The trailer appears to show the people on Earth forced to work for scraps in factories (presumably making things the people on the station want), with order being enforced by autonomous/remotely-controlled humanoid drones.

It's neither; it's factually inaccurate. GOES-R is alive and well, and likely to deliver on schedule (launch and operations in the 2015-2017 timeframe). The reason the article listed the expectated lifetime of the satellite was 2015 is that it should be replaced around then.

Factually incorrect. Project organizers have a legal obligation to deliver what they promise, or refund the money. I recall at least one case where the organizer did not deliver, and was successfully sued and forced to declare bankruptcy.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of the "gaming by the numbers" studios and publishers move that way. But I can guarantee that the people pouring millions of dollars into independent Kickstarter and greenlight games, and getting DRM-free software written by devs who care in return, will still be doing it in five years.

Prosecutors have discretion. They are not required to prioritize every case and put forward the largest number of possible charges.

What would you recommend?

Sure, but I think that's a grave mistake. Certainly, no console game can match the depth of the very deepest PC games, but there are still plenty of games that require strategy, knowledge, and reflex to complete (or be competitively successful). People aren't popping out a few minutes of Halo IV on the train to work.

Casual games are the biggest market in the same sense that Lego is the biggest tire manufacturer. Based on some quick googling, it looks like the casual game industry has revenues of about $3 billion, versus $78 billion for the video game industry as a whole.

You speak of the ultimate end, I spoke of the local mechanical one. Both are correct; patents are intended to allow you to profit, in the hopes that the profit motive will drive innovation.

This is the correct link for the patent at issue: http://www.google.com/patents/US5597520

Hm, serves me right for assuming the patent linked in the summary was the one the lawsuit was actually about. It appears that the one linked to has no actual relation, based on looking at the demand letter.

I think you may be misunderstanding GPP. It was a simple (somewhat pedantic) statement about how the traditional definition of a patent troll is someone that doesn't have a product. Since they have products, they're not a patent troll.

It's possible you're right. Inuitively, one would think that removing a possible incentive for spending a lot of money in R&D would reduce money spent there (which, in general, probably reduces results). There are things in this world that it takes a lot of money to find out. Generally, that means a profit motive (which might not exist if you can't necessarily capitalize on your own discoveries), or government funding (which makes sense for things like medical research, but not necessarily for things that are less essential, like consumer luxuries). I really don't think that if you remove that motivation, the amount of results would be the same. But if you happen to have any hard evidence (both of us are making claims derived from reasoning and extrapolation), I'd be interested to see it.

The purpose of patents is to ensure that people can spend a lot of money on research, with some kind of general guarantee that it can pay off for them. Making support struts thinner at the point of contact doesn't really strike me as something that resulted from a protracted compaign of research, but rather an isolated flash of insight. Those flashes of insight aren't irrelevant; they're important to making things move forward. But they don't need to be patented; people will have them anyway. In order to encourage the progress of science and the useful arts, I think one really only needs to protect the things that require a great deal of effort to discover.