Well, pay them for after hours work and deduct from then the personal e-mail answered during work hours. The employee can simply advise work they do not answer after hours emails or phone calls. If they are salaried, then the problem goes away because the concept of salaried removes the hours counting in the day and at night.
A university like MIT, Yale etc teach and produce graduates with skills that are respected and an employer can ask for a transcript and rely on it to show the merit of the person in these courses. Diploma mills also grant detailed transcripts, but gain little respect. Is the transition from diploma mill to university possible? - Yes, over a time, by following accreditation procedures, usually governed by the state any school can elevate itself. Now we have Khan and MITx, one of which grew from the earth overnight and the other which sprang from MIT. Both teach courses, but Khan has none of the past reputation of MIT(x), so how is the employer to gauge the relative merits of two applicants, one from MITx and one from Khan? It is apparent that MITx is self referential, based on many decades of fame. Khan is also self referential - but from a course history that can be as little as a few months. So how can they be compared? Years ago, a system was crafted to deal with the problem various colleges had to rate their student intake. How to cull the goofs from a slacker high school from the worthy students from a high school with a good curriculum. I am of course referring to the SAT tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT . These have served for decades to serve as such a screen. The SAT also has more limited test areas for expertise in restricted areas. I think that a third party, like SAT or ??, can fill this test void, and charge a fee for this service. As time goes by, employers will go through a learning process whereby MITx, Khan academy et al 'badges' will accrue merit, especially of these academies invoke a test procedure that tests the person (and not some online hired test passer), possibly in harmony with SAT et al, because they will see the need for this sort of process. Sadly, the cost will accrue to the student - who else?, and this will impact the freeness that is their hallmark. Of course, MITX and Khan can produce a dossier of 1000 questions on each of their courses that an employer can use to self test applicants, say on the 50 that fit is best? These banks of questions will make it to the web and people will take it to self assess and study to pass. All this is good.
It will be interesting to see how the fall into bankruptcy is managed. With the connivance of the right judge to set the right trustee, who relays to one side what the Russian partners bid is, so it can be slightly beaten, then the Greenberg faction will own it all. Even if they pay a high bid, since Greenberg will win they will get most of the money back after paying creditors, and they will have control of whatever is paid and they can quickly divert the kitty to themselves by well known legal methods.
The key is to avoid a trustee who is overly friendly to the Goldberg faction, although I suspect that such a trustee might already be positioned to be so, since it only takes a friendly judge to make it so.
What is needed is a motion in court to look into this and make a ruling. As for Greenberg dilution, let him pay his portion of the 4,000,000 euro, and their relative positions will be unchanged. He knows this and hopes to steal away the Russian portion in the bankruptcy and own the whole thing, but I think now the Russian buyer will bring pressure to bear..
e-learning needs the proper method and programming. The method that uses short modules to teach a concept and then quizzes the student to measure comprehension is best. Is the comprehension shows a lack, the student is re-looped into a variant with another explanatory approach, and again, if needed. 3 failures can trigger human intervention to assist the student. Success can be rewarded with a choice of games for a short interval.
Apple and the schools need to re-think the lockdown on the educational ipads so that only teaching apps and reward games are allowed. Surfing to a school site with solution sources will work. Unrestricted surfing on safe sites for an interval can be one of the rewards.
Being a retired teacher, I was conscious of the fact that the unions feared computers would reduce the need for teaching staff in the same manner as in the office and industry, so they opposed it. In addition, the incremental pay scale here in Canada means that new teachers start at $35,000 or so, and ramp up to $80,000 after 10 or more years. This means you can not get engineers, chemists, pharmacists, doctors, and many other college grads going into teaching because they can start at $60,000 or more on day 1 and never look back. The ranks of teacher input is filled with arts people and immigrants of various types who can not get their higher degree recognized here. A great levelling is needed, more to start and less at the end!!!
Yes, the first sale doctrine allows books to be repaired again and again.
You are wrong about the "you must not....." restriction. It is to ensure that paperbacks as well as hard covers are not repaired after wear and tear of circulation makes pages fall out. This means more full price sales to the libraries = more taxes. As you know, paperbacks are so called "perfect bound", which is simply glued at the spine and is the first type of binding to wear out, see here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookbinding Paperbacks are cheaper than hard covers and in the the UK publishers have a love-hate relationship with libraries - they would prefer to force each person buy a book to read it, and they do not want paperback repaired again and again with cello glue on covers etc and rebinding extending their life.
