Hanging's too good for him. Burning's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!
You're talking about the executives of Experian and Court Ventures, right?
Afterall, the 24-year old is a dumbass little brat who didn't know any better but should certainly be punished for his bad behavior. The executives at Experian do know better, in fact, they're supposed to know so much better that they are allowed to make decisions that affect everyone in the US...who can buy a house, a car, etc. They should get double the punishment of the dumbass kid.
No. I know a lawyer who works for a defense contractor... one of many lawyers there in just one of their offices who specializes in software licensing negotiations, even for the little programs people use for day to day stuff. When billions are on the line, they don't get the license terms wrong. Ever.
Nope, but assuming both spy, whose spying would you care the most? As a home user, the Chinese government has no interest in me. I have no contacts with the Dalai Lama. The US government probably has, since I'm hurting their sponsors by downloading the latest movies.
Not to mention that if some stupid design-by-bureaucracy algorithm false positive red flags you, the US government is more likely to do something about it, even if it just means putting you on a no-fly list, but it could also mean dragging you in an interrogating you and then slapping you with a NSL so you can't talk about it just because some government employee wants to cover their ass. You're more out of reach of the Chinese government, so they're not going to try to do anything unless you try to enter China or they really think you're doing something major.
So, if you're in the US, you should buy Huawei, and if you're in China, you should by from the US (I almost wrote Cisco, except they're most likely spying for both the Chinese and US governments). Better yet, if you're in China then buy something made in Taiwan.
How about an international treaty that bans all forms of cyberspying during peace time ? I'm sure both the US and China would protest against it in the security council but at least the choice between A and B would be conscious for everyone.
And how would that help? They have no problem outrightly violating the constitution that defines what they are, so why would we even think about trusting the government to abide by such a treaty?
Remember those "occupy" guys - yeah, neither does the press. There's a reason for that.
Yes, there is indeed a reason. The reason is that the media companies (that is, those companies that a massive majority of people get their "news" and information from) are owned by a few large companies, who are in turn owned by very wealthy people. The whole point of Occupy was to protest the laws and government policies that are specifically set up to benefit very wealthy people and large corporations at the expense of everyone else. Why would a very wealthy owner of a large media corporation want to highlight something that hurts their bottom line, when they can instead just let everyone forget about it after spinning it to make it sound like it's all just a bunch of homeless hippies who wanted an excuse to sleep on a park bench (that was a pretty insignificant minority, but of course it's what the media highlighted)?
Feel free to argue any of those points, but don't just make up stuff. Far too often (if not "always") there is no debate on the issues... just "but what about the children/unborn". Whatever.
I notice the tea party doesn't refer to religion, it's all about cutting government spending, but tea partiers also tend to be the loudest global warming deniers, largely because actually doing something about global warming requires spending and/or legislation/regulation, which is in conflict with their ideology. But heres the thing...what exactly do they mean by "scientific literacy?" That'll make a huge difference. Are we talking about sciency material that we learned in high school, or are we talking about how science is actually performed, what science means, and the scientific method (beyond just memorizing the "steps" of the scientific method from high school). A person might remember that bacteria cells don't have a nucleus, or that a mol in chemistry has something to do with molecules and is not an animal, but that's a helluva lot different from understanding the difference between studies showing evidence with hundreds of publications in peer reviewed journals vs. something some Fox News pundit said that just seems to "make sense" and sounds sciency because they use a couple of big words.
And why does religion matter? Because a lot of people that consider themselves to be devoutly religious tend to both ignore things discovered or proven using science or outrightly believe the opposite of whatever is discovered or proven using science. Rather than considering their faith being to believe in something in the absence of evidence, many of them choose to consider their faith believing in something despite evidence to the contrary.
So...just saying Tea Partiers vs. non-Tea-Partiers doesn't matter for squat. Compare them against other groups. Say, Tea-Partiers vs. college educated people. Or, tea-partiers vs people who don't watch Fox News, or tea-partiers vs. people who don't consider themselves to be strictly religious, or Tea Partiers vs. Europeans...you get the idea.
LynxOS is a proprietary Unix, compatible with Linux binaries. It does not contain the Linux kernel and is closed source.
And I didn't see anywhere in the summary or article that said runs Linux exclusively. The component they refer to as running LynxOS is only one part of the whole.
FTA:
mostly IBM blade servers running Red Hat Linux—and putting it in a ruggedized server room. Those ruggedized server rooms are called Electronic Modular Enclosures (EMEs), sixteen self-contained, mini data centers built by Raytheon.
I'm pretty sure anything called Red Hat Linux is going to contain the Linux kernel.
No, it wasn't. This was a manipulation tactic by a minority group of legislators to change the law even though they knew they couldn't really change the law legally (they tried and failed) and knew their tactic had no chance of success anyway. That they were able to do this points to a systematic problem that will only get worse. That they hemorrhaging resources into the military (see: Roman Empire) is only a symptom of that systematic corruption.
Well no... The thing about aliens visiting us is that it implies not only intelligence, but knowledge beyond ours. That's got major implications. Some random proteins a few billion miles away... not so interesting.
Not as interesting as aliens visiting us, but still having potential major implications just the same. Why? If there is evidence strong enough for the medial to call "proof" of life on another planet, it'll "prove" to the uneducated masses that there's a lot more interesting stuff out there than we know about, and that there really could be intelligent life elsewhere, so it's worth putting more resources into scientific research and maybe even education. Then again I'm probably being optimistic, and nobody would really care about finding life on other planets until we have licensing agreements for their reality shows.
Wait for the next campaign season, and I'll bet privacy will be a big issue.
On the off chance that it is, the you'll just have one politician with a D next to their name saying they care about privacy and promising to fix it, and another politician with an R next to their name saying they care about privacy and promising to fix it, and whichever one gets elected will do absolutely nothing to actually fix it and everyone will forget about it. At least in that case though, it might get a few more people fired up about it for a couple of months.
Except that's not gonna happen. The way the media has been spinning it, it's more likely that D's and R's will be promising to crack-down on potential leakers in order to overshadow what was actually being leaked. And don't pretend any 3rd party candidates will be heard by the media or have a chance of winning.
That's kind of it. We've known about secret closets in AT&T offices for ages, and we have known about NSA- microsoft cooperation for a long time. We've know since what, the 1990 that they were one of the biggest buyers of supercomputing tech etc.
So they are violating the law and the constitution, and just because we've thought it's been going on for a long time, now that we have proof we should just let it go? Here's a car analogy: You know your teenage neighbor has been joyriding in your car in the middle of the night for quite some time. Finally, another neighbor catches him on camera and gives you the proof. Do you: a) Figure it doesn't matter, because you know he's been doing it for quite some time anyway. b) Do what you need to in order to put a stop to it. If you take it to his parents, and they either outright lie about it (Clapper) or say tough cookies, it doesn't matter (Obama), then do you revert to (a) or do you escalate it?
Dad and mom do not agree, kids are minors and thus unable to decide for themselves in the eyes of the law, and thus medical evidence breaks the tie. I really don't see the problem here...
IF mom and dad and kids didn't want it and courts were ordering something, then that would be a different story.
Maybe, maybe not. You could argue that it would be considered child neglect, because it is "failure to protect" them from physical harm. If both parents agree, and have conditioned their children to agree, that does not in itself mean it's not child abuse.
The highest reading mentioned in the article, 0.484uS/hr, is approximately 1.07 Denver, or 0.96 Boulder. Exact values are hard to find, but it seems Denver is around 4mSv/year, and Boulder is ~4.5mSv/year, which is about.45 and.5 uSv/hr.
Ah, but the important question is: What type of radiation is it? Are we talking about Scary Radiation, or natural, USDA Certified Organic radiation (which has no chemicals!)? Since the.484uSv/hr is in Japan, which is the same country Fukushima is in, then it is 100% Scary Radiation. The radiation in Denver and Boulder is natural, certified organic radiation, so it has 0 uS/hr of Scary Radiation by comparison. Also keep in mind that most of the athletes probably have cell phones, which also emit significant amounts of Scary Radiation. Multiply these two sources of Scary Radiation together, and we're talking about a death sentence for all of the athletes.
When Obama vetoes this, will it still be Bush's fault?
Yes. Bush was the one who got it passed. He was the one who lied to us about what he would do with it. Obama is simply working with what Bush left him. He wouldn't lie to us the way Bush did. He told us he would end warrantless wiretapping, he told us he would close Gitmo, he told us he would bring the troops home from the Middle East. What? Gitmo is still open and torturing people without due process? The NSA is tapping everything without due process? Troop levels in Afghanistan have more than tripled since he took office? Nevermind.
Or perhaps someone independent of his/her political affiliations believes this will truly improve things for America and its citizens?
Obviously improving things for the US and its citizens would never be a Congressman's motivation, however, it is rather refreshing that a politician is doing something to brownnose his constituents rather than brownnosing corporate campaign contributors.
The E.U. court decided that it was proportionate because, given the nature of the article, Delfi should have expected offensive posts and exercised an extra degree of caution. In addition, the website did not appear to take any proactive steps to remove the defamatory and offensive comments, relying instead on automated word-filtering of certain vulgar terms or notification by users.
I see, so you think it's not okay to post a news article on a website if they can expect offensive posts? And that a website operator needs to take more proactive steps than work-filter and notification by users? That pretty much means that a website operator needs to manually read every single comment or post and determine if it constitutes defamation. I wonder how big a team of lawyers it would take to make that happen on slashdot.
It shouldn't matter who made the comments. Even if the site themselves posted the shit on purpose, "Offensive views" should be protected speech.
The "European Court of Human Rights" doesn't seem to give a damn about Human Rights.
That really depends on what you define as a human right, and how it affects other's rights. I do agree with you, but their reasoning was (FTA) "Article 10 of E.U. law allowed freedom of expression to be interfered with by national courts in order to protect a person's reputation." In other words, it's up to the member nation as to what constitutes libel. In the US it's libelous if you know it's not true.
In the US for example, speech isn't 100% free. If something damages somebody's reputation, you better be able to show that you believed it was true or you're on the hook for libel or slander. A lot of other countries have where speech that damages reputation is considered libelous in certain circumstances even if it's true. The comments may or may not be truthful, though it sounds like there was malice behind them, and may or may not have been considered libel in the US or other countries in addition to Estonia. That's not really the big issue here because that's nothing new. The big issue is that the news site was responsible for a comment that somebody else posted. Slippery slope and all.
4. Get campaign contributions from stakeholders of large defense contractors in exchange for awarding them bloated contracts for weapons we don't need. 4a. Blow shit up using weapons we paid way too much for. 4b. Get campaign contributions from stakeholder of large contracting companies in exchange for awarding them bloated contracts to rebuild the country that we blew up.
Oh look, another "let's call everyone who disagrees a conspiracy theorists" post.
Considering how theories barely keep up with reality lately, it takes a lot of ignorance - or vested interests - to keep touting that line.
It takes a lot of ignorance to think that a theory is the same thing as a hypothesis. The existence of gravity is just a theory afterall, yet for some reason I'm not floating off into space...a climate change denialist has about as much credibility as a gravity denialist to people who actually understand what science is.
I do have the impression at this point that ACA does not do enough to decouple health care financing from employment
Hear, hear! Health care should be completely decoupled from employment. That would be pro-business, and I'm always amazed it hasn't been promoted as such. It works for Canada and many other countries.
It would be pro-business, but not pro-insurance-business. The more insurance is decoupled from employment, the less they can charge for premiums and so the less money they make. The insurance industry has a big lobby, and this is the ACA is the one and only issue they are focused on. Other business have to divide their lobbying dollars between different issues.
A major part of the ACA is that medical insurance companies must spend a certain percentage of their premiums on medical care. If they don't, they have to return it to their customers. This is to significantly reduce premiums in the long term and to make sure that those dollars are going towards actual medical care. Of course, that goes contrary to insurance companies' practices, which is to maximize premiums and minimize the percent spent on actual medical care in order to maximize profit, which is their obligation to their shareholders, evilness doesn't even enter the equation. So you can sure as hell bet insurance companies are going to be doing whatever they can politically to push back on that. You can also sure as hell bet that they'll do their best to artificially jack up premiums in the short term in order to make the ACA look bad.
Plus it might give other trolls the idea that going after patents/sueing for bullshit claims may not always end in their favor. Kudos to her!
In the bigger picture, it will only make a difference if the people responsible for Lodsys's antics are held personally responsible. Otherwise a troll isn't really going to care if their company goes under as long as they walk away with some money in the meantime.
Android may suck, but it couldn't possibly suck this hard, could it?
And you don't think any Android manufacturers would have done this if they thought they could get away with it? Motorola? Samsung? Hell, Sony makes Android phones. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody at Sony was being fired right now for not figuring out how to successfully implement this first. Your mistake isn't in thinking Apple is evil. It is in thinking that other manufacturers aren't.
...the iPhone's fingerprint scanner works well. I was expecting it to be a gimmick that would give more false negatives or false positives than real results. That these guys had to use the same methods they would use for a high-quality expensive fingerprint scanner, and that those methods actually worked, tells me the iPhone's fingerprint scanner has potential.
To paraphrase the letter: We're family, we love you, so you should love us. Everything said in the media (except for a few pundits who we are paying off) is lies, the leaks didn't really say what they said. Everything we do is legal because we have the power to define the meaning of legal as anything we do.
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Hanging's too good for him. Burning's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!
You're talking about the executives of Experian and Court Ventures, right?
Afterall, the 24-year old is a dumbass little brat who didn't know any better but should certainly be punished for his bad behavior. The executives at Experian do know better, in fact, they're supposed to know so much better that they are allowed to make decisions that affect everyone in the US...who can buy a house, a car, etc. They should get double the punishment of the dumbass kid.
No. I know a lawyer who works for a defense contractor... one of many lawyers there in just one of their offices who specializes in software licensing negotiations, even for the little programs people use for day to day stuff. When billions are on the line, they don't get the license terms wrong. Ever.
Yeah, just ask Apple and Samsung!
Nope, but assuming both spy, whose spying would you care the most? As a home user, the Chinese government has no interest in me. I have no contacts with the Dalai Lama. The US government probably has, since I'm hurting their sponsors by downloading the latest movies.
Not to mention that if some stupid design-by-bureaucracy algorithm false positive red flags you, the US government is more likely to do something about it, even if it just means putting you on a no-fly list, but it could also mean dragging you in an interrogating you and then slapping you with a NSL so you can't talk about it just because some government employee wants to cover their ass. You're more out of reach of the Chinese government, so they're not going to try to do anything unless you try to enter China or they really think you're doing something major.
So, if you're in the US, you should buy Huawei, and if you're in China, you should by from the US (I almost wrote Cisco, except they're most likely spying for both the Chinese and US governments). Better yet, if you're in China then buy something made in Taiwan.
How about an international treaty that bans all forms of cyberspying during peace time ? I'm sure both the US and China would protest against it in the security council but at least the choice between A and B would be conscious for everyone.
And how would that help? They have no problem outrightly violating the constitution that defines what they are, so why would we even think about trusting the government to abide by such a treaty?
Remember those "occupy" guys - yeah, neither does the press. There's a reason for that.
Yes, there is indeed a reason. The reason is that the media companies (that is, those companies that a massive majority of people get their "news" and information from) are owned by a few large companies, who are in turn owned by very wealthy people. The whole point of Occupy was to protest the laws and government policies that are specifically set up to benefit very wealthy people and large corporations at the expense of everyone else. Why would a very wealthy owner of a large media corporation want to highlight something that hurts their bottom line, when they can instead just let everyone forget about it after spinning it to make it sound like it's all just a bunch of homeless hippies who wanted an excuse to sleep on a park bench (that was a pretty insignificant minority, but of course it's what the media highlighted)?
Here is the actual Tea Party platform
Feel free to argue any of those points, but don't just make up stuff. Far too often (if not "always") there is no debate on the issues... just "but what about the children/unborn". Whatever.
I notice the tea party doesn't refer to religion, it's all about cutting government spending, but tea partiers also tend to be the loudest global warming deniers, largely because actually doing something about global warming requires spending and/or legislation/regulation, which is in conflict with their ideology. But heres the thing...what exactly do they mean by "scientific literacy?" That'll make a huge difference. Are we talking about sciency material that we learned in high school, or are we talking about how science is actually performed, what science means, and the scientific method (beyond just memorizing the "steps" of the scientific method from high school). A person might remember that bacteria cells don't have a nucleus, or that a mol in chemistry has something to do with molecules and is not an animal, but that's a helluva lot different from understanding the difference between studies showing evidence with hundreds of publications in peer reviewed journals vs. something some Fox News pundit said that just seems to "make sense" and sounds sciency because they use a couple of big words.
And why does religion matter? Because a lot of people that consider themselves to be devoutly religious tend to both ignore things discovered or proven using science or outrightly believe the opposite of whatever is discovered or proven using science. Rather than considering their faith being to believe in something in the absence of evidence, many of them choose to consider their faith believing in something despite evidence to the contrary.
So...just saying Tea Partiers vs. non-Tea-Partiers doesn't matter for squat. Compare them against other groups. Say, Tea-Partiers vs. college educated people. Or, tea-partiers vs people who don't watch Fox News, or tea-partiers vs. people who don't consider themselves to be strictly religious, or Tea Partiers vs. Europeans...you get the idea.
to transfer taxpayer dollars to the pockets of MIC CEOs - all else is padding.
That is not true. It was, in fact, designed to transfer taxpayer dollars to the campaigns of certain politicians. The CEOs are just the middlemen.
LynxOS is a proprietary Unix, compatible with Linux binaries.
It does not contain the Linux kernel and is closed source.
And I didn't see anywhere in the summary or article that said runs Linux exclusively. The component they refer to as running LynxOS is only one part of the whole.
FTA:
mostly IBM blade servers running Red Hat Linux—and putting it in a ruggedized server room. Those ruggedized server rooms are called Electronic Modular Enclosures (EMEs), sixteen self-contained, mini data centers built by Raytheon.
I'm pretty sure anything called Red Hat Linux is going to contain the Linux kernel.
This was a chance to stop the hemorrhaging.
No, it wasn't. This was a manipulation tactic by a minority group of legislators to change the law even though they knew they couldn't really change the law legally (they tried and failed) and knew their tactic had no chance of success anyway. That they were able to do this points to a systematic problem that will only get worse. That they hemorrhaging resources into the military (see: Roman Empire) is only a symptom of that systematic corruption.
Well no... The thing about aliens visiting us is that it implies not only intelligence, but knowledge beyond ours. That's got major implications. Some random proteins a few billion miles away... not so interesting.
Not as interesting as aliens visiting us, but still having potential major implications just the same. Why? If there is evidence strong enough for the medial to call "proof" of life on another planet, it'll "prove" to the uneducated masses that there's a lot more interesting stuff out there than we know about, and that there really could be intelligent life elsewhere, so it's worth putting more resources into scientific research and maybe even education. Then again I'm probably being optimistic, and nobody would really care about finding life on other planets until we have licensing agreements for their reality shows.
Wait for the next campaign season, and I'll bet privacy will be a big issue.
On the off chance that it is, the you'll just have one politician with a D next to their name saying they care about privacy and promising to fix it, and another politician with an R next to their name saying they care about privacy and promising to fix it, and whichever one gets elected will do absolutely nothing to actually fix it and everyone will forget about it. At least in that case though, it might get a few more people fired up about it for a couple of months.
Except that's not gonna happen. The way the media has been spinning it, it's more likely that D's and R's will be promising to crack-down on potential leakers in order to overshadow what was actually being leaked. And don't pretend any 3rd party candidates will be heard by the media or have a chance of winning.
That's kind of it. We've known about secret closets in AT&T offices for ages, and we have known about NSA- microsoft cooperation for a long time. We've know since what, the 1990 that they were one of the biggest buyers of supercomputing tech etc.
So they are violating the law and the constitution, and just because we've thought it's been going on for a long time, now that we have proof we should just let it go? Here's a car analogy: You know your teenage neighbor has been joyriding in your car in the middle of the night for quite some time. Finally, another neighbor catches him on camera and gives you the proof. Do you:
a) Figure it doesn't matter, because you know he's been doing it for quite some time anyway.
b) Do what you need to in order to put a stop to it. If you take it to his parents, and they either outright lie about it (Clapper) or say tough cookies, it doesn't matter (Obama), then do you revert to (a) or do you escalate it?
Dad and mom do not agree, kids are minors and thus unable to decide for themselves in the eyes of the law, and thus medical evidence breaks the tie. I really don't see the problem here...
IF mom and dad and kids didn't want it and courts were ordering something, then that would be a different story.
Maybe, maybe not. You could argue that it would be considered child neglect, because it is "failure to protect" them from physical harm. If both parents agree, and have conditioned their children to agree, that does not in itself mean it's not child abuse.
The highest reading mentioned in the article, 0.484uS/hr, is approximately 1.07 Denver, or 0.96 Boulder. Exact values are hard to find, but it seems Denver is around 4mSv/year, and Boulder is ~4.5mSv/year, which is about .45 and .5 uSv/hr.
Ah, but the important question is: What type of radiation is it? Are we talking about Scary Radiation, or natural, USDA Certified Organic radiation (which has no chemicals!)? Since the .484uSv/hr is in Japan, which is the same country Fukushima is in, then it is 100% Scary Radiation. The radiation in Denver and Boulder is natural, certified organic radiation, so it has 0 uS/hr of Scary Radiation by comparison. Also keep in mind that most of the athletes probably have cell phones, which also emit significant amounts of Scary Radiation. Multiply these two sources of Scary Radiation together, and we're talking about a death sentence for all of the athletes.
When Obama vetoes this, will it still be Bush's fault?
Yes. Bush was the one who got it passed. He was the one who lied to us about what he would do with it. Obama is simply working with what Bush left him. He wouldn't lie to us the way Bush did. He told us he would end warrantless wiretapping, he told us he would close Gitmo, he told us he would bring the troops home from the Middle East. What? Gitmo is still open and torturing people without due process? The NSA is tapping everything without due process? Troop levels in Afghanistan have more than tripled since he took office? Nevermind.
Or perhaps someone independent of his/her political affiliations believes this will truly improve things for America and its citizens?
Obviously improving things for the US and its citizens would never be a Congressman's motivation, however, it is rather refreshing that a politician is doing something to brownnose his constituents rather than brownnosing corporate campaign contributors.
The E.U. court decided that it was proportionate because, given the nature of the article, Delfi should have expected offensive posts and exercised an extra degree of caution.
In addition, the website did not appear to take any proactive steps to remove the defamatory and offensive comments, relying instead on automated word-filtering of certain vulgar terms or notification by users.
I see, so you think it's not okay to post a news article on a website if they can expect offensive posts? And that a website operator needs to take more proactive steps than work-filter and notification by users? That pretty much means that a website operator needs to manually read every single comment or post and determine if it constitutes defamation. I wonder how big a team of lawyers it would take to make that happen on slashdot.
It shouldn't matter who made the comments. Even if the site themselves posted the shit on purpose, "Offensive views" should be protected speech.
