Unfortunately, the "expectation of privacy" in what people do in their daily lives is gradually being shrunk to the point where soon it will no longer exist. At that point, the brown stains being wiped across the US Constitution will completely obscure the words of 4th Amendment.
This doesn't completely make sense (although I also believe Fluke didn't actively initiate the action).
How would the Customs/Border "Protection" guys know whether or not SparkFun had a license from Fluke? Someone at CBP must have suspected something, and made a few phone calls asking questions first. They can't (legally) just claim Trademark/dress infraction and block passage because some random employee had a feeling in his gut.
They must have contacted someone (either SparkFun or Fluke) who said SparkFun didn't have permission and that the device was infringing. The CBP guy wouldn't have just pulled up the Trademark/dress filing and in his 'expert' capacity to interpret this decided to block the shipment without verifying the current ownership/licensee chain.
If it was SparkFun that sent a poorly written response and got themselves into trouble, then so be it. But, it may have been Fluke answering a simple question without thinking about the final outcome of their action.
Think of this like having the cops turn up at your door asking if you owned the car parked across your driveway, and you simply answer no and close the door. Then later that day your daughter's boyfriend complains that you had his car towed.
Literal Creationism (or "Intelligent design") is primarily an American thing pushed by fundamentalist protestants.
The vast majority of old school mainstream christian religious people (eg. Catholics Anglicans, etc) hold that evolution is a scientifically established principle (supported by both observation and related scientific theories). As far as how a deity fits into their picture, it is generally understood that the biblical stories are allegorical and not literal tellings of an event.
The concept of 'evolution guided by God' is simply a restatement that scientific evidence guides the description of how the universe works, and the random events that coincided to an eventual outcome may have been influenced or set in motion by some divine force. And even then, that is the simplistic layman's way of interpreting the phrase 'you/people were created by god'. With a deep theological understanding, the physical and spiritual aspects of the human condition are not necessarily connected and therefore unconflicted when it comes to changes in how we understand the workings of the known universe.
In general, religious belief does not hinge on anything that can ever be proven/disproven by observation, and is purely the domain of spiritual fulfilment and ideas that exist outside of the physical universe. For these people, there is no need for debate or argument. Science is science. Religion is religion. Their minds are open.
For the biblical fundamentalists that treat their bible as literal tellings of actual events, the 'debate' will never end. Science is religion. Religion is science. Their minds are closed.
These 'debates' are not attention whoring by the religious right, it is attention whoring by the media. More eyeballs for all involved.
Trademark/Copyright/Patent law aren't all inherently viewed as bad when implemented and executed properly. However, there are numerous examples (some of which appear on Slashdot) when the holder/government have overstepped the mark. This creates a feeling that the best solution to stop the abuses is to remove the system all-together. Here are some examples of the good/bad dichotomy:
Trademarks protecting an obvious brand-name: OK Trademarks protecting a vague/generalised name/design: BAD
Patents protecting a clearly novel, non-obvious and very specific invention: OK Patents on broad general topics and/or obvious incremental improvements: BAD
Copyright protecting a creator from having their clearly original work from being re-distributed commercially for a short time (14 years): OK Copyright on a few bars of music that appear in the middle of a song from 75 years ago that could easily have been re-created without ever being exposed to the original: BAD
Muscles are not necessarily damaged by small amounts of activity, but take them beyond their limits too often or too quickly and you get tears, strains and other indirect problems related to interconnects like bones and tendons. Sleep deprivation is not a typical activity and should be likened to overexertion or overuse.
I agree the blurb is sensationalist in its claims, but the observations in the article are still valid within the domain in their claims of how sleep deprivation affects the mice they were testing.
If a population had a few night owls that stood guard all night, there is no reason why those 'owls' couldn't have slept in the back of the cave during the day.
