The "3 days longer" statistic seems to be massively skewed by a single non-representative parcel that took 37 days later than its counterpart.
Ah, thank you -- I hadn't noticed that connection. I did think I would really like to see the data for myself, to find just such an anomaly.
If the "average of 3 days longer" statistic is really caused by that single outlier (i.e., if taking that out makes them about even), then it basically counts as a lie: while what they are saying is technically accurate, they know it will be interpreted as "the typical delivery took 3 days longer", which is not the same thing.
Hard to see how the 9:1 ratio of lost packages could be such an anomaly though...
However, when you look at they claim, how they act and what they do, it all seems the same, from an atheists point of view.
Well if you squint funny everything looks the same. But there are pretty important differences in practice. The thing that has people up in arms about scientology isn't the belief system. It's how they treat the outside world, their own members, and in particular how they treat former members. I grew up going to churches, including some pretty fundamentalist ones. But no one would ever disown or harrass people who left. Nor if anyone was talking about leaving would they be threatened with death (as a Muslim friend of mine was threatened by his brother, when he even tried to bring the subject of Christianity up).
The other thing is this: Have you ever been in or seen an abusive, manipulative, controlling relationship? A lot of times on the outside everything looks pretty normal. A lot of the external activities and things that manipulative / abusive people say look similar to those in a real, loving relationship. Both the abuser and the abusee frequently distort reality to maintain the fiction that they have a normal, loving relationship. But inside it's *very* different; but often in a way you can't really see clearly at first.
The same thing happens with religion. Human feelings surrounding religion, just like human feelings surrounding love, are very powerful. Most religious groups that have been around for a long time satisfy these feelings in a fairly healthy way. But just like there are people who can take feelings of love and affection and use them to manipulate people, resulting in an abusive relationship, there are religious organizations that can take the feelings that motivate people to follow a religion and use them to manipulate people as well, resulting in the cult.
This is the distinction between the modern words "cult" and a "religion". A religion is like a healthy friendship or romantic relationship: there's no element of control or manipulation. A cult is like an abusive relationship: all about control, manipulation, and abuse.
And what people are saying about Scientology is that it shows a lot of the classic signs of a cult -- and in some ways a particularly nasty one. That's certainly not to say it's the only cult out there; and it's not to say that there aren't other religious organizations that dabble in manipulation, or tend towards the controlling side. But it is particularly important given their size, and their history of attacking critics.
I stand by my suggestion, and I'm sure that most people would agree with me and not you. Beyond that, it's not worthwhile continuing the discussion. Your mind is set. And it's set because you want to disassociate WBC from your group. No amount of reasoning is going to make you change your mind.
Did you read the rest of my post? Because if we use your definition of "subjective", then even your definition of "Christian" is subjective.
For a start, Christians tend to act contrary to Christ's teachings everyday. That's why praying for forgiveness or going to confession is a regular occurrence. Even you accept that isn't only a criteria rather than a definition, which suggests even you accept it's weak.
Sorry, meant to respond to this. Yes, you're right; that's why I said "accept", not "obey". It's possible to accept that something is good or true without always doing it 100%. If a person asks for forgiveness or goes to confession, or even just feels guilty and tries to behave differently, it proves that they do accept that the teaching is valid.
But if a person consistently behaves as though X is not true, never shows any sign of attempting to behave as though X is true, never asks forgiveness for behaving as if X is not true, then isn't it reasonable to conclude that deep down, they really don't think X is true?
Because it's your opinion on what Christ's teachings are, and your opinion on how they match up to that. Doubly subjective.
I don't think you're using "subjective" or "opinion" properly. If I think chocolate tastes better than vanilla, that's my opinion. But if I think that an interview candidate will not perform very well, that is my *judgement*: either he will or he won't, and based on the evidence I have, I think he won't. Very little in this life is ever 100% clear; in the end, we have to look at the available evidence and make a judgement call. This is true of whether we believe what someone tells us, or evolution or global warming, or economics or politics or anything. Sometimes reasonable people can look at the same facts and come to opposite conclusions. But that doesn't mean that any conclusion is the same as any other one. Some conclusions are much more sound than others.
So the above definition is not subjective. What Christ's teachings were is a matter of fact. Whether someone's actions match up to it is also a matter of fact. Sometimes facts are not clear, and sometimes people can be mistaken due to poor judgement or poor information. If you think I'm mistaken about Jesus' teachings, or mistaken about whether someone's actions match up to that, you can try to persuade me to change my mind by evidence and argument.
