President Obama today dived into some of the topics covered by his State of the Union in a Google+ Hangout - taking aim at patent trolls and encouraging high schools to embrace a more high-tech curriculum, among other things.

Obama appeared from Roosevelt Room in the White House's West Wing to talk with several Americans via Google's group video-chat service.

That group included Adafruit founder Limor Fried, who questioned the president about what he could do to stop patent trolls and whether there should be a limit on how long people could own them. Obama pointed to patent reform legislation Congress passed several years ago, but acknowledged that it hasn't "captured all the problems" and said the bill "only went about halfway to where we need to go."

"[Patent trolls] are a classic example. They don't actually produce anything themselves," Obama said. "They're just trying to essentially leverage and hijack somebody else's idea and see if they can extort some money out of them."

There's a delicate balance between protecting intellectual property and making sure people aren't ruined financially by patent trolls, Obama said. "What we need to do is pull together additional stakeholders and see if we can build some additional consensus on smarter patent laws."

In order to have patented technology, however, you have to have technology smarts. When Fried later asked the president if he thinks high schools should have a computer programming requirement similar to a foreign language requirement, Obama said he "thinks it makes sense."

Ultimately, Obama said he wants to make sure the high school experience is "relevant." Vocational schools "got a bad rap," he said, because the perception was that people were being fast tracked into blue-collar jobs.

But Obama pointed to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who told the president that he'd taught himself to code, primarily because he was interested in gaming. There's a whole generation of kids who could benefit from getting a head start on similar high-tech learning. It "engages kids," Obama said.

"Given how pervasive computers and the Internet is now, I want to make sure they know how to actually produce stuff using computers and not simply consume stuff," he said.

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