Also, sleep deprivation may be less of an issue for those genetically inclined to need less sleep. Lack of sleep may take its toll in a different way than purely lowering the IQ of those participants. And clearly, for some, there may be no obvious issues at all. A slightly reduced life expectancy may be testable, but if something unrelated kills you first, you'll never know.
Sleep deprivation has been a natural and common occurrence throughout human evolution. It seems highly implausible that "an all-nighter" would cause permanent brain damage in any meaningful sense.
I doubt a single all-nighter is going to cause a measurable change to your long term brain function. However, anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.
Regarding human evolution; people generally sleep when it is dark. And with no unnatural sources of light, historically sleep deprivation would not have been anywhere near as common as it has become in modern society.
It's not that the secondary system is 'cross checking' or comparing results. They are really just monitoring circuits with a particular set of rules embedded in separate circuitry that just makes sure the primary system never breaks those rules. It is effectively the master control and will always 'win' if there is a problem. They are designed to be simple, robust and if possible, completely hardware based.
Some other examples are 'jabber' control hardware lockouts to stop a radio transmitter from crashing and permanently keying active; the watchdog timers in critical systems that will reset the system if it isn't periodically reset; power control systems that shutdown power domains if an overload is detected; etc.
Something like a nuclear power station should have more complex monitoring systems, but the rules are similar. In modern critical system design, the rules are generally set up to require a sanitising channel between the 'internet' and the control network. That channel may be some simple UART to UART based control logic that allows the a subset of general control commands to be issued without the ability to override the primary safety lockouts. If you want to override those, you have to turn up in person.
This type of security has been standard practice for years by the embedded systems engineers. Once people started shoehorning inappropriate solutions into critical system control, that's where it went belly up. That's where you end up with glorified 'web coders' writing what should be done by someone that understands the pitfalls. Sometimes, it's because 'management' has decided to requisition and install something beyond the design parameters set by the engineers.
When they do this in areas with custom plates (or plates that can end/start in a letter) they do the 'A-M', 'N-Z' alternating thing, along with odd/even.
So far there is insufficient proof that Dorian is Satoshi. A few random correlations across huge populations does not evidence make.
Perhaps the real Satoshi has a 5 year old kid and doesn't waste too much time on his pseudonymous accounts anymore. But, he still reads the news, saw this crap turn up and figured he couldn't just let it slide. I know I would have done the same if I was Satoshi and some poor bastard was baselessly getting hounded like that.
Regarding your comment on people who work for the DOD: it isn't like the movies. There are all sorts of people at various levels who may have come in because they worked at a firm that was subcontracted. The people I've worked with in this area aren't all geniuses. In fact most are far from it - most are just regular employees that have been vetted a little more than your average joe to weed out people with a problematic history. Don't you think every company out there wants the best and smartest people? Maybe the NSA somehow manages to find all the well rounded geniuses, and pays them huge amounts of money to keep them. But, the average DOD contractor is definitely not some super-employee like you elude to in your comment.
It also means that the cops will need much more evidence than 'looky right here what we've gone and found on your computer'. Which should apply to everyone anyway.
You could still drag on the window title, and if collapsed, drag on the icon. If that's too small for some people, they could always include an option where dragging on the menu bar text would drag the window.
I suspect the actual extinctions took place much more quickly, while the after effects continued long enough that nothing could recover until the planet had stabilised. It's not like an asteroid or volcanic eruption took place and everything gradually died off over many thousands of years.
It would have been a relatively sudden shock, followed by hell on earth for the event duration, dissipating over the long haul. A few small pockets of relative hospitability would have held out long enough for the rest of the environment to recover and life to re-colonise the rest of the planet.
In the Samsung suit there were many design and utility patents that they were alleged to have infringed.
Regarding the design patent you linked above, it was determined that Samsung had not infringed on that patent. Primarily because the patent's design when taken as a whole was not being infringed - even though some subset of its elemental features do. With a design patent like that, you end up with a very narrow definition of infringement - especially when it is so heavily superseded by similar prior art.
