There may already be cases of independent biotechnologists working for the highest bidder. The emergence of Roundup Ready Coca bushes (more like trees actually) in South America is very convenient indeed for the coca farmers and their business partners. The US taxpayer sprays the fields with glyphosate and actually helps the farmers by getting rid of the weeds.
The last DUI conviction of Bush was in 1976. Should we judge you too by what you did 34 years ago? Give me a break, its a non-issue for them and has been for years now.
and who do you think was pocketing that money? Western oil investors? Not a chance...the smugglers maybe got some money but the majority of it went to Saddam who used it for his own personal gratification and perhaps to pay bribes to corrupt UN officials, but none of the major American oil companies got a red cent out of that deal. The Arab countries keep their oil profits for themselves, they do not give them out to foreign investors.
Interesting response, although I expect that we will still be using the fed notes (unfortuantely, since you and I both are aparantely not crazy about the current system), baring some major meltdown, for the remainder of my lifetime. As for unwinding the federal reserve system by reintroducing private commodity backed money, I can only say that if it was not done very carefully, so as to avoid a perciptious drop in the dollar over too short a period of time, then it could result in a very hard landing for our economy and that would not ultimately serve the best interests of anyone. Your arguments ring true though and helped clear a few things up for me so thank you.
The founding fathers were loathe to add too many things which they considered to be obvious to our Constitution because they were afraid that if things were enumerated to explicitly they would eventually become the only rights guaranteed to the citizens. Hence the broad language and latitude on matters not considered absolutely essential (like the Bill of Rights and there were arguments about whether to include that as well for the same reason described above). The fourth amendment concerning unlawful searches and siezures and the right of the citizens to be "secure in their papers and possesions" indicates that the founding fathers valued privacy even though they did not enumerate it more explicitly as a specific right along with freedom of speech and the right to bear arms for example. Laws are not absolute in the United States and they can be challenged and declared "unconstitutional" and they very often are when bad laws, like the one in question in Australia, are passed by the legislature.
It is also true that Americans, being an independent and mostly anti-authoritarian lot with a healthy distrust of their federal government, frequently ignore, bend, or otherwise get around laws which they find to be inconvenient, stupid, or both. If you want privacy then take responsibility for it yourself. Use encryption and secure connections and register non-essential business relationships under manufactured identities and get yourself a mail drop to receive and send parcels under those aliases. If you don't care about privacy then don't do these things or trust the government to protect your privacy because we all know how much the people who violate your privacy, even in Europe where there are laws against it, care about rules and regulations...yeah right.
Then you take out your trusty knoppix CD and boot the machine into a Linux session before connecting to your g-mail account. Unless they are monitoring the computer at the hardware level (unlikely) then you are secure in the knowledge that that particular communication will remain private.
I wonder about that also. Will those who are in control of the U.S. government allow elections this time in November? Or will there be some "threat" that those in power say requires them to continue in power? Utterly ridiculous, of course they will there is no power or precedent for the 'state of emergency' in the United States.
In my opinion, the purpose of the U.S. government's war with Iraq is largely to make money for weapons and oil investors. The market for weapons has expanded dramatically internationally ever since the end of the Cold War so while the War on Terrorism and the Iraq War are potential profit centers for weapons manufacturers they are not soley responsible for the increase in the arms business. Men have always been interested in newer and more efficient ways to cut their neighbors' throats so this is really nothing new. As for the oil investors (myself among them) there is absolutely NO profit in Iraq. The American oil companies do not control the Iraqi oil, the Iraqis do. If American tankers fill up with Iraqi oil then they are paying the world price set on the mercantile exchange in Chicago and despite what you may have heard the oil business is not spectacularly profitable. It earns large revenues yes, but it also incurs large costs so at the end of the day it is maybe 10% profitable. That is a healthy profit yes, but there are many other American companies with even higher profit margins so why single out oil for your ire when the likes of Bechtel, Blackwater, Haliburton, and others who are profiting directly from the war at your (the taxpayers' expense) beckon? At least the oil companies provide you with a full gas tank for your money, what has Haliburton done for you lately? The war in Iraq has neither reduced prices at the gas pump nor profited American oil companies, if anything it has made the business tougher.
