hunk of coal.

... an O(1) solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem, but he ain't sharing it. Which is a bummer, since that's all I wanted for Christmas.

I was thinking the same thing. I think the main problem with this would be the legal issues. Unlike a controlled burn or avalanche control work, it would be very hard to predict the duration, magnitude and scale of the quakes being released. Just releasing the earthquake in the first place would be hard, and if you finally score and manage to release a lot of tectonic pressure, you wouldn't want to be the one that everyone could point to as the source of the resulting damage.

Project Stormfury ran into the same issues: difficult to predict whether it works, but assuming it does work, you're an easy blame target for things that are most likely Mother Nature's mistakes rather than your own.

Yeah, but they're looking at text messages, facebook, email etc. An AR app will have to fight those things for a person's attention.

...a gold farm is shopping for more child slave labor to produce more virtual crap to sell to negligent parents.

Ok, I guess the postman (or anyone else) could just find a new package with the same destination zip code as his package in order to defeat my suggested system. Their are further measures that could be taken to prevent this, such as incorporating an account number that is associated with a specific sending address in the code and maintaining a database of all packages sent during the day to prevent a code from being used twice in the same day.

Also, what 91degrees said. Scamming the postal service is a lot of risk for little gain.

This is avoidable with a well-engineered system. To make it difficult for a scammer to generate a viable code, they could require that the user supply some information specific to the package, such as the destination zip code and the date that it is being mailed. Then, the postal service could concatenate this info with a short randomly-generated package ID and sign it with a private key to generate a code.
The post office could then verify whether the code matches the characteristics of the package of itself. If there is ambiguity in the way the code is written on the package (say, a character that could not be completely discerned) the system could come up with multiple possibilities for syntactically valid codes and then attempt to verify each one and use the first one that matches.
If the generated codes are made of a limited alphanumeric charset instead of just digits, they should be able to carry enough information that the system can both be forgiving to human error and robust against attackers.
Also, with any system it would be possible to build a phone app that would let the user verify a newly-written code just by taking a picture of it with their phonecam.

They've tried it in freight trains

To clarify here, I only reuse passwords for accounts which could not be used for anything too nefarious if they were hacked. My logins for more important sites (like /.) have unique passwords.

Is it even worth the effort of coming up with a secure password for that site? If I had for some reason found it necessary to register with such a vapid site I would have just re-used one of my low-security passwords (which many other sites have access to). It isn't too surprising that nobody cares whether someone else is using their account to steal their noisy, eye-burning flash videos. What is far worse is if people are re-using passwords from much more important sites. In this case, it doesn't matter if your password is a random string of letters, numbers and special characters.

Those two surfaces are fundamentally different, topologically speaking. Would a spherical torus would look something like a 4-sided triangle? Or sound like one hand clapping?

Cosmic.

Clearly, you're being ironic, but you cannot out-irony the authorities.