They can't be honest about what they are selling, they'd look like a bunch of hypocrites. Bog forbid!

Nonsense, from now on, cigarettes will have pictures of balloons on the brightly colored packages and they'll be known as DeathStix_TM_LucasFilms

  Good points. I have to ask, however, that if the base idea of the patent can be shown to have prior art, shouldn't that invalidate the rest of the patent, regardless of embellishments? Shouldn't the patent applicants at least show that they have something new to contribute, and be required to patent just that aspect or aspects that can be shown to be original?

  Lately it's becoming fairly widely recognized that many if not most patents already reflect ideas that if not already thought of in detail, have prior art in substance. In the field of copyrights this is viewed as "derivative works". Perhaps the same thing should apply to patents.

GSVEMR

  Small wonder that so many people out there consider government's doings to be little more than "legalized" theft.

  Perhaps not in the abstract, but as is frequently said, there's a difference between theory and practice...

  It gets the point across ;-)

  All due respect, but my experience is exactly the opposite of yours.

  I've custom built and sold over 800 systems in the last five years, and the AMD based systems, in terms of hardware reliability, are far, far better than the intel based systems - especially in the mini case formats, where heat is a factor, but including the gaming rigs.

  Just looking at my invoices for this year, hardware replacement for the intel systems is over three times as common as it is for the amd based systems - and that includes the work I've done on systems I didn't build.

  I'm not even going to go into mobo driver issues, except to say fuck ATI. Any cognitive diss wrt that you can pipe to devnull.

  I agree with the GP. AMD kicks ass. I have seven custom built systems at home, all AMD/nvidia combos now as of early this year, because Intel's kit has not treated me very well since at least '05. They are rock solid. Downtime? What's that?

  YMMV, Flame on.

  GSVEMR

  Hah! Needs a Not Safe While Drinking Beer mod.

  I like your sig. Reminds me of a t-shirt I have:

"You laugh because I'm different. I laugh because you are all the same."

  GSVEMR

Bake a cantaloupe in the oven at low temp until it's hard enough.

  (Yes, actually know someone who tried that back in the early 80s. Thankfully, it wasn't me who had to deal with the parents coming home to a very evil smelling house. You know who you are, sis.)

  "My grand-dad died peacefully at 102 years of age, unlike the screaming passengers in his car." - ? :-D

  I like that idea - when I was a kid in the 70s I once mounted a battery powered megaphone on my bicycle, just for kicks - but it'd only distract the morons behind the wheel that much more ;-(