The tear off of the front pages in magazines allows retailers to send back the front only for an unsold credit, and can be used for books as well, but books are usually remaindered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remaindered_book As noted, remaindered books are intact, but are usually striped or marked in some way to stop remainders coming back for full credit
Publishers in the UK have long had the law that book in a library can not be repaired as they wear out from the toll of circulation and other wear and tear. This is seen in the fly-leaf inscription "You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer".
This prevents repair of worn books as well as re-purposing paperbacks into effectively hard cover books. The same law is in effect in many countries. In the USA the "First Sale" doctrine kills it
So wear and tear, driving back and forth, etc are collectively the "Friction" that creates an effective end of life of a book in the UK. In the USA, there is only the back and forth of borrowing as books can be rebound many times. With an e-book, friction is zero, it is a one click dollar free effort. The publishers want to set the life of a book as 26 lendouts via e-mail, which on the face of it is reasonable. If a book costs $25.00 that is about $1 per lend. At $100 it is about $4 - a little higher. So a small library fee per lent out book would suffice to pay the publisher.
As it is, taxes pay for the library books, but the low friction of e-books means that there will be far more loans, because friction is near zero, thus taxes must go up to match the similar cost of a similar number of friction based books.
So we will come to an accommodation in between these extremes, since the e-book model costs so much less in paper, printing and freight and overhead profits that the publishers could set the life of a book a 100 lendout and still be ahead.
Ever hear the comment that a snakes teeth point inward? The prey can not escape!!! Bell, Rogers and their ilk are like that. What looks, at first blush to be a gratuitous boon, will in time show the hidden teeth.
Like Google, 'do no evil' has morphed into 'do no weevil', and they protect the honor of weevils.
At the basis of my feelings is the sure knowledge that Bell is a rapacious predator
I recall, many years ago, when big iron ruled the campus and we all had to make runs we punched into cards, we would submit the card stack and they would be checked for errors and if no errors, the priesthood would accept your stack and it would be run overnight and we would get the results in the morning, the IT dept would also charge the profs grants a large fee for their shares of IT time. Profs hated this. Then around 1978-1982 the profs started to buy MITS, Imsais, Sols, Apples and the first PCs so their grad stoonts would peck away and solve problems. and since a PC cost about $5000 and the grad stoonts were free (LOL) there was a huge wave of desertion by the profs of the IT depts. The IT dept was cut off from it's usual food supply, and they sought help from Admin. Profs were forbidden to buy computers with grant $$, so the profs bought them with their own wages. Then the profs were forbidden to bring their own computers onto campus. So the profs used terminals to send data via modem to home, or they sneakernetted the data. In time the IT depts lost this race. Are they rising??
Volcanism might warm areas, as you suggest, releasing the methane, but I tend to feel that areas of volcanism would have been there for very long periods and this might have prevented clathrate formation in that area = nothing to break down. As we see from Iceland this past year, the melt of ice leads to a rise in the ground profile, which can allow greater heat diffusion?? More studies needed.
Drilling and accessing it from below may work, but I want to know the length and breadth of these deposits. From what I read they have not gone through a concentration process like oil and gas via various impermeable zones and concentration mechanisms, so there might be a resource that is to thin and widely spread to mine/extract???. It might be like shale gas - spread wide, and you need to fracture zones to tap, but if it has no impermeable cap, fracturing a zone will let it rise into the sea as warmer water floods in.
I think the methane is emitted over large areas and the amount at any one place might be too small to collect. An inverted cone 1000 meters across that funneled the methane into a tanker(compress and cool into liquid) for use in heating or chemical process industries. What is the rate of emission from this 1000 meter across plume?? It might be uneconomic.
We could make lots of inverted cone gatherers and burn off the methane - a less than perfect solution, but the CO2 thus released is 1/70th as bad as methane, warming wise.
Temperate methane clathrates are deeper and stabilized by pressure in warmer water. The Arctic clathrates, as mentioned in this article, exist over huge land areas and were stabilized by temperature under permafrost and there is also a lot in the shallow of the arctic, also cold stabilized. Both the water based and tundra based clathrates are being released now. This is very ominous. Nothing we can do will prevent this - not even a total cessation of coal/oil/gas combustion - and we know how likely that is! Part of the methane from millions of years of vegetative rotting on tundra and shallow seas was trapped in these clathrates. Large areas of tundra are also emitting methane the same way.
