A patent is a grant of exclusive rights to an invention in exchange for publishing. You don't acquire a patent so that you can publish something; you publish it so that you can dictate who can't use an invention.

IANAAL in any sense, but it seems to me that the Google front page being so horribly public would count as prior art. Everything I can find indicates that ANY publication in ANY form can constitute prior art.

It's been a while since I played, but I believe players can place a bounty on players that's visible to all players.

I'm not really sure why the bank wouldn't do this.

How will the oil drippings and the tire residue affect the panel output?

If ever there was a question more deserving of facetious response...

That was a great game. Unfortunately, it was buggy and hard to get to run even when it was new.

Your best bet would probably be to run it from Windows 98. *shudder*

That sort of thing has been available for quite some time.

I can scarcely imagine something more annoying. It's also totally unnecessary. A shortcut explicitly created by a user would be given execute. A downloaded shortcut would not have it. Like anything else in *nix.