That said, I still believe that generally vaccines are safe, and that they are beneficially for society. But should not be required unless highly communicable.
When you say "only if highly communicable"; I think you are not looking at the big picture.
And what about highly dangerous diseases that could become highly communicable through a small mutation?
Viruses that are extremely dangerous and take lives.
Wouldn't it be better for the public good to have a world population highly resistant against these, so there are as few copies of these bugs floating around as possible, and therefore fewer deaths?
HIV falls under that category -- a virus that mutates with high frequency.
Has types that can cross species. Has subtypes that can attack different cells.
With a few mutations, the very real possibility exists of it adapting new transmission methods, such as airborn
like flu.
It has not so far, but the possibility should not be discounted, could happen at any time, could already have happened. HIV with the high amount of it in the world (similar to flu), could be an airborn virus just as communicable as flu, on no time splat. By the time the news was out, it would be way too late to start working on production of enough vaccines to abate the inevitable carnage; and getting the vaccines compulsorily administered after that is such a slow thing that many lives would be lost due to the lack of foresight.
If much of the population is immunized against HIV, it may not thrive under the new transmission (and kill off the human population); the airborn variant might never take hold if the increased resistance caused by immunization to HIV results in failure to infect.
It is in the public interest to eliminate or reduce the amount of virus in the world before that could happen, through compulsory immunization, and having most of the population resistant, so HIV doesn't thrive anywhere, therefore can't mutate. It's unimportant that this doesn't help the 2 year old while they are a 2 year old; it helps the public health, because they will be resistant later in life, and the rate an abated virus can mutate is lower, with much fewer candidate hosts.
Is it ethical to shoot a person who's holding a gun on a dozen hostages in a bank and has promised to shoot one in five minutes unless a vehicle and a pile of money are handed over? If the answers are not the same, what is causing the means (shooting a person) ethical (justified) in one case but not the other, if not the end goal?
In this case the means 'shooting a person' are not required to achieve the end... an alternative end is available:
hand over a vehicle and a pile of money.
If you want to say the situation justifies shooting a person, then for the action to be justified....
avoiding the less-destructive alternative also has to be justified.
"Making the hard decisions" is just a cliche excuse people use to justify doing the unthinkable.
If something is unthinkable, then clearly it has not been thought about adequately.
How can you know if the means are justified by it, if you can't actually think about it?
The ends never justify the means. Never. Note that if they could, any action, no matter how heinous, could be justified. So they don't. Which is why such experiments ought to never be considered ethical.
Truly?? You care to qualify that statement?
What you have there is a false dilemma, mixed with a slippery slope argument. You claim "if the ends ever justified the means", the ends would always automatically justify any means. Ridiculous!
I think you have the concept of justification confused here. Things of adequate weight justify other things rationally.
Of course lots of people who did quantifiably heinous things, had what they called justifications for them that they believed,
they were not compellingly of sound reason -- people who committed genocide had justifications, they just don't make any logical or moral sense.
Reductio ad absurdum:
Apparently the US engagement in World War II was totally unjustifiable based on your reasoning.
Even stopping the Nazi genocide campaign would not be an end justifying killing a smaller number of people.
The right thing to do(TM) would have been not to build an army, and to simply instead just wait and try negotiating and other non-violent resistance tactics to attempt to diffuse the situation; despite the lives lost by inaction -- the cost of action cannot be justified, if the ends can't justify it.
Then the only justifiable thing to do if someone declares war against you, is to surrender.
If a small army of 100 men arrives at your country's border, and announces they will fight your nation to the death unless you surrender, and show no resistance, so they can execute their plan they inform you of -- to kill every man, woman, and child, in your country of 100 million, then the only justifiable thing to do is to surrender to this army of 100.
Because stopping them from killing 100 million of your country's people does not justify opening fire and risking the lives of this army of 100.
The only possible way to justify firing on this army of 100 is to achieve the end of preventing them from killing all 100 million of your country's people, like they will if not stopped by force.
Seriously.... people aren't going to volunteer for such a thing out of the blue. Although, some homeless or poor people might be enticed to take on huge risks, in exchange for cash, shelter, or food for their family. The risks scientists can expose people to and be able to sleep at night still have to be quite limited.
