The problem from corporate personhood is unlimited money in elections. The supreme court effectively killed campaign finance reform by declaring corporations as having free speech rights. In legal speak this is known as corporate personhood. There are a couple of very simple changes that can happen at the state level to put a leash on corporate influence in government:

1) Change state corporation law giving for profit limited liability to companies that have full personhood. The argument the supreme court uses for defending corporate personhood is that the constitution supports "the the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” So you allow people the right of free association so long as they do not hide under the shield of limited liability. One weird bit of law in all states is that you can not usually sue the owners of a company. The company yes, the owners, no. If I buy shares in MegaEvilChemCorp and one of their factories blows up and kills half a city the worst that can happen to me is that MegaEvilChemCorp could go bankrupt and I'm out what I paid for the stock. Even though I am an owner of MegaEvilChemCorp no one can sue me or put me in jail for the damages MegaEvilChemCorp may do even if they blow up or poison half a state. The result of this is that no large company would be an unlimited liability company and they would not have personhood rights.

2) Pass meaningful finance reform. $200 limit per person. Open up the books fully of any entity lobbying or campaigning. No PACS, no bundling, no "issue ads," no corporate or union money. (A union and corporate money ban needs to be bound together or it favors one side or the other).

3) Allow corporations to do the right thing. In most states if you run a company and do anything other than maximize profits you can get sued by any share holder. There is a movement to create corporations that are allowed to take other consideration into account beyond just short term economic gain such as the environment and their community. See http://www.bcorporation.net/ for more information. Very few companies are likely to do this in the near term, but lets at least allow the experiment for those who are interested in doing the right thing.

The Tea party was started by small scale conservative/libertarian activists in a small way. The main nerve that they hit was the bailout of wall street and an outrage of not helping the people in bad economic times; this was 2009. Fox and other conservative media hyped these early small rallies (less than 100 people) far beyond its size or effect. Fox is very adept at making a tempest in a tea pot (sorry for the pun). Very quickly the very well funded radical right DC lobbying firms sold their funders on backing/using the tea part. The Koche brothers oil tycoons provided massive funding and hijacked the movement. The Koche brothers' father was Fred Koche, the founder of the John Birch Society. The Birch Society was effectively the political arm of the KKK. While it is unfair to visit the sins of the father on the sons, the Koche brothers appear to have adopted the views of their father. Hijacking diffused the core message away from economic justice to social issues. While the right wing media machine is very effective at staying on the message of the day, moving the tea party away from economic justice moved the tea party away from gaining a broader mainstream following to become a dead-end in politics.
/.ers are right, the tea part had a message because one was provided. Commentators here are also right that OWS does not have ONE message. OWS was not thought that far ahead. OWS was a movement sparked by one image created by a culture jammer in Vancouver at AdBusters.org (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/57/Wall-Street-1.jpg). The difference from some random political flash mob is that the turnout was unexpectedly large and dedicated.
The key takeaway, as some have noted, is that economic justice and outsized corporate influence are issues that are resonating with every political group from libertarian to conservative to progressive. When the same concerns are shared by suburbia, the bible belt and urban hipsters then there is kindling for a big fire. These populations do not share a common language or views on other issues, but all it is going to take is some new event to spark are fire. The right scandal (corruption or financial) or sudden economic down turn (think of the blow back from a European banking melt down) could do it. It just need to to resonate with peoples unspoken anger. Someone new will emerge speaking a vocabulary with a new narrow message of economic justice and people will listen and respond. I predict this summer is going to be long and hot.
I don't see that change led by the tea party or OWS, but from some new source. My personal guess is that leader will come from the left as the right currently tends to beat down any of their own who stray from orthodoxy for more than they do their opposition. If that leadership comes from existing politicians likely examples would be for senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren to team-up. They both are real experts on finance and government and are willing to speak-out the problems ahead of other politicians.

Old news for the pacific northwest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creaky_voice It is considered one of the few vocal accents used in the area.

Yes, Virginia, there really is a frozen food lobby and they get congress http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristin-wartman/pizza-is-a-vegetable_b_1101433.html to declare that because pizza has a tiny smear of processed tomato sauce pizza counts as a vegetable for the purposes of getting federal funding for school lunches.

Bobcat,

So you are suggesting that we should arrest everyone who might become victims of violence? Or only those you don't like? If a mob wants to come to your home or office and assault you should you be arrested because it is "your" fault other are threatening you with violence? Are you saying that someone is "asking" to be carjacked because they own a car?

Or did you do the right thing and report these threats of violence to the police?

" First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came%E2%80%A6

LIDAR and fog do not play well together. Every time you get to the edge of a cloud you get a reflection. One solution is to combine RADAR and lidar. RADAR to cut through the fog and give you an approximation of the hard surface distance and then pick out the strongest LIDAR reflection within the RADAR's error range. Cheap and easy to do, but no one seems to do it. We are talking tiny, fit in a tea cup, ranging radar not some huge nav radar.

Agreed. Too bad the computer group didn't get named Compaq (or whatever) and the Agilent instrument/semi group get to keep the HP name.

The US patent office has a little used mechanism to prevent this it is called Statutory Invention Registration. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Statutory_Invention_Registration It effectively puts an invention into the public domain and provides a rock solid publication date. It's most common use is to force an invention into the public domain if an inventor feels that they can not get a meaningful patent on it to make sure what you suggest will not happen. It was probably created with academia and government agency in mind who's charter directs them to open source their work.

You can get a spayed or neutered open source self-propelled, neural net controlled chemical sensors from the the humane society for about $50. With a little training of the neural network using some bacon and a chew toy it can detect just about anything airborne. Plus you'll have a hard time building anything with a better low end sensitivity. Put out a little food on the back parch and you can likely snag an open source neural net sensor for free. Before acquiring such a sensor unit be sure to check you landlord's sensor policy. Seriously, how we ever made a living while hunting on the savannah with our snoozes is beyond me.

You've probably never heard of this book, but when you move from code monkey to engineer/architect you must read this book, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language. The other one you should read is the Toyoda Way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toyota_Way

Now there is an interesting coefficient to add to the Drake equation. Also, another one would be too much gravity to leave their plant so many fewer hot rods of the gods.

That should have been

handheld 0~~~coax~~~~~|

handheld 1~~~coax~~~~Mixer~~~coax~~~~wifi router~~~ethernet~~~server

handheld n~~~coax~~~~~|

Well sort of solved it. We were demo'ing a handheld wireless device that did not have a wired port. We opened the device, popped the nano sized connector from the wifi module to the PCB inverted "F" antenna and connected a very thin coax to the now vacant wifi module's antenna port. We connect all of the unit's coax leads to a RF mixer (think an analog version of a router) and also hooked up a generic wifi router via coax to the mixer so that the handheld units could talk to our on-site server (handheldmixerWiFi routerserver). Our demos worked perfectly. Nobody else had anything working and one of the main points of the show was to show off wifi capabilities. It took a bunch of cables and adapters/gender benders, etc as consumer routers have most of their pin's gender reversed so that you can't do this with retail parts and cables.

There is a very simple way to reduce corporation's back room influence on congress. Only allow companies to register as limited liability entity if they give up some of their personhood rights, including making campaign contributions. There, I fixed democracy for you. Go check out corporate personhood if you need more details on how twisted this has become.