Tired of companies inventing something great, then they stop innovating and instead sink all their money into lawyers and sue sue sue. Die Die Die.
Actually, it's when they're dying that they sue, sue, sue.
When a tech company is doing well, their money is better spent innovating and staying ahead of the pack. When they're getting behind, it's still better spent on getting ahead.
During this period patent portflios are mostly used defensively against other company's suits. Find some patents in the portfolio the other guys can be accused of infringing and counter-sue. Then settle for a cross-licensing agreement, and maybe a true-up payment if one side has a bigger pile of relevant patents.
But when they're dying, they're desperate. That's when they go through their portfolio and sue anybody they might be able to make money from.
(Been there, dealt with that: Northern Telecom was on the ropes. They'd been a big player in the design of SONNET and had a lot of patents on it. So they went after anybody with patents that looked like they were doing something SONNET-related that might infringe on one of theirs. So I and my co-architect got to spend a few weeks writing, for our lawyers, a set of analyses of why each of several NT patents didn't cover the stuff in our patents, or other chunks of the chips we'd designed that looked like they just MUST have an infringing component. B-b )
A thing to remember about High Tech is that there is enormous value added.
As a result, company management can be off-the-wall-fruitcakes, following or instituting management fads and perpetrating many horrible management pathologies, yet still have enough profit left that the company can go on for years before dying, or even thrive.
Then, even if they take it down (or better yet, bail out just before their house of cards collapses), or a competitor with less pathology eats their lunch, failure in High Tech is so often not the fault of the failing that it's not a black mark. Unless how they screwed up is SO visible that it becomes a scandal (or sometimes even if it is) they can then use their experience as a qualification credit when going for their next job, beat out less pathological but more junior applicants, apply the same or even bigger and better pathologies to another, larger, company, and take it down, too. Iterate for a while and you have a successful career, are rich from cashed-in stock options, and leave a trail of devastation as a legacy.
What's true for upper management goes double for middle management and functionaries. They get to inherit both the pathologies of those above them and create more or follow fads of their own. As lower-ranking they're expected to be less competent and their foul-ups are not the subject of major business-press scandal.
Minsky divided the first three decades of computer science education into three periods of about a decade each:
1) Computer science was too new. Colleges had no idea what to teach, so they taught the wrong stuff. (Like everybody was taught how to WRITE a compiler.) A four-year degree was actually a handicap for getting a job in industry: It meant you had more that you had to UN-learn before you could learn the stuff you actually needed to know to be useful. The trick was to go ALMOST to a degree (to get access to the tools to learn and the useful skills), then get a job and drop out.
2) Colleges figured out enough about what was really needed that going all the way to a four-year degree actually made you more useful than not.
3) Colleges got into teaching a bunch of computer-science methodology fads and the degree became a slight handicap again.
There have been a few more decades since then, and a lot more fads, both in computer science and in management. About a decade back, for instance, a degree was a mandatory check-box, and no matter how experienced you were, how many patents you had, who you knew, or how hard the people running the actual department were crying for you to be hired, you couldn't get HR to process your paper without having the sheepskin, checking the box, and filling in the adjacent slot with the name of one of a handful of big-name schools.
On one hand some big-name companies are again hiring by some measure of skill and not requiring degrees, a practice that might spread. (Especially if H1Bs get restricted.) On the other, we've got the "email provider is A SIGN" fad in H.R. circles. So here we go again.
On the other hand, when support is you main income then you'll do everything you can to make your software complicated and hard to use..
Actually you'll make it easy enough to use to get them hooked before it starts to bite them, and keep the support costs low enough to be perceived as cheaper than switching and incurring learning-curve costs, but high enough to gouge them.
This is the same sort of pricing strategy as that of classic manufactured goods.
Big pharma is only able to overcharge because the FDA creates a virtual monopoly, through its costly and lengthy process at the end of which very few companies are allowed to make a drug.
Remove the "virtual" and "costly and lengthly", substitute "no other" for "very few", and you've described the relevant characteristics of copyright. So it looks to me like the grandfather post is non-hooey.
Try to make an Epi-pen and sell it, it only costs like $30 to make [and patents have expired]
Aside: There is now an approved generic Epi-pen at a more reasonable price. The timing looks like the manufacturer started the development and approval process about the day the price-gouger announced the price hike. The inisible hand strikes as usual, the FDA approval process just delayed it.
I totally agree with the bulk of your post. But I agree completely with its predecessor.
Prices are controlled in many cases by the whims of the copyright owners.
Prices are ALWAYS controlled by the whim of the seller.
The ones still in business, however, tend to adjust them according to what they perceive makes them the most money (and are limited to those who guess well enough to make more than the spend, or haven't been in business long enough to have spent all they could raise, or are obtaining some other benefit that keeps them willing to continue).
Combine that with the willingness to pay of the crowd of people who want the product enough to even think about obtaining it, and you get the curves that economists make their living analyzing.
... the line between free speech, and being uncomfortable about something is very hard to draw.
THAT line is not hard AT ALL. The right to free speech completely trumps any desire to be protected against discomforting ideas and images.
There is an explicit constitutional right to free speech. The Supreme Court recognizes that it constitutes a complete ban on government action to even have a "chilling effect" on it, and has incorporated it against the States and all their components and subdivisions, which includes police and the officers and employees of public schools.
Cohen was Trump's lawyer. EVERYTHING that happened is on Cohen. Trump was acting on the advice of his lawyer no matter what.
Yep.
But there's nothing wrong with defence in depth, pleading both:
1) It's not a crime (no matter WHAT Cohen signed to get them to stop prosecuting him on taxes and lying to lenders.)
