"And honestly it has to be because what the FOSS community really needs is some human interface design lessons."
Hell, Apple needs interface lessons. And Canonical. And...
It's almost like they have forgotten, or never learned, much of the human interface research of the past 40 years.
Take Apple just for example, though I don't want to pick on them particularly. When they came out with Lion with an understandable desire to bring their mobile and desktop worlds somewhat more together, they did "mobile" things on the desktop that just didn't make any human interface sense! Like making narrower scrollbars that no longer have any color, and disappear. And sidebars that no longer have color icons; they're all gray. And so on. "Upgrading" to Lion was a huge "WTF?" experience for me.
All of those "trends" are contrary to what we know about efficient human interfaces. Narrower scrollbars are harder to use. Greyed-out scrollbars are harder to see. And you have to wait for disappearing scrollbars to appear again before you can use them. Minus 3 usability points, for just one interface item. Removing the color from the scrollbars, and other similar things they did, are all definite steps backward in human interface.
Let's get it straight, folks: the 3D look was not just a fad. There were real reasons for it. Colors are important in efficient eye-hand coordination. Smaller and narrower elements are harder to use. And so on.
The sad fact is, Microsoft did a lot of, or paid for a lot of, research into many of the human-computer interface elements we use today. (A lot of it came from PARC, too, but Microsoft picked it up.) Then... apparently they threw away 20 years of it for Windows 8. Go figure.
Maybe so but it ISN'T "work for hire". You seem to have missed the point of what I was saying. The big difference is that there is no discussion of the "normal course of your duties" context.
For example, they mention that Microsoft hired some contract workers to help build Windows. But -- and this is the important part -- THAT WAS THEIR NORMAL JOB. That's what they were hired to do. My example was specifically about someone who was hired to do one thing, then asked to do something else that was in a completely different context, and required a completely different skill set, than what he was hired for.
In my example, it wasn't [from your Wikipedia article] "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment". It was OUTSIDE any reasonable interpretation of the scope of his employment.
"If you patented an invention that was remotely related to McDonald's, while on the clock or off the clock, while being employed by them or not; you LOSE in court. Period."
Not so. And if fact that's a pretty bad attitude.
Example: you know that "burp tank" in your car? The one that catches the spillover when your radiator gets hot, then allows the cooling system to suck it back when it cools off?
The guy who invented (and patented) it took it to every major automobile in the WORLD (at the time): General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, BMW, Daimler (that was before the Chrysler merger), Toyota, Honda, etc. They all turned him down. Yet... the next model year, guess what? Amazingly, they ALL had burp tanks.
I saw him interviewed on TV. At the time of the interview he had sued 7 of those companies, and gotten a settlement every time, averaging $1,000,000 each. After his lawyer was paid. He said he had 12 more companies on his list.
Yes, it is possible to fight the big boys and win in patent court. Sure, the guy was getting settlements, not judgments, but that's only because the big auto companies KNEW they would either lose, or spend more money that it was worse defending themselves.
"Legally, you're probably right. But I think in practice it would generally be not so clear cut, and I think who actually filed the patent would be an important factor. "
What I described *IS* the actual practice. This -- or something so close to this as makes no difference -- was a case study in a college course in contract law.
While "normal duties" includes some gray area, the law itself is quite clear on this matter.
While you may be right about what is easier to do, that doesn't change who is ultimately in the right when it comes to patent ownership. Patent suits are a bitch, but that really has no bearing on the issue I mentioned.
"Make lobbying equal to bribery and throw the fuckheads in jail for life."
If you did that, you'd also have to get rid of all the lobbying by the unions (including teacher, police, and firefighter unions), insurance companies, "health care" companies, women's groups like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, other "civil rights" groups, minority groups, etc.
Having said that, I'm definitely in favor of your proposal. I've been saying the same thing for years. Except that the politicians who accept the bribes are the ones who should be given priority when it comes to jail.
"Cooks specify, design, and order the tools that work, and it's no great stretch to actually "invent" a new piece of equipment for the kitchen."
Yes. But. You're stretching my example a bit far. Sure, they improve things... people like to do that. But for one thing, you're talking about cooks working in a kitchen. There was a reason I put "cook" in quotes. A burger flipper is to a cook like a Razor scooter is to a motorcycle. And a McDonald's is not a "kitchen" in any sense that could be applied to a chef, who might actually be reasonably expected to do some of the things you say.
The question here is under what conditions an employer has a legal right to a patent. And the answer, according to the courts, is clearly "not in this case". In fact a very similar situation was one of our case studies in school.
