Smashing with a rock looks suspicious, and almost anyone that sees you do it will call the police. If you've got a fully-wired home, and an attacker compromises it, they can find out exactly when you're not home (from automated lights and climate control settings), unlock the door, and walk out with whatever high-value items they think they can get away with.

I'm not sure I understand your first point. Lego sells interesting models, and the pieces necessary to build them. For castles, this means a lot of blocks that are rectangular, and some special ones for things like gargoyles and drawbridge winches. For spaceships, this means a lot of angles and greebly-bits that you can make look like engines and weapons and exhaust ports. There's not some sort of "trick" where Lego is forcing you to buy high-margin specialty pieces; people want those pieces because they let you make things that look better. And, sure, if you try to take the pieces from a castle and make a spaceship, you'll end up with a blocky-looking spaceship. But I fail to see how providing the option of sleek pieces (which you could also use to make a sleek, elven-looking castle?) somehow degrades the experience. There are very few pieces in modern Lego sets that are genuinely single-purpose; a spaceship control surface could easily be an angel wing, a ship's rudder, or the fairing of a racecar.

Minecraft supplements, not replaces, Lego in the minds of creative kids. Minecraft is neat, and it lets you do a lot, but there's something special about being physically engaged with what you're building. You can't take your Minecraft creation out back to play by the stream (unless you recreate it with Legos?).

There was a time when this was true, but not so much within the past ~5 years. Can you give me a definition of what you'd call an "ordinary" brick, and what percentage of a set needs to be ordinary bricks (it's easier by piece count, but I suppose a by-volume comparison could be made) before you can classify it as general purpose? Or is there some other definition you'd prefer? Whatever it is, please make it quantitative; there are plenty of meticulously-maintained online resources we can use to determine exactly how many bricks of what types are in pretty much every Lego set ever made.

All sets produced via LEGO Ideas are limited edition. Though in truth, all sets are; you'll find great difficulty getting just sets older than a year, perhaps a year and a half, from the primary market.

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