2) I did it on the advice of my attorney, whom I was paying to tell me what was legal and handle these things in a legal manner. So I had no intent to break any laws and believed at the time this was all legal.
On page 1 I see:
- Tax evasion
- Lying to investigators.
- Making improper use of corporate money. The first two are only on Cohen. If The Donald thought Cohen was paying with his (Trump's) personal money the third is also only on Cohen.
Campaign contributions are on page 2, and the argument there is that if it wasn't paid by the campaign and is something he'd have paid anyway for reasons other than his run for president, it's not a campaign activity. (Imagine if the government tried to interpret a rich candidate's charitable donations as excessive campaign spending, because they make him look good to voters. It's the same argument.)
Investigators also managed to reconstruct at least 16 pages of physically shredded documents.
WAIT just a minute here...
I was under the impression that the Supreme Court had ruled that intact papers discarded in the trash could be used as evidence, but discarded shreds needed a warrant - BEFORE their seizure - because the person discarding shredded documents had an expectation of privacy.
Am I mistaken? Did they get a warrant before the papers were shredded and discarded (i.e. he was destroying evidence?) Did he shred them and then hang on to the shreds? If not, they're "Fruit of the Poisoned Tree".
(If I'm right, I'd like to see how the Supremes ruled if someone made the same argument about encrypted phone calls. The analogous ruling might protect against seizing logs of encrypted traffic without a before-the-call warrant, breaking the "no expectation of privacy in data stored with a third party" argument for encrypted calls. B-) )
I was also under the impression that such "Fruit" not only can't be used as trial evidence, but can't be used to develop leads without tainting them as well. (Cops routinely work around this by "calling in an anonymous tip" from the next desk over. But that won't work if they ADMIT they got the lead by improper behavior.) Something like this could run like wildfire through the whole investigation's findings, making it useless in court and reducing it to prosecutorial harassment.
Also: What kind of idiot uses a strip-shredder for anything he really wants to keep secret? Have they developed a way to reassemble crosscut shreads? If so, how do they avoid the "ransom note assembled from cut out newspaper letters" risk of reassembling fine shreads into somethig that looks coherent but is nothing like the original.
(Not that any of this matters for Cohen. He already pled guilty.)
Stuff like this is part of why there used to be a big separation between criminal investigation and counterintelligence work. You really don't want to let a spy keep spying if you can identify him and stop him using investigative techniques (short of torture) that would bring a criminal case down in flames.
I agree with everything you said up until that. Because you're tarring the entire population of the United States for what our ruling class has done, and what many of us have fought for our entire lives.
That kind of sloppy thinking - blaming the victims, lumping them with their victimizers, and then attacking the group - is what leads to wars, and to the very situations that empower those rulers to create and operate those agencies and perform those operations of which you rightly complain.
It's clear that you're not in the U.S. So let me clue you in to something. If you're getting your idea of what's going on here from the mainstream media - even your own - you have NO IDEA what's really going on here. The mainstream media is a monolith propaganda organization for one of the two ruling factions, and this became obvious to everybody who didn't already know it during the last presidential election cycle. See Wikileaks. (And guess why they're now trying to claim that Wikileaks was part of a Russian conspracy.)
The bulk of the U.S. ruled population, in its many varied groups, has been becoming fed up with both halves of the established ruling class and the bureaucracy and "intelligence" agencies (what is now being called the "deep state"). If you think they're oppressing you, what do you think they're doing to us? (They just need their cattle happy and confused enough to not stampede and be milked until slaughter, to keep them in resources.)
That was a big driver behind Trump's out-of-apparently-nowhere election - against the quintessential instance of a corrupt establishment's chieftain. It was the biggest - for many of us the only - pry-bar we could apply.
What do you expect us to do? Levitate the Pentagon? Attack the spooks with guns and butter?
I've made a bunch of Gray-Hoverman style antennas using foam board and foil tape (indoor use only, obviously). These pick up everything in my area and cost less than $5 each.
I made one out of a piece of wood, six screws, some leftover # 14 wire from a house rewiring project, and a balun (also lying about).
The townhouse is within about a mile of the east end of the Dumbarton in silicon valley. Pretty much ALL the digital signals the FCC says are detectable in my area are on on of three towers: North San Jose on a hilltop overlooking the bay (and a naked-eye object from my front yard), Sutro Tower near the Castro in San Francisco, and one to the east, just over the hills (near Walnut Creek if I recall correctly)
Left off the reflector, since the SF and SJ towers are almost exactly opposite directions at my site. No reflector means I hit them both at about 3dB down from what I'd get from just one with the reflector present.
Did I need to put it on the roof? In the attic? Heck, no. I stood it up it behind the TV -and-audio cabinet on the ground floor of a two-story house. It works just fine right through the wall, insulation, orchard, neighbors' houses, etc. (Also through the TV console to hit San Francisco.) AND it gets the signals from the one over-the-hill in the middle. (Didn't really expect that.)
In fact the only thing it DOESN'T get is the last analog TV signal, a low-power channel-6 station south of San Jose, run by a church (mainly to broadcast their services to their shutins, from what I hear).
For those familiar with analog TV, the channel 6 FM audio carrier is just below the FM band, and many older FM radios will pick it up just fine. That's probably why they didn't go digital.
The Gray-Hoverman is a great (and open source!) design. And while digital TV doesn't carry quite as far as analog (because it suddenly dies when the signal-to-noise ratio overcomes the forward error correction), when you CAN get it it is either just perfect, or (if on the ragged edge) has the occasional freeze, while analog would be "receivable" but horribly corrupted by multipath ghosting and "snow" from noise.
Ice on the lunar surface... could also be due to solar winds -- energetically charged ions emanating from the sun -- bombarding the Moon's surface to cause the chemical reactions needed to make frozen water.
Oh, RIGHT!
Rocks are generally metallic oxides. Solar winds are mostly high-energy protons - hydrogen nuclei. Hit a rock molecule with one, hang a hydrogen off one of the oxygen nuclei, turning it into a hydroxyl group. Hit the hydroxyl again and you knock off. It grabs that or another nearby proton and now you've got a water molecule in a near-moon orbit that intresects its surface.
A lot of 'em are pointed away - and have more than escape velocity. Bye-bye. Others bounce away (at more than escape velocity) before they get slowed down by one or more collisions with surface features (to below escape velocity). But some end up losing enough momentum to hang around and eventually condense out on a cryogenically-cold shadowed side of a rock or crater wall. Frost!
One of those things that are obvious in hindsight.
But it isn't always easy to say precisely how much we need,... Vitamin toxicity is a real thing,... [D dietary need] varies based on a number of factors, including personal factors... Though it is clear we need good nutrition, as a culture we seem to be going overboard.
Among the personal factors are issues with ageing (affecting things like synthesis and absorption) and exposure to light.
In addition to both the well-known and severe deficiency diseases and a number of lesser ones, overdosing can cause a number of problems: One of them being too-early calcification of a cracked or broken bone in the process of self-repair.
When I smashed the end of my humerus through my scapula in a bicycle accident, I asked the orthopaedist about using some nutritional (over-)supplementation to encourage healing. He said the bulk of them (E and C to discourage scarring and the latter encourage collagen generation - the first step in a bone break repair, Arginine and Ornithine on an empty stomach at bedtime to release GHRH) would just produce "expensive urine" so go ahead if I felt like it, but to NOT supplement with D other than drinking milk (which I could do) - which had entirely enough thanks to mandated fortification.
With lots of individual variation in the paths to the blood level of the Ds and a lack of an adequate regulatory pathway, (so you can't predict it from things like diet, age, sun exposure, etc.) you need to measure to tell what that level is. With both over- and under-dosing producing really nasty diseases with no symptoms until it's too late to do anything to reverse the damage, it's a really good idea to get it tested and adjust supplemtation to put it into that happy medium between the too-much and too-little pathologies.
Now whether the blood levels recommended by this guy ARE that happy medium is another can of worms. But my GP/cardiologist is onboard with it and prescribed both testing and adjusting supplementation. (Cardiologists are careful about calcium metabolism, as the calcification of plaques is a major factor in circulatory diseases.)
Does Stanford University need to pay for the sign to be there? Are they going to build something right on top of it with no possibility of that something being somewhere else?
No clue.
My wife's a historian and we love to look at the old stuff - ghost towns, historic structures, "old roads" where newer highway alignments or freeway bypasses carry the current traffic, etc.
But we realize that it costs to keep this stuff in repair, and that keeping it all around for posterity would mean posterity would have a shortage of resources, because the whole world, including all the valuable and useful stuff, would be locked up and turned into previous generatons' attics.
The Ampex sign was sowing its age - big time - for the last couple decades. With nobody willing to pay for its preservation and restoration - including paying the current owners for taking its value from them - it doesn't get preserved. Sad, but real-world.
People care about what other people care about enough to PAY for.
How much are YOU willing to pay Stanford University to keep the sign up? Do you have ANY IDEA what the cost of land in Silicon Valley is?
The Ampex operation there is gone. The site is now one of the major multi-spcialized-clinic complexes of the Stanford Hospital. (The sleep clinic, where I had my severe sleep apnea diagnosed and treated, is one of them.) What are they expected to do if they need more room to treat more sick people?
My Signia hearing aids cost about $5000 and that is certainly outrageous.
There's also the matter of economy of scale. A hearing aid chip is an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) and a complex, multicore, one at that.
I've been on several such projects. As of a few years ago the non-recurring expenses of building one paid to the fab was over a million bux, and the engineering team was much more.
And if you made ANY mistakes that required a "spin" it was anywhere from about half that (if you could fix it by adjusting some metal layers to change the hookup and maybe wire up extra gates you'd left lying around in the sea of "glue logic" just for that purpose) to the full price all over again. So you spent a LOT of engineering and server-farm time with costly licensed software to simulate the HELL out of it.
Now that engineering cost gets spread across the sales of all the chips you sell. If it's a consumer chip that goes into something nearly everybody with the money to do it buys, and you end up with a two-digit percentage of the world market, you might spread it so thin that the chip sells for less than a buck over the cost of manufacturing (and that gets driven down because there's so MANY built that the manufacturing batches are large and the setup cost also gets diluted.)
But if you have to spread it over a few thousand or tens-of-thousands of customers, you could easily have one or more thousands of bucks PER CHIP of engineering costs that the customer has to cover to keep your operation afloat.
Need to know if there are any cops around for your illegal business? Don't worry, you can just setup a wifi scanner on your phone to alert you when a cop's camera comes within range!
That also works with some of those "smart gun" systems the gun controllers try to foist on the public, to "keep the gun from being used by anyone but the owner".
Of course what's more fun (for the crookies) is to jam / DoS them, so the guns don't work for the cops, either. (Just like they fail when the batteries run down and the like.)
Hint: There's already enough that can go wrong with a gun and keep it from working, without adding more failure modes. When your life depends on it and you pull that trigger, it's supposed to go "bang".
The best quartz watch I had lost a little less than a second a month. Then I got too greedy and killed the golden goose - tried adjusting the quartz timing mechanism myself. After that I could never get it below 2 seconds of drift per month. What I didn't realize until it was too late was that as the error gets smaller, you have to wait longer between each adjustment (weeks) to determine if you had improved it or overshot.
Which is why, if you want to trim a watch crystal, you use a frequency counter against the 32,768 oscillator output. One second per month is one cycle per three seconds of error, so you can get a measurement better than that in a few seconds.
And you trim the frequency counter's reference by similarly using a radio to hear the "beat" of its reference oscillator output or spurious emissions against a WWV carrier. At 10 MHz a second-per-month accuracy would be about 90 beats per second.
(I seem to recall that there is, or was, at least one time reference transmitter at a power-of-two Hz that you could beat directly against harmonics from a watch. But I didn't find a reference to such a signal in a few minutes of net searching.)
Unfortunately, it's NOT a free market. The low wages are subsidized by a host of benefit programs for housing, food, medical care, and what passes for education for the families of the underpaid "undocumented" workers; by effective waivers of minimum wage laws, workplace safety rules, working hour enforcement, auto insurance requirements, and so on.
Citizens and legal residents who WOULD be willing to do those jobs, even at the low pay, need not apply: The employers can't employ them on those terms, since they could later demand the remainder of the legal minimum pay and enforcement of working conditions. Better for the employer to pay cash and, if the worker were crazy enough to gripe, report him to la migra.
It's a government welfare program for large employers and corporations, not for the common man. We pay for it in taxes for direct programs. We pay for it in lowered wages and higher unemployment. We pay for it in astronomically higher health care costs. We pay for it in higher auto insurance rates. We pay for it in low quality education of our children in public schools or by paying private school tutition in addition to our school taxes. We pay for it in shoddy work that has to be redone.
And the next time you hire someone to install a new roof on your house, or put in a new driveway, you're going with the more expensive contractor who doesn't hire illegals, right?
Tried that. In our area we weren't able to find any. When the laws aren't enforced, in a highly competitive market like contracting the businesses are divided into two groups: Those who hire "undocumented" workers, and those who are out of business. So even the licensed, bonded, high-rep, high quality contractors use illegal immigrants. (We know of one exception - in Oregon. He hires only citizens and other legals. And he makes his living fixing up the botch jobs done by the shadier subset of contractors and the "out of a truck - can't find them when it falls apart" "contractors" from the hardware store parking lots.)
Fuzzing is when you essentially throw piles of random data at something, usually to try to get it to break.
Note that, though throwing random junk may be productive, the data is typically mostly valid stuff with some pseudo-random ignoring-spec-limits modifications. That way you get into the guts of the responding system where the violation may trigger a bug that you otherwise can't get near.
Total junk tends to hit some bail-out before it gets deep enough to be useful. You try that, too, because you never know whether there's some bug in the outer layers. But just throwing random noise at a system in hopes of hitting a bug is akin to throwing it at a text editor in hopes of getting Shakespeare, or a vaild authentication certificate.
Ok, maybe this explains ships disappearing in the triangle..... How do big waves explain the disappearance of aircraft??
They don't.
But if you read down toward the end of TFA, you find that the Triange has a LOT of aircraft traffic, including a lot flown by inexperienced pilots, and Lloyds of London says that, by their stats, the percentage that go down in the Triangle is just what it is elsewhere.
An old saw says you can do any maneuver you want in an airplane, as long as you don't do it close to the ground. It probably applies about the same if you substitute "over water".
= = = =
A number of years ago my wife bought a sailboat from Hake Yachts, which was located in Florida. Hake is a great marine architect and makes sturdy ocean-capable small craft. (It has been said his products have enough epoxy/fiberglass in the hull to make TWO boats of a more typical design.)
One of the interesting features of our model is a fold-up table in the cabin. Cast onto the bottom in clear plastic (so it's easily visible when the table is up) is a marine chart of the Florida keys. (If he'd known we'd be sailing in the SF Bay area he'd have substituted one for the Golden Gate / Farallon Islands.) His larger models have a chart of the Florida-Bermuda-Bahamas area.
Why? Because he had a lot of customers who, newbies to sailing, would get their new boat, launch it, and immediately set out for Bermuda or the Bahamas, using no chart or a Florida road map. B-b Losing your customers at sea, even if it's totally their fault, is bad for your products' reputation. So this feature insures that they have at least ONE chart of the likely area.
The ocean around Florida is really dangerous if you get lost. If you're East and lose power, the Gulf Stream will take you to Britain - in a few months. Or other currents will take you to the Sargasso Sea - a downwelling - and getting to land from there without power or sail will take forever (or until continental drift rearranges the currents). Go too far south, then head west to pick up the Florida coast, and you'll go into the Gulf of Mexico, where you can sail West for a long time and eventually reach Texas, Mexico, or the Isthmus of Panama. You can fix that by turning North, IF you know you're West of Florida. But if you're wrong and you're East, you can cruise North through the Pacific until you reach Greenland, Iceland, or the polar ice cap.
Slashdot Mirror
Tired of companies inventing something great, then they stop innovating and instead sink all their money into lawyers and sue sue sue. Die Die Die.
Actually, it's when they're dying that they sue, sue, sue.
When a tech company is doing well, their money is better spent innovating and staying ahead of the pack. When they're getting behind, it's still better spent on getting ahead.
During this period patent portflios are mostly used defensively against other company's suits. Find some patents in the portfolio the other guys can be accused of infringing and counter-sue. Then settle for a cross-licensing agreement, and maybe a true-up payment if one side has a bigger pile of relevant patents.
But when they're dying, they're desperate. That's when they go through their portfolio and sue anybody they might be able to make money from.
(Been there, dealt with that: Northern Telecom was on the ropes. They'd been a big player in the design of SONNET and had a lot of patents on it. So they went after anybody with patents that looked like they were doing something SONNET-related that might infringe on one of theirs. So I and my co-architect got to spend a few weeks writing, for our lawyers, a set of analyses of why each of several NT patents didn't cover the stuff in our patents, or other chunks of the chips we'd designed that looked like they just MUST have an infringing component. B-b )
A thing to remember about High Tech is that there is enormous value added.
As a result, company management can be off-the-wall-fruitcakes, following or instituting management fads and perpetrating many horrible management pathologies, yet still have enough profit left that the company can go on for years before dying, or even thrive.
Then, even if they take it down (or better yet, bail out just before their house of cards collapses), or a competitor with less pathology eats their lunch, failure in High Tech is so often not the fault of the failing that it's not a black mark. Unless how they screwed up is SO visible that it becomes a scandal (or sometimes even if it is) they can then use their experience as a qualification credit when going for their next job, beat out less pathological but more junior applicants, apply the same or even bigger and better pathologies to another, larger, company, and take it down, too. Iterate for a while and you have a successful career, are rich from cashed-in stock options, and leave a trail of devastation as a legacy.
What's true for upper management goes double for middle management and functionaries. They get to inherit both the pathologies of those above them and create more or follow fads of their own. As lower-ranking they're expected to be less competent and their foul-ups are not the subject of major business-press scandal.
Minsky divided the first three decades of computer science education into three periods of about a decade each:
1) Computer science was too new. Colleges had no idea what to teach, so they taught the wrong stuff. (Like everybody was taught how to WRITE a compiler.) A four-year degree was actually a handicap for getting a job in industry: It meant you had more that you had to UN-learn before you could learn the stuff you actually needed to know to be useful. The trick was to go ALMOST to a degree (to get access to the tools to learn and the useful skills), then get a job and drop out.
2) Colleges figured out enough about what was really needed that going all the way to a four-year degree actually made you more useful than not.
3) Colleges got into teaching a bunch of computer-science methodology fads and the degree became a slight handicap again.
There have been a few more decades since then, and a lot more fads, both in computer science and in management. About a decade back, for instance, a degree was a mandatory check-box, and no matter how experienced you were, how many patents you had, who you knew, or how hard the people running the actual department were crying for you to be hired, you couldn't get HR to process your paper without having the sheepskin, checking the box, and filling in the adjacent slot with the name of one of a handful of big-name schools.
On one hand some big-name companies are again hiring by some measure of skill and not requiring degrees, a practice that might spread. (Especially if H1Bs get restricted.) On the other, we've got the "email provider is A SIGN" fad in H.R. circles. So here we go again.
On the other hand, when support is you main income then you'll do everything you can to make your software complicated and hard to use..
Actually you'll make it easy enough to use to get them hooked before it starts to bite them, and keep the support costs low enough to be perceived as cheaper than switching and incurring learning-curve costs, but high enough to gouge them.
This is the same sort of pricing strategy as that of classic manufactured goods.
Big pharma is only able to overcharge because the FDA creates a virtual monopoly, through its costly and lengthy process at the end of which very few companies are allowed to make a drug.
Remove the "virtual" and "costly and lengthly", substitute "no other" for "very few", and you've described the relevant characteristics of copyright. So it looks to me like the grandfather post is non-hooey.
Try to make an Epi-pen and sell it, it only costs like $30 to make [and patents have expired]
Aside: There is now an approved generic Epi-pen at a more reasonable price. The timing looks like the manufacturer started the development and approval process about the day the price-gouger announced the price hike. The inisible hand strikes as usual, the FDA approval process just delayed it.
I totally agree with the bulk of your post. But I agree completely with its predecessor.
Prices are controlled in many cases by the whims of the copyright owners.
Prices are ALWAYS controlled by the whim of the seller.
The ones still in business, however, tend to adjust them according to what they perceive makes them the most money (and are limited to those who guess well enough to make more than the spend, or haven't been in business long enough to have spent all they could raise, or are obtaining some other benefit that keeps them willing to continue).
Combine that with the willingness to pay of the crowd of people who want the product enough to even think about obtaining it, and you get the curves that economists make their living analyzing.
... the line between free speech, and being uncomfortable about something is very hard to draw.
THAT line is not hard AT ALL. The right to free speech completely trumps any desire to be protected against discomforting ideas and images.
There is an explicit constitutional right to free speech. The Supreme Court recognizes that it constitutes a complete ban on government action to even have a "chilling effect" on it, and has incorporated it against the States and all their components and subdivisions, which includes police and the officers and employees of public schools.
Doesn't matter, he already copped a plea deal.
As I pointed out in my next--to-the-last paragraph.
Cohen was Trump's lawyer. EVERYTHING that happened is on Cohen. Trump was acting on the advice of his lawyer no matter what.
Yep.
But there's nothing wrong with defence in depth, pleading both:
1) It's not a crime (no matter WHAT Cohen signed to get them to stop prosecuting him on taxes and lying to lenders.)
2) I did it on the advice of my attorney, whom I was paying to tell me what was legal and handle these things in a legal manner. So I had no intent to break any laws and believed at the time this was all legal.
Looking at the Forbes article I see I misinterpreted two of 'em. But no change:
- Lying to investigators.
Make that "Lying on a loan application". Still just Cohen being an jerk in his own personal dealings.
- Making improper use of corporate money.
The "improper use" was "making a campaign contribution". Same argument as the charges from page 2.
See page 1...
On page 1 I see:
- Tax evasion
- Lying to investigators.
- Making improper use of corporate money.
The first two are only on Cohen. If The Donald thought Cohen was paying with his (Trump's) personal money the third is also only on Cohen.
Campaign contributions are on page 2, and the argument there is that if it wasn't paid by the campaign and is something he'd have paid anyway for reasons other than his run for president, it's not a campaign activity. (Imagine if the government tried to interpret a rich candidate's charitable donations as excessive campaign spending, because they make him look good to voters. It's the same argument.)
Investigators also managed to reconstruct at least 16 pages of physically shredded documents.
WAIT just a minute here...
I was under the impression that the Supreme Court had ruled that intact papers discarded in the trash could be used as evidence, but discarded shreds needed a warrant - BEFORE their seizure - because the person discarding shredded documents had an expectation of privacy.
Am I mistaken? Did they get a warrant before the papers were shredded and discarded (i.e. he was destroying evidence?) Did he shred them and then hang on to the shreds? If not, they're "Fruit of the Poisoned Tree".
(If I'm right, I'd like to see how the Supremes ruled if someone made the same argument about encrypted phone calls. The analogous ruling might protect against seizing logs of encrypted traffic without a before-the-call warrant, breaking the "no expectation of privacy in data stored with a third party" argument for encrypted calls. B-) )
I was also under the impression that such "Fruit" not only can't be used as trial evidence, but can't be used to develop leads without tainting them as well. (Cops routinely work around this by "calling in an anonymous tip" from the next desk over. But that won't work if they ADMIT they got the lead by improper behavior.) Something like this could run like wildfire through the whole investigation's findings, making it useless in court and reducing it to prosecutorial harassment.
Also: What kind of idiot uses a strip-shredder for anything he really wants to keep secret? Have they developed a way to reassemble crosscut shreads? If so, how do they avoid the "ransom note assembled from cut out newspaper letters" risk of reassembling fine shreads into somethig that looks coherent but is nothing like the original.
(Not that any of this matters for Cohen. He already pled guilty.)
Stuff like this is part of why there used to be a big separation between criminal investigation and counterintelligence work. You really don't want to let a spy keep spying if you can identify him and stop him using investigative techniques (short of torture) that would bring a criminal case down in flames.
You are not the victim, you are the aggressor.
You are not my victim. You are full of bull $#1#.
I agree with everything you said up until that. Because you're tarring the entire population of the United States for what our ruling class has done, and what many of us have fought for our entire lives.
That kind of sloppy thinking - blaming the victims, lumping them with their victimizers, and then attacking the group - is what leads to wars, and to the very situations that empower those rulers to create and operate those agencies and perform those operations of which you rightly complain.
It's clear that you're not in the U.S. So let me clue you in to something. If you're getting your idea of what's going on here from the mainstream media - even your own - you have NO IDEA what's really going on here. The mainstream media is a monolith propaganda organization for one of the two ruling factions, and this became obvious to everybody who didn't already know it during the last presidential election cycle. See Wikileaks. (And guess why they're now trying to claim that Wikileaks was part of a Russian conspracy.)
The bulk of the U.S. ruled population, in its many varied groups, has been becoming fed up with both halves of the established ruling class and the bureaucracy and "intelligence" agencies (what is now being called the "deep state"). If you think they're oppressing you, what do you think they're doing to us? (They just need their cattle happy and confused enough to not stampede and be milked until slaughter, to keep them in resources.)
That was a big driver behind Trump's out-of-apparently-nowhere election - against the quintessential instance of a corrupt establishment's chieftain. It was the biggest - for many of us the only - pry-bar we could apply.
What do you expect us to do? Levitate the Pentagon? Attack the spooks with guns and butter?
Of course now that I got it working we don't watch it. B-) At ALL.
I've made a bunch of Gray-Hoverman style antennas using foam board and foil tape (indoor use only, obviously). These pick up everything in my area and cost less than $5 each.
I made one out of a piece of wood, six screws, some leftover # 14 wire from a house rewiring project, and a balun (also lying about).
The townhouse is within about a mile of the east end of the Dumbarton in silicon valley. Pretty much ALL the digital signals the FCC says are detectable in my area are on on of three towers: North San Jose on a hilltop overlooking the bay (and a naked-eye object from my front yard), Sutro Tower near the Castro in San Francisco, and one to the east, just over the hills (near Walnut Creek if I recall correctly)
Left off the reflector, since the SF and SJ towers are almost exactly opposite directions at my site. No reflector means I hit them both at about 3dB down from what I'd get from just one with the reflector present.
Did I need to put it on the roof? In the attic? Heck, no. I stood it up it behind the TV -and-audio cabinet on the ground floor of a two-story house. It works just fine right through the wall, insulation, orchard, neighbors' houses, etc. (Also through the TV console to hit San Francisco.) AND it gets the signals from the one over-the-hill in the middle. (Didn't really expect that.)
In fact the only thing it DOESN'T get is the last analog TV signal, a low-power channel-6 station south of San Jose, run by a church (mainly to broadcast their services to their shutins, from what I hear).
For those familiar with analog TV, the channel 6 FM audio carrier is just below the FM band, and many older FM radios will pick it up just fine. That's probably why they didn't go digital.