In my example, the manager knew full well the employee had a specific technical skill that is NOT normally part of a burger flipper's job, and asked him to employ that skill for the company. It is simply NOT a "normal duty" for a burger flipper at McDonald's to be doing mechanical engineering for a burger flipper's pay.
"Accepting wages, on company time, to do a company assigned task, specifically requested by a company representative."
Doesn't matter. The courts have repeatedly enforced the rule that it has to be part of the "normal duties" reasonably expected for that job.
The reason for this -- or part of the reason, at least -- is to prevent abuse. It prevents companies from hiring mechanical engineers as burger flippers, then expecting to get mechanical engineering out of them in exchange for the wages normally paid a burger flipper.
Granted, "normal course of duty" can be a pretty gray area sometimes... but sometimes not. I think my example was a pretty clear case of not. "Justified homicide" is a pretty gray area too... but it definitely exists in the law.
"I think you defeated your own argument with "He says he will pay your normal wages if you take some time during your shifts to find a way to make it better."
You might think that, but you'd be wrong. IANAL, but this was pretty clear in my Contract Law classes at university. It has to be part of the employee's "normal duties", or else you need a separate agreement.
The courts have repeatedly ruled that mere compensation is only part of the formula. If you ask somebody to perform special skills that fall outside their normal duties as an employee, you have no claim to a patent on their invention, unless you have an agreement that specifically says so.
That is why I used the example that I did. There is no way in hell anybody could reasonably consider mechanical engineering to be a "normal duty" for a burger flipper.
Part of the reason for this rule is that it prevents companies from hiring mechanical engineers to flip burgers, then expecting to get mechanical engineering skills out of them for a burger flipper's wage.
"So your manager could pay you to do something, which you could then patent and sue him for using?"
Yes. Very much so. It can happen and has happened.
If you are an employer, and you want someone's expertise outside their "normal duties", it behooves you to draw up a separate contract for that, if you have any aspirations of getting a patent out of it (and there is no other agreement).
"I think the company would argue that, and possibly win."
Companies HAVE argued that, and lost. That's why I wrote it.
Admittedly, "normal course of your duties" can be a gray area. But that's why I used a pretty clear example: it cannot be reasonably argued that mechanical engineering is a "normal duty" for a burger-flipper at McDonald's.
And they've tried the "other duties as directed" bit too. Sorry, but it won't wash. Normal means normal.
"And then you have companies that do not know what they have on their hands and let the employee keep it.
Woz lucked out on that, in a sense, when creating what became the Apple 1 while working for HP."
Why is this "-1"? And why can't we see the moderation popup anymore? Come on,/. Stop playing Apple and removing functionality.
"Murder, absolutely. No less or more than Hiroshima or Dresden."
I disagree completely. There might be moral arguments made to that effect, but I was referring to legality.
Hiroshima and Dresden were both acts of war, and neither were violations of then-current international law for war. (One might argue about who started the war but that's another matter.) Neither of those were considered "illegal", as acts of war, until after the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Drone killing, on the other hand, is killing, yet it is not a legal act of war or, legally, "justifiable self-defense" by our own law. It is an act specifically prohibited by treaty, and both U.S. and international law. Therefore it is legally murder.
"Lua is 12k lines of C code, comments included. Once compiled it weights like 200KB."
The issue (at least the one I was referring to) isn't the size or performance of the Lua interpreter. It's the size and performance of the scripts that will eventually be used.
So, having more RAM today is an excuse for using it all up? We can so we should? Is that it?
I use a computer sometimes that has more than 6,250 times that much memory... yet I frequently run into memory limitations on that machine, in the course of my work.
You think that's a good thing? It's not. It's absolutely ridiculous.
"How much disk space does this unnamed program take in proportion to your current disk versus the space taken by any of those programs in the disk you had back then? What does it do?"
That's moving the goalposts. I was referring to how bloated they've become in relation to the actual functionality they provide. (Sure... Office does more than it did then. But very much more? No. Yet the programs are many, many times the size they used to be.) You, on the other hand, are saying "Well, you have a larger hard disk, so it doesn't matter." Those are two very different things. And it does matter, because it strongly affects performance, and lessens the value of that larger hard drive, not to mention my limited RAM.