Yes, make the shit up, but with a veneer of plausibility, that a lawyer in a improper dismissal law suit will tear to shreds, and the lucky fired one get a year or two of lawsuit wages. Then you get fired, and there is another lawsuit, at which your earlier chicanery is revealed, you go to jail, you are forced to form a protective alliance, you find you like it...
That is the other side of the nature of many religious groups - cultism of one personality that expands until it attracts the enmity of the original group who beat them with sticks, etc., and off they go. Until mankind collectively throws off the yoke of religion....
This desire that Science must be subjugated to religious interpretation essentially destroyed Arabic Science after islam arose. Prior to islam the Arabs were scientific leaders. After islam, their students were all directed to an internalized study of the koran - ad absurditum. Islam actively suppresses any potential reformations (like all the old time religions, they wanted to grab converts and keep people from leaving). I recall the pilgrims came to America to find freedom from religion - as distinct from freedom of religion. In schools here in Canada the islamist students hound the other students into the 5 times/day prayers. The students need freedom from this oppressive process - freedom from religion...
The concept of weeding out 1/3rd of the students to present the right number to the second year lab and class sizes is fundamentally flawed. All the students who arrived had already achieved the needed grades to progress into the College. Many of these students are actually very smart - so smart that they arrived with good marks by a minimal degree of attention. Every item they saw, they understood and needed little study. When these people reach a higher level where brilliance does not allow a passing grade, they do not study = failure mode. So what we have is a method of identifying students with bad habits. At the same time there are those memory monsters who study between classes, and at lunchtime and at home on weekends and strangely, many dumb people do this - they think they have found the true path to success. What they have found is a path to second and perhaps third year. These people fail in third and fourth years and are not good enough for graduate school.
What is needed are tests that will identify these truly brilliant students in first year and getting them into good study habits from the start
This is the only true way. The USA and the UK increasingly coddles students, allowing them to pass more easily until we get to the sorry state we are in now.
The hard Sciences lend themselves very well to re-entrant computerized tutoring, where the syllabus is broken into numerous small modules and the student is given them in a sequence that he/she has to pass. If he/she fails, then the same concept is presented again from another point of view, and then again. After being unable to master the module the student is sent back to the basics that precede that concept from a second perspective, (that he passed earlier), and can then progress to the failed stage again. If failure occurs again, he will be routed to a human teacher to close master that aspect. This approach can teach a large body of students at varying paces, and does not force the best to keep pace with the worst (as it now done in many group classes)
When a patent is held by some entity capable to taking it to the broad market it gives that monopoly to someone who will use it - for the time. The Wright brothers had no such ability, although they insisted that they did, and became a block to further use by others(on reasonable terms). The steal patents were held by assorted blocs of large makers who wanted to their side to win and were quite capable to making their own steam ecology.
What is needed is some law that the maximum amount that all patents can cost a product is - say - 8%. Thus 4 patents used = 2% each, with some mechanism to apportion other percentages as to the value/significance of the patent(independent arbiters, as we all feel our own patent is worth the most).
In addition the Linux community must take the defensive measure of creating new ideas worth a patent and making that application and getting that patent to give some tit-for-tat defences. It makes no sense to think of an idea, and then publish it into the public domain, (even though perfectly patentable) because that throws away your own armor leaving you defenceless against the trolls ( non-makers of goods) or users (Apple, IBM, Nokia et al).
Sadly, the so called patent reform is the creature of people like Apple and IBM, and no true reform will emerge. We will get something like the Disney rule for copyright extension into the (infinite??) future.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, pay them for after hours work and deduct from then the personal e-mail answered during work hours. The employee can simply advise work they do not answer after hours emails or phone calls. If they are salaried, then the problem goes away because the concept of salaried removes the hours counting in the day and at night.
A university like MIT, Yale etc teach and produce graduates with skills that are respected and an employer can ask for a transcript and rely on it to show the merit of the person in these courses. Diploma mills also grant detailed transcripts, but gain little respect. Is the transition from diploma mill to university possible? - Yes, over a time, by following accreditation procedures, usually governed by the state any school can elevate itself.