Only if the single word is approved and the court allows using a single word subset within a larger trademark as being actionable. If every single word is suddenly 'owned' by someone because it's part of their trademarked name, that dramatically reduces the available trademark space. And buying a previously trademarked 'name', unless identical still does not mean you have grounds to claim 'market confusion' - as the product name did not apply to the product at the time the trademark was applied for. Next they'll claim all synonyms too: Lollie*, *Smasher, etc. Where does it end?
If the words were identical, or so close as to be confusing (i.e. CandyCrusher vs CandyCrush), then yeah, they have reasonable grounds for taking action. But CandySwipe as a name neither sounds or looks anything like CandyCrusher. And attempting to trademark anything with the word Candy in it, and then start suing people before it's even fully granted is jumping the shark.
See Microsoft and their attempt to take control of the single word 'Windows'. They tried and failed to trademark the single word 'Windows'.
The only outmanoeuvring that went on here, was targeting an smaller entity without deep enough pockets to defend themselves against a heavily financed legal attack.
A design patent is taken in totality, not on a claim by claim basis. An infringement is upheld when the 'copy' substantially violates the overall design, not just a single elemental claim.
Obviously, when describing a design, you need to describe each element that makes up that design. Rounded corners and the rectangular proportion are just two of many of those elements. How else can a design be described if not by listing the elements that make up the design? If it was a CAD file that described the design, we'd probably have a meme of 'Apple suing over a tangential curve to line intersect'.
The meme comes from people with a severe lack of understanding about how the patent system works, and the difference between a design patent and a utility patent. Either that, or they've made the invalid assumption that Apple somehow was able to have approved a patent with just a single claim of 'device in the shape of a rounded rectangle'.
I'm here to both point out that the meme is not describing reality, and also not an equivalent analogy to the issue as described in article summary.
I know the Slashdot meme of Apple suing over 'rounded corners' is prevalent. However, the actual design patent Apple were suing over contained numerous clauses (including operational UI elements as rendered by software) that the courts evaluate for infringement as a whole. It had nothing to do with Apple claiming violation of a singular clause of their design patent.
The only way that the Samsung/Apple example resembles the summary is that it involves lawyers and 'IP'.
What the summary describes is a lowest of low attempt that goes well beyond any real legal entitlement, by bullying an opponent in a way that requires significant financial backing to defend. And since the financial disparity between the parties is so large, mounting a legal defence is very difficult. If this were two equal players, the CandyCrush lawyers would likely be slapped out of court.
If you want to bring up an Apple comparison, it would be far better to find one about i* trademark claims.
The problem isn't that the developer has created a bug that he has to fix. It's that the cyclic process of development / debugging / testing are not being correctly accounted. Or more than likely, the second two phases are being ignored as part of the accounting.
If the developer were to be responsible for his bugs, then his time must have already included the debugging and testing phases. By the time the process is complete, there are a number of people in the loop who are 'responsible' for the remaining bug. If the process has not been correctly established, then the problem isn't with the developer, it is with the management. Therefore, the management should be paying out of their pocket for the developer to fix the bug.
There is no inherent reason why an employee that is part of a much larger process is somehow responsible for the entire process. Even the bricky isn't responsible that someone else gave him a bad batch of cement. The company should have planned for this and padded their estimate with appropriate margin to mitigate expected (and to some degree unexpected) risk.
Too many 'managers' do not understand that debugging and testing take more resources than that required to write the initial lines of code.
Another problem with RFID (in addition to the security issue) is that it encourages physical wallet and phone theft (mugging/pick pockets/etc). This is because simply having the card in hand is sufficient to complete a purchase - there is no PIN or signature requirement. And without your phone it'll take a while before you can call your bank and cancel the cards (since you're too busy reporting it to the police, and you'll need some more information like bank phone numbers, etc before you can cancel your cards).
