Here's a hint: a trademark has no natural expiration.

And a trademark can be lost if it's shown that you knew about the infringement but did nothing.

FTA: “Recently I applied for a patent on 3D printing,” Suarez told BBC in an interview.

Okay, give us the application number so we can actually see what you've done and see if there's any prior art. A cursory search of the USPTO application database returns nothing at all for Thomas Suarez as the inventor, nor for any Suarez in either Los Angeles or Manhattan Beach, the given (residential) address for CarrotCorp.

I really hope this kid has stumbled onto something good, but everyone seems content to just take him at his word without anything to substantiate his claims.

So, no, it isn't going to hurt like blazes.

He was referring to whatever surgery the patient had been rendrered unconscious for (say, an appendectomy), not surgery to implant a device in the brain

Then you have never looked at a ten line C program to implement a PID control loop for a servo motor.

But the controller that the loop is a part of will still be more than happy to drive whatever the motor is attached to right past its mechanical limits if a limit switch fails. :-) I've seen it happen many times myself.

Gaming typically relies on skill, not chance. If you play most games long enough, you'll be able to consistently beat certain levels. If you win at the roulette wheel, you're no more likely than before to win again. That's the difference. Otherwise, "exploiting pleasure-seeking behavior" could be stretched to describe every last industry in existence beyond the sales of food, water, shelter, and basic utilities.

With the model of directly purchasing the game itself (and no in-game purchases, like standard PC/console gaming) you can at least read about the game and have a reasonable expectation about what you are paying for. The real problem with in-game purchases is that the game is "free" or low-cost in the most technical sense, but after you invest many hours advancing the game you find that you can't really prosper without making additional purchases. It could be construed as a form of bait-and-switch.

The other problem would be that many of these games are aimed at children who make purchases the parents later get stuck with, but this problem begins in the home and should be solved within the home by actual parenting. That's not as convenient as using the tablet like a cheap babysitter but it would certainly be more worthwhile. If you wanted to solve this by government action, that's simple too: declare that these purchases are contractual in nature (the parent agreed to pay charges made to the phone bill or whatever) and that minors who make them cannot be held to a contract, therefore the companies cannot collect money when children make them. *Poof* - end of shitty business model.

Available soon: The 60" Sony LCD Panopticon!

Their primary function does not and should not supersede U.S. law.

The excuse Chief Justice Rehnquist gave in his majority opinion was that while being stopped at a checkpoint did count as "seizure" under the Fourth Amendment, it is only a "slight" intrusion which must be weighted against the importance of preventing drunk driving and the effectiveness of the roadblocks and therefore not a true violation of our Constitutional rights.

"Just the tip, okay baby?" as defined by the Supreme Court.

The operative and contested term being reasonable.

Which essentially is what the Fourth Amendment defines.

"Yeah, they broke the law, but they had good reasons!" Another useless government agency.

There were enough usability problems with them

Agreed, but you're going to have usability problems when the use of a poor UI continues to be dictated from above despite the opinions of the people that actually have to use it.

GUIs are suppose to be less work, not more - typing is more work (as the AC pointed out)

They're better for some things, not as good for others. I can pop up a command prompt and type "copy *.txt \newdirectory" a lot faster than I can select the same files in the UI and drag them to another window. Conversely, if I want to copy everything in a particular folder between a range of dates, it's usually faster to use the UI.

Reading your kind words is humbling, sir. You honor yourself by being one of the minority who read something like that and try to understand where it is coming from and how it could work, rather than playing the hostile audience and trying your best to tear it down because it opposes a common notion.

Rather than patronizingly talking down to me like this, try to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not talking about crimes that have victims here, like robbery and murder. Preventing those is legitimately within the purpose of having a government and a society. I'm talking about the wrong of trying to dictate lifestyles, of trying to micromanage the way others live based not on crimes but on approval. It's not terribly different from dictating to people what they may read, listen to, watch, and discuss.

American tyranny is what they call a soft tyranny. It's not so much jack-booted thugs waving guns around, demanding compliance. That's hard tyranny. Soft tyranny is when you no longer treat adult people like responsible adults because "you know what's good for them". The only way to have a healthy, long-term viable society is to expect adults to be responsible, to make their own decisions in any instance that does not involve a crime with a victim, and then (importantly) to accept the consequences of those decisions. Any effort to circumvent this will eventually destroy the very society itself.

If we were talking about metallurgists you'd have a point but most programmers I don't think size of local industry is their main obstacle to employment nor do I think the availability of workers is a driver for the size of the industry.

It isn't always, but depending on the kind of skills/work needed it can be. For instance, if you're primarily an embedded or industial automation developer, you're going to have an easier time finding work in an area that already does a lot of similar work, if for no other reason than there are non-trivial costs to running an embedded shop beyond just the software tools.