In addition, the clause I quoted above speaks of "securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"; so, if you please, also tell us how it provides justification for buying, selling, or otherwise assigning these rights to someone other than the originator.

The Constitutional rationale for patents is not monetisation, that's why:

Now please inform us as to how patent trolls promote the progress of science and/or useful arts.

...

(Warning--Spoiler ahead:) They don't.

If you're not joking or trolling, that would be Florian Müller. (Not giving him a free link, either--use the Google if you want or need to know more.)

Thank goodness most of those chips are made in China!

An understanding of some of the basic principles of "advanced" areas such as derivatives and integrals, probability and statistics, symbolic logic, set theory, etc., can prove invaluable in all manner of endeavours.

You don't need to be able to perform the calculations with the proficiency of a professional mathematician to realise the benefits.

Someone seems to think that comment was funny, but it was not intended as humour.

There are more advantages to being in a very public and very monogamous relationship than might be apparent at first glance, it seems.

anonymous coward, very apt.

Skype is available for Windows/Linux/Android/MacOS/iOS, and generally "just works".

There's also the fact that you can ring regular phones with it, and international calls are heaps cheaper this way. Since my fiancée and I are both expats, this is not a trivial consideration for either of us.

Jitsi looks very interesting, but the fact that it's not available for iOS devices (and according to their FAQ, not likely to be) is a major impediment to widespread adoption, even by folks such as myself who shy away from any hardware made by Apple, and isn't even an option for my fiancée unless she ditches her iPhone and iPad.

Those things being said, I would not object at all to adopting a Skype replacement for a variety of reasons, some of which you mention.

The US government apparently decided that "papers" should be taken literally, and thus it's open season on anything that's stored or transmitted digitally.

I myself have always regarded Anonymous as perhaps the ultimate expression of the old saying, "When four sit down to conspire, three are fools and the fourth is a government agent."

Sounds like she has mental issues.

Um, what? I've been there, and you obviously haven't.

It's more like... they see that their dealer has lots of cash, a fancy car and other bling-bling... rubs elbows with all kinds of important-looking people... and doesn't seem to have any trouble getting laid. What they -don't- see much of are the addicts who can't afford the habit, or who can't maintain.

-Using- is a choice. -Addiction- is not.

So you're saying that if you had the opportunity to work 5 hours and thus earn $40 more a week, you'd take the hours--knowing that you'd lose $75 a week in disability income by doing so?

I -went- to college before I turned 18, and I neither started school early nor skipped any grades.

(I was one of the 2 youngest in my high school graduating class--if I'd been born 6 days later, I'd likely have been the oldest in the graduating class following mine, excepting any kids who might have been held back and forced to repeat a year.)