Confiscated and closed the account are not the same thing, and do not have the same effect.

His account was closed: he will have his money returned to him.

His account was not confiscated as the government did not take his money for itself.

His account was also not frozen, where the bank held his money, but he was temporarily unable to access it.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but what the hey.

Many inventions, even some of the best, are only obvious after you've seen them. Hindsight is 20/20. How many times have you seen a new product and said to yourself or someone else: why didn't I think of that?!

Does that mean that none of these are inventions that are deserving of patent protection? The consensus among people who think about these things is: no, obvious in hindsight isn't a good reason to reject a patent. That's the rationale. So, I guess there can be one.

So, how do you decide what would have been obvious to someone who was thinking about the problem, without having seen the solution, as you now have? These tests are how the USPTO tries to answer that question.

Finally, what makes you think patent lawyers are ignorant? By definition, all of them have a technical degree or university-level training. Many practicing in the biochem field have advanced degrees. PhD is almost a requirement for entry. Many were also researchers before making the transition. Patent lawyers have a much older average starting age than your prototypical lawyers. Heck, I know one who was a tenured university professor for 20 years before looking for a new challenge.

Your post reads to me like the simplistic reaction of someone who's spent maybe 2 minutes thinking about this in the last month -- and both of them after reading this article. I could very well be wrong, but then I'd say you're just poor at communicating.

Just so you know, minors can enter into contracts. They're legally voidable by the minor, but they are not void. An example should make this part clear:

A minor buys a car from a dealer using a sales contract. The minor can choose, a week later, to void the contract, return the car, and take back the money paid for it. The dealer cannot. If the minor pays for the car and then the dealer doesn't deliver it, the minor can sue for breach of the contract, choosing an enforceable contract over a void one. Minor's choice.

That's how the law allows for contracts between competent parties and minors: we place the risk on the non-minor.

Fortunately, there's a politically-neutral website tracking this for you, in case you forget things.

The Obameter currently stands at:

118 promises kept;
36 compromises;
19 promises broken;
82 stalled;
247 in the works; and
3 unrated.

So, yes, I think there are some he has kept, along with some of every other sort.

Well, in the land of found-property law, the bartender actually has better claim to the found phone than the person who found it. The rationale is that the store proprietor is a permanent resident, and the rightful owner would probably return to the place he lost it -- here, the bar. And, in fact, that's what happened here. The bar owner reported the phone's owner calling repeatedly and frantically to find out if the phone had been turned in. It would have been better for all involved to give it to the bartender.

Technically, isn't it "Don't be evil"? Not only is that not "do no evil", it's also not "be good."

I sense some cognitive dissonance here. You say, "[H]aving newspapers that are controlled by a wealthy megacorp oligarchy is the exact opposite of [an informed citizenry]. And your sig says, "This video reveals Obama's Real Agenda in his own words" with a link to... foxnews.
 
It looks like you're trying to inform the citizenry by sending them to news controlled by a wealthy megacorp oligarchy. Maybe I'm missing something. It's early.

Alas, the Statute of Frauds section on $5,000 is in regards to a sale of goods over $5,000, excepting merchants in the course of normal business. A unilateral contract for services performed doesn't fall in that category.

The whole government? If so, I'm pretty sure they'd never be able to agree on how to get to my house.
 

What useless fearmongering. When cell phones first became pervasive, people had this same kind of hysteria: Oh no, we're all carrying microphones attached to a phone network! The government can work with cell phone companies to eavesdrop on our lives! 1984 was just a decade late!
 

After all the repetition of not outlawing technology that has legitimate alternative uses (i.e. p2p software), it's sad to see how many kneejerk fear responses there still are to each new advance that could be misused. The point of the article isn't that cell phones now have microphones that can be enabled, it's that the software is getting better at sound identification in context. And that has plenty of good uses, which the article lists, if you could disturb your paranoia to take look.
 

Yes, I readily agree that spying via mining of the resulting data could easily accomplished. But let's be serious: most of these phones already have a GPS receiver -- you're not panicking about "the government" tracking your every movement already, are you? And if you are -- just don't buy one. Nothing's making you use a phone with these capabilities.
 