Another sneaky one is people pushing the RFID pos reader onto someone else's purse wallet in the shop/bar/pub/etc. Or a taking the wallet/purse, using the card without even removing it, and putting the wallet/purse back.
The only thing currently preventing this going to extremes is video surveillance at the point of sale to identify the users of the stolen cards.
That's the beauty of just raising the fares to extortionate levels. You can even skim the extra revenue to pay for unrelated things like corporate crony^w^w roads. Which is great, because I drive anyway.
It's all about market capture and what people are willing to pay to save 2 hours a day against driving through the parking lot they call a freeway.
I could never fathom why it was possible in time gone by to build this infrastructure in the first place when the public transport clientele was so much smaller than it is today. Yet, all of a sudden it costs so much more with so little 'return'.
The answer could be that there are many more hands in the city's pocket that are being greased to the detriment of the people that live/travel there.
I'm not inherently against short/medium term price increases for well considered long term plans that involve big up-front costs. As long as the plan is real and not tied to contracts that have more to do with fattening corporate wallets than providing the desired goal of improving the city's transport network/roads/zoning/efficiency/etc.
Definitely not as quick and easy as raising the fare. The best thing about raising the fares is that you don't even need to try to improve anything. Just keep the fares going up and up! Costs are the same, and the differential increase in profit can be used to expand the city's infrastr^w coffers.
So instead of putting on more buses/trains and improving the transport infrastructure, you just keep raising the fair to reduce patronage. Great idea! If they quadruple the fairs tomorrow, they might even be able to get rid of a few entire routes. Less buses, less employees, and therefore lower payroll costs.
More importantly, if you have your own lawyers on your payroll, the cost is negligible. Especially when you consider that those lawyers seemingly only spend 5 minutes on Google doing 'due diligence'. If they spent much longer, then far less obvious/pre-existing patent applications would be made. That, of course, doesn't excuse the patent examiner for rubber stamping it after seemingly spending another 5 minutes Googling the claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the "expectation of privacy" in what people do in their daily lives is gradually being shrunk to the point where soon it will no longer exist. At that point, the brown stains being wiped across the US Constitution will completely obscure the words of 4th Amendment.
This doesn't completely make sense (although I also believe Fluke didn't actively initiate the action).
How would the Customs/Border "Protection" guys know whether or not SparkFun had a license from Fluke? Someone at CBP must have suspected something, and made a few phone calls asking questions first. They can't (legally) just claim Trademark/dress infraction and block passage because some random employee had a feeling in his gut.
They must have contacted someone (either SparkFun or Fluke) who said SparkFun didn't have permission and that the device was infringing. The CBP guy wouldn't have just pulled up the Trademark/dress filing and in his 'expert' capacity to interpret this decided to block the shipment without verifying the current ownership/licensee chain.
If it was SparkFun that sent a poorly written response and got themselves into trouble, then so be it. But, it may have been Fluke answering a simple question without thinking about the final outcome of their action.
Think of this like having the cops turn up at your door asking if you owned the car parked across your driveway, and you simply answer no and close the door. Then later that day your daughter's boyfriend complains that you had his car towed.
Literal Creationism (or "Intelligent design") is primarily an American thing pushed by fundamentalist protestants.
The vast majority of old school mainstream christian religious people (eg. Catholics Anglicans, etc) hold that evolution is a scientifically established principle (supported by both observation and related scientific theories). As far as how a deity fits into their picture, it is generally understood that the biblical stories are allegorical and not literal tellings of an event.
The concept of 'evolution guided by God' is simply a restatement that scientific evidence guides the description of how the universe works, and the random events that coincided to an eventual outcome may have been influenced or set in motion by some divine force. And even then, that is the simplistic layman's way of interpreting the phrase 'you/people were created by god'. With a deep theological understanding, the physical and spiritual aspects of the human condition are not necessarily connected and therefore unconflicted when it comes to changes in how we understand the workings of the known universe.
