The USPTO does not guarantee that your patent cannot be challenged, it just gives everyone else a target, as in "Hey! I was doing that in 1971 and ...". The rest is left as an exercise to the destructive class, aka, "lawyers." (not to be confused with the Creative Class ").

Sorry, the assumption that pure democracy (or pure representative democracy) is better than a republic is completely at odds with the facts of modern psychology, brain science and marketing research. In a democracy we let the mass speak with their advertisement-besotted understanding of issues that are far too complex to fit into 30-second video bits. In a republic we let the mass pick representatives who then act in the best interests of the highly paid lobbyists (who are paid by rent-seekers (definition)) and activists (who spend time the rest of us cannot or will not). The rent-seekers and activists count on the fact that the losers in their transactions (the taxpayers) see small marginal costs while the focusing of those small marginal costs into the winners pockets becomes a very attractive cash flow (just think, if you could get a penny for each credit card transaction, you'd be able to retire, but which of the millions using credit cards would have the will and the incentive to fight back?). As for forming large coalitions (in a sort of fully realized "at -large", well just look at how well that is working in the countries that have the parliamentary systems. I think that Europe's inability to address their fiscal nightmare lines up quit nicely with the US inability to address their own fiscal problem. And reactions of people like Depardieu just serve to remind us that talent and money are mobile in ways that the run-of-the-mill rest are not. Any strongly formed effort to prevent rent-seeking will have to deal with that mobility or face turning their country into the next "place to be from." The real solution for the truly conscientious might be as simple as "dropping out" the way the hippies in the 60's wanted to, leaving the salarymen and wage-slaves to support the rent-seekers.

You have to teach creationism first, because only in the context of overturning reason-based and faith-based beliefs can you teach the history of the scientific method in a way that guides the student to understand its power. Seeing the theory of evolution come to life (ahem, so to speak) as the result of a discovery process that slowly tears down those cherished creationist fallacies is the PERFECT way to teach how the scientific method itself evolved to be based on data and observation over "pure intellect" (as in the ancient Greeks, per Aristotle, who argued that "heavier things fall faster because they logically had to) and faith (whose followers argue that " God created the heavens and the earth..." ).

We sometimes forget that both of the non-scientific methods lead to great and often institutional stupidity. Reason without data is seen all the time when charlatans and the like argue that "women are the same as men because anything else is social heresy". And as for faith without data, well, get thee to Missouri.

> Or do you put everything in one pile?

The people who visit my office might think I do ...

Yeah, right. You'd rather have the surcharge hidden so you could pretend it did not exist. I bet you think the Affordable Care Act actually was about health care and not about insurance.

Frankly, the confluence of islamofascist infiltration and political correctness drive my strong tendency to arm myself to the limits allowed by the laws in effect at the time I am arming, hence my 50-round clips are not registered and never will be. Because my other on-line persona are not nearly so gracious as this one, as in other venues I refer to the islamofascists in far less civilized terms (even, gasp, presenting pictures of Mohamet in unflattering ways). And a large caliber with high rate of fire works pretty well in defending against onesies and twosies of any religious sect.

The people who argue that we are (im)morally equivalent to these goat-fekkers are confusing the 1400s (nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition) with the 1960s. The separation of Church and State (such as it is in the West, see Magna Carta) has not been discovered yet in the MIddle East. Only the Europeans and in some sense the Chinese-Japanese-Koreans and similar have separated the two.

Footnote: high-caliber and high fire rate do not help at all against the mob (adverts not-withstanding, so don't look for me in cities.

Ooops, the 3.5-4 was suppposd to be a [WAG]3.5-4[/WAG]

Idiocratic journalists don't even ask the first order correcting question let alone the second. The first is, how much is their spending per capita compared to ours (duh, about a factor of 4 or 5 there), and second, how much is their spending per engineer/scientist (or whatever subgroup that actually needs that spending). Again, duh, about a factor of 3.5-4? Of course, we ARE producing the worlds most educated baristas, busquers and bloggers.

We also get Google and Wikipedia ... doing for free (with tip jars ala NPR/PBS) what AOL, Yahoo, etc could not do. This is just like musicians having to learn to make their money off their IP by selling concerts rather than by selling the songs. They make less on average as a consequence, but there are more people making those token wages as 2nd income (my perception, no data). Sure, we still have the top-pop-40 industrial-"musak" feeding the masses, but who cares? Let them tear each other apart in the free market while the rest of us enjoy the new subsistence economy.

One thing that Henry Ford was noted for was his idea that the workers should be paid well enough to afford the products they produce (at least, in basic industries like car production). This idea (that workers are also customers) may need to be revisited. How will a world operate when it is producing all the electric cars we need with only a handful of technicians running massively automated factories? More importantly, how will we keep clothing and food production factories running when the only work available is as baristas and busquers? The automated workplace needs a new model for (re)distributing income, or it will collapse from lack of markets. And we cannot simply borrow against equity (like we did in the 1990s with housing) to fuel the consumer-based economy. The transition from industrial to the new subsistence society is not going to be any smoother than any other massive shifts in economic systems were.. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a rough ride.

Well, I could turn this around and claim that the thing we are doing over and over is making it harder for citizens to defend themselves, with these sorts of things as a natural consequence of that failure to change. But then I am more of an evidence-based decision maker rather than a simple ideologue.

An aside: Be careful what you wish for (lower cancer rates), treating cancer as a terminal condition might be cheaper than treating it as a disease then turning around and also paying for heart failure as the terminal condition. By the way, Total Cost of Ownership type analyses are really frowned on in a society that has disconnected health care costs from the health care consumers. So go ahead and pick from the menu 'cause the kids'll pick up the bill (a switch on the usual parents-as-ATMs, no?).

New regs are all about making it harder to fly, so we can reduce our carbon footprints, so we can delay the end of the current ice age by another 100 years (it's coming whether we all start walking yesterday).

Hey, remember 1945? Don't make me open up another can o' whoop-ass on you.