And you say "unnamed" in a way that makes you seem skeptical. Here are a few of my apps, with how many times each is larger than that old hard drive (rounded down to the integer portion): iPhoto: 14x, GnuCash: 18x, Bible Glo: 18x, iTunes: 32x, Gimp: 28x, Chrome browser: 55x, VMware Fusion: 77x, Autodesk Inventor: 163x, Xcode: 354x.
"You seem to believe so, since you have it installed. The rest of us couldn't possibly judge an unspecified program."
No, that doesn't follow at all. I have them installed because I am resigned (for now) to putting up with this horrendous software bloat, but that doesn't mean I have call to appreciate it. As I have pointed out, there are definite downsides to it, including reduced performance, and reduced value of my HDD and RAM. And I have specified a number of them for you now, so you don't have that objection anymore./.
According to Microsoft themselves, a current install of Office Standard takes up 300 times the size of that entire office hard drive. Yet, even though it didn't even remotely fill that hard drive, Office today is not even a world away from offering anything like 300 times the functionality that it did then.
(I used as an example a typical, middle-of-the-road hard drive from a PC in use in business offices of the time: 10MB. Not new computers just coming out... but typical of what was actually being actively used, maybe 2-3 years old. New computers in '94 didn't usually have 10MB, they were likely to have more like 40MB. But the ones already in use typically were smaller: 10-20MB. And I can say that with some authority because I was systems manager for a large office and had to maintain over 80 computers.)
And I don't need my memory refreshed, thank you very much. 300 times as large, but not even remotely near 300 times the functionality. If you compare the programs head-to-head, probably not really even twice the functionality. My point is made.
"Slashdotters arguing over who has the larger ego is like elephants arguing over which one has more crinkly skin."
Hahaha. Perhaps, but I think a marketer blowing marketing's own horn pretty loudly, as opposed to someone who said wait a little while before doing professional marketing, is the clear winner in the ego contest.
I probably should not go on about this, but I think it needs to be said. "Social Networking" is in its infancy, AND some of the bigger services (I'm looking at you, Facebook and Google) are notorious privacy invaders. Trying to actually make them part of the desktop is grossly premature, or even inappropriate. For the people who want them (and maybe they want some service OTHER than the ones that are built-in), there are perfectly good apps. We do not need -- and in my case I do not want -- them to be "integrated".
To me, integrating Facebook or Twitter into your desktop is akin to bolting a payphone to your car.
"Pardon my French but Ubuntu either needs to either produce something worthwhile and useful that will move open source desktop and GUI usage forwards dramatically or they need to run out of Shuttleworth's cash and fuck off."
But traditionally, GUI is really not a "part" of Linux at all. It is an add-on. Thus X, and Gnome, and KDE. I don't mention Unity because I don't think it's worth mentioning... I view it as a niche attempt to corner the Linux interface market, which is likely doomed to fail.
I have been using Kubuntu -- the semi-official KDE Ubuntu -- for years. I like it, it's stable, and the interface with least surprise. It does what I want, when I want, and it doesn't try to "integrate" things that do not need to be, or should not be, integrated. (Like Twitter, or Facebook, or Google Search, or whatever... big FAIL on Apple's part to put things like that in the desktop interface. Twitter and Facebook are properly separate services, and will likely be replaced by something else in a few years. Google Search already has credible competitors.)
"How does "mocking" violate your constitutional rights to own a Predator drone?"
I don't know about rights, but I don't understand how someone could see the drone killings as "controversial" at all. According to treaty and international law, it's murder. Plain and simple. No room for much in the way of real controversy.
"If you work in a big company (i.e. an employee), it is not your patent."
Let me give you a real example of what I was saying above. Just hypothetically:
You work for McDonald's. Your contract says you were hired as a "cook" (you flip hamburgers), and there is nothing specific in your work contract about patents.
Later, your manager somehow finds out about your degree in Mechanical Engineering, and asks you to give some thought toward improving a piece of equipment in the restaurant. He says he will pay your normal wages if you take some time during your shifts to find a way to make it better. In the process of working on that milkshake machine, you invent a gadget or process that makes it 50% more efficient (whatever that means for milkshake machines).
McDonald's does NOT own any rights to the patent, because Mechanical Engineering is not "in the normal course of your duties" as a hamburger flipper. Even though you were specifically asked to do it, for pay.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes, you can block their servers."
sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash
Then click no.
No more dash, back to good old bash, which has worked just fine for just about everybody for a long time.
"And honestly it has to be because what the FOSS community really needs is some human interface design lessons."
Hell, Apple needs interface lessons. And Canonical. And...
It's almost like they have forgotten, or never learned, much of the human interface research of the past 40 years.
