The USPTO isn't funded by campaign contributions, it's funded by patent application fees. Much easier to follow the money than assume ulterior motive being applied in a more roundabout way.

Sounds like fun. What's the best site to play it on? :D

...and Texas also has silly blue laws, so liquor stores are all closed on Sunday, and armed TABC agents rough up customers at locations accused of violations.

I rather prefer the liquor laws in Chicago -- if ever there was a city that learned its lessons from Prohibition...

Since the idea is that this universe is a simulation, who says it is a simulation of reality? Maybe we are some kids crazy fantasy world in which the container has to be larger then its contents! FREAKY!

The trick to thinking outside the box, is to stop thinking the box is real.

IF this is a simulated world, there is no reason to assume the rules in the simulation are the same as the ones of the world in which the simulation is running.

We've been paying for roads by the mile for decades, via gas taxes -- an effective way of making people who drive more, pay more.

That might be true if gas taxes were more than double what they are now.

Funds from gas taxes go to a fund accessible to the federal highway administration -- which is to say that they don't pay for city streets at all, which are covered purely by property taxes. Even then, the FHWA only covers about 49% of highway costs, meaning that the majority of the costs of highways remain borne by the states, and are paid out of different taxes.

(This is a sore point because so many folks wrongly consider cyclists freeloaders on account of not paying gas taxes -- when the amount of wear put on roads is proportional to cubed vehicle weight, making the road wear caused by cyclists negligible, whereas the property taxes and state sales taxes paid are not).

Big brothers everywhere: "Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!"

DIFFERENT SPECIES ARE DIFFERENT. Film at 11.

"Humans are late bloomers when compared with other primates -- they spend almost twice as long in childhood and adolescence as chimps, gibbons, or macaques do."

And since chimps, gibbons, and macaques are the dominant life forces on the planet -- what with their iPhones and running water and skyscrapers and space programs and whatnot -- it is obvious that this difference in growth is a PROBLEM that must be FIXED.

WE MUST LEANT THE SECRET OF THE MACAQUE'S POWER!

Seriously, what the blistering fuck?

"Earned" offshore, when 99% of the work is not the sales but the engineering -- which is very much onshore effort.

This is a place where Europe's VAT approach has it right.

Oh, duh, I didn't even catch that. OK, so it's not actively damaging, just totally worthless. :-)

I know change.org petitions are mostly worthless from the point of view of getting a meaningful response back from the government, but if you EVER want the government to take them seriously, quit using it for shit like this.

I'd have more respect for a 1st-grader using it to get his school to serve chocolate milk, than I do for this idiot wikipedia editor who thinks it's the proper venue for something like this.

Never stopped them before.

Hey once the ability is there, why not?

Another plausible but false story: "Slashdot to start supporting ÃUnicodeÃ(TM) characters"

Your post advocates a

( ) technical
( ) legislative
(x) market-based
( ) vigilante

approach to fixing the app store. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.

(x) Apple is doing quite well these days, thankyouverymuch, and doesn't really give a shit how you think they should be run. (You, in general, public at large, and probably you, in particular, JLG.)

(x) Scammy developers will pay people in 4th-world countries to say their app is great.

(x) Probably a bunch more reasons that I don't have the energy to think up this second.

... Throwback Tuesday!