But money is not the only purpose. One key to understanding why Cheney and Rumsfeld and the Bush family want violence is understanding the mental illness of anger. Anger is an emotion not an illness. Everyone gets angry from time to time, even you (hence your venemous post).
It is true that they are apparently helping their friends and family who have investments in weapons and largely hidden business with the U.S. government. What are these "hidden business" that you speak of? The government is in the business of spending your tax money and they certainly don't make money, quite the opposite. I have also invested in the weapons business and it has been a good investment for me as well. There are a few things that men will always want to buy: drugs, weapons, and entertainment. This is why I am an investor in the VICE fund. Invest in vice...you won't be dissapointed (well at least not by the returns)
It's the anger of alcoholic personalities; both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been arrested for driving while intoxicated. Not sure about Cheney (although his doctor would certainly recommend against drinking given his known cardiac conditions) but by all accounts George W. Bush has not touched alcohol since 1986 when he became a Teetotaler. The man has other faults to be sure, but alcoholism and drinking are not among them.
I also agree that hard currency would be preferable to the current fiat money system as it exists right now in the United States if only because it would force the current government to put their financial house in order (this incidentally is one of the main reasons why liberals argue so vociferously against a return to the gold standard, because it would put the brakes on their government spending plans and reduce or eliminate their ability to confiscate and redistribute wealth by devaluing the fiat currency through inflation which is really a back door tax).
However, there are problems with commodity money. For example, whenever the money is backed by a commodity that commodity must be carefully stored, husbanded, and taken care of so that it may preserve its value as a store of value. This is the primary reason why gold and other precious metals have traditionally served this role. They are durable, recognizable, divisible, rare and not easily counterfeited, and they store lots of value in a relatively small volume (every thing that one could want out money). However, if exceptional care is not taken then these storage and management costs can escalate until a substantial amount of the stored value is spent ensuring the continued survival of the commodity which stores that value. In theory, a wisely managed fiat money system could preserve many of the values of a commodity based money system without the attendant storage drawbacks provided that our leaders were wise enough and disciplined enough to exercise restraint and adopt good judgment in economic policies, but that is the very problem isn't it...these philosopher kings never seem to be around when you need them.
As for government incompetence, it can always screw things up. However, even though I am sympathetic to the gold standard I am not yet prepared to back a return to the gold standard for two (2) primary reason: First, it is impossible to know for sure who has already horded gold and where and in how much quantity. Thus, at least for the short term, it would open us up to outside meddling in our economy and money supply by alternatively hoarding or dumping of gold supplies until an equilibrium was reached. Second, there is not enough physical gold in existence to back every transaction which occurs in our global economy with a meaningful quantity of gold. The present value of the dollar in terms of fractions of ounce of gold probably does not reflect the true scarcity of gold that would be necessary to cover the transaction if gold were actually being used as backing for the currency.
I do not attribute the economic growth and increase in quality of life over the last several hundred years to the government. However, it is true that the government exercises a great deal of control, by virtue of their monopoly on hard power (i.e. military might), over the money supply so any solution to the fiat money problems or even commodity money must involve the government at some level, unless one is advocating anarchy which I reject as unworkable.
It's by design that you can't easily obtain citizenship. All they really need to do is find an American spouse and have an anchor baby to stay in the United States until the child reaches the age of majority, by which time the foreign spouse has long since been granted citizenship anyway. If Microsoft wants more H1B candidates to stick around then they need to encourage hookups between their American employees and their foreign H1Bs and graduate student interns.
It will be interesting to watch this play out. Indeed it will, but perhaps not for the reasons that you may think...
Sadly, the American people are gonna have to start paying taxes from somewhere. I would prefer that the government cut spending first. There are entirely too many programs, earmarks, and expenses that are entirely superfluous or completely unnecessary. Of course, there are many people who are very comfortable with the present arrangement and they will fight tooth and nail to keep their subsidies, grants, and handouts flowing, but that is another argument for another day. As for paying taxes, well that is where things get interesting.
We have a huge debt and a lot of immediate things the government simply needs to take care of.
