If the boss thinks that the product has the potential to be good enough that the company will become profitable, he ought to giving the people who are actually producing that product an incentive to make it something worth purchasing...

SB

This has nothing to do with free speech.

  It has everything to do lazy, greedy stupidity. Some idiots at a company figuring they can get rich from selling a cheap plastic replication of Jobs (I don't know what drugs they were on when they dreamed it up, and I don't want to know) and then part of Apple's legal division - apparently with nothing better to do - figuring they might make some money in suing said idiots into the ground and, just possibly, buying the dead company in the future; in order to make money on it ala Lucas? WTF?

  Stupidity: Meet Stupidity. May the off of the bottom dwellers feed on each other until nothing is left but the rubber soles of their shoes and a few expensive, indigestible tie clips.

  Both sides of this fracas disgust me. I could express a wish that they'd go find something useful to do with their lives, but I know it would not make a damned bit of difference.

  SB

  That the authorities there did not immediately confiscate it is also news for nerds - very good news.

  There will be another endless court fight coming, however - the right of private citizens to fly cameras over other people's backyards.

  Sigh.

  IMO if the government wants to spy on it's citizens, then it should also grant the right for citizens to spy on citizens, including citizens who are government employees. It's only fair, right?

  Yeah, it's pretty fucked, either way. But I'd rather have the right for citizens to spy on citizens, than have corporations or government have that right exclusively. The tech is already there. The genie is out of the bottle. Short of complete suppression of garage/basement tech entrepreneurs there is no way to stop it from becoming ubiquitous.

  Of course if I wanted my backyard to be really private, I could employ tech (such as lasers or other things not invented yet) to spoof or blind the surveillance - and such would be my right, yes?

  Nod to William Gibson.

  SB

  Assuming, of course, that those suing aren't being taken to the cleaners by ambulance chasing lawyers who they look up in the yellow pages.

  Like everything else, this is hardly a simple problem.

SB

...and why is that?...

  SB

  Late, but parent post deserves at least an Insightful mod.

SB

Some of them work for Obama. I guess they aren't losers, after all.

  You know what I find most disgustingly ironic about all the rhetoric lately?

  Too many people are forgetting that the real roots of the problems we have now don't stem from just this administration or this congress, but from decades worth of corruption and self-serving jackasses that WE - yes, WE - have elected into office.

  As George Carlin said once: "Where are all the bright, honest people of conscience?"

SB

  Statistic should not be used to try and predict phenomena which depend on variables or data that are neither quantifiable nor reliable.

SB

  Any government that does not ensure that it's citizens have access to affordable and competent health care will eventually find that it's citizens are no longer willing nor able to work and pay taxes.

  A personal liberty? How does "provide for the common defence and general welfare" not include defending the physical well-being of the citizens - "against enemies foreign and domestic" - "domestic" including greedy corporations who profit off of citizens who have little or no recourse other than lawsuits that they can't afford to pay for?

SB

Payment gets worked out later.

  That's changing, too. My local regional hospital system used to work with people on payment plans. Not anymore. Without announcing it they went to a "90 days or it goes to collections" plan, and even those people who were making payments, and were not behind, had their accounts sent to collections, with no warning or notification whatsoever.

  Now our local hospital system is owned and run by people who have already managed to piss off most of the region with their greediness - they posted record profits for 2009 and the board of directors promptly voted a 5-10% hike in fees across the board - but I can't imagine that there aren't other hospital systems doing the same thing, particularly the ones owned by systems that have bought up or out all the local smaller clinics and GPs.

  Let's call it what it is, OK? Sheer, conscience-less, unmitigated greed by people for whom a fifty thousand dollar hospital bill is pocket change, and who have no problem lobbying, bullying and pushing our lawmakers into ensuring that the profit comes their way.

  The ironic part of that is that those people don't understand the difference between feeding off of a host and killing said host. Or having said host go to desperate measures to kill it's parasite. Fools.

  SB

  expense, inefficiency, corruption and greed. Stupendous amounts of greed.

SB

  One could at least hope that the gropers wash their hands thoroughly between passengers. Even if they are not directly touching skin, the clothing that passengers are wearing will still have viral and bacterial colonies that it picks up from close contact, and the "screeners" are spreading it from passenger to passenger. They can't eliminate the problem completely, but a good skin-stripping wash will at least cut the transmission down.

SB

Funnies aside...

  Being groped without consent is equivalent to rape, regardless of whether it's my genitals that are being groped. Rape is not about sex, although that is often a part of the "act". It's about control over another person, and abuse of that control, and that is why the term has been used in many other contexts.

  If the alternative to submitting to it is imprisonment or physical violence, what other term could one use?

SB