"It's pretty typical for any and all contractual obligations over an asset to be tossed in a bankruptcy court."
However, it's not so simple when an asset held by the bankrupt company wasn't really theirs to sell in the first place. Suppose they had a fleet of cars which were leased. If they go bankrupt during the lease, they have to give the cars back, and cannot sell them.
In a sense, the personal information was leased to company; it was never theirs to sell and shouldn't become theirs to sell just because of bankruptcy.
"This is because it's generally assumed that as long as the general algorithm is disclosed, the ordinary artisan is capable of writing the code to implement it without undue experimentation."
But when you look at software patents, they often don't disclose the actual algorithm, they just list a bunch of claims explaining WHAT the program does, without giving you any information about the steps to perform it.
"But for us in the USA, we're cursed with a 3rd-world-quality public school system, so going to college is a necessity if you want to be considered "educated" beyond the level needed to clean toilets."
If you take a look at what they actually study in high school in 3rd world countries, it's often more advanced than in typical US public schools.
It's just that a large percentage of 3rd world kids don't attend school at all at the high school level, because the country simply doesn't have enough high schools, or they attend sporadically because so many parents are just too poor to afford textbooks, transportation and the other costs associated with school.
"The program offers concrete, hands-on instruction designed to follow how someone who was self-taught would learn. (The first teacher was himself a self-taught programmer.) They are expected to spend the bulk of the time learning on their own. The students are taught very little theory, avoiding computer science altogether."
The damn patent reads like a high level specification of Facebook, and Facebook already had tens of millions of users in 2008. This is new heights of idiocy at the USPTO.
"However if a company like BP and their subcontractors, the Transocean and Halliburton knew that they would be judged and they would have to pay the damages, the clean up costs and if they knew that the government would set up a Class Action Lawsuit on behalf of all the people that the government represents to punish the companies involved for destroying the common resource: the ocean, the coasts, the living creatures in the oceans and on the shores, everything. If they knew that the liabilities could be x100 or x1000 the actual damages, well, you would not need regulators from governments."
It is not sufficient to punish the companies; the individuals running the company also need to be held accountable. Otherwise, the CEO and upper management can just walk away with the wealth that was accumulated during the good times, leaving the company behind to suffer after the disaster. To be effective, the penalties would have to include some combination of prison time and seizing the personal wealth of those responsible.
... and the foreign sale was authorized by the copyright holder, isn't that the first sale?
If the authorized foreign sale doesn't count under US law, the copies made abroad should not get copyright protection when outside the US. The copyright holders should not be able to enjoy this "have your cake and eat it too" situation where they receive copyright protection abroad (under international treaties) while selling it, and then get to block importation into the US by making the foreign sale not count as a first sale.
"If all this tech si so f'ing great, you'd think some company, even a Chinese company, would be rushing to make them, even under patent license because they would corner the market if the panels were cheap and more efficient!"
It's unlikely for a super-efficient solar technology to ever make it to market while the oil companies are so big and powerful. They'll buy up promising solar and other alternative energy companies and patents and then bury the technology so it doesn't interfere with their existing business models. That's why you periodically keep reading of cheaper or more efficient solar panels without anything becoming of it.
Within a few decades it will be proven that neither dark matter nor dark energy exists; they're just hypotheses to fill the gaps between the observed behavior of the universe and our current understanding of the laws of physics.
Once we have sufficiently explored the alternative gravitational theories that don't rely on dark energy or dark matter, and obtained a sufficiently improved grasp of the laws of physics, we'll be able to explain the cosmic observations without resorting to the "voodoo" of dark matter or dark energy.
Sorry, dude. Perhaps there are some 0.01% of software patents that are truly worthy of patent protection. But the other 99.99% of unworthy software patents do far more damage than the tiny set of brilliant useful software patents, so it's better overall to just get rid of all software patents.
I don't trust politicians to be able to reform the patent system to raise the threshold for innovation so that only the worthy 0.01% (or whatever) would be patented. And even if they did, I don't trust the USPTO and politicians to keep things that restrictive, with all the corporate lobbying that goes on (which has been allowed to increase thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling). It's a lot safer to just get rid of all software patents forever.