This is why scientists need to figure out a way to make non-sentient clones that are highly genetically similar and highly physically similar to humans in structure, function, and appearance, based on mostly human DNA, so they could have models to experiment on that essentially are human bodies, but since the clones are non-sentient, either have no working brain or rather, have the intelligence equivalent to a dog brain, they can be experimented on readily without a living person taking on any risk.
Then it would make sense if they could give the vaccine to 1000 models; and see how many of their human models become infected, after vaccination, and after certain exposure to the real virus.....
Here in the United States we can't even agree that HPV vaccination is a no brainer for our children -- we'd rather be able to dangle the threat of cervical cancer over children's heads as a scare tactic to prevent them from having sex.
The HPV vaccine has limited effectiveness, it requires 3 doses and only provides any protection against some of the highest risk strains of the virus, for 4 to 6 years.
Meanwhile... reports of dangerous side effects have been linked to the vaccine, severe illness, deaths, permanent disability.
In this case, even vaccinated people should fear HPV, pretty much just by the same amount.
With such a limited scope vaccine, it's really not much protection, and a false sense of security can cause more HPV infections.
For many people: getting vaccinated is definitely not a good cost, risk, benefit tradeoff.
For others, particularly anyone planning on having sex, especially unprotected intercourse with multiple
partners, it might be, of course, a good decision, to get vaccinated -- the chance of exposure to HPV
becomes high, and upon exposure to HPV, the chance of it being one of the high-risk strains
is decent.
Even with HPV + AIDS vaccine, the activity is life-threatening, there is no shortage of life-threatening or permanent life-inconveniencing STDs to go around.
"Don't want to eliminate the fear of STDs" was never really an argument against STD vaccination in any case.
The simple fact is vaccination against individual STDs doesn't decrease the long term risks...
You can lie about age on the internet for now. That is, until the government creates an online id.
In Korea, every citizen is assigned a National Registration number, that online sites are required to collect
before opening an account, even a MMORPG account, and that identifies the subscriber's age.
So yeah... your ability to lie about your age on the internet relies upon you living in a free country, or being able to do business with other organizations in a free country, without them being blocked.
Where free country is defined as a country that doesn't assign each citizen an ID number and
require every provider of a product / service / online account to collect the ID number and verify
age using that ID before entering into a business relationship.
Who told you this? Last time there were updates for my Lion machine it informed me that updates were available and offered me the choice of whether or not to install them.
It's details of MacOS Lion
that have been well published that MacOS Lion has automated security updates.
Some updates require approval.
This doesn't preclude the possibility of Apple installing other security updates to installed apps without approval in the future,
or of removing 'banned' apps entirely (supposing Apple deemed the app to be bad, or in violation of Apple's policies for the Mac app store).
Do you think they are reserving rights to do so in the EULA, for no reason?
No, the only ones who will be forced to pay are those who let their accounts expire. If you like your account, keep it active. There is no breach of promise.
First of all... with EveryDNS accounts didn't expire; it doesn't make sense for DNS accounts to expire, you don't need to login to a website to use DNS services -- you just need to keep the domain registered with the registrar, to be using DNS service. Second of all... they are only doing that for one year or so; in the not so distant future, it is likely the EveryDNS users will be forced to pay or leave, why else would they put a time limit? Second of all; that's only as long as you already had an account; you don't need to add any more domains to it..... Yeah, they let you keep your old account and services active (for now); you just can't make any changes to it; they will only continue to service domains you had active at the time they were still providing a free service. As soon as you need to make a change or add a new domain, you find they didn't live up to their promise at all -- they don't continue to provide the free service under compatible conditions.
And the paid service is only $20/year.
No.... Third of all their service is Really expensive;
it's $39/Year per Zone for DynDNS standard.
If I have about 15 personal domains. That would be $585 a year for DynDNS' basic service;
on top of the $7.80/year per domain annual registrar renewal cost.
They took over handling of the "EveryDNS" free service, with promises to continue the service.
But now they have forced all EveryDNS users who want to keep using the service to pay them to migrate.
And EveryDNS is gone.
Obviously the choice of DynDNS to be the ones to take over the service was a bit disingenuous, since,
it was just a strategy to make more $$$ while pretending to be altruistic
People that actually work in the real world, with real companies with real budgets, and that have some self respect, honesty and pride in what they do will have to justify their salaries or rates somehow, and one of the tools used is some kind of metrics.
