I vaguely recall an article years ago on something like TheDailyWtf where some idiot webmaster wrote a web application with links instead of buttons to perform tasks, and was confused why his site and data was getting trashed repeatedly, until he figured out it was the crawling bots.

This is nothing new: unskilled developers using the wrong methods and getting burned.

The 50s and 60s need to be erased from memory concerning policy decisions, because the prosperity at that time is heavily biased by the fact that Europe and Japan were destroyed, and the United States was the only shop in town.

The United states does not have a criminal justice system. It has a criminal legal system.

It is an important distinction to make.

Map is disappointing. Whomever decided that color scheme should be slapped.

I was expecting something like this: http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa but for all countries.

The map linked has every traffic fatality in the United States, and the age, sex, and classification of each death.

It's quite a bit more than an 'entry level' DSLR. Bring an entry level DSLR to a high-radiation environment like outer space and see how well it keeps taking pictures.

If those industries cannot survive without a large pool of free labor, then they should go the way of the dodo.

By having them unpaid, you are essentially making those jobs only be accessible to people from wealthy families. Only people from wealthy families can afford to pay the bills while working for free. Everyone else has to find a paying job, which would then exclude them from being able to gain entry into those fields.

Yeah, and you wanna comment on how things go for the life during those events? Your first example was likely a major extinction event, and a volcanic eruption 70k years ago nearly wiped out humans

When a "worst company in America" competition doesn't have corporations such as Monsanto, Phillip Morris, etc, as contestants, then you know it is a load of shit.

Your first mistake is thinking that the US has a 'justice system' at all. The US has a legal system. It is concerned with order, it is not concerned with justice.

The little rubber boot is not even remotely something that patents should protect. You are subscribing to the faulty, revisionist "dibs" model of patents.

The bargain made in patents is that society provides protection, in exchange for the inventor disclosing how their machine works. The alternative, as was the case prior to patents, was that guilds were very secretive about their processes and technologies, and if something happened to the guild, the technology disappeared along with them. The patent bargain was made to bring their technological secrets into the public domain.

In the case of a rubber boot on an ethernet cable, there is nothing to disclose. You can figure out all there is to it by looking at it for 2 seconds. There is nothing consequential for society to reverse engineer in lieu of a patent. Protecting a rubber boot with patent protection is a terrible deal for society.

Wasn't there a similar backlash over Spore, another EA title?

What I want to know is why people still give money to EA when they pull these sorts of shenanigans.

Best Buy is headquartered in Minnesota, an at-will employment state. They can eliminate anyone at any time for any reason, and don't need a bogus excuse to do so.

Hero did not "technically" invent the steam engine. He made a steam powered novelty yes, and is credited with making the first steam engine of any kind, but his aeropile still had a long way to go before becoming a device that could power industry.

The point of patents is not to protect anyone's investments. The trade-off of patents is disclosure. Prior to patents, trades often kept their methods secret, and if any trades died out, so did their technologies. Patents were created to incentivize inventors to share the secrets of their invention, for the public good. A monopoly on the technology was the bargaining token to encourage them to spill the beans.

Patents systems do not care about investments, it only exists to make disclosure a more appealing option than secrecy.