The few companies that produce and sell devices that have standard USB ports, customers will jump all over that, and the other companies will have to change their products to use USB to become competitive. Either that or the consumer electronics industry is being noncompetitive and the US Department of Justice needs to lay the smack down on them.

The floating square of background with a floating talking bust reminds me of Max Headroom.

I enjoyed the on Earth Lexx episodes, but unless the Red Dwarf crew went back in time (or they adopt the circular time line from the Lexx universes) your argument is not relevant. The Red Dwarf is supposed to have left our solar system in our future and by the time they get back elaborate sets and props should be needed.

As an embedded programmer who does mixed C and assembly programming the most difficult part of assembly is keeping track of more than a very few variables, so register allocation alone is enough to warrant using a compiler.
That being said, compilers sometimes do terribly stupid things.

The data is secured.

If you required patent owners to make actual products it would actually hurt the little fellow since he's got to either spend lots of money to build the darn thing and try to sell it or lose the patent. Making the darn thing and trying to sell it is expensive. Selling or licensing the patent is much more do-able. Also, a lot of patents make use of other patents, so if XYZ Inc. holds the patent for a certain type of levitation device and you figure out how to make it operate 100x more efficiently and patent that, go to XYZ Inc. and say "hey! Look what I got! You wanna license it?" they say "Oh, but you're not making a product with it so we'll file a complaint with the USPTO, wait a week, and use the idea to make our levitron better anyway! hahahaha!"

Not anymore. The US Supreme Court overturned that last year.

I hold a patent on the process of increasing performance review ratings via filing for patents.

I've experienced enough differences between the same release of Firefox between Windows and Linux to more than account for this.

Most likely there's some way to cancel the order on the basis of faulty or incompatible produce -- "Y'all's version of Open Office don't work on my computer! I want my money back!" type deal.
Look into that, remove their version of it, and get the official one or even different software.

I was diagnosed when I was 6 and took Ritalin on and off throughout school. It was so funny when I went from never ever finishing anything on time to being done with my work faster than my classmates thought was possible. I was able to work circles around them.
Slashdot and the rest of the Internet are terribly distracting for someone with A(H)DD.

Since IBM is already working on simulating a cat brain it's very likely.

Ditti, except I'm not usually medicated anymore.
If I've been working on or thinking about a particularly interesting problem I can't even sleep until I am totally exhausted. This once forced me to give up chess (which I suck at anyway) so that I could eventually think about other stuff.
In programming I often lose interest in what I'm working on once I've solved the problem though there's still bugs in my implementation. Bugs are less interesting than a new algorithm.

What's needed is a perl script that reads other perl scripts and explains them to other programmers.

No. Those work because the black side of the squares absorbs light which produces heat which makes air touching it heat up which causes that air to expand which creates a pressure difference between that side and the other side of the card which causes the thing to spin.
The actual force produced is minuscule.