Take Apple just for example, though I don't want to pick on them particularly. When they came out with Lion with an understandable desire to bring their mobile and desktop worlds somewhat more together, they did "mobile" things on the desktop that just didn't make any human interface sense! Like making narrower scrollbars that no longer have any color, and disappear. And sidebars that no longer have color icons; they're all gray. And so on. "Upgrading" to Lion was a huge "WTF?" experience for me.
All of those "trends" are contrary to what we know about efficient human interfaces. Narrower scrollbars are harder to use. Greyed-out scrollbars are harder to see. And you have to wait for disappearing scrollbars to appear again before you can use them. Minus 3 usability points, for just one interface item. Removing the color from the scrollbars, and other similar things they did, are all definite steps backward in human interface.
Let's get it straight, folks: the 3D look was not just a fad. There were real reasons for it. Colors are important in efficient eye-hand coordination. Smaller and narrower elements are harder to use. And so on.
The sad fact is, Microsoft did a lot of, or paid for a lot of, research into many of the human-computer interface elements we use today. (A lot of it came from PARC, too, but Microsoft picked it up.) Then... apparently they threw away 20 years of it for Windows 8. Go figure.
... and a newer, better client-side language.
"[citation needed]"
I have already given my citation. This was a case study in a University course on Contract Law.
"That's almost a paraphrase of 'work for hire'."
Maybe so but it ISN'T "work for hire". You seem to have missed the point of what I was saying. The big difference is that there is no discussion of the "normal course of your duties" context.
For example, they mention that Microsoft hired some contract workers to help build Windows. But -- and this is the important part -- THAT WAS THEIR NORMAL JOB. That's what they were hired to do. My example was specifically about someone who was hired to do one thing, then asked to do something else that was in a completely different context, and required a completely different skill set, than what he was hired for.
In my example, it wasn't [from your Wikipedia article] "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment". It was OUTSIDE any reasonable interpretation of the scope of his employment.
s/major automobile/major automobile manufacturer
"If you patented an invention that was remotely related to McDonald's, while on the clock or off the clock, while being employed by them or not; you LOSE in court. Period."
Not so. And if fact that's a pretty bad attitude.
Example: you know that "burp tank" in your car? The one that catches the spillover when your radiator gets hot, then allows the cooling system to suck it back when it cools off?
The guy who invented (and patented) it took it to every major automobile in the WORLD (at the time): General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, BMW, Daimler (that was before the Chrysler merger), Toyota, Honda, etc. They all turned him down. Yet... the next model year, guess what? Amazingly, they ALL had burp tanks.
I saw him interviewed on TV. At the time of the interview he had sued 7 of those companies, and gotten a settlement every time, averaging $1,000,000 each. After his lawyer was paid. He said he had 12 more companies on his list.
Yes, it is possible to fight the big boys and win in patent court. Sure, the guy was getting settlements, not judgments, but that's only because the big auto companies KNEW they would either lose, or spend more money that it was worse defending themselves.
"I think this thread has totally lost the spirit of the article."
This thread wasn't ABOUT the article. It was about an inaccurate statement made by somebody who was commenting on the article.
/. that aren't specifically about TFA or the OP.
Give it a rest, man. I see whole pages of comments on
"Legally, you're probably right. But I think in practice it would generally be not so clear cut, and I think who actually filed the patent would be an important factor. "
What I described *IS* the actual practice. This -- or something so close to this as makes no difference -- was a case study in a college course in contract law.
While "normal duties" includes some gray area, the law itself is quite clear on this matter.
While you may be right about what is easier to do, that doesn't change who is ultimately in the right when it comes to patent ownership. Patent suits are a bitch, but that really has no bearing on the issue I mentioned.
"Make lobbying equal to bribery and throw the fuckheads in jail for life."
If you did that, you'd also have to get rid of all the lobbying by the unions (including teacher, police, and firefighter unions), insurance companies, "health care" companies, women's groups like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, other "civil rights" groups, minority groups, etc.
Having said that, I'm definitely in favor of your proposal. I've been saying the same thing for years. Except that the politicians who accept the bribes are the ones who should be given priority when it comes to jail.
"Cooks specify, design, and order the tools that work, and it's no great stretch to actually "invent" a new piece of equipment for the kitchen."