The finances of nations operate under a somewhat different set of rules than they do at the individual level and primarily for one simple reason: the government has the sovereign power to create money out of thin air (a power which they share with the banks, but for all intents and purposes the creation begins with the government). Thus, every dollar in your pocket or in your bank account exists because of debt (i.e. somebody owes somebody else or has a claim on a fixed amount of the property, labor, or capital resources of another). If there were NO debt then there would be NO money in circulation (or at least debt backed money as we know it today) and we would be forced back into commodity backed private currencies (which where quite common during the early part of the history of the United States) or perhaps even the barter system, the most primitive and least efficient of all monetary systems because it relies on the coincidence of wants between groups of people (i.e. if you want an iPod and you work as a gardener then you must find someone who is willing to trade you an iPod for gardening services or perhaps something else that you can trade to still someone else for that iPod and so on).
Now, in practice the government will ALWAYS have debt because they want to maintain an equilibrium in the system by ensuring that there is sufficient money (not too much and not too little) to promote the optimum equilibrium efficiency of the economy. As you can see, this is a very difficult job to do well and the history of central bankers around the world is good reason for people to be skeptical. However, the basic system as it exists today in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world, including debt, is very necessary for our modern economy to function and you would be hard pressed to find many people who would prefer to go back to the standards of living that were commonplace a few hundred years in the past before substantial economic growth and modern finance made our modern world possible.
The task of writing a new core OS (under the Windows API) seems to be too difficult for a company run by marketing people and lawyers. There have been mistakes made by Microsoft that everyone, including Microsoft, will acknowledge (even Steve Ballmer, albeit grudgingly). However, Microsoft does employ a lot of really good engineers and their research division really does do some top notch work (although how it never ends up quite right in their products is probably has more to do with the aforementioned marketers and lawyers). In response to your "they have never written an OS from scratch" claim, what about Singularity? It was written in scratch from C# which was in turn designed by Anders Hejlsberg, a respected Danish software engineer of Delphi fame.
If I were this sysadmin then I would set up *one* computer where the budding H4x0|2z could try out their newfound "talent" in a more controlled and less potentially destructive manner. It is better to encourage exploration and learning about the computer in a controlled environment than it is to crush an eager young mind with an overly authoritarian response. The United States is going to need more citizens in the future with extensive knowledge of computer security so it makes sense to encourage those with a budding talent to hone their skills in a constructive fashion.
It might assuage your anger somewhat to know that very few candidates running for national public office in the United States take the public or so called "hard-money" anymore because of the restrictions attached to accepting such funding. One simply cannot buy the necessary advertising on the national television networks and websites at the going rates these days with the meager tax-payer funded "hard-money". That is why every serious candidate opts-out of public funding and takes "soft-money" from private political donors and groups because you just about cannot be a serious candidate at the national level without opting-out.
having a long amber actually promotes speeding through intersections in such cities, and results in more pedestrian injuries and deaths. Perhaps, but not as many as you might think. There are many cities and outlying suburbs, especially in California, where there are no sidewalks or the sidewalks are only part of some strip mall and end at the nearest street corner so there are no pedestrians on these roads because these suburban areas were laid out with the car in mind and not the pedestrians.
Money is immaterial to government organizations like the FBI so long as there is enough to pay salaries and fund organizational needs. Beyond that these organizations exist in the political realm where the success is measured and rewards doled out based upon achievement of political objectives and saving money or spending the money of the taxpayers wisely is pretty far down the list of political priorities in most government organizations. Besides, if you spend less money then you get a hand shake for coming in under budget and then next year your budget is cut to reflect the "new" level of savings whereas if you go over the budget then you are rewarded with even more money next year so that you can really "get tough on crime". The incentives are exactly backwards and, of course, it also doesn't help that very often the white collar criminals and the big corporate political donors are one in the same people and it simply wouldn't do for the FBI to be "harassing" the "friends" of a powerful politician when there are much easier and more politically expedient targets to be singled out for "special attention" by the FBI and other government organizations.
It probably has less to do with actually selling a particular product than it does with saturation advertising which is designed to bypass the natural mental defenses that people have built up to advertising in general by so completely saturating the mind with brand image, logo, slogan, etc...that when the decision to make a purchase finally does come it is made on an almost subconscious level (i.e. you drop the item in your shopping cart without even thinking about it really). That is the angle that most spammers are working for their clients these days. They know you hate it, they know that you would never buy anything directly from them, but they and their clients don't care because they do not require your active cooperation in any way for their strategy to work because they are attempting to manipulate your subconscious through information overload to short circuit the rational decision making part of your brain the next time you have to make a purchase so that you will buy their brand without remembering specifically where you heard of it or even if you have seen it before. That explains the client of the spammer, but the spammer is simply a mercenary who cares about getting paid and he doesn't give a crap either way as long as he gets paid (by his clients) to run the spam campaigns on their behalf.