It may be reasonable for people to come to opposite conclusions about whether Jesus would support abortion, or gay marriage, or divorce. But it is absolutely not reasonable for any person to read his teachings, or those of his disciples, and think that writing "God hates fags" on a sign is something he would approve of.
I propose that a reasonable, objective and widely-agreed definition is: A person who believes that Jesus Christ existed and was the son of God.
That's subjective too (by your definition of "subjective", which seems to be "requires a judgement call"). To "believe that Jesus Christ existed" includes at least some parameters for what this "Jesus Christ" was like -- and if "what Christ's teachings are" is in part a matter of judgement, then "what Jesus Christ was like" is also a matter of judgement. Furthermore, do they actually believe that Jesus Christ existed and was the Son of God? We can't see or measure the internal states of their minds; we can only tell what they believe by how they act. And in my judgement, they certainly don't act like they believe that a man like the Jesus Christ described in the Gospels was the Son of God.
Unless, of course, you mean "A person who has the phonemes J-E-Z-Uh-S attached to some idea, no matter what that idea is." In which case, your definition of Christian is not very reasonable nor very widely accepted.
No it's not, it's entirely subjective. You're comparing the person with your idea of how a christian behaves, rather than coming up with a reasonable, objective and widely agreed definition of what a christian is, and then testing the person against that.
Um, how is "A true Christian accepts Christ's teachings" an unreasonable, subjective criteria that is not widely agreed? (Criteria because it's not a full definition, but it's one aspect of a definition.) What would you propose as a reasonable, objective, widely-agreed definition?
As they don't, or indeed have anything at all that says they are atheist, all that's left is your misunderstanding of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Wait, are you saying that NO TRUE ATHEIST would not call themselves an atheist? That NO TRUE ATHEIST would call themselves a Baptist Church? Why is "what they call themselves" a criteria that can be excluded from the argument, when "what they teach" or "how they act" doesn't?
There's certainly a point to the "No True Scotsman" argument. However, the problem is that the way it's used sometimes doesn't leave us with any criteria for defining what *is* a True Scotsman. By taking away all definitions and boundaries, it completely removes our ability to use language to communicate ideas. The result is using language only for propaganda -- which is what people who point to the Phelps Family and say, "Christianity is a religion of hate" are doing.
I think the real conclusion is this: It's only a "No True Scotsman" fallacy if either 1) no criteria are suggested, or 2) the criteria suggested have nothing to do with the word itself. "No true Scotsman would watch the Twilight series" is a fallacy; but "No true Scotsman has never spent any time in Scotland" sounds perfectly reasonable. "No true Christian would support gay marriage" is a fallacy, but "No true Christian would teach something opposite to Christ's teachings" is perfectly reasonable.
We were even so bold as to insist that the Bible guaranteed that Christ would return on May 21 and that the true believers would be raptured....However, even so, that does not excuse us. We tremble before God as we humbly ask Him for forgiveness for making that sinful statement. We are so thankful that God is so loving that He will forgive even this sin.
but yeah, not sure how many other people who believed him have come out and said the same thing...
The 'Church' makes up to several million dollars a year on the settlements to all the nuisance suits, and have hundreds going at any one time, more than 1000 concurrent ones at some points in the past. Its strictly a business model.
I've heard this thrown around, but I have yet to see any actual references. I would dearly love to repeat this story with confidence -- can you provide any?
If you are going to conflate a small group engaging in clearly fringe behavior with a larger mainstream group, it is YOUR responsibility as the accuser to show the links. NOT the responsibility of the accused to show lack of links.
Maybe a better response would be to say, "Actually, WBC are ATHEISTS!!!! Look at how awful and hateful atheists are!" After all, there's no way you can prove they're *not* atheists... No True Scotsman!
The WBC has many many lawyers including members of the Phelps family. They, the WBC, make a living by suing.
The picketing is simply to drum up additional lawsuits.
I'd absolutely love to believe that and spread the word about them, but not without a reference. Have you got one?
Well to start, you have to see that there may be a problem, so you're already a big chunk of the way there.
One thing would be to expose yourself to as much experts in non-knowledge-oriented fields as possible. I worked for a gas station in high school, and I enlisted in the military reserves. For the first two years I was in the reserves, I dreaded going for my monthly weekend training, because I knew that at least once per weekend I would do something really stupid. (Like, "Hey, I'll save weight in my pack by not bringing any extra socks." When we're going to be training outside all weekend. In February in Michigan. Socks don't really weigh that much, but having dry ones sure helps keep you from getting frostbite...) Every month it was something different; and the other guys, most of whom were attending 2-year community college or trade schools, would say, "Aren't you going to [major state university]? How can you do something so dumb?" Honestly, I don't know.
Anyway, eventually I must have run out of stupid things to do. But the whole experience -- not just me doing stupid things, but seeing the really wise things that other people did -- gave me a lot of respect for people who didn't have book-smarts.
That's what I'm constantly telling people who talk about "how when they were kids they could play in the street without worry." People tend to believe sensationalized media over sound reason and logic, even when you show them crime rate statistics for the last 50 years and show how much higher a risk they were at when THEY were a kid.
Just tossing this out there, is it possible that there are fewer strange abductions because people are more paranoid?
A device that 1) has a data link to the outside world, 2) has a GPS receiver, and 3) has a microphone ought to be far riskier to steal.
Unfortunately, not if you can yank the SIM card out right away. My iPhone went missing a few months back, and I noticed it for sure within 45 minutes. I had FindMyiPhone enabled and the whole bit; but even though I went on the website within an hour of the phone being missing, there was no report. It's possible that the battery had died in that time, since I disable the "auto-lock" feature; but it seems much more likely to me that the phone had simply had the SIM yanked out.
I haven't taken this particular course, but the "Introduction to Computer Design" course at my university, where we started with AND and OR gates, and ended by building a simple microprocessor, was definitely one of my favorites. It definitely had the feeling of magic: you figure out what you want to do, put together a bunch of random bits of logic, draw a box around it, and suddenly you've got an adder or an instruction decoder. I still feel that way whenever I write a really new bit of funcitonality.
I've long thought that Facebook's only real asset is in being a fad. And fads often vanish very suddenly.
It's no more a fad than e-mail is a fad. Facebook (and Twitter) are fundamentally new ways of communicating. Whether Facebook itself will last is up for debate. But there will be something *like* Facebook with us from now on.
Inevitably I will hear the same track, often more than once and skip it.
Is it actually the same track, or a different version of the same song? The problem I have is that for popular groups, like U2, the studio versions of their "hits" are on 4-5 different anthologies, and there are 10-15 different "live" versions, and Pandora doesn't seem to recognize that it's actually the same song. Same thing with dance music: A lot of dance music are remixes of each other -- but again, Pandora doesn't recognize that they're almost the same song, so things end up getting repetitive. Less popular groups don't seem to have this problem.
Place signs around the area (they do not have to be large) saying, "Video Surveillance in Use." Make sure you clean up any existing trash.
I thought about suggesting this; but it may just cause the person to wear a ski mask / mud up his license plate before doing the dumping. Plus, it doen't actually stop the dumper, it just tells him to go to the next house down the road.
Some day a-la a an old Voyager episode they may have a cure for it, but right now the prevailing wisdom is to keep them locked up forever, because a death sentence is actually more expensive.
Is it really necessary to lock them up? If someone is born without empathy, they can't really do anything about that. But they can at least see that there are benefits to having people happy with them, and living roughly within the rules for society. They can even channel their sadistic tendencies to appropriate channels -- like playing certain kinds of cut-throat games (Diplomacy comes to mind). I'm pretty sure I've got people of my acquaintance who fit this description, but manage not to be evil anyway.
A billion dollars for a browser choice dialouge? It is beyond my comphrension how this could be considered rational or acceptable in any way.
Well the point of the fine is to make it economically adventageous for Microsoft to follow the law. Suppose that they were expecting to benefit by $250M (through network effects of having a larger market share, &c) by having 28 million people running IE by default instead of being given a choice. And suppose they thought there was a 50% chance they'd just get away with it. Ignoring morality or commitment to rule of law or anything like that, and looking only at money, what's the rational decision for the following fine amounts?
$100,000: Expected value of breaking the law is $250M - (0.5 * $100k) = $250M (rounded to 3 decimal places). No-brainer.
$100,000,000: Expected value of breaking the law is $250M - (0.5 * $100M) = $200M. This is just a 20% tax, but still well worth it.
$500,000,000: Expected value of breaking the law is $250M - (0.5 * $250M) = $0. But maybe our chances are a bit better than 50% -- and it's so easy, we might as well do it as not. Besides, at least we get to be evil, which we enjoy.