Ticket system "metrics" are problematic for IT, because every support issue is unique.
IT support matters are not uniform commodities -- you can't measure the efficiency of a knowledge
worker the same way you can measure the efficiency of a physical worker, such as a restaurant cook or cashier -- number of
burgers made per hour, or number of items scanned at the register per hour might be valid ways of judging performance for menial tasks in those industries.
Such things are 'uniformly sized units of work', which means they are comparable.
A chef who can make 1000 burgers an hour has definitely done more work than a chef
who made 700 burgers per hour.
But an IT support worker who resolved 10 tickets in an hour, has not necessarily done any more work
and does not necessarily have any more skill than a representative who has closed 2 tickets in an hour.
That is, you have a fundamental issue, when there is nothing valid to measure.
where people are constantly calling me asking to fix stuff, then my numbers will be awesome!
I think you missed the part where total IT service revenue for that application is divided by the number of tickets.
The more tickets for a specific IT service, the less the issue resolution is worth.
The fewer total tickets for that service, the more each resolution is worth.
I have been tasked with logging our performance using the statistics from our ticket management system. I've also been tasked with comparing these stats and determining if we are performing above or below what is considered optimal.
Standard ticketing system metrics are no good.
Add a post-incident survey to your customer interactions.
Your metrics don't measure performance, unless you can actually measure how 'hard' the ticket is intrinsically /
what skill is required, and how well the ticket is solved.
A good solution might prevent further issues, a bad solution might cause more issues to occur.
The fewer IT support issues a customer has, the more each resolution was worth, because that indicates
their problem was actually solved.
Define a new metric: "Ticket importance" = Importance level given to the issue by the customer relative to the other issues.
Define a new metric: "Customer Happiness" = Score given by the customer with the resolution of the issue, from 0% to 100%.
Define a new metric: Revenue per Ticket = Revenue of applicable IT support Service Delivered per period of time divided by average Number of Trouble tickets for that service for the same period of time.
Define a new metric: Ticket Weight = Rank of the ticket out of all other tickets issued by the service, as a percentage. 100% would indicate it's the only ticket that matters, 0% would indicate solving the ticket is not an accomplishment, e.g. wasted time
Define a new metric: Ticket worth = Ticket Weight * Revenue per Ticket
Define a new metric: Ticket resolution value = Ticket Worth * Customer Happiness.
Sum the resolution value of all the tickets solved by IT support personnel.
When multiple IT persons are involved in the same ticket, calculate total hours spent on the ticket,
and divvy out the 'Resolution points' based on the amount of time spent on that ticket
by each team member.
I'm thinking.... put a polarizing filter on the camera, and a cover/filter on its flash.
Use a flash of a specific wavelength and filter everything else out from reaching your camera.
I think this is part of a cross licensing strategy that could finally make Apple stop being so stupid. The rest of the phone world has patents on tech that Apple employs. The rest of the phone world has FRAND'ed those patents.
Personally... I would like to see this get escalated more, and raise more and more
embarrassment for those involved, and more and more public awareness of the
corrupt patent system.
The whole Blackberry VS RTP situation was great for raising public awareness.
The patent system will never get reformed without the public demanding it.
That, and the system actually needs to benefit lawyers too, since lawyers are a disproportionate part of politicians and political contributors and lobbyists.
The system doesn't need to actually benefit the lawyers... the lawyers in the influential positions just need to think it will benefit the lawyers, or them personally.
"Patent troll" usually means "non-practicing entity", not "anyone who sues on patent grounds"
Usually, yes... but lately, some large corporations have been blurring the lines, by suing
over bad patents obtained for obvious technical choices falsely labelled as "invention"s.
They would do better if they were more responsive to customers (like, ok, remove Carbon if you must, but provide a downloadable compatibility layer, or open source it! Some people need this stuff).
Jury nullification is only good for overturning specific unjust laws, not for reversing the course of the entire nation.
Jury nullification doesn't overturn the unjust law, if successful, it just prevents the unjust law's penalty from taking effect against that specific defendant in that specific case where the jury decided the law was unjust and found innocent on the basis of law.
