I imagine this would be reserved for people dumping tons of toxic chemicals into the local water supply on a daily basis. Provided the right person is prosecuted and not some joe schmoe that was thrown under the bus, I like this idea. I'd like it even more if it was extended to senoir bank employees and politicians in equal measure.

I expect (a) you're wrong, (b) it's the reverse, and (c) that will only happen when the bank/politician gets in the way of the politicians who actually run the show.

So who do you execute, then? The entire board of directors, the guy(s) that did it directly, or all of them?

Whoever you feel like. Including the fellow who happens to have not been involved, but can't pull the strings to get out.

I'm wondering which of Scalia's opinions that was. Can't find it on Google.

That "as in the beer sense" is likely a misrepresentation; have you heard of auditing code or patching it yourself?
I've applied new kernel patches before they became available on the branch I follow; it could have been 2-3 days or more to get the security fix as a compiled update (backport, test, and release).

Secondly, you should perhaps look at the rhetoric associated with "open source" (the term originally used) before you judge someone a hypocrite for their attitude towards "FOSS" (your choice of terms). The two may be similar in meaning, but the mentality isn't.
Open source is not "Everyone, you included, should release source and use FOSS, because it's the right thing" but "Open source is better, but still, you can take your pick".

For example, ESR in Why I hate proprietary software:

More precisely, I hate the proprietary software system of production. Not at the artisan level; Iâ(TM)ve defended the right of programmers to issue work under proprietary licenses because I think that if a programmer wants to write a program and sell it, itâ(TM)s neither my business nor anyone elseâ(TM)s but his customerâ(TM)s what the terms of sale are.

You seem to be missing something:
"A gene you have" is preexisting and natural (at least for anyone who can post now...); hence, it is not patentable.
"My genome" refers to the genes and alleles I have collectively.
Genes do not spring into existence as a result of sex.
Rather, sexual reproduction takes preexisting genes and recombines them to create a new collection of genes.

Unless someone other than one's parents gave birth to a person as genetically equivalent to you as an identical twin and patented the genome before one's birth (otherwise, prior art comes into play), the situation you refer to could not happen.
In other words: The probability of the first happening is approximately null, with a potential variation less than one quadrillionth (I don't know the real number off the top of my head, but one quadrillion is what 50 genes having two alleles would result in. That's probably a tremendous underestimate of the variation.)
Also, any offspring one had would not be covered by the patent, because they would have a different set of genes.

And finally, one could argue that any given combination of preexisting genes is obvious in light of prior art.

Recovery mode? chroot? I would expect anyone who could use a terminal for recovery to know about those.

For your information, I would chroot in like this:

mount $ROOTDEV $TARGET
cd $TARGET
for d in sys proc dev dev/pts run
do
mount --bind /$d $d
done
[ -e etc/resolv.conf ] || cp /etc/resolv.conf etc/
chroot ./

And you think a CAD package (which really needs GPU acceleration) is not one of those?

A couple-year-old Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet card, which works fine with a 2000 Dell Dimension.
And there's this video card that uses PCI (Fermi, not Kepler, but it's NVIDIA's 2012 entry-level card)

Argh. "this"== OP ("Why should a computer understand me when we can't understand each other?")

Saw this article and the one about PRISM, thought for a moment thaat it said:
"When Will My Government Understand Me?"

And no, Offtopic is not what this is.

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

That's all there is to it, really.

+1 Insightful.
I would give you my last mod point if I hadn't already posted.

Here's a scenario you probably didn't think about:
I (hypothetically) own a farm on a river, where the state wants to put a reservoir.
With the Fifth:
State purchases the land from me. I go buy another farm.
Without the Fifth:
State compels me to give them title. I have to go find land, sell off my livestock and equipment to pay for it, and end up broke.

Yes, that is the Fifth. Last clause of it, to be precise.
As a Libertarian, you should be conviced of its importance by now.

OK, OK, I'll give you something that's relevant to the right of silence as stated in the Fifth Amendment. Example is drawn from the previously linked video (Never talk to police), but modified because I know this context.
I buy gas with cash, and so I often have no proof I did so (real fact). I come home on Fridays, and often couldn't provide "admissible" evidence (ie-beyond my family) of having done so until Sunday (past fact).
Now here's the scenario from the video (purely hypothetical):
I am accused of having robbed a store in a town a hundred miles away, where I stay and go to college during the week.
That store happens to be one I purchased goods at previously, and tossed the receipt because hey, I buy with cash, it's something small, there's no way I'll need the receipt.
  But that robbery happens to have been done on Saturday, while I was home.
A former acquaintance thinks they see me near the store, ten minutes before the robbery. (You should know that mistaken identity happens a lot.)
I'm accused and brought in for questioning.
Fifth:
I say nothing. At court, the case gets thrown out because they have no evidence (except maybe something that from all the law can tell may have been purchased or stolen there)
No fifth:
I hear the brief accusation (someone stole goods from such-and-such store on Saturday), protest "I was a hundred miles away! There's no way I could have done that! And I don't have the goods!"
The mistaken testimony of the former acquaintance is used to establish that I lied, then they produce the goods I bought and threw away the receipt for (not that that would have helped, my name being absent).
Prosecution says: "As you can see, Mr. So-and-so lied about both his location and having the goods."
Jury convicts me.

I have these to my credit:

-A few commits to my name in musl
-A bug report mentioned in the FreeDOS kernel, and a trivial buildfix not credited by name
-A small patch in libnl (you might be able to find it in the git log, I don't know for sure...)
-A small patch in CDE
-xzcat in toybox, and a few cleanup commits (my name is mentioned in the log ~6 times)

And I also have a program that's publicly available (on github) and past 0.1, though I wouldn't consider it released yet. (This is it, if you're curious.)

So it really depends what counts.

You don't need those grocers' apostrophes. It's Mondays and Fridays. They are not possessive.

There, FTFY.

Just to be pedantic, you were correct about him, but you did need one.

Here's the situation:
Apple has an agreement with the publishers that says "No one is permitted to sell for less than this."
In other words, they tell potential ebook sellers "Sure you can try to compete, but don't think you can sell more / establish yourself / give consumers a better deal by selling at a lower price."
Now, here's the purpose of the Sherman Antitrust Act:
"To protect the consumers by preventing arrangements designed, or which tend, to advance the cost of goods to the consumer."
Sounds pretty obvious that what Apple is doing is an example of what the Sherman Antitrust Act is about, doesn't it?
And here's how the law starts:

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal.

http://books.google.com/books?id=biU3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA209