They pick this particular court in Texas because the judges there have been shown to be more friendly towards the patent holder, regardless of if they hold a ridiculous patent or not. It's called venue shopping, and you better believe that every single company does it. Much like how there are shitloads of companies that are incorporated in Delaware, even though they probably don't have a single Delaware employee - corporate law in Delaware is far more friendly to the company than where they actually are.
Public perception of a company only works when they have an actual product to sell. With patent trolls, the products are the lawsuits, and lawyers don't give two shits about public perception in the media.
Before spouting off nonsense and idiocy, please inform yourself on the workings of the Senate, or at least some basic information on which Senators sit on which committees. For example, when you specifically cite Senator Sanders as voting for this bill, you should probably not just make that up as that could be considered to be libel. To refute your absolutely false claim, I present you with the web site for the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which prominently features the roster of Senators that sit on that committee, and thus vote to advance a bill for the full Senate to vote on. Please note that Senator Sanders is not among them, and also please note that this bill has not been debated on the Senate floor, much less voted to end debate, much less voted on final passage.
Thank you, go take a god damn civics class, and don't post on anything happening in the Congress again until you do.
Do you really think that those things aren't going to happen? Have you seen anything in the post- USA PATRIOT Act Congressional history that says that this won't become law except for the loud noises made from a few 'fringe' Senators that actually give a damn about the Bill of Rights?
Well, when you arbitrarily say that details don't matter, then yeah, okay. However, in my world (and everyone else's), details DO matter, and a bluetooth headset just isn't capable of pulling anywhere close to the kind of load necessary to make the battery explode without burning out other components along the way. As it turns out, designed wattage matters when it comes to this kind of thing.
Try replacing the battery with a piece of shit from China that is unsafe to begin with. Then put a massive resistive load on it (like a coil designed to flash liquid into vapor instantly) which draws far more amperage per unit time than can safely be drawn from that piece of shit battery.
It's a pretty good recipe for how to make something go "bang".
Don't mix up ethylene glycol with propylene glycol. Ethylene glycol is used as de-icing fluid and anitfreeze in your car's radiator, and is rather toxic. Propylene glycol is used as a food additive / preservative. I wouldn't want to breathe either of them into my lungs.
Or people will just buy from somewhere outside the FDA's jurisdiction and have it shipped in. Good luck checking millions of UPS and FedEx packages for e-cig parts that look just like every other god damn electronic parts ever.
If a bluetooth headset pulls that kind of amperage out of a battery, then it's clearly a very shitty bluetooth headset and would never pass UL, and very likely would never be sold.
Garbage lithium batteries + huge electrical load + proximity of face = blown up face. Why is this hard to understand?
And so this is where globalism triumphs: assemble your own from parts easily found online and screwed together. Let's see the FDA do something about that.
How is it theft if you are voluntarily purchasing a product that bears a tax? If you don't like paying taxes on certain products, don't buy those products. It's not like it's a huge tightly-held secret that tobacco products have the shit taxed out of them by each and every jurisdiction that can lay claim to the sale.
That might possibly be the dumbest argument against tobacco taxes ever.
They buy Seagate because Seagate will allow them to do volume purchases.
It's a bit easier to go to your local Best Buy and get one or two drives of whatever manufacturer you want then to buy 10,000 drives in a single order. The article specifically says that WD and Toshiba haven't been able to get that done, where Hitachi and Seagate have.
Honestly, what is the difference between what Wendy's is doing here, and what hundreds of pizza places did with their web / app ordering? Instead of telling a person what I want who puts the order in, I put the order in myself.
This is a natural fit for some form of automation, and was inevitable regardless of mandatory wage increase.
The math is quite simple. If the automation of the job is made cheaper than employing someone to do the same job, the company will choose the automation just about every time.
Want to save people's jobs? Get those people to do them better than a machine can, or cheaper than a machine can.
Tell that to Jack-in-the-Box which just about failed because of the incredibly terrible mishandling of a food-borne illness situation, which is now a widely used lesson in why accountability matters. As it turns out, when those customers go across the street, and it happens with enough customers, it means shutting restaurants.
You get a job fixing the automation machines when they inevitably shit the bed?
Getting closer to this story - have you ever seen a customer-proof computer with software that has exactly zero bugs? You already know these kiosks will be running some variant of Windows.
1. Pass some laws raising labor costs to the point of companies automating low-skill positions and put a bunch of people out of work 2. Unemployment rises due to #1 3. Create a bunch of make-work government jobs in order to deal with #2 4. Pass some more laws raising taxes to pay for #3, because reality. 5. Cost of living goes up because businesses pass on the additional expenses of #1 and #4 to their customers. 6. The new wage created by #1 is no longer a 'living wage' for the least skilled jobs in the economy, and your eyes wander back to step 1.
