You are wrong. 100% of cases is a higher intake of calories then output of calories. Anything else would suggest that perpetual motion is possible.

This is not really the best solution. There are still legitimate businesses using patent laws in legitimate ways to protect themselves - pretty much all industry involved in chemistry, biotechnology and material science. It takes a lot of initial resources to develop a new material or a new drug even though the eventual manufacture of them might be cheap. It would just not make any sense to invest in these things if the minute you get the new drug out of the door a dozen other companies would start selling it for half the price because they didn't have to cover the research and testing costs.

A much more elegant solution would be to pay for the patent protection. It could work like this:
- you choose the $ amount others have to pay you to use your technology (covered in the patent)
- others can just pay you that amount and use it (you cannot decline)
- you have to pay 1% of that amount per year to the authorities or lose your patent

That's the basic idea. You could maybe extend it with things like changing the amount, or limiting the timespan during which the people can use your patent after they pay etc.

It wouldn't harm the honest users - the big pharma could easily pay a couple hundred thousand per patent, the small inventor could easily pay 100 bucks per year and get some money back (because under current laws it's practically impossible for an individual to enforce his patent). And the trolls that have tens of thousands of trash patents on their portfolios would fold.

Unfortunately there would probably be much less litigation going on so the lawyers will lob aggressively against any attempt to introduce such a system.

A little bit. Specifically issues regarding intellectual property that got escalated up to our CEO. What did I learn of it?

CEOs of big companies listen to their lawyers very carefully and don't second guess them. At least in tech companies they don't.

Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't the CEO's at the biotech and pharma firms that decided they needed to dump money on congress on this issue as if they didn't have better use for their capital. Guess who convinced them to do it...

Plus, the trial lawyers played no small part in this. Read the article.

The ars technica article does. You are probably talking about the opensource.com article - that one really does not say 'why', just 'what'.

Here's the meat part:

...

...

Fucking. Lawyers.

Is it really cheap? You need a lot of manpower that you wouldn't if you'd use an electronic system. And manpower is typically where the most of the costs come from.

Not in the same shape though.

It might not impact you much if you are going to one conference, but if you fly to multiple destinations within a week, it will build up. Your back/joint pain, stress level, lack of sleep will show. It might mean that you will save 5k on the boarding passes of your exec but then pay millions for the bad decision she makes.

You went overboard with this statement.

You don't show each and every element of a crime to get a conviction. There's means, motive and opportunity. Often proving just two of those can get a guilty verdict.

Also there is collecting stamps and there is trying to legislate stamp collecting as mandatory in schools, going to war in the name of stamps, giving medical advice based on stamps etc.

No. If they measured correlation between exposure to light and *reduction* of BMI, I wouldn't mind, but as it is, interpreting that statement that way is some snake oil salesman level of dishonesty (why not say "Weight can influence the amount of exposure to the sunlight people get"?).

You are wrong in this case. If they just wanted to determine the correlation, they shouldn't have put the following statement in their abstract:

That's way beyond saying 'there's a correlation'

Didn't all this happen 5 years ago? Why bring it up now and call it "The dark side of social media"?

How does this even make sense within the topic of gay relationships? Can you criticize homosexuality without aiming at the homosexuals? Because that's what Eich is doing. And it's way past just 'raising an objection', it's about coming up with a law that directly affects the lives of the target group Eich disagrees with. So the pragmatic thing is to retaliate with the same - aim at the people doing this and affect *their* lives as well.

Let's not pretend Proposition 8 is harmless for the gays. The fact is that homosexuality is fairly common in populations (not just human ones). The proponents of Prop. 8 say it's unnatural and that's why they want gay marriage banned. As long as the society puts this stigma on the gays and even institutionalizes it, they will have a harder life. Where's the fairness in that?

Are you suggesting that OKCupid should ask its users not to use WordPerfect? That would be laughable at best. OKCupid just picks a fight in their domain, where it makes sense. Plus, the message should be that any support for Prop. 8 is despicable.

I get a strong sense of the bovine fecal matter just from reading the texts on the packaging. That stuff is quite potent!