Maybe an American can answer this for me: Why must a third party focus on the Presidency?
It seems like the easiest election to win would be in the house, and the balance between the current 2 parties is so tight that a handful of seats would provide a balance of power position to a third party, allowing them to push through some legislation, which may at least make the news before dying in the Senate. Why does this not happen?

You're kidding, right? About half the people I work with have at least 1 patent. Every large company brags about how many patents they have and every patent has a couple people listed as inventors. While patent numbers and titles should be on your resume, they don't differentiate you from anyone who worked at a company large enough to employ a team of lawyers whose job is to search for patentable work.

I see you've been reading my employment contract...

This is false. A pilot with a private (non-commercial) license may fly a passenger who reimburses them for the expenses of the flight, including plane rental and fuel. It doesn't become commercial until they make a profit.

So it's basically an extra-crappy pre-fab then?

Actually a search engine is one of the few things where the cost depends less on use and more on the amount of the Internet you would like to index. It takes a lot of storage and processing power to create an easily-searchable index of the Internet.

I hear their shipping tends to damage the package contents, unfortunately.

I've worked in companies from 80 people worldwide to over 100000 people worldwide, and I have never actually seen this. The process in every company I know is about the same. Your resume hits an HR person or recruiter, who does a very preliminary scan, and if your resume has one of the dozen-or-so skills we want your resume comes directly to the developer or manager who will be interviewing, in a pile with all the resumes who passed this filter. I once made the mistake of asking my HR person for the reject pile, as I couldn't believe how low the quality was in a stack of about 30 resumes. I spent half a day going through resumes that had so many typos they weren't understandable, had no indication the applicant had ever worked with a computer, or were so full of things that are illegal to consider for employment that they just scream 'interview me and get sued if you don't hire!' After that I have no desire to ever go through a reject pile ever again. If you can't get a resume past that filter you don't want to work for me, you will never be able to meet my communication expectations.

This isn't about the 'enlarge your penis' level of spam, this is about the website you gave your email to 5 years ago that still emails you daily with the broken unsubscribe link. This is about forcing companies to not be annoying and incompetent. After all, if they want to operate in Canada they should learn how to be polite.

I was actually thinking I could probably use this to overcome the region restrictions on my blu-ray player. This seems like the type of hack that is used by the owner of the device to do things Sony didn't want the player to do, not so much the make-this-device-a-bot type.

Clearly one undergrad course can bring you up to date on what Intel, AMD, and ARM have had teams of researchers working on for decades. I did a basic architecture course in second year, it is an introduction only, it does not qualify you to say that you understand modern computer architecture.

I doubt any one person has full knowledge of how a computer works. I have a reasonably good grasp of most of the software layers, and a fairly good idea of how the hardware abstraction works, but reading about the pentium division bug makes it clear that an undergraduate math degree is not enough to understand the inner workings of the CPU. I understand the performance difference between wifi B and N, but I don't know the protocol details. SSD drives are magic to me. I would guess that full knowledge of how a computer works would require advanced degrees in CS, a couple different maths, and electrical engineering, at the very least.

Governments and corporations have different motivations (assuming competence on both sides). As you point out, private industry has a profit motive, but that isn't necessarily their only or highest motivation. Government isn't usually looking to profit, but they usually require higher levels of accountability and consultation with the general public, which takes a long time and isn't always cheap.

I think car companies will embrace people printing their own dials and widgets eventually. It allows them to use cheaper parts up front since they can be easily replaced, and keeps them from having to produce every single part for 10 years after they sell the car. Car makers are in the market of selling cars, while they may make some money off replacement parts it ain't their core business.

Because your system runs on Linux, and fixing a bug solves a problem in your system? Once you have the fix contributing it back saves you the hassle of maintaining it as a patch as new kernel work is done. Also hardware companies want their equipment to work on Linux for everyone. Also what nblender said.