How's this for a way to fix it:

After the second (or third) year, patent damages are limited to 20 times the amount the patent holder pays as patent fees. The patent fees are voluntary, you pay as much or as little as you want and you can only increase the fee by 25% in any given year.

Under this scheme nobody can afford to sit on huge piles of junk patents and collect any real court damages from them. People will only pay large fees (and be able to collect large damages) for patents which are earning real money.

That's the theory, yes.

The practice is that the wealthy just use the patent system as a weapon against small guys to achieve the exact same thing.

Um, no.

All those eyes looking at it will have it fixed up in no time.

Is there any reason why a simulator mounted on a gimbal on the end of a spinning arm can't produce any amount of G in any direction?

(OK, it can never simulate zero G but I"m guessing that's not very important for dogfight simulators)

The way to protect the average investor is to stabilize the economy. The best way to do that is:

a) Make company CEOs and boards of directors personally responsible for failure.
b) Give the bailout to the affected people, not the company that caused it (does their business model magically change just because they get a bailout?)

Clue: Many people lost their life savings even though there was a bailout.

The bailout mostly made rich people richer. It's mostly the poor who lost out, and they got to pick up the tab for the bailout.

So is all your debt.

PS: People have savings...? Really?

Hush, you're not supposed to mention Iceland anywhere in the 'free' world. It might lead to subversion.

Um, no. Imagine what would happen to the economy if everybody's debt was wiped out overnight. No mortgage or credit card payments.

Plus the government still has a trillion dollars to spend.

Those 'jobless' would be working again within a couple of weeks.

All we need to do is make sure the bank directors lose all their personal assets and we've got a working plan, methinks.

Yep. There was no way they could have kept their computers switched on without a bailout.

Nope. If the bank collapses, cancel all the mortgages/loans/credit card debt.

Shareholders would be pissed, some people get a windfall and that's not fair on the others .... but imagine what it would do for the economy - probably far more good than any bank bailout and shareholders would be more likely to vote for a CEO with his feet on the ground instead of the one with the best hair.

Even if true, how about we give those trillions directly to the people and/or cancel their mortgages instead of propping up the system that caused the problem.

I bet a bank facing the loss of all its mortgages would be a damn sight more careful with their money than one that isn't.

The government also needs to step in every time they see a lot of money being magicked out of thin air by people near the bottom of the food chain (eg. the dotcom bubble, housing bubble, etc.). That never leads to anything other than collapse, a lot of rich people getting richer and the poor people picking up the tab.

Yeah, telling CEOs they still get golden parachutes if they drive huge corporations to ruin is a much better plan for the long term.

My idea to 'improve the system' is to only bail them out if the entire board of directors agrees to turn over all their assets to the taxpayer and/or go to jail.

LOL! Cry me a river...

That's a couple of trips to the cinema. A tank of gas.