Despite the juror's admission to the press that he failed to follow jury instructions, claiming that the damages award was meant as punishment when the instructions said no such thing?
Despite the juror's admission to the press that he acted as an expert witness during deliberations, falsely telling the other jurors that prior art which runs on a different processor does not invalidate a patent?
How exactly should one discover during Voir Dire that a juror will do things like not follow the jury instructions and act as an expert witness during deliberations?
And what question should one ask during Voir Dire to determine whether Velvin Hogan would act as an expert witness during deliberations, telling jurors (falsely) that if prior art doesn't run on the same processor it can't be prior art?
Hogan screwed the pooch during deliberations and consequently the verdict is a farce.
We will not reach truly autonomous levels in our lifetime, but I believe we have already reached the point where we have more people than we have valuable work for them to do, where by valuable work I mean a wage you can live on.
Think of it this way. You've got a job that takes 20 people to do, and you replace it with one robot, two operators, a maintenance guy, a designer, and a salesman. You've replaced 20 people with 5 - now what are the other 15 people going to do? (btw, the designer's job is no longer needed once the robot blueprints are finished, and the salesman requires a continuous stream of robots to sell so his job is also short term)
Yeah, and maybe we could recognize that in order to feel fullfilled and needed, some people like to work 50-60 hours a week - and let them.
Fixed that for you. There's no reason we can't have a typical work week of 20-30 hours while also having people who work twice that with overtime, and having them paid time and a half for their efforts.
Yeah, the student loan bubble is going to pop. But I don't think it will be that nasty, actually. I'm willing to bet that a lot of colleges will just go belly up, as there's no real short-term need for colleges and they don't pay politicians enough to warrant a bailout.
The financial bubble, though, will fuck everything up. But I think there's a lot of inertia and that maybe some radical new economy will spring from the ashes.
I'm with you on the idea of a social safety net, however constructed, but then it should go paired with a removal of the minimum wage
I am 100% for this idea. Get rid of the minimum wage and replace it with a stipend of some sort. This would make it easier to earn a living on a lower wage, opening up a ton of new jobs that were just not possible before because they weren't worth the minimum wage, and it would also help make American workers more competitive in a global marketplace.
You know what you are relying on, when you talk about printing money and giving it away as 'basic income'? You are relying on other people's labour somewhere, that supposedly will keep subsidising you by taking your freshly printed dollars.
Does it have to be someone's labor? What if our society could largely be run by machines and a small percentage of workers who maintain them in exchange for a higher standard of living?
Have you considered that we may end up with more people than we have useful work for them to do, or that we might have useful work but it isn't valuable enough to earn a living? The fun part comes when you realize that with a basic income, you could do away with the minimum wage entirely. All that work that wasn't valuable enough to earn a living can now be done by someone on a basic income.
You might be interested to read about the "mincome" - it's quite similar. The experiment seems to have found that only mothers and teenagers really worked less.
central wealth distribution has been shown time and again to disincentivise people from actually doing something useful with their lives
The good news is that I, and just about every American on every side of the political spectrum, agree with you entirely. We do not want a central wealth distribution. We are also very, very far from a such a distribution; you would be forgiven if you only thought there were three parts of the left pie in this graph of wealth by quintiles because the bottom 40% of Americans have about 0.3% of America's wealth (and this is coincidentally about equal to that of the combined owners of Wal-Mart)
And the sad thing is that we probably don't underestimate the inequality that badly, if it weren't for those at the very top. I'm not talking about the 1%. Or even the 0.1%. Or the 0.01%. You need a couple more 0's because the problem is the top 400. If you remove those individuals from the equation as outliers, then Americans probably have an accurate estimate of wealth inequality. The top 400 are not only gaining greater wealth faster than the mere 1%, but the rate is increasing, a term which I have seen called "economic redshift".
Personally, while I do not wish to see a central wealth distribution, I wouldn't mind seeing our current wealth distribution move a little bit more toward the center.
Would you spend two point five BILLION pounds (so ~FIVE BILLION dollars) in taxes that you don't have to?
I've been seeing this argument a lot. But the thing is that Google is clearly gaming the system. They earned those profits in the UK and the UK deserves those profits. But Google is basically saying "haha, good luck getting them"
Would you spend thousands of dollars on a TV that you don't have to? I mean, after all, you could just steal the TV. Or buy it on a credit card and then not pay your bill later. The only difference is that we call this gaming of the system "theft" and we have laws that we can use to punish people who do this sort of thing.
Except Apple and Michael Jackson were selling products for profit (i.e. commercial). Ms Thomas, however, at no point sold those songs (i.e. non-commercial).
The problem is that the statutory damages were designed for commercial infringement, and are now being employed against non-commercial infringers.
Add up all the military spending in all the world, and the US is responsible for 41% of it. The nearest competitor, China, spends 1/5 of what we do (8.2%). The fourth largest military in the world right now, the UK, spends 1/11 of what we do (3.6%).
Sure, that's in 2012, but I'm sure the general pattern holds true. Let's estimate that Iraq spent 1/10 of what we did on the military back in the 90's. When you are 10x stronger than your opponent, your opponent is weak compared to you.
In this girl's case, the retrovirus that seeks out her cancerous cell type is HIV, which attacks white blood cells.
Not to detract from your post, but I have to be picky about this.
This girl had T-cells removed from her body. Then reprogrammed HIV cells were used to patch the T-cell code so that it would target B-cells. Then the patched T-cells were injected back into her. At no point in time was she exposed to the virus.
It's not global warming that is killing coral reefs. It is ocean acidification.
In a nutshell: as more CO2 is released, it will dissolve into the ocean to maintain equilibrium. As CO2 dissolves into the ocean, the result is an increase in carbonic acid, creating bicarbonate and hydronium ions, which reduce the pH of the ocean.
Under "normal" conditions, the carbonate ions are supersaturated. As pH falls, carbonate ions become undersaturated. In these "abnormal" conditions, calcium carbonate and aragonite (what coral "bones" are made of) are vulnerable to dissolution.
In more plain terms, the coral reef's skeleton is being dissolved faster than the coral reef can build it. Note that the tests for this hypothesis controlled for pollution, so this effect is observed even if the only factor is decreasing pH. From the abstract of the paper cited below, "We investigated the calcification rates of five colonies of the zooxanthellate coral Stylophora pistillata in synthetic seawater using the alkalinity anomaly technique."
So if it's okay to tax my investments as ordinary income, then you should be okay with taxing all capital gains as ordinary income. Right?
Wasn't the whole point behind taxing capital gains at a lower rate to encourage investment? And yet here I am, "investing" what will be taxed as ordinary income. So the lower capital gains tax isn't necessary to encourage investment after all.
My employer recently submitted a grant proposal about a device that could potentially connect to an iPod over Bluetooth, and one of the grant reviewers nailed us over MFi licensing. But even aside from that...
From Roving Networks' website:
"All products designed to connect to iPhone's, iPod's and iPad's including those that incorporate the Roving Bluetooth APL module must be registered and approved with Apple's Made for iPod (MFi) program."
From Apples' website:
"Developers who wish to develop electronic accessories for iPhone, iPad or iPod using licensed components and/or software should join the MFi Program. Companies, organizations, government entities and educational institutions are eligible to apply. Case developers, app developers and developers of accessories that only use standard technology (e.g., Bluetooth Low Energy or standard Bluetooth profiles supported by iOS) do not need to join the MFi Program."
So while you are right that a standard Bluetooth profile (e.g. headset) doesn't require MFi licensing, which of these standard Bluetooth profiles would you use for your Hello World example?
And just keep in mind that Android support requires NONE of this MFi shit. No special iAP authentication chip. No need to shoehorn yourself into a standard profile to avoid having Apple run a credit check on you. No onerous restrictions on hobbyists or small businesses which have no mass manufacturing capability.
Let's say you wanted to use Bluetooth to talk to an iPod or an iPad. You'd think you could just buy a Bluetooth module from, say, Roving Networks - say, the RN-42, and then connect it to your PIC/Arduino and start sending Hello World, right?
Okay, you say, so maybe this is like USB, you pay a few grand and get a VID and then go about your business.
WRONG!
The requirements surrounding MFi are ridiculous. For example, Apple will run a credit check on your company. If you are not a high-volume manufacturing company, then you're stuck with only the development license, and you will have to outsource your manufacturing. A development license is required even if you want to design an in-house app. Hobbyists need not apply - you cannot even get the development license if you want to design something for personal use. Oh, and you need to sign an NDA before they will tell you the royalty rates.
The man was bankrupted. His house was put into foreclosure. If a company did that to you, do you think you'd just forgive them after 20 years?
If some company bankrupted me and put my house into foreclosure, I would hold a grudge for the rest of my life, and I would take it out on any company even tangentially related to them.
A lie of omission is still a lie. The Judge asked him if he, his family, or anyone very close to him has ever been involved in a lawsuit. When you swear to tell the "whole truth and nothing but the truth", you don't get to say just one example when there were multiple.
Let's say you've been in the hospital three times, once for your appendix, once for your tonsils, and once for a concussion. The doctor asks you "have you ever been in the hospital before?" Are you seriously going to just say "yeah, had my tonsils taken out", or are you going to give your doctor the whole truth?
THE COURT: Okay. Welcome back. Please take a seat. We had a few more departures in your absence. Let's continue with the questions. The next question is, have you or a family member or someone very close to you ever been involved in a lawsuit, either as a plaintiff, a defendant, or as a witness? Let's see. On the first row, who would raise their hand to that question? All right. Let's go to Mr. Hogan.
I'm pretty sure "THE COURT" means the Judge. And I left the "Mr. Hogan" in there too, so there was no doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
Attacking the juror was just pathetic
Despite the juror's admission to the press that he failed to follow jury instructions, claiming that the damages award was meant as punishment when the instructions said no such thing?
Despite the juror's admission to the press that he acted as an expert witness during deliberations, falsely telling the other jurors that prior art which runs on a different processor does not invalidate a patent?
How exactly should one discover during Voir Dire that a juror will do things like not follow the jury instructions and act as an expert witness during deliberations?
And what question should one ask during Voir Dire to determine whether Velvin Hogan would act as an expert witness during deliberations, telling jurors (falsely) that if prior art doesn't run on the same processor it can't be prior art?
Hogan screwed the pooch during deliberations and consequently the verdict is a farce.
We will not reach truly autonomous levels in our lifetime, but I believe we have already reached the point where we have more people than we have valuable work for them to do, where by valuable work I mean a wage you can live on.
Think of it this way. You've got a job that takes 20 people to do, and you replace it with one robot, two operators, a maintenance guy, a designer, and a salesman. You've replaced 20 people with 5 - now what are the other 15 people going to do? (btw, the designer's job is no longer needed once the robot blueprints are finished, and the salesman requires a continuous stream of robots to sell so his job is also short term)
Fixed that for you. There's no reason we can't have a typical work week of 20-30 hours while also having people who work twice that with overtime, and having them paid time and a half for their efforts.
Yeah, the student loan bubble is going to pop. But I don't think it will be that nasty, actually. I'm willing to bet that a lot of colleges will just go belly up, as there's no real short-term need for colleges and they don't pay politicians enough to warrant a bailout.
The financial bubble, though, will fuck everything up. But I think there's a lot of inertia and that maybe some radical new economy will spring from the ashes.
I am 100% for this idea. Get rid of the minimum wage and replace it with a stipend of some sort. This would make it easier to earn a living on a lower wage, opening up a ton of new jobs that were just not possible before because they weren't worth the minimum wage, and it would also help make American workers more competitive in a global marketplace.
Does it have to be someone's labor? What if our society could largely be run by machines and a small percentage of workers who maintain them in exchange for a higher standard of living?
Have you considered that we may end up with more people than we have useful work for them to do, or that we might have useful work but it isn't valuable enough to earn a living? The fun part comes when you realize that with a basic income, you could do away with the minimum wage entirely. All that work that wasn't valuable enough to earn a living can now be done by someone on a basic income.
You might be interested to read about the "mincome" - it's quite similar. The experiment seems to have found that only mothers and teenagers really worked less.
The good news is that I, and just about every American on every side of the political spectrum, agree with you entirely. We do not want a central wealth distribution. We are also very, very far from a such a distribution; you would be forgiven if you only thought there were three parts of the left pie in this graph of wealth by quintiles because the bottom 40% of Americans have about 0.3% of America's wealth (and this is coincidentally about equal to that of the combined owners of Wal-Mart)
And the sad thing is that we probably don't underestimate the inequality that badly, if it weren't for those at the very top. I'm not talking about the 1%. Or even the 0.1%. Or the 0.01%. You need a couple more 0's because the problem is the top 400. If you remove those individuals from the equation as outliers, then Americans probably have an accurate estimate of wealth inequality. The top 400 are not only gaining greater wealth faster than the mere 1%, but the rate is increasing, a term which I have seen called "economic redshift".
Personally, while I do not wish to see a central wealth distribution, I wouldn't mind seeing our current wealth distribution move a little bit more toward the center.
Donwulff said 20,000 km, but being that he is probably not from America, used . as a group separator instead of ,
I've been seeing this argument a lot. But the thing is that Google is clearly gaming the system. They earned those profits in the UK and the UK deserves those profits. But Google is basically saying "haha, good luck getting them"
Would you spend thousands of dollars on a TV that you don't have to? I mean, after all, you could just steal the TV. Or buy it on a credit card and then not pay your bill later. The only difference is that we call this gaming of the system "theft" and we have laws that we can use to punish people who do this sort of thing.
Except Apple and Michael Jackson were selling products for profit (i.e. commercial). Ms Thomas, however, at no point sold those songs (i.e. non-commercial).
The problem is that the statutory damages were designed for commercial infringement, and are now being employed against non-commercial infringers.
And if the woman had kicked or bit the police man, then I would have no problem with her getting tazed.
Considering that the US currently spends more on "defense" than almost all other nations in the world combined...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures
Add up all the military spending in all the world, and the US is responsible for 41% of it. The nearest competitor, China, spends 1/5 of what we do (8.2%). The fourth largest military in the world right now, the UK, spends 1/11 of what we do (3.6%).
Sure, that's in 2012, but I'm sure the general pattern holds true. Let's estimate that Iraq spent 1/10 of what we did on the military back in the 90's. When you are 10x stronger than your opponent, your opponent is weak compared to you.
Not to detract from your post, but I have to be picky about this.
This girl had T-cells removed from her body. Then reprogrammed HIV cells were used to patch the T-cell code so that it would target B-cells. Then the patched T-cells were injected back into her. At no point in time was she exposed to the virus.
It's not global warming that is killing coral reefs. It is ocean acidification.
In a nutshell: as more CO2 is released, it will dissolve into the ocean to maintain equilibrium. As CO2 dissolves into the ocean, the result is an increase in carbonic acid, creating bicarbonate and hydronium ions, which reduce the pH of the ocean.
Under "normal" conditions, the carbonate ions are supersaturated. As pH falls, carbonate ions become undersaturated. In these "abnormal" conditions, calcium carbonate and aragonite (what coral "bones" are made of) are vulnerable to dissolution.
In more plain terms, the coral reef's skeleton is being dissolved faster than the coral reef can build it. Note that the tests for this hypothesis controlled for pollution, so this effect is observed even if the only factor is decreasing pH. From the abstract of the paper cited below, "We investigated the calcification rates of five colonies of the zooxanthellate coral Stylophora pistillata in synthetic seawater using the alkalinity anomaly technique."
^ Gattuso, J.-P.; Frankignoulle, M.; Bourge, I.; Romaine, S. and Buddemeier, R. W. (1998). "Effect of calcium carbonate saturation of seawater on coral calcification". Global and Planetary Change 18 (1–2): 37–46. Bibcode 1998GPC....18...37G. doi:10.1016/S0921-8181(98)00035-6.
