No, I was just trying to put myself in the head of the wack-a-doodles who think that FB & Google are out to get them in particular, rather than to just make billions of $$$s.

It's a public key. It does nothing to prove ownership. I could easily download any public key from a keyserver and add it to my account.

Can I have your private key?

(Pretty sure you meant 'public key' there.)

What if they show you your public key, but they show others their public key they created to proxy for you, And suggest they mail you at the @facebook.com email address they rolled out years ago?

Yeah, they'd get caught in a heartbeat, and it'd never work in practice, but for the paranoid it might be a worry...

Sawfish must be a lot smarter than humans since they didn't form a nonsensical religion around it.

Not to mention that the software that the company I work for is writing (NFV stuff) will put networking professionals out of jobs before too long...

Well, I think of "drone" and UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... ] ) as synonymous, and at least Wikipedia there says there are two classes of UAV, autonomous and remotely piloted.

So, I guess it's a question of definitions...

Ok lets say it has to be a permanent heart valve.

For math ease, let's say a heart beats at 60 beats per minute (once per second .. though average resting heart rates are usually a little faster than that).

So to calculate how many days it will take to go through 10 million cycles we do Number of cycles / (Hours in a day x Minutes in an hour x Beats in a minute) = 10,000,000 / (24 x 60 x 60) = 10,000,000 / 86,400 = 115.74 = about 116 days .. nearly 4 months.

So unless they can get say 100 million or more out of it I don't think this will find much use outside of a temporary heart valve.

Oh yeah? http://www.patentlyapple.com/p...

http://www.patentlyapple.com/p...

We can easily use technology and get enough seafood .. have you seen how big the ocean is? If we had the will we could set up massive netted farm areas .. it's already being done in some scale for blue fin tuna. For land meat .. we can grow meat via tissue culture in the extreme case. There's already project to gneetically engineer yeast to produce milk and milk proteins. In fact a lot of our caloric intake can come from plant and animal tissue culture. We could grow our calories and produce milk via yeast in large vats. We can have enough water through desalination. These can all be run on nuclear energy with no pollution.

That survey only looked at patents issued on a single day. There are still a couple hundred thousand unexamined patents from the 80s and 90s .. what will the patent term adjustment look like when they issue?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

i) Yes, unless it qualifies for a patent term adjustment.
ii) virtually every patent issued nowadays is delayed so much that patent term adjustments are virtually guaranteed. You always get it when the USPTO doesn't approve your patent within a specified time as a result of their delays.
iii) Yes.
iv) If the patent is delayed they can get back royalties from others who independently came up with similar technology during the time in which the patent was being processed -- at least recently new applications are being published within 18 months so this issue is diminished for new filed applications. But then it's still a problem because of the issue referred to in (v) .. a company can collect on standards essential technology for extended periods of time and technology can't really advance while someone owns a monopoly for such a long time.
v) There isn't only one patent on HDTV you ditz. HDTV is covered by hundreds of patents on the various technologies that comprise it. A single company can have a patent on the audio encoding and a separate one on the video processing aspect -- they can collect on the audio encoding patent when it issues and then collect for an extended period on the video processing part when that issues. In fact many companies have more than one patent on HDTV. Look at how many companies had patents on mp3 technology .. just google it fool.

What about an autonomous drone which is just flying to certain GPS coordinates and then detonating? Or even just using inertial guidance and image processing?

It is absurd that the USPTO has a massive backlog on patent issuance -- by law, it is expected that a patent term is 20 years from the filing date -- however there is an exception to that rule if the patent is not issued within 2 years -- if the patent is not issued within 2 years (due to a USPTO delay) the clock on that 20 years is paused until the patent issues. There are still hundreds of thousands of patents filed on things like HDTV which havent yet issued. It means that HDTV technology will be patent encumbered for the long term future. Nobody has the incentive to fix it. If you wanted to make an open hardware HDTV, you can't do it royalty free because a lot of the HDTV standards essential technologies are still patented and will STAY patented virtually forever thanks to the USPTO patent backlog. Why would any tech companies object to that? They make money off the patents they filed that got issued PLUS the ones that were filed but the USPTO hasnt taken action on them. Think about it this way if Sony filed two patents on HD technology, they get one of them issued fairly quickly within 2 years .. and then by luck or bribery the USPTO action on the second patent is delayed 19 years just as the first patent is expiring .. then because it's the USPTO's fault that the second patent didnt issue .. they get to claim 17 years of additional monopoly on the HD technology. I am not against patents, I am against infinitely long patents .. which are unconstitutional .. yet in practice the USPTO is enabling it. Let's not forget that the constitution only authorizes patent rights if and only if they enable the advancement of the useful arts and sciences (and those too for limited times).