Friday afternoon, when all the crazies come out.

I'm a mechanical engineer-turned-patent attorney.
 

My undergraduate degree was chock full of tests where you drew a square centimeter-sized box around the final, right answer. Bridge fell over if it was too small, collapsed under its own weight if too large. Either way, someone was unhappy.
 

Law school was the polar opposite. I expected this, because it deals with an infinite permutations of human situations conflicting with abstract guiding principles. I accept this. To some degree, I enjoyed it during the education phase. I certainly enjoy it in the practice phase. Makes things challenging, keeps me on my mental toes.
 

If you want the cut-and-dry world, stay in programming. Nothing where human interactions are managed will ever be clearly-defined with immutable rules of logic and physics. To expect the law to be that way is naive and/or unrealistically simple. This is not to say that lawyers don't exacerbate the situation from time to time. But there is little that makes for easy decisions in the world of human behavior.
 

My family's house did burn down while I was in high school, with two younger siblings. Many photos were lost. Some, forever. Most are back, however, including photos of my childhood and that of my parents. Over the years, we had exchanged photos with our family. After we were settled and life had returned to normal, everyone returned pictures. We even got some new ones I'd never seen before.
 

Digitize your photos, if you like. Don't forget to grab all your thumb drives as you're evacuating, or have them stored remotely and/or online, if you like. Whatever you choose.
 

My only purpose in commenting was to share the experience I had of witnessing how my family's cultural/social interaction had provided for off-site data recovery. I don't know if anyone was trading pictures for a reason, but it worked out nicely. The lesson is applicable to digital photos as well: off-site backup! The medium isn't nearly as important as the practice.

I interpreted that sentence to mean there is only one chance in a million of surviving being hit by a meteorite, not that the chance of being hit at all was so small. I would guess the odds of being struck at any second are far less than one in a million, or we'd be splattered all over the place. Similarly, it seems like the odds of surviving are much higher than one in a million, unless, in addition to our two survivors, there are 1,999,998 smoten people we haven't heard much about.

Music, movies, and microcode. Every so often, I wonder what Mr. Stephenson drinks, and where I can get some.

Okay, two solutions:

1) Require the FCC inspector obtain a warrant -- this is probably easy enough. If there's detectable interference, the FCC inspector should be in there anyway.
2) Stop growing pot.

Not mutually exclusive, either.

The fourth amendment was never designed to prevent all evidence of crimes from being used against suspects. There's nothing in the fourth amendment that says non-warranted evidence should be ignored, either. That's purely a judicial construct designed to "remedy" bad acts by police. So in your situation, a federal agent on an unrelated matter encounters evidence of a crime, and turns it over to the police. I'm having a hard time mustering outrage that a criminal is arrested when a government agent with authority to be at his location sees evidence of a crime.

Let's amp it up a little, too, since pot stirs arguments about intrinsic criminality. Let's say the FCC agent encounters child abuse in progress. Or a literal smoking gun and dead person. Or a kidnapped person. Or residual evidence of past violence -- blood or a bloody weapon, say -- which leads to a DNA sample identifying a past convicted felon. In each case, the evidence from the unwarranted search leads to a police warrant or testimony, or other evidence offered against a suspect. Are all of those improper? I don't think so. The fourth amendment is not a magic wand to remove evidence of a crime.

Sure, the FCC inspector might be mistaken. That doesn't mean he went in with the intent of violating the person's search and seizure rights. And if the government agent is not trying -- intending -- to violate those rights, it makes no sense to exclude the evidence. That's why there's fourth amendment exceptions, like public safety, and genuine inadvertent error. Throwing out evidence when the police did nothing wrong doesn't serve anyone's interests but the criminals. And catching criminals is in the public's interest.

And let's get real: the local cops don't have FCC inspectors in their hip pocket. If the FCC is there, it's because the FCC should be there. In which case, requiring them to get a warrant won't stop them; they'll have one.

This whole exercise seems like a red herring to me.

John Connor? Is that you?