If the person does it again and gets arrested again, they could still be tried and convicted by a different jury, in the very same jurisdiction, for violating the very same unjust law.
Their exoneration by jury nullification once doesn't change the law, or protect anyone else.
There's no strong likelihood that jury nullification over the same injustice will be repeated consistently.
Only read up on jury nullification / subscribe to that legal theory, if you are prepared to get removed from the jury.
Judges have firmly rejected jury nullification.
Except that patent trolls don't file patents; they look at the existing and emerging markets and then buy old patents that - with a stretch - cover those markets.
That's what patent trolls have done so far. They become more and more successful over time, and eventually they have the capital to bankroll even more ambitious trolling endeavors, unfortunately.......
Why would a patent troll start now, roll the dice, and wait 4 years for whatever might come out of the patent office? Answer: they wouldn't. They go after established deep pockets
But if they got the patent before the invention, the troll might be able to acquire even more aggregate revenue more easily.... by getting people to "license" their patent up front, before rolling out product, without the patent troll having to exert legal costs per target.
The not-so-well-established pockets funded by investors with deep pockets who are insistent on things being licensed properly, are viable targets for patent trolls too, especially as their number increases and there is more and more competition among patent trolls to get 'useful' patents
One of these machines falls into the wrong hands and patent trolls use it with a small
bit of programming to create patent applications for them;
and by that I mean... machine generated patents
In other words... entirely nonsensical patents for technology that has never been actually used,
and might not actually work, but an extremely massive number of eloquently written machine-generated
patents covering every conceivable problem with weird vague claims, with problem sets, and concepts
for machine-generated patent claims obtained from automatic mining of past patent language, weblogs, etc...
The invention might not be real by any stretch of the imagination, but the awarded nonsensical patent
might be vague enough to actually sue over a technology actually invented in the future
In other words... the ultimate patent troll is a computer AI that generates convincing applications in massive
numbers without actually inventing anything.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I still believe that generally vaccines are safe, and that they are beneficially for society. But should not be required unless highly communicable.
When you say "only if highly communicable"; I think you are not looking at the big picture. And what about highly dangerous diseases that could become highly communicable through a small mutation? Viruses that are extremely dangerous and take lives.
Wouldn't it be better for the public good to have a world population highly resistant against these, so there are as few copies of these bugs floating around as possible, and therefore fewer deaths?
HIV falls under that category -- a virus that mutates with high frequency. Has types that can cross species. Has subtypes that can attack different cells. With a few mutations, the very real possibility exists of it adapting new transmission methods, such as airborn like flu.
It has not so far, but the possibility should not be discounted, could happen at any time, could already have happened. HIV with the high amount of it in the world (similar to flu), could be an airborn virus just as communicable as flu, on no time splat. By the time the news was out, it would be way too late to start working on production of enough vaccines to abate the inevitable carnage; and getting the vaccines compulsorily administered after that is such a slow thing that many lives would be lost due to the lack of foresight.
If much of the population is immunized against HIV, it may not thrive under the new transmission (and kill off the human population); the airborn variant might never take hold if the increased resistance caused by immunization to HIV results in failure to infect.
It is in the public interest to eliminate or reduce the amount of virus in the world before that could happen, through compulsory immunization, and having most of the population resistant, so HIV doesn't thrive anywhere, therefore can't mutate. It's unimportant that this doesn't help the 2 year old while they are a 2 year old; it helps the public health, because they will be resistant later in life, and the rate an abated virus can mutate is lower, with much fewer candidate hosts.
Is it ethical to shoot a person who's holding a gun on a dozen hostages in a bank and has promised to shoot one in five minutes unless a vehicle and a pile of money are handed over? If the answers are not the same, what is causing the means (shooting a person) ethical (justified) in one case but not the other, if not the end goal?
In this case the means 'shooting a person' are not required to achieve the end... an alternative end is available: hand over a vehicle and a pile of money.
If you want to say the situation justifies shooting a person, then for the action to be justified.... avoiding the less-destructive alternative also has to be justified.
"Making the hard decisions" is just a cliche excuse people use to justify doing the unthinkable.
If something is unthinkable, then clearly it has not been thought about adequately. How can you know if the means are justified by it, if you can't actually think about it?