In general, religious belief does not hinge on anything that can ever be proven/disproven by observation, and is purely the domain of spiritual fulfilment and ideas that exist outside of the physical universe. For these people, there is no need for debate or argument. Science is science. Religion is religion. Their minds are open.
For the biblical fundamentalists that treat their bible as literal tellings of actual events, the 'debate' will never end. Science is religion. Religion is science. Their minds are closed.
These 'debates' are not attention whoring by the religious right, it is attention whoring by the media. More eyeballs for all involved.
Trademark/Copyright/Patent law aren't all inherently viewed as bad when implemented and executed properly. However, there are numerous examples (some of which appear on Slashdot) when the holder/government have overstepped the mark. This creates a feeling that the best solution to stop the abuses is to remove the system all-together. Here are some examples of the good/bad dichotomy:
Trademarks protecting an obvious brand-name: OK
Trademarks protecting a vague/generalised name/design: BAD
Patents protecting a clearly novel, non-obvious and very specific invention: OK
Patents on broad general topics and/or obvious incremental improvements: BAD
Copyright protecting a creator from having their clearly original work from being re-distributed commercially for a short time (14 years): OK
Copyright on a few bars of music that appear in the middle of a song from 75 years ago that could easily have been re-created without ever being exposed to the original: BAD
Muscles are not necessarily damaged by small amounts of activity, but take them beyond their limits too often or too quickly and you get tears, strains and other indirect problems related to interconnects like bones and tendons. Sleep deprivation is not a typical activity and should be likened to overexertion or overuse.
I agree the blurb is sensationalist in its claims, but the observations in the article are still valid within the domain in their claims of how sleep deprivation affects the mice they were testing.
If a population had a few night owls that stood guard all night, there is no reason why those 'owls' couldn't have slept in the back of the cave during the day.
Also, sleep deprivation may be less of an issue for those genetically inclined to need less sleep. Lack of sleep may take its toll in a different way than purely lowering the IQ of those participants. And clearly, for some, there may be no obvious issues at all. A slightly reduced life expectancy may be testable, but if something unrelated kills you first, you'll never know.
Sleep deprivation has been a natural and common occurrence throughout human evolution. It seems highly implausible that "an all-nighter" would cause permanent brain damage in any meaningful sense.
I doubt a single all-nighter is going to cause a measurable change to your long term brain function. However, anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.
Regarding human evolution; people generally sleep when it is dark. And with no unnatural sources of light, historically sleep deprivation would not have been anywhere near as common as it has become in modern society.
It's not that the secondary system is 'cross checking' or comparing results. They are really just monitoring circuits with a particular set of rules embedded in separate circuitry that just makes sure the primary system never breaks those rules. It is effectively the master control and will always 'win' if there is a problem. They are designed to be simple, robust and if possible, completely hardware based.
Some other examples are 'jabber' control hardware lockouts to stop a radio transmitter from crashing and permanently keying active; the watchdog timers in critical systems that will reset the system if it isn't periodically reset; power control systems that shutdown power domains if an overload is detected; etc.
Something like a nuclear power station should have more complex monitoring systems, but the rules are similar. In modern critical system design, the rules are generally set up to require a sanitising channel between the 'internet' and the control network. That channel may be some simple UART to UART based control logic that allows the a subset of general control commands to be issued without the ability to override the primary safety lockouts. If you want to override those, you have to turn up in person.
This type of security has been standard practice for years by the embedded systems engineers. Once people started shoehorning inappropriate solutions into critical system control, that's where it went belly up. That's where you end up with glorified 'web coders' writing what should be done by someone that understands the pitfalls. Sometimes, it's because 'management' has decided to requisition and install something beyond the design parameters set by the engineers.
When they do this in areas with custom plates (or plates that can end/start in a letter) they do the 'A-M', 'N-Z' alternating thing, along with odd/even.
So far there is insufficient proof that Dorian is Satoshi. A few random correlations across huge populations does not evidence make.