As Scott Crossfield pointed out just before he died a few years ago, every aircraft that went significantly over Mach 3 is now in a museum. There is little if any need now for piloted aircraft that can reach those speeds. Even as early as the 1960s, it was clear to everyone involved that guided missiles would obviate the need for supersonic manned bombers and other similar weapons systems. The mach 3+ reconnaissance aircraft survived somewhat longer in the form of the aforementioned SR-71 but even that eventually fell by the wayside as satellites and now remote piloted (and cheap) drones have replaced it too. The military value of tremendous speed, or speed that was both attainable and sustainable in a manned aircraft, has also been greatly diminished over time as missiles and radar systems have continued to improve so there is little incentive to reintroduce aircraft like the SR-71 which relied not on stealthiness but raw speed to outrun trouble in the form of antiquated (by the standards of today) soviet era air defense systems, not to mention that such systems are of limited utility in fighting enemies like Al-Qaeda and other non-state actors who don't have any air defenses to speak of anyway.
Right, but if you wish to invoke your 5th amendment rights then you say, "I assert my fifth amendment privilege" in answer to the question that you do not wish to answer due to self incrimination (I believe that is the customary phrasing in court, but variations should be accepted as long as the everyone understands that you are invoking your rights under the fifth amendment). However, in some cases you can be compelled to testify and cannot take the fifth. For example, if you are granted total immunity from prosecution for anything arising out of your sworn testimony then you can be compelled to talk because you cannot incriminate yourself if you are immune from prosecution (embarrassment doesn't count, you have a right not to incriminate yourself but not a right to be free from potentially embarrassing testimony under immunity). IANAL, but I am reasonably certain that this is how it works.
If a material misrepresentation or omission is made during sworn testimony AND the fifth (5th) amendment privilege was not or could not (i.e. immunity) be invoked then isn't that perjury?
but in rush hour traffic, there's really none. Then you aren't being aggressive enough in your rush hour driving. You really have to be an asshole to save time during rush hour but it can be done.
Only works for the big players, though. The little guys get screwed. Patent Trolls are usually quite small and hire contingency fee law firms to litigate the case(s) on their behalf. This has a number of advantages as well as a few (relatively minor) disadvantages...(from TFA):
Advantage:
"Some believe patent trolls have an unfair advantage over manufacturers since they are relatively immune to the typical defensive tactic large entities use against small patent plaintiffs, because the cost of litigation tends to fall more heavily on an accused infringer than on a plaintiff with a contingency-fee lawyer, and because trolls have an almost-unrestricted ability to choose their preferred plaintiff-friendly forums, most prominently the Eastern District of Texas."
IANAL, but it seems to me that it should NOT be too difficult to structure the corporate ownership in such a way that any profits from successful litigation can be extracted as legal fees from the patent trolling shell company by the law firm(s) which service it (and probably own it indirectly as well) as a vehicle to pursue their litigation while shielding the parent law firm from more direct retaliation. In any case, you would be going after the patent troll and its lawyers on their home field (i.e. the legal system) where, unless you hired equally good attorneys, they would probably be at a very definite advantage.
Disadvantage(s):
"Patent trolls are at a disadvantage in at least two ways. First, patent owners who make and sell their invention are entitled to awards of lost profits. However, patent trolls, being non-manufacturers, typically do not qualify. Further, patent owners' rights to bar infringers from manufacture, use, or sale of technologies that infringe their patents has recently been curtailed in the court decision eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C.. Rather than automatically granting an injunction, the US Supreme Court stated that Courts must apply a standard reasonableness test to determine if an injunction is warranted. Writing in Forbes magazine about the impact of this case on patent trolls, writer Jessica Holzer concludes: "The high court's decision deals a blow to patent trolls, which are notorious for using the threat of permanent injunction to extort hefty fees in licensing negotiations as well as huge settlements from companies they have accused of infringing. Often, those settlements can be far greater than the value of the infringing technology: Recall the $612.5 million that Canada's Research in Motion forked over to patent-holding company NTP to avoid the shutting down of its popular BlackBerry service."
