This is completely false. Patents were never about the "little guy". Their purpose is to benefit society by providing an advantage to disclosing the secrets of invention so society can learn. Prior to patents, technology was often a closely guarded secret, belonging to individuals or trade guilds, secrets that were often lost with the deaths of the people involved. By making disclosure a more attractive option than secrecy, society could benefit by learning from the details of the inventions.

That is the idea of the patent system. "Little guy" doesn't mean shit, all that matters is having useful knowledge disclosed to society, whether its individuals or mega-corps.

I believe you are talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

In the US, more than 1/10th of traffic fatalities are pedestrians. Clearly, helmets should be mandatory for walking then, too.

*their

Also, not all failures are caused by "not doing there job right", especially when venturing into new territory. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a classic example of a disastrous engineering project, pushed the envelope and collapsed, but not because the engineers didn't do their job right. There hadn't been a bridge of that size with that design before, and aerodynamic concerns weren't taken into account. If that bridge hadn't collapsed and taught the lesson, some other bridge would have.

You can never remove all risk. You may call that 'passing the buck', but blaming all failures, regardless of cause, as "not doing there job right", forces a stone-age technological capability.

Right, there are very few productive people that drink alcohol in the US. Very small group indeed.

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.