Perhaps the real Satoshi has a 5 year old kid and doesn't waste too much time on his pseudonymous accounts anymore. But, he still reads the news, saw this crap turn up and figured he couldn't just let it slide. I know I would have done the same if I was Satoshi and some poor bastard was baselessly getting hounded like that.
Regarding your comment on people who work for the DOD: it isn't like the movies. There are all sorts of people at various levels who may have come in because they worked at a firm that was subcontracted. The people I've worked with in this area aren't all geniuses. In fact most are far from it - most are just regular employees that have been vetted a little more than your average joe to weed out people with a problematic history. Don't you think every company out there wants the best and smartest people? Maybe the NSA somehow manages to find all the well rounded geniuses, and pays them huge amounts of money to keep them. But, the average DOD contractor is definitely not some super-employee like you elude to in your comment.
It also means that the cops will need much more evidence than 'looky right here what we've gone and found on your computer'. Which should apply to everyone anyway.
You could still drag on the window title, and if collapsed, drag on the icon. If that's too small for some people, they could always include an option where dragging on the menu bar text would drag the window.
I suspect the actual extinctions took place much more quickly, while the after effects continued long enough that nothing could recover until the planet had stabilised. It's not like an asteroid or volcanic eruption took place and everything gradually died off over many thousands of years.
It would have been a relatively sudden shock, followed by hell on earth for the event duration, dissipating over the long haul. A few small pockets of relative hospitability would have held out long enough for the rest of the environment to recover and life to re-colonise the rest of the planet.
In the Samsung suit there were many design and utility patents that they were alleged to have infringed.
Regarding the design patent you linked above, it was determined that Samsung had not infringed on that patent. Primarily because the patent's design when taken as a whole was not being infringed - even though some subset of its elemental features do. With a design patent like that, you end up with a very narrow definition of infringement - especially when it is so heavily superseded by similar prior art.
Only if the single word is approved and the court allows using a single word subset within a larger trademark as being actionable. If every single word is suddenly 'owned' by someone because it's part of their trademarked name, that dramatically reduces the available trademark space. And buying a previously trademarked 'name', unless identical still does not mean you have grounds to claim 'market confusion' - as the product name did not apply to the product at the time the trademark was applied for. Next they'll claim all synonyms too: Lollie*, *Smasher, etc. Where does it end?
If the words were identical, or so close as to be confusing (i.e. CandyCrusher vs CandyCrush), then yeah, they have reasonable grounds for taking action. But CandySwipe as a name neither sounds or looks anything like CandyCrusher. And attempting to trademark anything with the word Candy in it, and then start suing people before it's even fully granted is jumping the shark.
See Microsoft and their attempt to take control of the single word 'Windows'. They tried and failed to trademark the single word 'Windows'.
The only outmanoeuvring that went on here, was targeting an smaller entity without deep enough pockets to defend themselves against a heavily financed legal attack.
A design patent is taken in totality, not on a claim by claim basis. An infringement is upheld when the 'copy' substantially violates the overall design, not just a single elemental claim.
Obviously, when describing a design, you need to describe each element that makes up that design. Rounded corners and the rectangular proportion are just two of many of those elements. How else can a design be described if not by listing the elements that make up the design? If it was a CAD file that described the design, we'd probably have a meme of 'Apple suing over a tangential curve to line intersect'.
The meme comes from people with a severe lack of understanding about how the patent system works, and the difference between a design patent and a utility patent. Either that, or they've made the invalid assumption that Apple somehow was able to have approved a patent with just a single claim of 'device in the shape of a rounded rectangle'.
I'm here to both point out that the meme is not describing reality, and also not an equivalent analogy to the issue as described in article summary.
I know the Slashdot meme of Apple suing over 'rounded corners' is prevalent. However, the actual design patent Apple were suing over contained numerous clauses (including operational UI elements as rendered by software) that the courts evaluate for infringement as a whole. It had nothing to do with Apple claiming violation of a singular clause of their design patent.