Yes. But. You're stretching my example a bit far. Sure, they improve things... people like to do that. But for one thing, you're talking about cooks working in a kitchen. There was a reason I put "cook" in quotes. A burger flipper is to a cook like a Razor scooter is to a motorcycle. And a McDonald's is not a "kitchen" in any sense that could be applied to a chef, who might actually be reasonably expected to do some of the things you say.
The question here is under what conditions an employer has a legal right to a patent. And the answer, according to the courts, is clearly "not in this case". In fact a very similar situation was one of our case studies in school.
In my example, the manager knew full well the employee had a specific technical skill that is NOT normally part of a burger flipper's job, and asked him to employ that skill for the company. It is simply NOT a "normal duty" for a burger flipper at McDonald's to be doing mechanical engineering for a burger flipper's pay.
"Accepting wages, on company time, to do a company assigned task, specifically requested by a company representative."
Doesn't matter. The courts have repeatedly enforced the rule that it has to be part of the "normal duties" reasonably expected for that job.
The reason for this -- or part of the reason, at least -- is to prevent abuse. It prevents companies from hiring mechanical engineers as burger flippers, then expecting to get mechanical engineering out of them in exchange for the wages normally paid a burger flipper.
Granted, "normal course of duty" can be a pretty gray area sometimes... but sometimes not. I think my example was a pretty clear case of not. "Justified homicide" is a pretty gray area too... but it definitely exists in the law.
"I think you defeated your own argument with "He says he will pay your normal wages if you take some time during your shifts to find a way to make it better."
You might think that, but you'd be wrong. IANAL, but this was pretty clear in my Contract Law classes at university. It has to be part of the employee's "normal duties", or else you need a separate agreement.
The courts have repeatedly ruled that mere compensation is only part of the formula. If you ask somebody to perform special skills that fall outside their normal duties as an employee, you have no claim to a patent on their invention, unless you have an agreement that specifically says so.
That is why I used the example that I did. There is no way in hell anybody could reasonably consider mechanical engineering to be a "normal duty" for a burger flipper.
Part of the reason for this rule is that it prevents companies from hiring mechanical engineers to flip burgers, then expecting to get mechanical engineering skills out of them for a burger flipper's wage.
"So your manager could pay you to do something, which you could then patent and sue him for using?"
Yes. Very much so. It can happen and has happened.
If you are an employer, and you want someone's expertise outside their "normal duties", it behooves you to draw up a separate contract for that, if you have any aspirations of getting a patent out of it (and there is no other agreement).
"I think the company would argue that, and possibly win."
Companies HAVE argued that, and lost. That's why I wrote it.
Admittedly, "normal course of your duties" can be a gray area. But that's why I used a pretty clear example: it cannot be reasonably argued that mechanical engineering is a "normal duty" for a burger-flipper at McDonald's.
And they've tried the "other duties as directed" bit too. Sorry, but it won't wash. Normal means normal.
"And then you have companies that do not know what they have on their hands and let the employee keep it. Woz lucked out on that, in a sense, when creating what became the Apple 1 while working for HP."
Why is this "-1"? And why can't we see the moderation popup anymore? Come on, /. Stop playing Apple and removing functionality.
"Murder, absolutely. No less or more than Hiroshima or Dresden."
I disagree completely. There might be moral arguments made to that effect, but I was referring to legality.
Hiroshima and Dresden were both acts of war, and neither were violations of then-current international law for war. (One might argue about who started the war but that's another matter.) Neither of those were considered "illegal", as acts of war, until after the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Drone killing, on the other hand, is killing, yet it is not a legal act of war or, legally, "justifiable self-defense" by our own law. It is an act specifically prohibited by treaty, and both U.S. and international law. Therefore it is legally murder.
"Lua is 12k lines of C code, comments included. Once compiled it weights like 200KB."
The issue (at least the one I was referring to) isn't the size or performance of the Lua interpreter. It's the size and performance of the scripts that will eventually be used.
"I only have 640 KB you insensitive clod!"
So, having more RAM today is an excuse for using it all up? We can so we should? Is that it?
I use a computer sometimes that has more than 6,250 times that much memory... yet I frequently run into memory limitations on that machine, in the course of my work.
You think that's a good thing? It's not. It's absolutely ridiculous.
"How much disk space does this unnamed program take in proportion to your current disk versus the space taken by any of those programs in the disk you had back then? What does it do?"
That's moving the goalposts. I was referring to how bloated they've become in relation to the actual functionality they provide. (Sure... Office does more than it did then. But very much more? No. Yet the programs are many, many times the size they used to be.) You, on the other hand, are saying "Well, you have a larger hard disk, so it doesn't matter." Those are two very different things. And it does matter, because it strongly affects performance, and lessens the value of that larger hard drive, not to mention my limited RAM.