Now we have Khan and MITx, one of which grew from the earth overnight and the other which sprang from MIT. Both teach courses, but Khan has none of the past reputation of MIT(x), so how is the employer to gauge the relative merits of two applicants, one from MITx and one from Khan?
It is apparent that MITx is self referential, based on many decades of fame. Khan is also self referential - but from a course history that can be as little as a few months. So how can they be compared? Years ago, a system was crafted to deal with the problem various colleges had to rate their student intake. How to cull the goofs from a slacker high school from the worthy students from a high school with a good curriculum. I am of course referring to the SAT tests
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT . These have served for decades to serve as such a screen. The SAT also has more limited test areas for expertise in restricted areas. I think that a third party, like SAT or ??, can fill this test void, and charge a fee for this service. As time goes by, employers will go through a learning process whereby MITx, Khan academy et al 'badges' will accrue merit, especially of these academies invoke a test procedure that tests the person (and not some online hired test passer), possibly in harmony with SAT et al, because they will see the need for this sort of process. Sadly, the cost will accrue to the student - who else?, and this will impact the freeness that is their hallmark. Of course, MITX and Khan can produce a dossier of 1000 questions on each of their courses that an employer can use to self test applicants, say on the 50 that fit is best? These banks of questions will make it to the web and people will take it to self assess and study to pass. All this is good.
It will be interesting to see how the fall into bankruptcy is managed. With the connivance of the right judge to set the right trustee, who relays to one side what the Russian partners bid is, so it can be slightly beaten, then the Greenberg faction will own it all. Even if they pay a high bid, since Greenberg will win they will get most of the money back after paying creditors, and they will have control of whatever is paid and they can quickly divert the kitty to themselves by well known legal methods.
The key is to avoid a trustee who is overly friendly to the Goldberg faction, although I suspect that such a trustee might already be positioned to be so, since it only takes a friendly judge to make it so.
What is needed is a motion in court to look into this and make a ruling. As for Greenberg dilution, let him pay his portion of the 4,000,000 euro, and their relative positions will be unchanged. He knows this and hopes to steal away the Russian portion in the bankruptcy and own the whole thing, but I think now the Russian buyer will bring pressure to bear..
e-learning needs the proper method and programming. The method that uses short modules to teach a concept and then quizzes the student to measure comprehension is best. Is the comprehension shows a lack, the student is re-looped into a variant with another explanatory approach, and again, if needed. 3 failures can trigger human intervention to assist the student. Success can be rewarded with a choice of games for a short interval.
There are a number of these out there, such as the MIT site http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html and the Khan Academy http://www.khanacademy.org/, these are among the best
Apple and the schools need to re-think the lockdown on the educational ipads so that only teaching apps and reward games are allowed. Surfing to a school site with solution sources will work. Unrestricted surfing on safe sites for an interval can be one of the rewards.
Being a retired teacher, I was conscious of the fact that the unions feared computers would reduce the need for teaching staff in the same manner as in the office and industry, so they opposed it. In addition, the incremental pay scale here in Canada means that new teachers start at $35,000 or so, and ramp up to $80,000 after 10 or more years. This means you can not get engineers, chemists, pharmacists, doctors, and many other college grads going into teaching because they can start at $60,000 or more on day 1 and never look back. The ranks of teacher input is filled with arts people and immigrants of various types who can not get their higher degree recognized here. A great levelling is needed, more to start and less at the end!!!
Yes, the first sale doctrine allows books to be repaired again and again.
You are wrong about the "you must not....." restriction. It is to ensure that paperbacks as well as hard covers are not repaired after wear and tear of circulation makes pages fall out. This means more full price sales to the libraries = more taxes. As you know, paperbacks are so called "perfect bound", which is simply glued at the spine and is the first type of binding to wear out, see here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookbinding
Paperbacks are cheaper than hard covers and in the the UK publishers have a love-hate relationship with libraries - they would prefer to force each person buy a book to read it, and they do not want paperback repaired again and again with cello glue on covers etc and rebinding extending their life.
The tear off of the front pages in magazines allows retailers to send back the front only for an unsold credit, and can be used for books as well, but books are usually remaindered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remaindered_book
As noted, remaindered books are intact, but are usually striped or marked in some way to stop remainders coming back for full credit
Publishers in the UK have long had the law that book in a library can not be repaired as they wear out from the toll of circulation and other wear and tear. This is seen in the fly-leaf inscription "You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer".
