This gun is a terrorist's dream! The problems here are so obvious that hopefully this will be banned quickly.

Your discussion should mention that it is patent pending. Otherwise they will probably not be interested.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the price of gas is down by nearly $1.00 a gallon since the election. Duh...which party generally controls gas prices?

One of the reason why California has so many startups is that California State law clearly states that work done by an employee for the employee's own time and business interests belongs to the employee. It is very clear that the author of this article has no experience with startups.

If the default "inventions belong to the employer" rule was in effect everywhere, then the net effect would be to lock up employee ideas with little actual benefit to the employer. This is because most big companies are not very innovative, and thus fail to exploit most employee inventions. Most of the modern world as we know it would never have happened.

Dangerous and bad idea. I hope that the article remains forever ignored after this.

...But the sword was considered to be too powerful for anyone to possess, so it was removed from the game and stored on a one gig flash drive. But it was foretold that one day players who could wield the sword might reveal themselves...

In retrospect, Apple should have kept Google maps in iOS for another year, and rolled out iOS maps first as an app. That way they would have had time to debug, and get a more graceful market introduction. I suspect that the problem is that Apple did not do enough iOS maps testing in advance, and was blindsided by all of the post-launch problems. Given that this is a safety issue, this is actually a pretty big fail.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requires Java in order for outside users (such as patent agents and attorneys) to access their files on the USPTO servers. They have been warning for months that their systems are not compatible with Java 7, and only work with earlier versions of Java.

This is a big pain, since it forces you to keep your entire system at Java 6.X. Earlier I thought that this delay was mere bureaucratic foot dragging. Now I'm thinking that perhaps they had a "heads up" warning.

Mercury, not impossible to land on in certain regions -- Venus unlikely due to extreme heat and pressure, Mars a given, Jupiter no solid surface, Saturn no solid surface, Uranus no solid surface, Neptune no solid surface, Pluto -- not a planet.

So technically, assuming that no one wants to go to Mercury for some reason (unlikely), then outside of Mars, there are no other "planets" nearby anyway. If we call planets around other stars by a different name, and again assuming that Mercury is just to uninteresting to visit, then he might be right. Of course this still leaves lots of other real estate out there to visit.

The Russians had this idea first!

From personal experience, I can vouch that Apple II floppy disks hold up over 25 years!

Oh great, after years of grammar in er, grammar school, now I'll have to unlearn ending sentences with a period

The aliens are probably just trying to avoid lawsuits by keeping their existence secret while they quietly download our valuable copyright material. However we Earth people are already implementing the perfect defense. Here all we have to do is to keep continuing our present policy of extending copyright terms every time "Mickey Mouse" is in danger of falling into the public domain. We keep doing this until we perfect our faster than life drive..

So you thought you could escape eh Zog? That's $150,000 per infringed song.

According to Wikipedia: Decimation (Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten") was a form of military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth".[1] A unit selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades, often by stoning or clubbing

OK a valid if harsh form of management, but note the critical distinction that the Romans reserved this very harsh technique for unusual events. They were not dumb enough to do this to every unit on a routine basis!

I was in Rochester as a small boy in the 1950's, and knew about the reactor from about the age of 4 or so. As I recall, some of the cooling water drained into a small duck pond (surrounded about the fence). I was told that there was some small amount of radioactivity, although no one much was concerned at the time. At any rate, the main thing that got through my 4 year old mind was that for some reason it was not a good idea to try to climb the fence or get near the ducks. At any rate, it was generally known, and not a secret.

If NSA is not partnering with Google, then probably somebody needs to be fired. If I were them, I probably would have responded with a "well Duh!" comment.