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.

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.

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.

I can't speak for everyone, but I most certainly have turned down jobs when the salary wasn't adequate, and I know plenty of others than have as well.

Where I work now, we have two H-1Bs in our dev group of 12. Both are outstanding workers, and "legitimate" in that the company made a good-faith effort to fill the positions with Americans, but wasn't able to find people with the needed skills. Both are also paid at what I would consider to be an appropriate wage comparable to ours, and HR takes good care of them and makes a real effort to abide by both the letter and spirit of the law. This is how it's supposed to work.

Having said that, I've also worked at places that brought in H-1Bs in preference to American workers, even when the domestic workers were more qualified for the position. The reason? Money. At one place I worked (dev group of 14 with 4 domestic workers), the highest paid of that group was at about my experience and competence level, yet was paid less than 2/3 of my salary, and the company made it very clear to all of them that if they didn't toe the line, they were welcome to go right back to the five different nations they came from. Of course, personal experience doesn't mean it happens everywhere, but I've seen it enough to believe that there are a non-trivial number of employers that are in fact abusing the program.

Okay, there's the misunderstanding - I hadn't understood you were talking about automated pre-checkin testing. I still am not seeing the need for "multiple compilers, multiple OSes, and multiple binary architectures" mentioned by the original poster for a product that is intended for a single platform. I frankly don't care whether my code builds and how it runs under Clang when we're a Visual Studio shop. Of course it's different for an open-source organization or a library vendor that needs to support multiple build/run environments, but those are rare exceptions. For most, we're talking about adding a lot of complexity, time, and maintenance costs to get a common code base for a number of different build environments that will never be used in production, particularly when there's a full-time QA department available.