This prevents repair of worn books as well as re-purposing paperbacks into effectively hard cover books. The same law is in effect in many countries. In the USA the "First Sale" doctrine kills it
So wear and tear, driving back and forth, etc are collectively the "Friction" that creates an effective end of life of a book in the UK. In the USA, there is only the back and forth of borrowing as books can be rebound many times. With an e-book, friction is zero, it is a one click dollar free effort.
The publishers want to set the life of a book as 26 lendouts via e-mail, which on the face of it is reasonable. If a book costs $25.00 that is about $1 per lend. At $100 it is about $4 - a little higher. So a small library fee per lent out book would suffice to pay the publisher.
As it is, taxes pay for the library books, but the low friction of e-books means that there will be far more loans, because friction is near zero, thus taxes must go up to match the similar cost of a similar number of friction based books.
So we will come to an accommodation in between these extremes, since the e-book model costs so much less in paper, printing and freight and overhead profits that the publishers could set the life of a book a 100 lendout and still be ahead.
With apologies to Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous poem, First they came..., his cry of protest against those Germans who did nothing to stop the Nazi rise to power, and who stood by as the Nazis purged group after group of "undesirables" in their country.
http://webweaversworld.blogspot.com/2006/10/first-they-came-for-jews-variations-on.html
When SOPA came for the ISPs,
I remained silent;
after all I was not an ISP.
When SOPA locked up the all the routers,
I remained silent;
after all I did not have a router.
When they came for the movie uploaders,
I did not speak out;
after all I was not an uploader.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
no worries, I was keen to make the do no weevil joke, LOL
Not antigoogle, but was not sure of the exact phrase
Ever hear the comment that a snakes teeth point inward? The prey can not escape!!!
Bell, Rogers and their ilk are like that.
What looks, at first blush to be a gratuitous boon, will in time show the hidden teeth.
Like Google, 'do no evil' has morphed into 'do no weevil', and they protect the honor of weevils.
At the basis of my feelings is the sure knowledge that Bell is a rapacious predator
So the crypto works...The intended recipient is the only one who understands...
I recall, many years ago, when big iron ruled the campus and we all had to make runs we punched into cards, we would submit the card stack and they would be checked for errors and if no errors, the priesthood would accept your stack and it would be run overnight and we would get the results in the morning, the IT dept would also charge the profs grants a large fee for their shares of IT time. Profs hated this. Then around 1978-1982 the profs started to buy MITS, Imsais, Sols, Apples and the first PCs so their grad stoonts would peck away and solve problems. and since a PC cost about $5000 and the grad stoonts were free (LOL) there was a huge wave of desertion by the profs of the IT depts. The IT dept was cut off from it's usual food supply, and they sought help from Admin. Profs were forbidden to buy computers with grant $$, so the profs bought them with their own wages. Then the profs were forbidden to bring their own computers onto campus. So the profs used terminals to send data via modem to home, or they sneakernetted the data. In time the IT depts lost this race.
Are they rising??
Volcanism might warm areas, as you suggest, releasing the methane, but I tend to feel that areas of volcanism would have been there for very long periods and this might have prevented clathrate formation in that area = nothing to break down.
As we see from Iceland this past year, the melt of ice leads to a rise in the ground profile, which can allow greater heat diffusion??
More studies needed.
Drilling and accessing it from below may work, but I want to know the length and breadth of these deposits. From what I read they have not gone through a concentration process like oil and gas via various impermeable zones and concentration mechanisms, so there might be a resource that is to thin and widely spread to mine/extract???. It might be like shale gas - spread wide, and you need to fracture zones to tap, but if it has no impermeable cap, fracturing a zone will let it rise into the sea as warmer water floods in.
I think the methane is emitted over large areas and the amount at any one place might be too small to collect. An inverted cone 1000 meters across that funneled the methane into a tanker(compress and cool into liquid) for use in heating or chemical process industries. What is the rate of emission from this 1000 meter across plume?? It might be uneconomic.
We could make lots of inverted cone gatherers and burn off the methane - a less than perfect solution, but the CO2 thus released is 1/70th as bad as methane, warming wise.
