Actually when the Shah was overthrown, most of the brightest people in Iran celebrated. That's because he was a really bad dictator and the only reason most people in the West are not aware of it is because he was very pro-American and very friendly with most western countries.
The problem with revolutions is that it's hard to stabilize things afterwards. And there is no guarantee that the nice and respectful people will take over to draft a Constitution that grants freedom for the people. That's when many of the brightest in Iran got really disappointed and the religious extremists took the power.

You can read the account of one of those brightest people who left Iran years later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjane_Satrapi
Marjane's account seemed pretty fair and balanced to me (based on the differences with the cliches I had heard, what I know about the publishers, the variety of the anecdotes and their "true to life" aspect).

The constitution explicitly says that congress can only allow patents to further progress.
So a patent that blocks critical progress in our society would mean that the law that allowed the patent is unconstitutional, no?
So when you interpret the laws, look at the patents, you need to check that you are not interpreting in ways that would violate the constitution.

So taking into account the effect on society doesn't sound that stupid to me...
 

Don't worry, politicians know how to judge industries worth saving based on contributions to their campaigns and to super PACs. The economics are merely indicators but campaign contributions tell the Truth.
And I am sure Hollywood accounting allows for plenty of lobbying and campaign contribution. After all, money spent on politicians can't be profit and if it's not profit then you don't have to give their share to the right holders or the government.
  So lobbying is indeed compatible with Hollywood accounting.

A 1 week vacation was enough for a coworker to forget his passphrase on his work desktop.
Clearly, a week in jail could be enough.

It sounded like the examples given were to use the rooms when nobody is in there:
1) look inside the empty room and see what was left on the white board or post it notes etc.
2) listen and here people in an another room.

That seems quite clever and hard to notice. Somebody might walk in, notice the conf system is on and turn it off.

Spying on an actual meeting happening in the same room that the conf system did not seem to be the main target.

Actually some websites actually manage to make Google ads very unpleasant by putting so many of them on the top of the page, in the middle of the content etc.
This probably leads to people clicking on them by mistake which from the advertiser's perspective is bad. The advertisers are likely to complain to Google and any ad agency or even to ask Google for refunds for such clicks.

So a page full of ads is not just bad for the user, it's bad for targeted advertising which is what Google does.

They could do a Doodle that says that, Google Doodles are actually NEWS and reported in many places.

They have 13$ arduinos... That said, I prefer a Linux machine that can run python, java, apache and everything and then just talk to some IO library or something to take care of moving motors etc.
But that's because I am a software guy....

They will ask Walmart for video footage to identify who bumped into your car and drove away.
At least that's what the insurance told my wife once...

Anybody knows what the liability is when parts of somebody's rocket land on somebody's home and kill someone?
This thread has quite a few examples of rocket components falling on houses, so it seems the risk is actually pretty high.
Do government representatives come and indemnify the victims?
And then, what's going to happen for private launches?