"Take the piss all you like, the fact is they have the highest gun ownership in Europe and the lowest gun crime."
Yes, but they can't just buy as many guns as they want whenever they want. They are given registered assault rifles with a regulated supply of ammo that is periodically checked by the government. And they are also given military training and discipline along with it. They actually have a well-regulated militia, unlike America.
Egghead seriously sucked when they changed from a brick-and-mortar to a strictly online shop. Their physical shops were great, but they were clueless when it came to running an e-commerce business. I totally believe your story. I also had a bad experience with their online operation, but it was for something cheap and it was eventually resolved in my favor.
You should contact the mods and ask them to mod your "Newegg" rant down to -1 so fewer people will see it.
"Currently, legal immigrant or legal non-immigrant temporary workers who do not have a green card already must have an "employment authorization document", which is a similar card to the proposed--it contains a fingerprint and bar code, and you have to present it to an employer before you can be hired. Just like this current system does not deter employers from hiring illegal immigrants and illegal immigrants from obtaining jobs, the proposed new card won't stop them either. I don't see the point."
The reason why those high-tech green cards and employment authorization cards are ineffective is that citizens don't have to use them. So instead of using a fake green card or employment card, illegal immigrants pretend to be citizens by using something else that is relatively easy to forge, like a fake birth certificate.
If everybody including citizens had to use some form of sophisticated, hard to forge document, that would stop 95% of the illegal workers who are pretending to be legal. But the American people apparently are not willing to pay that price in order to enforce the immigration laws. And while such documents if mandatory for everybody would stop 95% of the pretenders, it still wouldn't stop the employers who knowingly hire illegal workers under the table.
"If you knowingly let infringers make use of your IP so you can sue them when they're worth something, you lose the ability to enforce your patent."
Not entirely. You lose the right to sue for past infringement, but you can still successfully sue for infringement that occurs after you've warned the infringing parties.
"If you think the top level executives make too much, try to start you own company and see how hard it is to even make the minimal wage for yourself and how much you have to bet your life on it up front."
The CEOs and other top executives who are the founders of the company generally much perform better and have less outlandish compensation (relative to performance) than those who got into the position via politicking and connections. Those non-founders who are selected for the position are largely determined to steal value for themselves, not build value for investors.
"The vast majority of the world's livestock farms aren't on land that's suitable for arable farming."
Perhaps that's true if you count the number of individual farms, but definitely not if you count the animals involved. Most farm animals today are NOT fed on grass and bush that's growing on land that is unsuitable for human-edible crops. Most are in big industrial farms and fed on corn and soy and other grains.
"If the entire population of the world went vegan, we'd survive for about a decade."
Nonsense. If the world went vegan, we'd be able to use far less land to feed the same number of people, because we wouldn't be feeding crops to farm animals. Less than 30% of the crops we feed to farm animals is returned to us as an edible product; 60-95% of what we feed them is burned off as calories or turned into inedible or undesirable bodyparts like bone.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. Operating on a bit-by-bit level would be like selling rice by the individual grain, instead of in quantities like 8 oz, 1 pound, 2 pounds, etc.
The hardware can read an entire sector in an instant, just like you can pick up a bag of rice in one shot rather than gathering up individual grains. Then the operating system will piece out what part of the sector it needs, just like you will then scoop out the specific amount of rice you want.
What is going on here is like deciding to increase the minimum bag size from 8 oz to 4 pounds. That makes things more efficient by having to deal with fewer bags, but results in somewhat more waste if your needs don't align with the bag size. However, now that we're dealing with larger and larger quantities (i.e. larger disk drives and files), the waste becomes relatively trivial... nobody cares about 3 lbs of rice being wasted out of a truckload.
Let's say a blues guitarist working for tips in New Orleans pours his heart into an original song and releases the recording for sale via the Internet, but it doesn't make a dime because everyone's listening to rock. Then 14 years later people start to rediscover blues and his song sells millions of copies... is he just shit out of luck? It's not his fault that he was ahead of his time, why should he be punished?"
