I'm always confused as to why people get hung on this point so often. Why would someone in 1000 years (barring some apocalyptic situation), or even 20 years need a specific player to read a DVD, floppy disk, hard disk, or anything? All of these can be examined with more generic laboratory inspection equipment now, why is it unrealistic that 10 years from now you might have an optical disk scanner that reads just about anything? Even the encoding that the disks use isn't very complicated, we crack much more difficult codes all the time.

You might want to look up the meaning of 'small fry' too. The term literally was correctly applied.

How big the video game industry is? If you take 20 seconds to look it up you'd see that EA has a market cap of 6.49 billion vs Apple's market cap of 115.25 billion. Where do people keep getting the idea that EA is so big, they're literally a small fry compared to Apple.

When getting started developing something usually the first thing people do is run a patent search to see if the idea is unencumbered enough even bother with. If you've got a patent sitting there most engineers are going to stop in their tracks, whatever your actual feelings about licensing it are. In my experience with engineers who are actually doing the development your patent will scare them away and chances are that your idea will languish until the patent period expires. Maybe if you can somehow fit into the claims the fact that your intend it to be public domain that would work.

I'm a Real Engineer with a good bit of auto industry experience (though not a Chartered Engineer or PE as we tend to call them in the US, that's more for the civil engineering types), and I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that engineers aren't just 'jumped up mechanics'. Most of the best engineers I've worked with are captivated with experimentation, elegant design, and high performance applications. The best mechanics work with the same drive. The best engineers I know ARE jumped up mechanics. Just because someone learned how to analyze stresses and work with Navier-Stokes doesn't make them some zombie with a calculator.

As an engineer I'm not amazed by the fact that someone spent a year trying to find the cheapest plastic to mold a barely adequate oil pan from. We have a pretty good idea of what is cheap and what works. Tata worked with a different set of specifications than automotive designers in other countries and something different came out. I'm not ready to make a judgment whether the specs are wise or not, we'll see that over the next few years.

Valedictorian in EE at MIT? I wasn't aware we had valedictorians, maybe they got rid of it between then and now.

First Solar has a 25 year warranty on the power output of their panels. As far as I've seen this is pretty common for panels intended for large installations.

Here's a couple random links to back that up:
https://energy.wesrch.com/User_images/Pdf/L02_1221963706.pdf
http://www.evergreensolar.com/upload/pdf/us/Warranty_Cedar_Spruce_v1.5-060329_US.pdf

You sure? My LG Keybo (aka enV2) most definitely has a standard USB micro B. I'm looking at the cable right now.

I think my point applies to what you're talking about very well. If qwerty had been patented we might be using a better keyboard layout today rather than dealing with the momentum that qwerty has developed. I agree that the pickup will definitely be slower, but after the initial ramp up we'd have a better system for ourselves because of the forced diversity. Would the loss because of waiting a few years for multitouch schemes to fight it in smaller user groups outweigh the benefits of the eventual standardization on a better evolved scheme?

Also, I'm not convinced 'natural' gestures are the best way to do multitouch. When training for various sports it seems that the best techniques are those that don't seem natural at all but have been proven more effective. Things like pitching a baseball or swinging a golf club come to mind immediately.

On the other hand, the problems that patents present to progress along a line of design can actually work in our favor. I've run up against patents in the past and in working on an alternate way of solving the problem I run into a better solution. There's no reason that what was patented is the best solution, it's most likely just the most obvious. It's actually a cool little trick for forcing development out of local minima (assuming a cost function on optimality like all sane people do).

Random rant: I've found 90% of the patents I run into are stuff someone patented to sit on and aren't actively developing. Apparently actually making the thing and marketing it are too hard, it's much more efficient to patent a swath of bad ideas and try to force licenses upon those who actually want to make progress.

The funny thing about this is that however many geeks there are that think it'd be fun to set up a jammer there's as many geeks out there who'd like nothing more than to track them down. I can see amateur radio operators having a field day (pun intended) hunting them down and helping the FCC hand out fines. No doubt crushing fines both because of the implications for emergency handling and because it's a strike against the telecoms. Tracking down cell phone jammers could become a major sport for radio operators if they become more common.

You sure of that? All the new electrical engineers I know (quite a few) hold a ton of respect for all the crazy things that were done with vacuum tubes back in the old days. The mechanical engineers (of which I am one) all love the old mechanical computers. Just because the new stuff is newer doesn't make the old stuff quaint or simple, in fact, most of the advances we have have made our jobs easier (and all of us less badass engineers). Those guys were taking on unbelievable problems with green CRTs, slide rules, and drafting tables.

The fact that those things exist, let alone work, should leave you slack-jawed.

It only looks like hammered dog meat if you don't know what you're looking at. I'm sure all the engineers that see the stuff are both amazed by the audacity of most of these designs and by the fact that they ever even approached the reliability they have with such complexity. On the other hand, I'm sure most of the same engineers have gripes about almost all of the design details.

You've still got to admire the complete absurdity of such machines though.