The Gray-Hoverman is a great (and open source!) design. And while digital TV doesn't carry quite as far as analog (because it suddenly dies when the signal-to-noise ratio overcomes the forward error correction), when you CAN get it it is either just perfect, or (if on the ragged edge) has the occasional freeze, while analog would be "receivable" but horribly corrupted by multipath ghosting and "snow" from noise.
Ice on the lunar surface ... could also be due to solar winds -- energetically charged ions emanating from the sun -- bombarding the Moon's surface to cause the chemical reactions needed to make frozen water.
Oh, RIGHT!
Rocks are generally metallic oxides. Solar winds are mostly high-energy protons - hydrogen nuclei. Hit a rock molecule with one, hang a hydrogen off one of the oxygen nuclei, turning it into a hydroxyl group. Hit the hydroxyl again and you knock off. It grabs that or another nearby proton and now you've got a water molecule in a near-moon orbit that intresects its surface.
A lot of 'em are pointed away - and have more than escape velocity. Bye-bye. Others bounce away (at more than escape velocity) before they get slowed down by one or more collisions with surface features (to below escape velocity). But some end up losing enough momentum to hang around and eventually condense out on a cryogenically-cold shadowed side of a rock or crater wall. Frost!
One of those things that are obvious in hindsight.
But it isn't always easy to say precisely how much we need,... Vitamin toxicity is a real thing, ... [D dietary need] varies based on a number of factors, including personal factors ... Though it is clear we need good nutrition, as a culture we seem to be going overboard.
Among the personal factors are issues with ageing (affecting things like synthesis and absorption) and exposure to light.
In addition to both the well-known and severe deficiency diseases and a number of lesser ones, overdosing can cause a number of problems: One of them being too-early calcification of a cracked or broken bone in the process of self-repair.
When I smashed the end of my humerus through my scapula in a bicycle accident, I asked the orthopaedist about using some nutritional (over-)supplementation to encourage healing. He said the bulk of them (E and C to discourage scarring and the latter encourage collagen generation - the first step in a bone break repair, Arginine and Ornithine on an empty stomach at bedtime to release GHRH) would just produce "expensive urine" so go ahead if I felt like it, but to NOT supplement with D other than drinking milk (which I could do) - which had entirely enough thanks to mandated fortification.
With lots of individual variation in the paths to the blood level of the Ds and a lack of an adequate regulatory pathway, (so you can't predict it from things like diet, age, sun exposure, etc.) you need to measure to tell what that level is. With both over- and under-dosing producing really nasty diseases with no symptoms until it's too late to do anything to reverse the damage, it's a really good idea to get it tested and adjust supplemtation to put it into that happy medium between the too-much and too-little pathologies.
Now whether the blood levels recommended by this guy ARE that happy medium is another can of worms. But my GP/cardiologist is onboard with it and prescribed both testing and adjusting supplementation. (Cardiologists are careful about calcium metabolism, as the calcification of plaques is a major factor in circulatory diseases.)
Does Stanford University need to pay for the sign to be there? Are they going to build something right on top of it with no possibility of that something being somewhere else?
No clue.
My wife's a historian and we love to look at the old stuff - ghost towns, historic structures, "old roads" where newer highway alignments or freeway bypasses carry the current traffic, etc.
But we realize that it costs to keep this stuff in repair, and that keeping it all around for posterity would mean posterity would have a shortage of resources, because the whole world, including all the valuable and useful stuff, would be locked up and turned into previous generatons' attics.
The Ampex sign was sowing its age - big time - for the last couple decades. With nobody willing to pay for its preservation and restoration - including paying the current owners for taking its value from them - it doesn't get preserved. Sad, but real-world.
People don't care what other people care about.
People care about what other people care about enough to PAY for.
How much are YOU willing to pay Stanford University to keep the sign up? Do you have ANY IDEA what the cost of land in Silicon Valley is?
The Ampex operation there is gone. The site is now one of the major multi-spcialized-clinic complexes of the Stanford Hospital. (The sleep clinic, where I had my severe sleep apnea diagnosed and treated, is one of them.) What are they expected to do if they need more room to treat more sick people?
My Signia hearing aids cost about $5000 and that is certainly outrageous.
There's also the matter of economy of scale. A hearing aid chip is an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) and a complex, multicore, one at that.
I've been on several such projects. As of a few years ago the non-recurring expenses of building one paid to the fab was over a million bux, and the engineering team was much more.
And if you made ANY mistakes that required a "spin" it was anywhere from about half that (if you could fix it by adjusting some metal layers to change the hookup and maybe wire up extra gates you'd left lying around in the sea of "glue logic" just for that purpose) to the full price all over again. So you spent a LOT of engineering and server-farm time with costly licensed software to simulate the HELL out of it.
Now that engineering cost gets spread across the sales of all the chips you sell. If it's a consumer chip that goes into something nearly everybody with the money to do it buys, and you end up with a two-digit percentage of the world market, you might spread it so thin that the chip sells for less than a buck over the cost of manufacturing (and that gets driven down because there's so MANY built that the manufacturing batches are large and the setup cost also gets diluted.)
But if you have to spread it over a few thousand or tens-of-thousands of customers, you could easily have one or more thousands of bucks PER CHIP of engineering costs that the customer has to cover to keep your operation afloat.
Need to know if there are any cops around for your illegal business? Don't worry, you can just setup a wifi scanner on your phone to alert you when a cop's camera comes within range!
That also works with some of those "smart gun" systems the gun controllers try to foist on the public, to "keep the gun from being used by anyone but the owner".
Of course what's more fun (for the crookies) is to jam / DoS them, so the guns don't work for the cops, either. (Just like they fail when the batteries run down and the like.)