So if it's okay to tax my investments as ordinary income, then you should be okay with taxing all capital gains as ordinary income. Right?
Wasn't the whole point behind taxing capital gains at a lower rate to encourage investment? And yet here I am, "investing" what will be taxed as ordinary income. So the lower capital gains tax isn't necessary to encourage investment after all.
Do you hav 401k? Aren't you therefore an investor?
Nope. My 401(k) will be taxed as ordinary income when I go to withdraw from it. If I was an investor, it would be taxed as a capital gain.
Remember years ago when it was first announced that Voyager was entering interstellar space?
No, I remember reading articles about Voyager crossing the termination shock and the heliosheath. Now we're coming up on the heliopause.
My employer recently submitted a grant proposal about a device that could potentially connect to an iPod over Bluetooth, and one of the grant reviewers nailed us over MFi licensing. But even aside from that...
From Roving Networks' website:
"All products designed to connect to iPhone's, iPod's and iPad's including those that incorporate the Roving Bluetooth APL module must be registered and approved with Apple's Made for iPod (MFi) program."
From Apples' website:
"Developers who wish to develop electronic accessories for iPhone, iPad or iPod using licensed components and/or software should join the MFi Program. Companies, organizations, government entities and educational institutions are eligible to apply. Case developers, app developers and developers of accessories that only use standard technology (e.g., Bluetooth Low Energy or standard Bluetooth profiles supported by iOS) do not need to join the MFi Program."
So while you are right that a standard Bluetooth profile (e.g. headset) doesn't require MFi licensing, which of these standard Bluetooth profiles would you use for your Hello World example?
And just keep in mind that Android support requires NONE of this MFi shit. No special iAP authentication chip. No need to shoehorn yourself into a standard profile to avoid having Apple run a credit check on you. No onerous restrictions on hobbyists or small businesses which have no mass manufacturing capability.
Let's say you wanted to use Bluetooth to talk to an iPod or an iPad. You'd think you could just buy a Bluetooth module from, say, Roving Networks - say, the RN-42, and then connect it to your PIC/Arduino and start sending Hello World, right?
WRONG!
Apple has not only extended Bluetooth to require a special iAP authentication chip, but they have a special licensing program called MFi.
Okay, you say, so maybe this is like USB, you pay a few grand and get a VID and then go about your business.
WRONG!
The requirements surrounding MFi are ridiculous. For example, Apple will run a credit check on your company. If you are not a high-volume manufacturing company, then you're stuck with only the development license, and you will have to outsource your manufacturing. A development license is required even if you want to design an in-house app. Hobbyists need not apply - you cannot even get the development license if you want to design something for personal use. Oh, and you need to sign an NDA before they will tell you the royalty rates.
You think it's a stretch?
The man was bankrupted. His house was put into foreclosure. If a company did that to you, do you think you'd just forgive them after 20 years?
If some company bankrupted me and put my house into foreclosure, I would hold a grudge for the rest of my life, and I would take it out on any company even tangentially related to them.
A lie of omission is still a lie. The Judge asked him if he, his family, or anyone very close to him has ever been involved in a lawsuit. When you swear to tell the "whole truth and nothing but the truth", you don't get to say just one example when there were multiple.
Let's say you've been in the hospital three times, once for your appendix, once for your tonsils, and once for a concussion. The doctor asks you "have you ever been in the hospital before?" Are you seriously going to just say "yeah, had my tonsils taken out", or are you going to give your doctor the whole truth?
Not in this case. See this transcript from groklaw. http://www.groklaw.net/pdf4/ApplevSamsung-1991Ex1.pdf
I'm pretty sure "THE COURT" means the Judge. And I left the "Mr. Hogan" in there too, so there was no doubt.
Should the next Humble Bundle come out with indie, DRM-free titles, will you eat crow?
Because, in your words, indies have been dropped and DRM-free have been dropped. As if they will never, ever do that sort of thing again.