Perhaps the trees are attracted to the high ion levels rather than the other way around.

Even HP hasn't solved the "evaporating in the printer" problem, nor have Epson or Canon. Leave an inkjet sit for 6 months or so and the cartridges will be useless.

If you search the ubuntu forums you'll find plenty of threads complaining about intel graphics problems going back to 8.04. There are at least 2 PPA repositories with different xorg and kernel versions available that work to varying degrees to fix the problem, but nothing I'm aware of that works 100%. Previous posts notwithstanding, checking /var/log/syslog will often show intel video driver (i915) errors at the time of the crash. (Often more of a graphics system hang than a full system crash, console is usually still available but X hangs and cannot be restarted without a reboot) I'm not knowledgeable about all the hardware, but shouldn't it be possible to reset the graphics system somehow without a full reboot? I've experienced X hanging on my own laptop with intel 852/855, usually occurs during video playback.

Why not swap the whole car?

That's funny, but there is a practical solution using the previously mentioned bluetooth transceivers. Carry your laptop with a microphone, run general purpose equalizer software set up to compensate for your particular hearing frequency deficiencies, and send the output to an over-the-ear bluetooth headset. Of course battery life may be a problem but it should last long enough for a job interview.

iPAQ: introduced April 2000, before compaq merged with HP. They had desktops using the same name even earlier.
iPOD: Introduced October 2001

100 incidents out of millions of cars, each driven for years and thousands of miles... There is a good chance Toyota may NEVER discover the actual cause.

I think the larger issue is not whether this is a good idea for a game demo, but why is an idea at this level of abstraction even patentable?

So if a pickpocket steals a wallet from a patron inside a restaurant, the restaurant owner is liable?

You mean like in Cowboy Bebop the Movie?

I can't comment on military applications, but I do have 30 years experience in mobile equipment and vehicle maintenance and fleet management. Despite the OBD 2, the major vehicle producers are increasingly requiring proprietary information and specialized tools for what could be simple routine repairs and maintenance. The described system could be a boon to technicians but my cynical view is that it will just be turned into another income source for vehicle manufacturers and dealer service departments. On many cars now you can't even change a coolant hose without a substantial investment in a "hose fitting disconnect kit", let alone accessing any non-generic DTCs from OBD2 or CAN. And of course Ford, Honda, GM, Toyota etc. are all different.

No wonder women never post to /.

That would apply to DRM on recorded media like a CD or DVD or one-way communication like old fashioned conventional broadcast TV. I don't know about the UK, but US cable providers, for instance, could certainly implement a DRM system that used for example public/private keys or some other type of separately delivered encryption key. Simply reverse-engineering such a system would not by itself allow playback of the encrypted stream.