And you say "unnamed" in a way that makes you seem skeptical. Here are a few of my apps, with how many times each is larger than that old hard drive (rounded down to the integer portion): iPhoto: 14x, GnuCash: 18x, Bible Glo: 18x, iTunes: 32x, Gimp: 28x, Chrome browser: 55x, VMware Fusion: 77x, Autodesk Inventor: 163x, Xcode: 354x.
"You seem to believe so, since you have it installed. The rest of us couldn't possibly judge an unspecified program."
No, that doesn't follow at all. I have them installed because I am resigned (for now) to putting up with this horrendous software bloat, but that doesn't mean I have call to appreciate it. As I have pointed out, there are definite downsides to it, including reduced performance, and reduced value of my HDD and RAM. And I have specified a number of them for you now, so you don't have that objection anymore. /.
According to Microsoft themselves, a current install of Office Standard takes up 300 times the size of that entire office hard drive. Yet, even though it didn't even remotely fill that hard drive, Office today is not even a world away from offering anything like 300 times the functionality that it did then.
(I used as an example a typical, middle-of-the-road hard drive from a PC in use in business offices of the time: 10MB. Not new computers just coming out... but typical of what was actually being actively used, maybe 2-3 years old. New computers in '94 didn't usually have 10MB, they were likely to have more like 40MB. But the ones already in use typically were smaller: 10-20MB. And I can say that with some authority because I was systems manager for a large office and had to maintain over 80 computers.)
And I don't need my memory refreshed, thank you very much. 300 times as large, but not even remotely near 300 times the functionality. If you compare the programs head-to-head, probably not really even twice the functionality. My point is made.
"Slashdotters arguing over who has the larger ego is like elephants arguing over which one has more crinkly skin."
Hahaha. Perhaps, but I think a marketer blowing marketing's own horn pretty loudly, as opposed to someone who said wait a little while before doing professional marketing, is the clear winner in the ego contest.
I probably should not go on about this, but I think it needs to be said. "Social Networking" is in its infancy, AND some of the bigger services (I'm looking at you, Facebook and Google) are notorious privacy invaders. Trying to actually make them part of the desktop is grossly premature, or even inappropriate. For the people who want them (and maybe they want some service OTHER than the ones that are built-in), there are perfectly good apps. We do not need -- and in my case I do not want -- them to be "integrated".
To me, integrating Facebook or Twitter into your desktop is akin to bolting a payphone to your car.
"Pardon my French but Ubuntu either needs to either produce something worthwhile and useful that will move open source desktop and GUI usage forwards dramatically or they need to run out of Shuttleworth's cash and fuck off."
But traditionally, GUI is really not a "part" of Linux at all. It is an add-on. Thus X, and Gnome, and KDE. I don't mention Unity because I don't think it's worth mentioning... I view it as a niche attempt to corner the Linux interface market, which is likely doomed to fail.
I have been using Kubuntu -- the semi-official KDE Ubuntu -- for years. I like it, it's stable, and the interface with least surprise. It does what I want, when I want, and it doesn't try to "integrate" things that do not need to be, or should not be, integrated. (Like Twitter, or Facebook, or Google Search, or whatever... big FAIL on Apple's part to put things like that in the desktop interface. Twitter and Facebook are properly separate services, and will likely be replaced by something else in a few years. Google Search already has credible competitors.)
"How does "mocking" violate your constitutional rights to own a Predator drone?"
I don't know about rights, but I don't understand how someone could see the drone killings as "controversial" at all. According to treaty and international law, it's murder. Plain and simple. No room for much in the way of real controversy.
"If you work in a big company (i.e. an employee), it is not your patent."
Let me give you a real example of what I was saying above. Just hypothetically:
You work for McDonald's. Your contract says you were hired as a "cook" (you flip hamburgers), and there is nothing specific in your work contract about patents.
Later, your manager somehow finds out about your degree in Mechanical Engineering, and asks you to give some thought toward improving a piece of equipment in the restaurant. He says he will pay your normal wages if you take some time during your shifts to find a way to make it better. In the process of working on that milkshake machine, you invent a gadget or process that makes it 50% more efficient (whatever that means for milkshake machines).
McDonald's does NOT own any rights to the patent, because Mechanical Engineering is not "in the normal course of your duties" as a hamburger flipper. Even though you were specifically asked to do it, for pay.