$1,000,000,000: Expected value of breaking the law is $250M - (0.5 * $1B) = $-250M. Ah -- probably not worth it then.
Given the size of Microsoft, and the potential benefit they get from breaking the law, a "rational" fine is one big enough to make it "rational" for MS not to play games with the EU anymore.
there's dozens of Android handsets but a lot of them will be lucky to see a single major upgrade over their lifetime.
Although to be fair, the updates Apple sends are always targeted towards their current hardware, and they don't seem to care if they slow older hardware down. My iPhone 3G was snappy when I first bought it, but in update after update, things just keep getting slower. Most of the core functionality still *works*, but you just have to wait for several minutes if you're switching from one "big" application to another. I'm not sure that's really that much better than just being abandoned.
If you want to fix the patent system, we need to treble the number of examiners. Alas, the congress critters seem intent to not increase the funding to get to a healthy state.
No, first you have to ask why there are so many patent applications. The answer to that is that most patents are granted, hard to overturn, and thus are incredibly valuable. It's a vicious circle: the USPTO has too many applications, so skimps and grants bad patents; Bad patents are incredibly valuable, so more people apply, so the USPTO is too busy.
I think what should happen is this:
Anyone can sue to invalidate a patent
If a patent is inavlidated, the USPTO pays the legal expenses of those who got it overturned.
That way, there would be incentive for people to actively look for bad patents to overturn; and, there would be an incentive for the USPTO not to grant patents which are going to be overturned. And once only actually valid patents get approved, then the volume of applications will go down drastically.
OK, it's one thing to only go off what was said in the summary, but it's another thing to just make stuff up out of thin air and then be offended about it. If you read his blog post, which is linked to from TFA, you'll find that Delta gave he and his wife another flight the next day.
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Ah, thank you -- I hadn't noticed that connection. I did think I would really like to see the data for myself, to find just such an anomaly.
If the "average of 3 days longer" statistic is really caused by that single outlier (i.e., if taking that out makes them about even), then it basically counts as a lie: while what they are saying is technically accurate, they know it will be interpreted as "the typical delivery took 3 days longer", which is not the same thing.
Hard to see how the 9:1 ratio of lost packages could be such an anomaly though...
Well if you squint funny everything looks the same. But there are pretty important differences in practice. The thing that has people up in arms about scientology isn't the belief system. It's how they treat the outside world, their own members, and in particular how they treat former members. I grew up going to churches, including some pretty fundamentalist ones. But no one would ever disown or harrass people who left. Nor if anyone was talking about leaving would they be threatened with death (as a Muslim friend of mine was threatened by his brother, when he even tried to bring the subject of Christianity up).
The other thing is this: Have you ever been in or seen an abusive, manipulative, controlling relationship? A lot of times on the outside everything looks pretty normal. A lot of the external activities and things that manipulative / abusive people say look similar to those in a real, loving relationship. Both the abuser and the abusee frequently distort reality to maintain the fiction that they have a normal, loving relationship. But inside it's *very* different; but often in a way you can't really see clearly at first.
The same thing happens with religion. Human feelings surrounding religion, just like human feelings surrounding love, are very powerful. Most religious groups that have been around for a long time satisfy these feelings in a fairly healthy way. But just like there are people who can take feelings of love and affection and use them to manipulate people, resulting in an abusive relationship, there are religious organizations that can take the feelings that motivate people to follow a religion and use them to manipulate people as well, resulting in the cult.
This is the distinction between the modern words "cult" and a "religion". A religion is like a healthy friendship or romantic relationship: there's no element of control or manipulation. A cult is like an abusive relationship: all about control, manipulation, and abuse.
And what people are saying about Scientology is that it shows a lot of the classic signs of a cult -- and in some ways a particularly nasty one. That's certainly not to say it's the only cult out there; and it's not to say that there aren't other religious organizations that dabble in manipulation, or tend towards the controlling side. But it is particularly important given their size, and their history of attacking critics.
Did you read the rest of my post? Because if we use your definition of "subjective", then even your definition of "Christian" is subjective.
Sorry, meant to respond to this. Yes, you're right; that's why I said "accept", not "obey". It's possible to accept that something is good or true without always doing it 100%. If a person asks for forgiveness or goes to confession, or even just feels guilty and tries to behave differently, it proves that they do accept that the teaching is valid.