The ends never justify the means. Never. Note that if they could, any action, no matter how heinous, could be justified. So they don't. Which is why such experiments ought to never be considered ethical.
Truly?? You care to qualify that statement?
What you have there is a false dilemma, mixed with a slippery slope argument. You claim "if the ends ever justified the means", the ends would always automatically justify any means. Ridiculous!
I think you have the concept of justification confused here. Things of adequate weight justify other things rationally.
Of course lots of people who did quantifiably heinous things, had what they called justifications for them that they believed, they were not compellingly of sound reason -- people who committed genocide had justifications, they just don't make any logical or moral sense.
Reductio ad absurdum: Apparently the US engagement in World War II was totally unjustifiable based on your reasoning. Even stopping the Nazi genocide campaign would not be an end justifying killing a smaller number of people.
The right thing to do(TM) would have been not to build an army, and to simply instead just wait and try negotiating and other non-violent resistance tactics to attempt to diffuse the situation; despite the lives lost by inaction -- the cost of action cannot be justified, if the ends can't justify it.
Then the only justifiable thing to do if someone declares war against you, is to surrender.
If a small army of 100 men arrives at your country's border, and announces they will fight your nation to the death unless you surrender, and show no resistance, so they can execute their plan they inform you of -- to kill every man, woman, and child, in your country of 100 million, then the only justifiable thing to do is to surrender to this army of 100. Because stopping them from killing 100 million of your country's people does not justify opening fire and risking the lives of this army of 100.
The only possible way to justify firing on this army of 100 is to achieve the end of preventing them from killing all 100 million of your country's people, like they will if not stopped by force.
Why, are you volunteering to be expended?
Seriously.... people aren't going to volunteer for such a thing out of the blue. Although, some homeless or poor people might be enticed to take on huge risks, in exchange for cash, shelter, or food for their family. The risks scientists can expose people to and be able to sleep at night still have to be quite limited.
This is why scientists need to figure out a way to make non-sentient clones that are highly genetically similar and highly physically similar to humans in structure, function, and appearance, based on mostly human DNA, so they could have models to experiment on that essentially are human bodies, but since the clones are non-sentient, either have no working brain or rather, have the intelligence equivalent to a dog brain, they can be experimented on readily without a living person taking on any risk.
Then it would make sense if they could give the vaccine to 1000 models; and see how many of their human models become infected, after vaccination, and after certain exposure to the real virus.....
Here in the United States we can't even agree that HPV vaccination is a no brainer for our children -- we'd rather be able to dangle the threat of cervical cancer over children's heads as a scare tactic to prevent them from having sex.
The HPV vaccine has limited effectiveness, it requires 3 doses and only provides any protection against some of the highest risk strains of the virus, for 4 to 6 years.
Meanwhile... reports of dangerous side effects have been linked to the vaccine, severe illness, deaths, permanent disability.
In this case, even vaccinated people should fear HPV, pretty much just by the same amount. With such a limited scope vaccine, it's really not much protection, and a false sense of security can cause more HPV infections.
For many people: getting vaccinated is definitely not a good cost, risk, benefit tradeoff.
For others, particularly anyone planning on having sex, especially unprotected intercourse with multiple partners, it might be, of course, a good decision, to get vaccinated -- the chance of exposure to HPV becomes high, and upon exposure to HPV, the chance of it being one of the high-risk strains is decent.
Even with HPV + AIDS vaccine, the activity is life-threatening, there is no shortage of life-threatening or permanent life-inconveniencing STDs to go around.
"Don't want to eliminate the fear of STDs" was never really an argument against STD vaccination in any case. The simple fact is vaccination against individual STDs doesn't decrease the long term risks...
You can lie about age on the internet for now. That is, until the government creates an online id.
In Korea, every citizen is assigned a National Registration number, that online sites are required to collect before opening an account, even a MMORPG account, and that identifies the subscriber's age.
So yeah... your ability to lie about your age on the internet relies upon you living in a free country, or being able to do business with other organizations in a free country, without them being blocked.
Where free country is defined as a country that doesn't assign each citizen an ID number and require every provider of a product / service / online account to collect the ID number and verify age using that ID before entering into a business relationship.
Who told you this? Last time there were updates for my Lion machine it informed me that updates were available and offered me the choice of whether or not to install them.
