....while these emails are to and from a Bush appointee...

You missed the point the GP was making. Fast charge for daily use, with a tiny swap ability if you happen to run down your charge and the car dies on the side of the road somewhere. That wouldn't be a half ton pack being exchanged, closer to a 20-50 pound supercap.

Seriously, do you think this is the reason W&M shouldn't be involved? I worked at a jeweler (where you have to have W&M certification on some equipment), and they wouldn't inspect the scales every certification period. Not even close. It would be 5+ inspection periods, at a minimum, before they would show up to provide their certification instead of mailing it - and this is in an industry where literally hundreds to thousands of dollars directly rely on each time the scale is used, not someone's home internet connection.

RTFS

If you can grow Earth-originated plants on a meteorite substrate, there's a rather decent possibility that there's already things growing on it.

$5000 for an MRAP is a pittance. The public isn't being "billed for it" again, they're basically getting it for free.

You mention something that isn't true. The Wii U different from other consoles - Nintendo relies almost entirely on first party development to sell consoles. Their biggest franchises, like Smash Bros. and Mario Kart, haven't even released yet. Their first year was almost entirely devoid of new releases from their franchises barring Mario. The Wii U obviously hasn't hit its' stride - but the reason is the wait for those killer games to provide the momentum for the console, not the other way around as what typically happens with Microsoft and Sony.

Good thing you'd be recording it then.

At least for me, it was gradually developed over time jut by doing it faster and faster. The same goes for regular keyboards, actually - I made post a while back about Mario Teaches Typing being effective, but I didn't have much time with it (only in school), so I only got the middle row from that. The rest was from hunt and peck, which gradually evolved on its' own into touch typing. Just keep using it regularly, and you'll get faster.

The definition of "ownership" when it comes to sports franchises varies, but basically Sterling doesn't own anything. According to the NBA's constitution, he doesn't even really own so much as the name - if the NBA terminates his ownership, the NBA immediately takes over the team and all its' assets (and has to provide the market value from the sale or liquidation of those assets). The NBA is structured more like a club, where when you join, you get a name under which you can conduct business, and have to share a bit of the profit with the club, and have to follow an extremely detailed set of rules on how to conduct that business.

Stereolithography was patented in 1986. I would imagine Ford would be an early adopter (at least to buy one machine to see what they could do with it), so it's not really a claim I'd call completely crazy. This is the GP's point, but for 6 parts per day, that doesn't seem that crazy either - they likely run the machines 24/7 and produce mostly small parts with them.

Seriously, why do people think that they're going to buy a car and the sales guy isn't going to try and, you know, sell them a car? It's one thing when companies actively lie about their products, like claiming a car would get 30mpg when it's rated at 10mpg, but their job is to sell you a fucking car. They're going to spin that 10mpg number to seem insignificant, and they aren't going to give a shit about your personal finances, because that's your problem, not theirs. I'd only be concerned if car companies were outright lying on their specification sheet for the car, or if dealers lied about the price and handed you paperwork with a higher than negotiated price in the hope that you didn't notice it before signing.

They literally have days to examine each patent. One friend, in particular, could evaluate more than double his actual quota. Time isn't the USPTO's problem, at all.

The problem is that there's substantial pressure for them to accept bullshit patents. There's both direct pressures, as in managers telling them to "just accept it", and systemic pressures, as the system itself is arranged such that rejecting a patent becomes a massive headache for the individual examiner. The people I know in the office hate that they're forced to accept some troll patents, but there's nothing they can do about it. The other options are that they miss their quota because they have to reevaluate a patent on appeal (a reevaluation doesn't count towards their quota, and takes far longer than the initial evaluation because of the bureaucracy surrounding rejections), or they're pushing towards getting fired because their boss outright tells them to accept the fucking patent. They need to be somewhat selective in which ones they fight the system to actually reject, or they will no longer be employed, either by way of the boss's personal opinion of them or by consistently missing their quota.

Next time, know what the reality is before you write out some massively condescending bullshit describing how somebody else doesn't understand reality.

This guy got modded insightful for saying "this" to the quote, but that's not true in the slightest. I actually know patent examiners; they have far, far more time than that to review patent applications.

No, he was not the first person to be prosecuted under the act. There's plenty of other people who have been prosecuted with the Espionage Act, including some who were actually executed, like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.