But if a person consistently behaves as though X is not true, never shows any sign of attempting to behave as though X is true, never asks forgiveness for behaving as if X is not true, then isn't it reasonable to conclude that deep down, they really don't think X is true?
I don't think you're using "subjective" or "opinion" properly. If I think chocolate tastes better than vanilla, that's my opinion. But if I think that an interview candidate will not perform very well, that is my *judgement*: either he will or he won't, and based on the evidence I have, I think he won't. Very little in this life is ever 100% clear; in the end, we have to look at the available evidence and make a judgement call. This is true of whether we believe what someone tells us, or evolution or global warming, or economics or politics or anything. Sometimes reasonable people can look at the same facts and come to opposite conclusions. But that doesn't mean that any conclusion is the same as any other one. Some conclusions are much more sound than others.
So the above definition is not subjective. What Christ's teachings were is a matter of fact. Whether someone's actions match up to it is also a matter of fact. Sometimes facts are not clear, and sometimes people can be mistaken due to poor judgement or poor information. If you think I'm mistaken about Jesus' teachings, or mistaken about whether someone's actions match up to that, you can try to persuade me to change my mind by evidence and argument.
It may be reasonable for people to come to opposite conclusions about whether Jesus would support abortion, or gay marriage, or divorce. But it is absolutely not reasonable for any person to read his teachings, or those of his disciples, and think that writing "God hates fags" on a sign is something he would approve of.
That's subjective too (by your definition of "subjective", which seems to be "requires a judgement call"). To "believe that Jesus Christ existed" includes at least some parameters for what this "Jesus Christ" was like -- and if "what Christ's teachings are" is in part a matter of judgement, then "what Jesus Christ was like" is also a matter of judgement. Furthermore, do they actually believe that Jesus Christ existed and was the Son of God? We can't see or measure the internal states of their minds; we can only tell what they believe by how they act. And in my judgement, they certainly don't act like they believe that a man like the Jesus Christ described in the Gospels was the Son of God.
Unless, of course, you mean "A person who has the phonemes J-E-Z-Uh-S attached to some idea, no matter what that idea is." In which case, your definition of Christian is not very reasonable nor very widely accepted.
Um, how is "A true Christian accepts Christ's teachings" an unreasonable, subjective criteria that is not widely agreed? (Criteria because it's not a full definition, but it's one aspect of a definition.) What would you propose as a reasonable, objective, widely-agreed definition?
Wait, are you saying that NO TRUE ATHEIST would not call themselves an atheist? That NO TRUE ATHEIST would call themselves a Baptist Church? Why is "what they call themselves" a criteria that can be excluded from the argument, when "what they teach" or "how they act" doesn't?
There's certainly a point to the "No True Scotsman" argument. However, the problem is that the way it's used sometimes doesn't leave us with any criteria for defining what *is* a True Scotsman. By taking away all definitions and boundaries, it completely removes our ability to use language to communicate ideas. The result is using language only for propaganda -- which is what people who point to the Phelps Family and say, "Christianity is a religion of hate" are doing.
I think the real conclusion is this: It's only a "No True Scotsman" fallacy if either 1) no criteria are suggested, or 2) the criteria suggested have nothing to do with the word itself. "No true Scotsman would watch the Twilight series" is a fallacy; but "No true Scotsman has never spent any time in Scotland" sounds perfectly reasonable. "No true Christian would support gay marriage" is a fallacy, but "No true Christian would teach something opposite to Christ's teachings" is perfectly reasonable.
Well Harold Camping did say this in the aftermath:
but yeah, not sure how many other people who believed him have come out and said the same thing...
I've heard this thrown around, but I have yet to see any actual references. I would dearly love to repeat this story with confidence -- can you provide any?
Maybe a better response would be to say, "Actually, WBC are ATHEISTS!!!! Look at how awful and hateful atheists are!" After all, there's no way you can prove they're *not* atheists... No True Scotsman!
I'd absolutely love to believe that and spread the word about them, but not without a reference. Have you got one?
Well to start, you have to see that there may be a problem, so you're already a big chunk of the way there.
One thing would be to expose yourself to as much experts in non-knowledge-oriented fields as possible. I worked for a gas station in high school, and I enlisted in the military reserves. For the first two years I was in the reserves, I dreaded going for my monthly weekend training, because I knew that at least once per weekend I would do something really stupid. (Like, "Hey, I'll save weight in my pack by not bringing any extra socks." When we're going to be training outside all weekend. In February in Michigan. Socks don't really weigh that much, but having dry ones sure helps keep you from getting frostbite...) Every month it was something different; and the other guys, most of whom were attending 2-year community college or trade schools, would say, "Aren't you going to [major state university]? How can you do something so dumb?" Honestly, I don't know.