Hint: There's already enough that can go wrong with a gun and keep it from working, without adding more failure modes. When your life depends on it and you pull that trigger, it's supposed to go "bang".
The best quartz watch I had lost a little less than a second a month. Then I got too greedy and killed the golden goose - tried adjusting the quartz timing mechanism myself. After that I could never get it below 2 seconds of drift per month. What I didn't realize until it was too late was that as the error gets smaller, you have to wait longer between each adjustment (weeks) to determine if you had improved it or overshot.
Which is why, if you want to trim a watch crystal, you use a frequency counter against the 32,768 oscillator output. One second per month is one cycle per three seconds of error, so you can get a measurement better than that in a few seconds.
And you trim the frequency counter's reference by similarly using a radio to hear the "beat" of its reference oscillator output or spurious emissions against a WWV carrier. At 10 MHz a second-per-month accuracy would be about 90 beats per second.
(I seem to recall that there is, or was, at least one time reference transmitter at a power-of-two Hz that you could beat directly against harmonics from a watch. But I didn't find a reference to such a signal in a few minutes of net searching.)
You like the "free market", right?
Hypocrite...
Unfortunately, it's NOT a free market. The low wages are subsidized by a host of benefit programs for housing, food, medical care, and what passes for education for the families of the underpaid "undocumented" workers; by effective waivers of minimum wage laws, workplace safety rules, working hour enforcement, auto insurance requirements, and so on.
Citizens and legal residents who WOULD be willing to do those jobs, even at the low pay, need not apply: The employers can't employ them on those terms, since they could later demand the remainder of the legal minimum pay and enforcement of working conditions. Better for the employer to pay cash and, if the worker were crazy enough to gripe, report him to la migra.
It's a government welfare program for large employers and corporations, not for the common man. We pay for it in taxes for direct programs. We pay for it in lowered wages and higher unemployment. We pay for it in astronomically higher health care costs. We pay for it in higher auto insurance rates. We pay for it in low quality education of our children in public schools or by paying private school tutition in addition to our school taxes. We pay for it in shoddy work that has to be redone.
And the next time you hire someone to install a new roof on your house, or put in a new driveway, you're going with the more expensive contractor who doesn't hire illegals, right?
Tried that. In our area we weren't able to find any. When the laws aren't enforced, in a highly competitive market like contracting the businesses are divided into two groups: Those who hire "undocumented" workers, and those who are out of business. So even the licensed, bonded, high-rep, high quality contractors use illegal immigrants. (We know of one exception - in Oregon. He hires only citizens and other legals. And he makes his living fixing up the botch jobs done by the shadier subset of contractors and the "out of a truck - can't find them when it falls apart" "contractors" from the hardware store parking lots.)
Darn. You beat me by two minutes. B-b
For those not familiar with it, and who don't want to follow the link and read a page, the current version of the old saw is:
(The article linked by the parent poster tracks variants back as far as 1875 in France.)
Fuzzing is when you essentially throw piles of random data at something, usually to try to get it to break.
Note that, though throwing random junk may be productive, the data is typically mostly valid stuff with some pseudo-random ignoring-spec-limits modifications. That way you get into the guts of the responding system where the violation may trigger a bug that you otherwise can't get near.
Total junk tends to hit some bail-out before it gets deep enough to be useful. You try that, too, because you never know whether there's some bug in the outer layers. But just throwing random noise at a system in hopes of hitting a bug is akin to throwing it at a text editor in hopes of getting Shakespeare, or a vaild authentication certificate.
Ok, maybe this explains ships disappearing in the triangle.....
How do big waves explain the disappearance of aircraft??
They don't.
But if you read down toward the end of TFA, you find that the Triange has a LOT of aircraft traffic, including a lot flown by inexperienced pilots, and Lloyds of London says that, by their stats, the percentage that go down in the Triangle is just what it is elsewhere.
An old saw says you can do any maneuver you want in an airplane, as long as you don't do it close to the ground. It probably applies about the same if you substitute "over water".
= = = =
A number of years ago my wife bought a sailboat from Hake Yachts, which was located in Florida. Hake is a great marine architect and makes sturdy ocean-capable small craft. (It has been said his products have enough epoxy/fiberglass in the hull to make TWO boats of a more typical design.)
One of the interesting features of our model is a fold-up table in the cabin. Cast onto the bottom in clear plastic (so it's easily visible when the table is up) is a marine chart of the Florida keys. (If he'd known we'd be sailing in the SF Bay area he'd have substituted one for the Golden Gate / Farallon Islands.) His larger models have a chart of the Florida-Bermuda-Bahamas area.
Why? Because he had a lot of customers who, newbies to sailing, would get their new boat, launch it, and immediately set out for Bermuda or the Bahamas, using no chart or a Florida road map. B-b Losing your customers at sea, even if it's totally their fault, is bad for your products' reputation. So this feature insures that they have at least ONE chart of the likely area.
The ocean around Florida is really dangerous if you get lost. If you're East and lose power, the Gulf Stream will take you to Britain - in a few months. Or other currents will take you to the Sargasso Sea - a downwelling - and getting to land from there without power or sail will take forever (or until continental drift rearranges the currents). Go too far south, then head west to pick up the Florida coast, and you'll go into the Gulf of Mexico, where you can sail West for a long time and eventually reach Texas, Mexico, or the Isthmus of Panama. You can fix that by turning North, IF you know you're West of Florida. But if you're wrong and you're East, you can cruise North through the Pacific until you reach Greenland, Iceland, or the polar ice cap.