Yes, he should be shit out of luck. That's what happens to just about everybody who makes a product or service that is not wanted within a short enough time after production. It spoils, or it gets sold off below cost or dumped so it doesn't continue to take up shelf space at the expense of better selling products. Or if it's a whole shop that's producing something nobody wants right now, the shopkeeper ultimately can't pay rent, and gets kicked out, and the business dies. That's not punishment, that's the reality of business and the market.
That seems like a rotator cuff injury, when you can't raise your arm above your head. The fall that broke your arm, or the immobilization of the arm after the injury, may have resulted in your rotator cuff being damaged or atrophied. Go to an orthopedic specialist to check out your shoulder. You may need surgery and/or several months of physiotherapy to repair the damaged rotator cuff muscles/tendons.
Higher-bitrate video or audio is more likely to have hiccups in a live stream when using a slow connection or internet traffic is high. When I view online videos at a site that gives a range of resolutions, sometimes the lower-resolution one looks better because the higher-resolution version gets pixelated as it struggles to maintain the higher data rate.
For this to be a valid comparison, they should have the listeners completely download each track, then listen, so bandwidth hiccups don't influence the result.
"Last I checked the people that used your service the most were your best customers."
When it comes to bandwidth, people who use it the most are the worst, as they consume more of the resource than the average user without paying more to compensate for it. Their best customers are those who only use the Internet once every two days for bandwidth-trivial tasks like checking email.
"You're kidding, right? The ONLY reason there were so many sub-prime mortgages was because the government created them, through regulation. The whole mess was a direct result of the government essentially mandating that lenders give insane loans to people who couldn't possibly afford them."
Nonsense. The regulations for lending in the low income and minority communities never required or encouraged banks to make ridiculous ARMs, zero-down-payment loans, or loans without proof of income. In addition, many of the largest banks involved in the overlending madness were exempt from those regulations.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's pretty typical for any and all contractual obligations over an asset to be tossed in a bankruptcy court."
However, it's not so simple when an asset held by the bankrupt company wasn't really theirs to sell in the first place. Suppose they had a fleet of cars which were leased. If they go bankrupt during the lease, they have to give the cars back, and cannot sell them.
In a sense, the personal information was leased to company; it was never theirs to sell and shouldn't become theirs to sell just because of bankruptcy.
"This is because it's generally assumed that as long as the general algorithm is disclosed, the ordinary artisan is capable of writing the code to implement it without undue experimentation."
But when you look at software patents, they often don't disclose the actual algorithm, they just list a bunch of claims explaining WHAT the program does, without giving you any information about the steps to perform it.
"But for us in the USA, we're cursed with a 3rd-world-quality public school system, so going to college is a necessity if you want to be considered "educated" beyond the level needed to clean toilets."
If you take a look at what they actually study in high school in 3rd world countries, it's often more advanced than in typical US public schools.
It's just that a large percentage of 3rd world kids don't attend school at all at the high school level, because the country simply doesn't have enough high schools, or they attend sporadically because so many parents are just too poor to afford textbooks, transportation and the other costs associated with school.
From the article:
"The program offers concrete, hands-on instruction designed to follow how someone who was self-taught would learn. (The first teacher was himself a self-taught programmer.) They are expected to spend the bulk of the time learning on their own. The students are taught very little theory, avoiding computer science altogether."
Not the type I would hire.
"If Facebook came afterward, then Facebook is not prior art."
The patent was Filed in 2008. Facebook was up and running years before that.
The damn patent reads like a high level specification of Facebook, and Facebook already had tens of millions of users in 2008. This is new heights of idiocy at the USPTO.
"However if a company like BP and their subcontractors, the Transocean and Halliburton knew that they would be judged and they would have to pay the damages, the clean up costs and if they knew that the government would set up a Class Action Lawsuit on behalf of all the people that the government represents to punish the companies involved for destroying the common resource: the ocean, the coasts, the living creatures in the oceans and on the shores, everything. If they knew that the liabilities could be x100 or x1000 the actual damages, well, you would not need regulators from governments."