Anyway, eventually I must have run out of stupid things to do. But the whole experience -- not just me doing stupid things, but seeing the really wise things that other people did -- gave me a lot of respect for people who didn't have book-smarts.
Just tossing this out there, is it possible that there are fewer strange abductions because people are more paranoid?
Wow, it will not only break off, but somehow flip over France and Spain into the Atlantic? That's going to be some earthquake...
Unfortunately, not if you can yank the SIM card out right away. My iPhone went missing a few months back, and I noticed it for sure within 45 minutes. I had FindMyiPhone enabled and the whole bit; but even though I went on the website within an hour of the phone being missing, there was no report. It's possible that the battery had died in that time, since I disable the "auto-lock" feature; but it seems much more likely to me that the phone had simply had the SIM yanked out.
I haven't taken this particular course, but the "Introduction to Computer Design" course at my university, where we started with AND and OR gates, and ended by building a simple microprocessor, was definitely one of my favorites. It definitely had the feeling of magic: you figure out what you want to do, put together a bunch of random bits of logic, draw a box around it, and suddenly you've got an adder or an instruction decoder. I still feel that way whenever I write a really new bit of funcitonality.
It's no more a fad than e-mail is a fad. Facebook (and Twitter) are fundamentally new ways of communicating. Whether Facebook itself will last is up for debate. But there will be something *like* Facebook with us from now on.
Is it actually the same track, or a different version of the same song? The problem I have is that for popular groups, like U2, the studio versions of their "hits" are on 4-5 different anthologies, and there are 10-15 different "live" versions, and Pandora doesn't seem to recognize that it's actually the same song. Same thing with dance music: A lot of dance music are remixes of each other -- but again, Pandora doesn't recognize that they're almost the same song, so things end up getting repetitive. Less popular groups don't seem to have this problem.
I thought about suggesting this; but it may just cause the person to wear a ski mask / mud up his license plate before doing the dumping. Plus, it doen't actually stop the dumper, it just tells him to go to the next house down the road.
So, about equivalent to a light gasoline car, except:
Is it really necessary to lock them up? If someone is born without empathy, they can't really do anything about that. But they can at least see that there are benefits to having people happy with them, and living roughly within the rules for society. They can even channel their sadistic tendencies to appropriate channels -- like playing certain kinds of cut-throat games (Diplomacy comes to mind). I'm pretty sure I've got people of my acquaintance who fit this description, but manage not to be evil anyway.
Well the point of the fine is to make it economically adventageous for Microsoft to follow the law. Suppose that they were expecting to benefit by $250M (through network effects of having a larger market share, &c) by having 28 million people running IE by default instead of being given a choice. And suppose they thought there was a 50% chance they'd just get away with it. Ignoring morality or commitment to rule of law or anything like that, and looking only at money, what's the rational decision for the following fine amounts?
Given the size of Microsoft, and the potential benefit they get from breaking the law, a "rational" fine is one big enough to make it "rational" for MS not to play games with the EU anymore.
Although to be fair, the updates Apple sends are always targeted towards their current hardware, and they don't seem to care if they slow older hardware down. My iPhone 3G was snappy when I first bought it, but in update after update, things just keep getting slower. Most of the core functionality still *works*, but you just have to wait for several minutes if you're switching from one "big" application to another. I'm not sure that's really that much better than just being abandoned.
No, first you have to ask why there are so many patent applications. The answer to that is that most patents are granted, hard to overturn, and thus are incredibly valuable. It's a vicious circle: the USPTO has too many applications, so skimps and grants bad patents; Bad patents are incredibly valuable, so more people apply, so the USPTO is too busy.
I think what should happen is this:
That way, there would be incentive for people to actively look for bad patents to overturn; and, there would be an incentive for the USPTO not to grant patents which are going to be overturned. And once only actually valid patents get approved, then the volume of applications will go down drastically.
OK, it's one thing to only go off what was said in the summary, but it's another thing to just make stuff up out of thin air and then be offended about it. If you read his blog post, which is linked to from TFA, you'll find that Delta gave he and his wife another flight the next day.