Of course this is incredibly simplified, but the answer is absolutely not more make-work government jobs. I'd rather that the government gives some form of tuition assistance in order for people displaced by the inevitable falling cost of automation versus the rise in mandated minimum wage, so that they can get better jobs and create more tax base, which pays back that tuition assistance over the next 30 years of successful gainful employment that is far above the minimum wage.
He's not telling them they are making too much money. He's telling them that due to outside regulation, keeping them around is more expensive than automating the job. You even nailed the 'why' when you said that Wendy's doesn't exactly cater to the wealthy - they need to keep the average selling price down, so they can continue to exist.
What we are seeing is the inevitable consequence of increases in levels of technology, and outside regulation forcing wages up on jobs that have traditionally not been viewed as a career position, but rather a stepping stone for someone starting out in the labor market. The company is going to do what is necessary to keep sales up and expenses down, and some governmental entity just made automation cheaper than people. The consequence of that shift is that those people are free to look for higher paying opportunities elsewhere.
The upside: we've had self check-out in supermarkets for some time now, and there's still plenty of standard check lanes open any time I go to the store, because that shitty scan robot isn't fast enough for anything but a few items, and doesn't give a level of customer service that you can get from another person. The market will decide which model it likes better - a computer that you place your own order on and then use SamdroidplePay, or talking to a person who can be friendly and courteous at the going regulated market wage, and not enraging if you have the gall to pay with cash, because we still haven't figured out a machine that accepts cash properly.
TL;DR: All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. Are you similarly pissed off that your car wasn't hand-welded together by some guy named Burt that is still staggering around from pounding cans of Pabst the night before?
I'm sure that someone looking to build a rail system in central California absolutely did not take anything seismic into their design, because earthquakes are so rare there.
Slashdot Mirror
We are also curious and would love an answer.
Sincerely,
The FBI
They pick this particular court in Texas because the judges there have been shown to be more friendly towards the patent holder, regardless of if they hold a ridiculous patent or not. It's called venue shopping, and you better believe that every single company does it. Much like how there are shitloads of companies that are incorporated in Delaware, even though they probably don't have a single Delaware employee - corporate law in Delaware is far more friendly to the company than where they actually are.
Public perception of a company only works when they have an actual product to sell. With patent trolls, the products are the lawsuits, and lawyers don't give two shits about public perception in the media.
Dear Dipshit:
Before spouting off nonsense and idiocy, please inform yourself on the workings of the Senate, or at least some basic information on which Senators sit on which committees. For example, when you specifically cite Senator Sanders as voting for this bill, you should probably not just make that up as that could be considered to be libel. To refute your absolutely false claim, I present you with the web site for the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which prominently features the roster of Senators that sit on that committee, and thus vote to advance a bill for the full Senate to vote on. Please note that Senator Sanders is not among them, and also please note that this bill has not been debated on the Senate floor, much less voted to end debate, much less voted on final passage.
Thank you, go take a god damn civics class, and don't post on anything happening in the Congress again until you do.
Do you really think that those things aren't going to happen? Have you seen anything in the post- USA PATRIOT Act Congressional history that says that this won't become law except for the loud noises made from a few 'fringe' Senators that actually give a damn about the Bill of Rights?
Well, when you arbitrarily say that details don't matter, then yeah, okay. However, in my world (and everyone else's), details DO matter, and a bluetooth headset just isn't capable of pulling anywhere close to the kind of load necessary to make the battery explode without burning out other components along the way. As it turns out, designed wattage matters when it comes to this kind of thing.
"Genius"
A flashlight is quite a different beast from a resistive coil meant to flash liquid into vapor.
Try replacing the battery with a piece of shit from China that is unsafe to begin with. Then put a massive resistive load on it (like a coil designed to flash liquid into vapor instantly) which draws far more amperage per unit time than can safely be drawn from that piece of shit battery.
It's a pretty good recipe for how to make something go "bang".
Don't mix up ethylene glycol with propylene glycol. Ethylene glycol is used as de-icing fluid and anitfreeze in your car's radiator, and is rather toxic. Propylene glycol is used as a food additive / preservative. I wouldn't want to breathe either of them into my lungs.
Or people will just buy from somewhere outside the FDA's jurisdiction and have it shipped in. Good luck checking millions of UPS and FedEx packages for e-cig parts that look just like every other god damn electronic parts ever.
If a bluetooth headset pulls that kind of amperage out of a battery, then it's clearly a very shitty bluetooth headset and would never pass UL, and very likely would never be sold.