Temperate methane clathrates are deeper and stabilized by pressure in warmer water. The Arctic clathrates, as mentioned in this article, exist over huge land areas and were stabilized by temperature under permafrost and there is also a lot in the shallow of the arctic, also cold stabilized. Both the water based and tundra based clathrates are being released now. This is very ominous. Nothing we can do will prevent this - not even a total cessation of coal/oil/gas combustion - and we know how likely that is!
Part of the methane from millions of years of vegetative rotting on tundra and shallow seas was trapped in these clathrates. Large areas of tundra are also emitting methane the same way.
dig deeper here http://tinyurl.com/d64n5zb
Bill
Yes, make the shit up, but with a veneer of plausibility, that a lawyer in a improper dismissal law suit will tear to shreds, and the lucky fired one get a year or two of lawsuit wages. Then you get fired, and there is another lawsuit, at which your earlier chicanery is revealed, you go to jail, you are forced to form a protective alliance, you find you like it...
That is the other side of the nature of many religious groups - cultism of one personality that expands until it attracts the enmity of the original group who beat them with sticks, etc., and off they go. Until mankind collectively throws off the yoke of religion....
This desire that Science must be subjugated to religious interpretation essentially destroyed Arabic Science after islam arose. Prior to islam the Arabs were scientific leaders. After islam, their students were all directed to an internalized study of the koran - ad absurditum. Islam actively suppresses any potential reformations (like all the old time religions, they wanted to grab converts and keep people from leaving). I recall the pilgrims came to America to find freedom from religion - as distinct from freedom of religion. In schools here in Canada the islamist students hound the other students into the 5 times/day prayers. The students need freedom from this oppressive process - freedom from religion...
The concept of weeding out 1/3rd of the students to present the right number to the second year lab and class sizes is fundamentally flawed. All the students who arrived had already achieved the needed grades to progress into the College. Many of these students are actually very smart - so smart that they arrived with good marks by a minimal degree of attention. Every item they saw, they understood and needed little study. When these people reach a higher level where brilliance does not allow a passing grade, they do not study = failure mode. So what we have is a method of identifying students with bad habits. At the same time there are those memory monsters who study between classes, and at lunchtime and at home on weekends and strangely, many dumb people do this - they think they have found the true path to success. What they have found is a path to second and perhaps third year. These people fail in third and fourth years and are not good enough for graduate school.
What is needed are tests that will identify these truly brilliant students in first year and getting them into good study habits from the start
This is the only true way. The USA and the UK increasingly coddles students, allowing them to pass more easily until we get to the sorry state we are in now.
The hard Sciences lend themselves very well to re-entrant computerized tutoring, where the syllabus is broken into numerous small modules and the student is given them in a sequence that he/she has to pass. If he/she fails, then the same concept is presented again from another point of view, and then again. After being unable to master the module the student is sent back to the basics that precede that concept from a second perspective, (that he passed earlier), and can then progress to the failed stage again. If failure occurs again, he will be routed to a human teacher to close master that aspect. This approach can teach a large body of students at varying paces, and does not force the best to keep pace with the worst (as it now done in many group classes)
A small thrust like this can be used to keep the station up permanently and even to adjust the orbital attitude as needed.
This will save those missions to send up maneuvering fuel from time to time and save lots of $$
The man that controls magnetism will rule the world, - Dick Tracy, ca 1945
Hit them with the field, and they will fall over (and all their metal objects, teeth, fillings, etc, will get hot or go flying)
When a patent is held by some entity capable to taking it to the broad market it gives that monopoly to someone who will use it - for the time. The Wright brothers had no such ability, although they insisted that they did, and became a block to further use by others(on reasonable terms). The steal patents were held by assorted blocs of large makers who wanted to their side to win and were quite capable to making their own steam ecology.
What is needed is some law that the maximum amount that all patents can cost a product is - say - 8%. Thus 4 patents used = 2% each, with some mechanism to apportion other percentages as to the value/significance of the patent(independent arbiters, as we all feel our own patent is worth the most).
In addition the Linux community must take the defensive measure of creating new ideas worth a patent and making that application and getting that patent to give some tit-for-tat defences. It makes no sense to think of an idea, and then publish it into the public domain, (even though perfectly patentable) because that throws away your own armor leaving you defenceless against the trolls ( non-makers of goods) or users (Apple, IBM, Nokia et al).
Sadly, the so called patent reform is the creature of people like Apple and IBM, and no true reform will emerge. We will get something like the Disney rule for copyright extension into the (infinite??) future.