The only way that the Samsung/Apple example resembles the summary is that it involves lawyers and 'IP'.
What the summary describes is a lowest of low attempt that goes well beyond any real legal entitlement, by bullying an opponent in a way that requires significant financial backing to defend. And since the financial disparity between the parties is so large, mounting a legal defence is very difficult. If this were two equal players, the CandyCrush lawyers would likely be slapped out of court.
If you want to bring up an Apple comparison, it would be far better to find one about i* trademark claims.
Is that you Westley?
Sadly, there is so much truth to what you've written.
"...tidy up that graphic, and we'll ship next Monday."
The problem isn't that the developer has created a bug that he has to fix. It's that the cyclic process of development / debugging / testing are not being correctly accounted. Or more than likely, the second two phases are being ignored as part of the accounting.
If the developer were to be responsible for his bugs, then his time must have already included the debugging and testing phases. By the time the process is complete, there are a number of people in the loop who are 'responsible' for the remaining bug. If the process has not been correctly established, then the problem isn't with the developer, it is with the management. Therefore, the management should be paying out of their pocket for the developer to fix the bug.
There is no inherent reason why an employee that is part of a much larger process is somehow responsible for the entire process. Even the bricky isn't responsible that someone else gave him a bad batch of cement. The company should have planned for this and padded their estimate with appropriate margin to mitigate expected (and to some degree unexpected) risk.
Too many 'managers' do not understand that debugging and testing take more resources than that required to write the initial lines of code.
Mods, please fix the bad mod on the parent.
Another problem with RFID (in addition to the security issue) is that it encourages physical wallet and phone theft (mugging/pick pockets/etc). This is because simply having the card in hand is sufficient to complete a purchase - there is no PIN or signature requirement. And without your phone it'll take a while before you can call your bank and cancel the cards (since you're too busy reporting it to the police, and you'll need some more information like bank phone numbers, etc before you can cancel your cards).
Another sneaky one is people pushing the RFID pos reader onto someone else's purse wallet in the shop/bar/pub/etc. Or a taking the wallet/purse, using the card without even removing it, and putting the wallet/purse back.
The only thing currently preventing this going to extremes is video surveillance at the point of sale to identify the users of the stolen cards.
That's the beauty of just raising the fares to extortionate levels. You can even skim the extra revenue to pay for unrelated things like corporate crony^w^w roads. Which is great, because I drive anyway.
It's all about market capture and what people are willing to pay to save 2 hours a day against driving through the parking lot they call a freeway.
I could never fathom why it was possible in time gone by to build this infrastructure in the first place when the public transport clientele was so much smaller than it is today. Yet, all of a sudden it costs so much more with so little 'return'.
The answer could be that there are many more hands in the city's pocket that are being greased to the detriment of the people that live/travel there.
I'm not inherently against short/medium term price increases for well considered long term plans that involve big up-front costs. As long as the plan is real and not tied to contracts that have more to do with fattening corporate wallets than providing the desired goal of improving the city's transport network/roads/zoning/efficiency/etc.
Definitely not as quick and easy as raising the fare. The best thing about raising the fares is that you don't even need to try to improve anything. Just keep the fares going up and up! Costs are the same, and the differential increase in profit can be used to expand the city's infrastr^w coffers.
So instead of putting on more buses/trains and improving the transport infrastructure, you just keep raising the fair to reduce patronage. Great idea! If they quadruple the fairs tomorrow, they might even be able to get rid of a few entire routes. Less buses, less employees, and therefore lower payroll costs.
I smell profit here!
More importantly, if you have your own lawyers on your payroll, the cost is negligible. Especially when you consider that those lawyers seemingly only spend 5 minutes on Google doing 'due diligence'. If they spent much longer, then far less obvious/pre-existing patent applications would be made. That, of course, doesn't excuse the patent examiner for rubber stamping it after seemingly spending another 5 minutes Googling the claims.