Garbage lithium batteries + huge electrical load + proximity of face = blown up face. Why is this hard to understand?
And so this is where globalism triumphs: assemble your own from parts easily found online and screwed together. Let's see the FDA do something about that.
How is it theft if you are voluntarily purchasing a product that bears a tax? If you don't like paying taxes on certain products, don't buy those products. It's not like it's a huge tightly-held secret that tobacco products have the shit taxed out of them by each and every jurisdiction that can lay claim to the sale.
That might possibly be the dumbest argument against tobacco taxes ever.
They buy Seagate because Seagate will allow them to do volume purchases.
It's a bit easier to go to your local Best Buy and get one or two drives of whatever manufacturer you want then to buy 10,000 drives in a single order. The article specifically says that WD and Toshiba haven't been able to get that done, where Hitachi and Seagate have.
They're already selling me that thing, and giving me a tool to tell my ISP that they are interfering with that sale.
Netflix wins, I win, the ISP loses through their customer base having another data point to how they are being screwed. I see no problem with this.
Honestly, what is the difference between what Wendy's is doing here, and what hundreds of pizza places did with their web / app ordering? Instead of telling a person what I want who puts the order in, I put the order in myself.
This is a natural fit for some form of automation, and was inevitable regardless of mandatory wage increase.
The math is quite simple. If the automation of the job is made cheaper than employing someone to do the same job, the company will choose the automation just about every time.
Want to save people's jobs? Get those people to do them better than a machine can, or cheaper than a machine can.
You hit the double-word-score if the domestic machine replacements are built with cheaper labor overseas!
Well, if he is gainfully employed in repairing automated systems, all of us would be bothered if he gets replaced. End times would be upon us.
Tell that to Jack-in-the-Box which just about failed because of the incredibly terrible mishandling of a food-borne illness situation, which is now a widely used lesson in why accountability matters. As it turns out, when those customers go across the street, and it happens with enough customers, it means shutting restaurants.
You get a job fixing the automation machines when they inevitably shit the bed?
Getting closer to this story - have you ever seen a customer-proof computer with software that has exactly zero bugs? You already know these kiosks will be running some variant of Windows.
So let me get this straight:
1. Pass some laws raising labor costs to the point of companies automating low-skill positions and put a bunch of people out of work
2. Unemployment rises due to #1
3. Create a bunch of make-work government jobs in order to deal with #2
4. Pass some more laws raising taxes to pay for #3, because reality.
5. Cost of living goes up because businesses pass on the additional expenses of #1 and #4 to their customers.
6. The new wage created by #1 is no longer a 'living wage' for the least skilled jobs in the economy, and your eyes wander back to step 1.
Of course this is incredibly simplified, but the answer is absolutely not more make-work government jobs. I'd rather that the government gives some form of tuition assistance in order for people displaced by the inevitable falling cost of automation versus the rise in mandated minimum wage, so that they can get better jobs and create more tax base, which pays back that tuition assistance over the next 30 years of successful gainful employment that is far above the minimum wage.
You have the general premise wrong.
He's not telling them they are making too much money. He's telling them that due to outside regulation, keeping them around is more expensive than automating the job. You even nailed the 'why' when you said that Wendy's doesn't exactly cater to the wealthy - they need to keep the average selling price down, so they can continue to exist.
What we are seeing is the inevitable consequence of increases in levels of technology, and outside regulation forcing wages up on jobs that have traditionally not been viewed as a career position, but rather a stepping stone for someone starting out in the labor market. The company is going to do what is necessary to keep sales up and expenses down, and some governmental entity just made automation cheaper than people. The consequence of that shift is that those people are free to look for higher paying opportunities elsewhere.
The upside: we've had self check-out in supermarkets for some time now, and there's still plenty of standard check lanes open any time I go to the store, because that shitty scan robot isn't fast enough for anything but a few items, and doesn't give a level of customer service that you can get from another person. The market will decide which model it likes better - a computer that you place your own order on and then use SamdroidplePay, or talking to a person who can be friendly and courteous at the going regulated market wage, and not enraging if you have the gall to pay with cash, because we still haven't figured out a machine that accepts cash properly.
TL;DR: All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. Are you similarly pissed off that your car wasn't hand-welded together by some guy named Burt that is still staggering around from pounding cans of Pabst the night before?
I'm sure that someone looking to build a rail system in central California absolutely did not take anything seismic into their design, because earthquakes are so rare there.
You do know that UCLA is a major research institution, and a premier medical school, right?
Why does a source have to come from government, and not peer-reviewed medical journals?