The "European Court of Human Rights" doesn't seem to give a damn about Human Rights.
That really depends on what you define as a human right, and how it affects other's rights. I do agree with you, but their reasoning was (FTA) "Article 10 of E.U. law allowed freedom of expression to be interfered with by national courts in order to protect a person's reputation." In other words, it's up to the member nation as to what constitutes libel. In the US it's libelous if you know it's not true.
In the US for example, speech isn't 100% free. If something damages somebody's reputation, you better be able to show that you believed it was true or you're on the hook for libel or slander. A lot of other countries have where speech that damages reputation is considered libelous in certain circumstances even if it's true. The comments may or may not be truthful, though it sounds like there was malice behind them, and may or may not have been considered libel in the US or other countries in addition to Estonia. That's not really the big issue here because that's nothing new. The big issue is that the news site was responsible for a comment that somebody else posted. Slippery slope and all.
4. ??
4. Get campaign contributions from stakeholders of large defense contractors in exchange for awarding them bloated contracts for weapons we don't need.
4a. Blow shit up using weapons we paid way too much for.
4b. Get campaign contributions from stakeholder of large contracting companies in exchange for awarding them bloated contracts to rebuild the country that we blew up.
5. Profit!
Oh look, another "let's call everyone who disagrees a conspiracy theorists" post.
Considering how theories barely keep up with reality lately, it takes a lot of ignorance - or vested interests - to keep touting that line.
It takes a lot of ignorance to think that a theory is the same thing as a hypothesis. The existence of gravity is just a theory afterall, yet for some reason I'm not floating off into space...a climate change denialist has about as much credibility as a gravity denialist to people who actually understand what science is.
I do have the impression at this point that ACA does not do enough to decouple health care financing from employment
Hear, hear! Health care should be completely decoupled from employment. That would be pro-business, and I'm always amazed it hasn't been promoted as such. It works for Canada and many other countries.
It would be pro-business, but not pro-insurance-business. The more insurance is decoupled from employment, the less they can charge for premiums and so the less money they make. The insurance industry has a big lobby, and this is the ACA is the one and only issue they are focused on. Other business have to divide their lobbying dollars between different issues.
A major part of the ACA is that medical insurance companies must spend a certain percentage of their premiums on medical care. If they don't, they have to return it to their customers. This is to significantly reduce premiums in the long term and to make sure that those dollars are going towards actual medical care. Of course, that goes contrary to insurance companies' practices, which is to maximize premiums and minimize the percent spent on actual medical care in order to maximize profit, which is their obligation to their shareholders, evilness doesn't even enter the equation. So you can sure as hell bet insurance companies are going to be doing whatever they can politically to push back on that. You can also sure as hell bet that they'll do their best to artificially jack up premiums in the short term in order to make the ACA look bad.
Plus it might give other trolls the idea that going after patents/sueing for bullshit claims may not always end in their favor. Kudos to her!
In the bigger picture, it will only make a difference if the people responsible for Lodsys's antics are held personally responsible. Otherwise a troll isn't really going to care if their company goes under as long as they walk away with some money in the meantime.
Android may suck, but it couldn't possibly suck this hard, could it?
And you don't think any Android manufacturers would have done this if they thought they could get away with it? Motorola? Samsung? Hell, Sony makes Android phones. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody at Sony was being fired right now for not figuring out how to successfully implement this first. Your mistake isn't in thinking Apple is evil. It is in thinking that other manufacturers aren't.
...the iPhone's fingerprint scanner works well. I was expecting it to be a gimmick that would give more false negatives or false positives than real results. That these guys had to use the same methods they would use for a high-quality expensive fingerprint scanner, and that those methods actually worked, tells me the iPhone's fingerprint scanner has potential.
To paraphrase the letter:
We're family, we love you, so you should love us. Everything said in the media (except for a few pundits who we are paying off) is lies, the leaks didn't really say what they said. Everything we do is legal because we have the power to define the meaning of legal as anything we do.