It is not sufficient to punish the companies; the individuals running the company also need to be held accountable. Otherwise, the CEO and upper management can just walk away with the wealth that was accumulated during the good times, leaving the company behind to suffer after the disaster. To be effective, the penalties would have to include some combination of prison time and seizing the personal wealth of those responsible.
... and the foreign sale was authorized by the copyright holder, isn't that the first sale?
If the authorized foreign sale doesn't count under US law, the copies made abroad should not get copyright protection when outside the US. The copyright holders should not be able to enjoy this "have your cake and eat it too" situation where they receive copyright protection abroad (under international treaties) while selling it, and then get to block importation into the US by making the foreign sale not count as a first sale.
"If all this tech si so f'ing great, you'd think some company, even a Chinese company, would be rushing to make them, even under patent license because they would corner the market if the panels were cheap and more efficient!"
It's unlikely for a super-efficient solar technology to ever make it to market while the oil companies are so big and powerful. They'll buy up promising solar and other alternative energy companies and patents and then bury the technology so it doesn't interfere with their existing business models. That's why you periodically keep reading of cheaper or more efficient solar panels without anything becoming of it.
Within a few decades it will be proven that neither dark matter nor dark energy exists; they're just hypotheses to fill the gaps between the observed behavior of the universe and our current understanding of the laws of physics.
Once we have sufficiently explored the alternative gravitational theories that don't rely on dark energy or dark matter, and obtained a sufficiently improved grasp of the laws of physics, we'll be able to explain the cosmic observations without resorting to the "voodoo" of dark matter or dark energy.
Sorry, dude. Perhaps there are some 0.01% of software patents that are truly worthy of patent protection. But the other 99.99% of unworthy software patents do far more damage than the tiny set of brilliant useful software patents, so it's better overall to just get rid of all software patents.
I don't trust politicians to be able to reform the patent system to raise the threshold for innovation so that only the worthy 0.01% (or whatever) would be patented. And even if they did, I don't trust the USPTO and politicians to keep things that restrictive, with all the corporate lobbying that goes on (which has been allowed to increase thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling). It's a lot safer to just get rid of all software patents forever.
"Take the piss all you like, the fact is they have the highest gun ownership in Europe and the lowest gun crime."
Yes, but they can't just buy as many guns as they want whenever they want. They are given registered assault rifles with a regulated supply of ammo that is periodically checked by the government. And they are also given military training and discipline along with it. They actually have a well-regulated militia, unlike America.
Egghead seriously sucked when they changed from a brick-and-mortar to a strictly online shop. Their physical shops were great, but they were clueless when it came to running an e-commerce business. I totally believe your story. I also had a bad experience with their online operation, but it was for something cheap and it was eventually resolved in my favor.
You should contact the mods and ask them to mod your "Newegg" rant down to -1 so fewer people will see it.
"Currently, legal immigrant or legal non-immigrant temporary workers who do not have a green card already must have an "employment authorization document", which is a similar card to the proposed--it contains a fingerprint and bar code, and you have to present it to an employer before you can be hired. Just like this current system does not deter employers from hiring illegal immigrants and illegal immigrants from obtaining jobs, the proposed new card won't stop them either. I don't see the point."
The reason why those high-tech green cards and employment authorization cards are ineffective is that citizens don't have to use them. So instead of using a fake green card or employment card, illegal immigrants pretend to be citizens by using something else that is relatively easy to forge, like a fake birth certificate.
If everybody including citizens had to use some form of sophisticated, hard to forge document, that would stop 95% of the illegal workers who are pretending to be legal. But the American people apparently are not willing to pay that price in order to enforce the immigration laws. And while such documents if mandatory for everybody would stop 95% of the pretenders, it still wouldn't stop the employers who knowingly hire illegal workers under the table.
"If you knowingly let infringers make use of your IP so you can sue them when they're worth something, you lose the ability to enforce your patent."
Not entirely. You lose the right to sue for past infringement, but you can still successfully sue for infringement that occurs after you've warned the infringing parties.