It's details of MacOS Lion
that have been well published that MacOS Lion has automated security updates. Some updates require approval.
This doesn't preclude the possibility of Apple installing other security updates to installed apps without approval in the future, or of removing 'banned' apps entirely (supposing Apple deemed the app to be bad, or in violation of Apple's policies for the Mac app store).
Do you think they are reserving rights to do so in the EULA, for no reason?
There are *no* automatic updates on Apple stuff (OSX or iOS) - you have to agree to them each time.
Starting with Mac OS v10.7 Lion, updates are done behind the scenes, fully automated. Agreeing to each update is a thing of the past
No, the only ones who will be forced to pay are those who let their accounts expire. If you like your account, keep it active. There is no breach of promise.
First of all... with EveryDNS accounts didn't expire; it doesn't make sense for DNS accounts to expire, you don't need to login to a website to use DNS services -- you just need to keep the domain registered with the registrar, to be using DNS service.
Second of all... they are only doing that for one year or so; in the not so distant future, it is likely the EveryDNS users will be forced to pay or leave, why else would they put a time limit?
Second of all; that's only as long as you already had an account; you don't need to add any more domains to it.....
Yeah, they let you keep your old account and services active (for now); you just can't make any changes to it; they will only continue to service domains you had active at the time they were still providing a free service. As soon as you need to make a change or add a new domain, you find they didn't live up to their promise at all -- they don't continue to provide the free service under compatible conditions.
And the paid service is only $20/year.
No.... Third of all their service is Really expensive; it's $39/Year per Zone for DynDNS standard.
If I have about 15 personal domains. That would be $585 a year for DynDNS' basic service; on top of the $7.80/year per domain annual registrar renewal cost.
And this would make UMG immune under the penalty provisions of the DMCA for taking down fair use and non-owned content.
It could open UMG and Google up to other claims such as tortious interference, and anti-competitive behavior.
They took over handling of the "EveryDNS" free service, with promises to continue the service.
But now they have forced all EveryDNS users who want to keep using the service to pay them to migrate.
And EveryDNS is gone.
Obviously the choice of DynDNS to be the ones to take over the service was a bit disingenuous, since, it was just a strategy to make more $$$ while pretending to be altruistic
When Microsoft's on trial, a guilty verdict has to be unanmous?
Normally in a Civil trial unanimity is not required.
People that actually work in the real world, with real companies with real budgets, and that have some self respect, honesty and pride in what they do will have to justify their salaries or rates somehow, and one of the tools used is some kind of metrics.
Ticket system "metrics" are problematic for IT, because every support issue is unique.
IT support matters are not uniform commodities -- you can't measure the efficiency of a knowledge worker the same way you can measure the efficiency of a physical worker, such as a restaurant cook or cashier -- number of burgers made per hour, or number of items scanned at the register per hour might be valid ways of judging performance for menial tasks in those industries.
Such things are 'uniformly sized units of work', which means they are comparable. A chef who can make 1000 burgers an hour has definitely done more work than a chef who made 700 burgers per hour.
But an IT support worker who resolved 10 tickets in an hour, has not necessarily done any more work and does not necessarily have any more skill than a representative who has closed 2 tickets in an hour.
That is, you have a fundamental issue, when there is nothing valid to measure.
where people are constantly calling me asking to fix stuff, then my numbers will be awesome!
I think you missed the part where total IT service revenue for that application is divided by the number of tickets. The more tickets for a specific IT service, the less the issue resolution is worth.
The fewer total tickets for that service, the more each resolution is worth.
I have been tasked with logging our performance using the statistics from our ticket management system. I've also been tasked with comparing these stats and determining if we are performing above or below what is considered optimal.
Standard ticketing system metrics are no good. Add a post-incident survey to your customer interactions. Your metrics don't measure performance, unless you can actually measure how 'hard' the ticket is intrinsically / what skill is required, and how well the ticket is solved.
A good solution might prevent further issues, a bad solution might cause more issues to occur. The fewer IT support issues a customer has, the more each resolution was worth, because that indicates their problem was actually solved.
Define a new metric: "Ticket importance" = Importance level given to the issue by the customer relative to the other issues.
Define a new metric: "Customer Happiness" = Score given by the customer with the resolution of the issue, from 0% to 100%.