So, small players would be at a larger disadvantage if they actually produced something other than litigation, but as you can see the system strongly favors the patent trolls with very dubious if any benefits accruing to society from the whole affair. Even with the disadvantages, it pays to be a patent troll.
If the shareholders are behind the board on this one then perhaps now would be a good time to enact a poison pill to make any hostile takeover a very bitter pill indeed for Microsoft to swallow.
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There may already be cases of independent biotechnologists working for the highest bidder. The emergence of Roundup Ready Coca bushes (more like trees actually) in South America is very convenient indeed for the coca farmers and their business partners. The US taxpayer sprays the fields with glyphosate and actually helps the farmers by getting rid of the weeds.
The last DUI conviction of Bush was in 1976. Should we judge you too by what you did 34 years ago? Give me a break, its a non-issue for them and has been for years now.
and who do you think was pocketing that money? Western oil investors? Not a chance...the smugglers maybe got some money but the majority of it went to Saddam who used it for his own personal gratification and perhaps to pay bribes to corrupt UN officials, but none of the major American oil companies got a red cent out of that deal. The Arab countries keep their oil profits for themselves, they do not give them out to foreign investors.
Interesting response, although I expect that we will still be using the fed notes (unfortuantely, since you and I both are aparantely not crazy about the current system), baring some major meltdown, for the remainder of my lifetime. As for unwinding the federal reserve system by reintroducing private commodity backed money, I can only say that if it was not done very carefully, so as to avoid a perciptious drop in the dollar over too short a period of time, then it could result in a very hard landing for our economy and that would not ultimately serve the best interests of anyone. Your arguments ring true though and helped clear a few things up for me so thank you.
The founding fathers were loathe to add too many things which they considered to be obvious to our Constitution because they were afraid that if things were enumerated to explicitly they would eventually become the only rights guaranteed to the citizens. Hence the broad language and latitude on matters not considered absolutely essential (like the Bill of Rights and there were arguments about whether to include that as well for the same reason described above). The fourth amendment concerning unlawful searches and siezures and the right of the citizens to be "secure in their papers and possesions" indicates that the founding fathers valued privacy even though they did not enumerate it more explicitly as a specific right along with freedom of speech and the right to bear arms for example. Laws are not absolute in the United States and they can be challenged and declared "unconstitutional" and they very often are when bad laws, like the one in question in Australia, are passed by the legislature.
It is also true that Americans, being an independent and mostly anti-authoritarian lot with a healthy distrust of their federal government, frequently ignore, bend, or otherwise get around laws which they find to be inconvenient, stupid, or both. If you want privacy then take responsibility for it yourself. Use encryption and secure connections and register non-essential business relationships under manufactured identities and get yourself a mail drop to receive and send parcels under those aliases. If you don't care about privacy then don't do these things or trust the government to protect your privacy because we all know how much the people who violate your privacy, even in Europe where there are laws against it, care about rules and regulations...yeah right.
Then you take out your trusty knoppix CD and boot the machine into a Linux session before connecting to your g-mail account. Unless they are monitoring the computer at the hardware level (unlikely) then you are secure in the knowledge that that particular communication will remain private.
I also agree that hard currency would be preferable to the current fiat money system as it exists right now in the United States if only because it would force the current government to put their financial house in order (this incidentally is one of the main reasons why liberals argue so vociferously against a return to the gold standard, because it would put the brakes on their government spending plans and reduce or eliminate their ability to confiscate and redistribute wealth by devaluing the fiat currency through inflation which is really a back door tax).
However, there are problems with commodity money. For example, whenever the money is backed by a commodity that commodity must be carefully stored, husbanded, and taken care of so that it may preserve its value as a store of value. This is the primary reason why gold and other precious metals have traditionally served this role. They are durable, recognizable, divisible, rare and not easily counterfeited, and they store lots of value in a relatively small volume (every thing that one could want out money). However, if exceptional care is not taken then these storage and management costs can escalate until a substantial amount of the stored value is spent ensuring the continued survival of the commodity which stores that value. In theory, a wisely managed fiat money system could preserve many of the values of a commodity based money system without the attendant storage drawbacks provided that our leaders were wise enough and disciplined enough to exercise restraint and adopt good judgment in economic policies, but that is the very problem isn't it...these philosopher kings never seem to be around when you need them.