"If you think the top level executives make too much, try to start you own company and see how hard it is to even make the minimal wage for yourself and how much you have to bet your life on it up front."
The CEOs and other top executives who are the founders of the company generally much perform better and have less outlandish compensation (relative to performance) than those who got into the position via politicking and connections. Those non-founders who are selected for the position are largely determined to steal value for themselves, not build value for investors.
"The vast majority of the world's livestock farms aren't on land that's suitable for arable farming."
Perhaps that's true if you count the number of individual farms, but definitely not if you count the animals involved. Most farm animals today are NOT fed on grass and bush that's growing on land that is unsuitable for human-edible crops. Most are in big industrial farms and fed on corn and soy and other grains.
"If the entire population of the world went vegan, we'd survive for about a decade."
Nonsense. If the world went vegan, we'd be able to use far less land to feed the same number of people, because we wouldn't be feeding crops to farm animals. Less than 30% of the crops we feed to farm animals is returned to us as an edible product; 60-95% of what we feed them is burned off as calories or turned into inedible or undesirable bodyparts like bone.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, no. Operating on a bit-by-bit level would be like selling rice by the individual grain, instead of in quantities like 8 oz, 1 pound, 2 pounds, etc.
The hardware can read an entire sector in an instant, just like you can pick up a bag of rice in one shot rather than gathering up individual grains. Then the operating system will piece out what part of the sector it needs, just like you will then scoop out the specific amount of rice you want.
What is going on here is like deciding to increase the minimum bag size from 8 oz to 4 pounds. That makes things more efficient by having to deal with fewer bags, but results in somewhat more waste if your needs don't align with the bag size. However, now that we're dealing with larger and larger quantities (i.e. larger disk drives and files), the waste becomes relatively trivial ... nobody cares about 3 lbs of rice being wasted out of a truckload.
Let's say a blues guitarist working for tips in New Orleans pours his heart into an original song and releases the recording for sale via the Internet, but it doesn't make a dime because everyone's listening to rock. Then 14 years later people start to rediscover blues and his song sells millions of copies ... is he just shit out of luck? It's not his fault that he was ahead of his time, why should he be punished?"
Yes, he should be shit out of luck. That's what happens to just about everybody who makes a product or service that is not wanted within a short enough time after production. It spoils, or it gets sold off below cost or dumped so it doesn't continue to take up shelf space at the expense of better selling products. Or if it's a whole shop that's producing something nobody wants right now, the shopkeeper ultimately can't pay rent, and gets kicked out, and the business dies. That's not punishment, that's the reality of business and the market.
That seems like a rotator cuff injury, when you can't raise your arm above your head. The fall that broke your arm, or the immobilization of the arm after the injury, may have resulted in your rotator cuff being damaged or atrophied. Go to an orthopedic specialist to check out your shoulder. You may need surgery and/or several months of physiotherapy to repair the damaged rotator cuff muscles/tendons.
Higher-bitrate video or audio is more likely to have hiccups in a live stream when using a slow connection or internet traffic is high. When I view online videos at a site that gives a range of resolutions, sometimes the lower-resolution one looks better because the higher-resolution version gets pixelated as it struggles to maintain the higher data rate.
For this to be a valid comparison, they should have the listeners completely download each track, then listen, so bandwidth hiccups don't influence the result.
Then use the money to buy yourself another laptop, so you can use it exclusively for personal stuff and the company-reimbursed one for work purposes.
"Last I checked the people that used your service the most were your best customers."
When it comes to bandwidth, people who use it the most are the worst, as they consume more of the resource than the average user without paying more to compensate for it. Their best customers are those who only use the Internet once every two days for bandwidth-trivial tasks like checking email.
"You're kidding, right? The ONLY reason there were so many sub-prime mortgages was because the government created them, through regulation. The whole mess was a direct result of the government essentially mandating that lenders give insane loans to people who couldn't possibly afford them."
Nonsense. The regulations for lending in the low income and minority communities never required or encouraged banks to make ridiculous ARMs, zero-down-payment loans, or loans without proof of income. In addition, many of the largest banks involved in the overlending madness were exempt from those regulations.