Define a new metric: Revenue per Ticket = Revenue of applicable IT support Service Delivered per period of time divided by average Number of Trouble tickets for that service for the same period of time.
Define a new metric: Ticket Weight = Rank of the ticket out of all other tickets issued by the service, as a percentage. 100% would indicate it's the only ticket that matters, 0% would indicate solving the ticket is not an accomplishment, e.g. wasted time
Define a new metric: Ticket worth = Ticket Weight * Revenue per Ticket
Define a new metric: Ticket resolution value = Ticket Worth * Customer Happiness.
Sum the resolution value of all the tickets solved by IT support personnel. When multiple IT persons are involved in the same ticket, calculate total hours spent on the ticket, and divvy out the 'Resolution points' based on the amount of time spent on that ticket by each team member.
I'm thinking.... put a polarizing filter on the camera, and a cover/filter on its flash. Use a flash of a specific wavelength and filter everything else out from reaching your camera.
I think this is part of a cross licensing strategy that could finally make Apple stop being so stupid. The rest of the phone world has patents on tech that Apple employs. The rest of the phone world has FRAND'ed those patents.
Personally... I would like to see this get escalated more, and raise more and more embarrassment for those involved, and more and more public awareness of the corrupt patent system.
The whole Blackberry VS RTP situation was great for raising public awareness. The patent system will never get reformed without the public demanding it.
That, and the system actually needs to benefit lawyers too, since lawyers are a disproportionate part of politicians and political contributors and lobbyists.
The system doesn't need to actually benefit the lawyers... the lawyers in the influential positions just need to think it will benefit the lawyers, or them personally.
"Patent troll" usually means "non-practicing entity", not "anyone who sues on patent grounds"
Usually, yes... but lately, some large corporations have been blurring the lines, by suing over bad patents obtained for obvious technical choices falsely labelled as "invention"s.
They would do better if they were more responsive to customers (like, ok, remove Carbon if you must, but provide a downloadable compatibility layer, or open source it! Some people need this stuff).
Compatibility layer? What, like Rosetta?
Jury nullification is only good for overturning specific unjust laws, not for reversing the course of the entire nation.
Jury nullification doesn't overturn the unjust law, if successful, it just prevents the unjust law's penalty from taking effect against that specific defendant in that specific case where the jury decided the law was unjust and found innocent on the basis of law.
If the person does it again and gets arrested again, they could still be tried and convicted by a different jury, in the very same jurisdiction, for violating the very same unjust law.
Their exoneration by jury nullification once doesn't change the law, or protect anyone else.
There's no strong likelihood that jury nullification over the same injustice will be repeated consistently.
Only read up on jury nullification / subscribe to that legal theory, if you are prepared to get removed from the jury. Judges have firmly rejected jury nullification.
Except that patent trolls don't file patents; they look at the existing and emerging markets and then buy old patents that - with a stretch - cover those markets.
That's what patent trolls have done so far. They become more and more successful over time, and eventually they have the capital to bankroll even more ambitious trolling endeavors, unfortunately.......
Why would a patent troll start now, roll the dice, and wait 4 years for whatever might come out of the patent office? Answer: they wouldn't. They go after established deep pockets
But if they got the patent before the invention, the troll might be able to acquire even more aggregate revenue more easily.... by getting people to "license" their patent up front, before rolling out product, without the patent troll having to exert legal costs per target.
The not-so-well-established pockets funded by investors with deep pockets who are insistent on things being licensed properly, are viable targets for patent trolls too, especially as their number increases and there is more and more competition among patent trolls to get 'useful' patents
One of these machines falls into the wrong hands and patent trolls use it with a small bit of programming to create patent applications for them; and by that I mean... machine generated patents
In other words... entirely nonsensical patents for technology that has never been actually used, and might not actually work, but an extremely massive number of eloquently written machine-generated patents covering every conceivable problem with weird vague claims, with problem sets, and concepts for machine-generated patent claims obtained from automatic mining of past patent language, weblogs, etc...
The invention might not be real by any stretch of the imagination, but the awarded nonsensical patent might be vague enough to actually sue over a technology actually invented in the future
In other words... the ultimate patent troll is a computer AI that generates convincing applications in massive numbers without actually inventing anything.