As for government incompetence, it can always screw things up. However, even though I am sympathetic to the gold standard I am not yet prepared to back a return to the gold standard for two (2) primary reason: First, it is impossible to know for sure who has already horded gold and where and in how much quantity. Thus, at least for the short term, it would open us up to outside meddling in our economy and money supply by alternatively hoarding or dumping of gold supplies until an equilibrium was reached. Second, there is not enough physical gold in existence to back every transaction which occurs in our global economy with a meaningful quantity of gold. The present value of the dollar in terms of fractions of ounce of gold probably does not reflect the true scarcity of gold that would be necessary to cover the transaction if gold were actually being used as backing for the currency.
I do not attribute the economic growth and increase in quality of life over the last several hundred years to the government. However, it is true that the government exercises a great deal of control, by virtue of their monopoly on hard power (i.e. military might), over the money supply so any solution to the fiat money problems or even commodity money must involve the government at some level, unless one is advocating anarchy which I reject as unworkable.
The finances of nations operate under a somewhat different set of rules than they do at the individual level and primarily for one simple reason: the government has the sovereign power to create money out of thin air (a power which they share with the banks, but for all intents and purposes the creation begins with the government). Thus, every dollar in your pocket or in your bank account exists because of debt (i.e. somebody owes somebody else or has a claim on a fixed amount of the property, labor, or capital resources of another). If there were NO debt then there would be NO money in circulation (or at least debt backed money as we know it today) and we would be forced back into commodity backed private currencies (which where quite common during the early part of the history of the United States) or perhaps even the barter system, the most primitive and least efficient of all monetary systems because it relies on the coincidence of wants between groups of people (i.e. if you want an iPod and you work as a gardener then you must find someone who is willing to trade you an iPod for gardening services or perhaps something else that you can trade to still someone else for that iPod and so on).
Now, in practice the government will ALWAYS have debt because they want to maintain an equilibrium in the system by ensuring that there is sufficient money (not too much and not too little) to promote the optimum equilibrium efficiency of the economy. As you can see, this is a very difficult job to do well and the history of central bankers around the world is good reason for people to be skeptical. However, the basic system as it exists today in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world, including debt, is very necessary for our modern economy to function and you would be hard pressed to find many people who would prefer to go back to the standards of living that were commonplace a few hundred years in the past before substantial economic growth and modern finance made our modern world possible.
If I were this sysadmin then I would set up *one* computer where the budding H4x0|2z could try out their newfound "talent" in a more controlled and less potentially destructive manner. It is better to encourage exploration and learning about the computer in a controlled environment than it is to crush an eager young mind with an overly authoritarian response. The United States is going to need more citizens in the future with extensive knowledge of computer security so it makes sense to encourage those with a budding talent to hone their skills in a constructive fashion.
You are quite correct, I had two separate but often associated concepts intertwined. Thank you for clarifying.
It might assuage your anger somewhat to know that very few candidates running for national public office in the United States take the public or so called "hard-money" anymore because of the restrictions attached to accepting such funding. One simply cannot buy the necessary advertising on the national television networks and websites at the going rates these days with the meager tax-payer funded "hard-money". That is why every serious candidate opts-out of public funding and takes "soft-money" from private political donors and groups because you just about cannot be a serious candidate at the national level without opting-out.
Money is immaterial to government organizations like the FBI so long as there is enough to pay salaries and fund organizational needs. Beyond that these organizations exist in the political realm where the success is measured and rewards doled out based upon achievement of political objectives and saving money or spending the money of the taxpayers wisely is pretty far down the list of political priorities in most government organizations. Besides, if you spend less money then you get a hand shake for coming in under budget and then next year your budget is cut to reflect the "new" level of savings whereas if you go over the budget then you are rewarded with even more money next year so that you can really "get tough on crime". The incentives are exactly backwards and, of course, it also doesn't help that very often the white collar criminals and the big corporate political donors are one in the same people and it simply wouldn't do for the FBI to be "harassing" the "friends" of a powerful politician when there are much easier and more politically expedient targets to be singled out for "special attention" by the FBI and other government organizations.
