I have never seen a complete and unambiguous requirement for any real piece of software, and I would wager no other software engineer has either.

You are conflating ignorance of the law with ignorance of the facts (and you appear to have copious amounts of both).

A pre-existing patent is not law, it is fact. IBM advises its employees to remain ignorant of other patents while working on products because if those products are later found infringing then their liability is reduced.

I was a Master Inventor at IBM before I quit in 2010 and we absolutely did check for pre-existing patents before filing anything new. Occasionally this would lead to wasted effort within IBM because a proposal would get further through the process than it would if the inventors had looked for relevant patents before starting work.

Doubtful.

If you can stream one rendered image every 16ms you can display 60fps. If you send OpenGL commands you will be better-off on a lot of frames but it will stutter every time you need to send a texture larger than a rendered frame (and most textures are larger than a rendered frame).

The game is to make the peak frame latency 16ms (or whatever your target is), not to reduce the average.

Actually the old-skool unit of mass is the slug, not the gram.

What I find odd is this: "stifle" is a relatively obscure word to use and yet they can't spell "dissent".

No you shouldn't. You should expect 0.5 collisions after hashing N/2 items. Trivially you are guaranteed at least M collisions when hashing N+M items.

I don't actually know off the top of my head how many collisions you should expect if you hashed N items.

If you're going to be connected to the emergency services of the wrong country anyway, I would say you have bigger problems than which number to dial.

It was implemented. In the UK at least if you call an emergency number when you have a weak signal it will dramatically improve for the duration of the call as the cell tower reconfigures itself to use up to its maximum power and, as you say, drops any other call that was interfering with the call placed by your handset.

The towers are smart enough not to drop any calls or boost the power unless it will help.

The forms linked from this page give you a good idea of what will bring you to the attention of SIS and friends.

I own a small business selling apps on the iOS store and I agree that 30% is a reasonable price for what they provide.

Apple do nothing to market or promote your apps, so you should not have included that. You missed a relatively important factor in that they test and validate the apps they sell which gives consumers more confidence to purchase than they have on competitor's app stores.

I agree with this in principle, but I would add that it is a matter between the subscribers and the telephone company; I do not see that any third party has grounds to interfere in that relationship.

If the telephone company's scheme is optional, subscribers are given a clear choice, and subscribers may change their choice at any time without penalty then I would say it's fine. Failing that, if subscribers have a choice of telcos and at least one of them offers an unfiltered option there is no need for any regulator to get involved.

n/t

It should be relatively easy to bust the myth: what are the capacities of the USB drives? If they are all >4Gb I don't buy that they are from 3 years ago. Drive make and model would also give you a fairly firm point for the earliest point in time at which they could have been purchased.

Debatable. It cost more than all the computers and related hardware in the office combined for sure.

No it doesn't. It specifies that the rights over their discoveries shall go to the Inventors but it nowhere specifies the process that inventors shall be required to undergo to secure those rights.

Under first-to-file as it is practiced elsewhere it is still illegal for anyone other than the inventor to secure a patent on a discovery. It is really a very minor change which only makes a difference in the case of near-contemporaneous discoveries. It mostly benefits accidental inventors who are less likely to be able to provide any evidence for the date of invention than the industrial-scale patent-generators who receive most patents.

A secondary effect which may turn out to be rather more important is that the current US system requires that you file within 1 year of the discovery or never file for patent protection; so an invention cannot be kept a trade-secret and used for 40 years before being patented by that same person/corporation when they feel there is a risk of someone else working it out, effectively securing them a 65-year monopoly. First-to-file elsewhere generally allows this; I am not familiar with the US statute in question.