It probably has less to do with actually selling a particular product than it does with saturation advertising which is designed to bypass the natural mental defenses that people have built up to advertising in general by so completely saturating the mind with brand image, logo, slogan, etc...that when the decision to make a purchase finally does come it is made on an almost subconscious level (i.e. you drop the item in your shopping cart without even thinking about it really). That is the angle that most spammers are working for their clients these days. They know you hate it, they know that you would never buy anything directly from them, but they and their clients don't care because they do not require your active cooperation in any way for their strategy to work because they are attempting to manipulate your subconscious through information overload to short circuit the rational decision making part of your brain the next time you have to make a purchase so that you will buy their brand without remembering specifically where you heard of it or even if you have seen it before. That explains the client of the spammer, but the spammer is simply a mercenary who cares about getting paid and he doesn't give a crap either way as long as he gets paid (by his clients) to run the spam campaigns on their behalf.
Right, but if you wish to invoke your 5th amendment rights then you say, "I assert my fifth amendment privilege" in answer to the question that you do not wish to answer due to self incrimination (I believe that is the customary phrasing in court, but variations should be accepted as long as the everyone understands that you are invoking your rights under the fifth amendment). However, in some cases you can be compelled to testify and cannot take the fifth. For example, if you are granted total immunity from prosecution for anything arising out of your sworn testimony then you can be compelled to talk because you cannot incriminate yourself if you are immune from prosecution (embarrassment doesn't count, you have a right not to incriminate yourself but not a right to be free from potentially embarrassing testimony under immunity). IANAL, but I am reasonably certain that this is how it works.
If a material misrepresentation or omission is made during sworn testimony AND the fifth (5th) amendment privilege was not or could not (i.e. immunity) be invoked then isn't that perjury?
The MAFIAA will be sending him his settlement letter soon enough I'd wager...
Advantage:
"Some believe patent trolls have an unfair advantage over manufacturers since they are relatively immune to the typical defensive tactic large entities use against small patent plaintiffs, because the cost of litigation tends to fall more heavily on an accused infringer than on a plaintiff with a contingency-fee lawyer, and because trolls have an almost-unrestricted ability to choose their preferred plaintiff-friendly forums, most prominently the Eastern District of Texas."
IANAL, but it seems to me that it should NOT be too difficult to structure the corporate ownership in such a way that any profits from successful litigation can be extracted as legal fees from the patent trolling shell company by the law firm(s) which service it (and probably own it indirectly as well) as a vehicle to pursue their litigation while shielding the parent law firm from more direct retaliation. In any case, you would be going after the patent troll and its lawyers on their home field (i.e. the legal system) where, unless you hired equally good attorneys, they would probably be at a very definite advantage.
Disadvantage(s):
"Patent trolls are at a disadvantage in at least two ways. First, patent owners who make and sell their invention are entitled to awards of lost profits. However, patent trolls, being non-manufacturers, typically do not qualify. Further, patent owners' rights to bar infringers from manufacture, use, or sale of technologies that infringe their patents has recently been curtailed in the court decision eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L.L.C.. Rather than automatically granting an injunction, the US Supreme Court stated that Courts must apply a standard reasonableness test to determine if an injunction is warranted. Writing in Forbes magazine about the impact of this case on patent trolls, writer Jessica Holzer concludes: "The high court's decision deals a blow to patent trolls, which are notorious for using the threat of permanent injunction to extort hefty fees in licensing negotiations as well as huge settlements from companies they have accused of infringing. Often, those settlements can be far greater than the value of the infringing technology: Recall the $612.5 million that Canada's Research in Motion forked over to patent-holding company NTP to avoid the shutting down of its popular BlackBerry service."
So, small players would be at a larger disadvantage if they actually produced something other than litigation, but as you can see the system strongly favors the patent trolls with very dubious if any benefits accruing to society from the whole affair. Even with the disadvantages, it pays to be a patent troll.
If the shareholders are behind the board on this one then perhaps now would be a good time to enact a poison pill to make any hostile takeover a very bitter pill indeed for Microsoft to swallow.
You mean they won't increase?