Without a working model, all they have is words and diagrams on paper that might not work in practice. But that piece of paper gives them the right to sue somebody else who implements the concept and makes it work.

They need to bring back the working model requirement. If there is no working model, grant the patent provisionally. Don't let the patent holder sue before they have a working model, and if they don't build a working model by a specific deadline (say 5 years) the patent goes up for auction, with proceeds going to the patent owner. Or they can sell the patent before the 5 years are up. The new owner must have a working model before they can sue.

That way inventors can still get paid for a useful invention even if they don't have the resources to build the working model themselves.

Heisenberg wouldn't be in danger of getting fired. He is the danger.

"Also, I frankly think there is nothing wrong with ex-cons having to work their way up from the bottom when they reintegrate into society."

In theory that sounds fine, but in practice it is a problem because the less they earn from law-abiding jobs is the more they'll be inclined to return to crime. If they have the skills for a $30/hour job, the rest of us are better off if they can get that $30/job, as they'll be more likely to stay out of trouble than if they had a minimum wage job.

" On the other hand, why are you whining about Photoshop. Plenty of FOSS and offline commercial packages will teach you the same skills. For someone who has spent a good amount of time behind bars, you're awfully entitled (I wonder how much that attitude figured into your original incarceration)."

Employers want experience using Photoshop, not the FOSS equivalents which aren't similar enough to convince employers that the skills are readily transferable.

Their complaint is about price-fixing from January 2004 to January 2010. You couldn't get a DVD-R drive for under $20 back in 2009.

"Maybe it's time for the US to take the hint and stop this barbaric and medieval practice?"

Maybe it's time for the US to take the hint and start manufacturing their own propofol and other drugs of major importance.

The schools are bad because they can't attract good teachers to the area due to the high cost of living, and they're not willing to double or triple the salaries to bring in the good teachers.

In this case, the father wanted them to get the vaccine but the mother didn't. The parents disagreed, the court broke the tie, it didn't impose its will against both parents.

They need to bring back the working model requirement. If you can't produce a working model, maybe your idea won't work exactly as written, but if your patent would block others from making a variation which works.

For cases where the working model is too expensive or time-consuming for the inventor to build, grant the patent provisionally with the requirement that a working model must be produced within 7 years. If no working model is produced by then, the patent automatically goes up for auction (alternatively the inventor can sell it or put it up for auction before that), with auction proceeds going to the inventor. Whoever buys that patent has to produce a working model before they can sue anybody for infringement.

With that system, the inventor can still get paid for what they invent even if building a working model is beyond their capabilities.

So what if it's not really 15 minutes for a colonoscopy? The 15 minutes was just an example to demonstrate a point, which is that for various procedures the payment is based on an assumed X minutes for a particular procedure although it actually takes X/5 minutes.

Yes, the writer could have done a better job on choosing numbers more consistent with reality, but the point they're making still stands.

You apparently work for somewhere like Microsoft, Intel, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or HP, where most of their employees in the US are US citizens, and they pay H1B workers the same as US citizens.

But most H1B visas are used by big outsourcers like Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro and Tata. Making $100,000/year while working for them is way out of the ordinary for anybody who isn't in management.

H1B workers have to pay the same level of taxes as a US citizens, including Social Security which they normally won't be able to collect unless they eventually get green cards or US citizenship.

"There is a different class of visa for that - employees of multinational companies going from one country to another."

That is the L1 visa, used for management. They use that to send the project managers and executives to the US. But the on-site developers have H1B. If they're using the L1 to send the regular developers, that's visa fraud.

Except that the H1B is being used to support and expand outsourcing. The big outsourcing companies send developers with H1B to clients in the US to provide an on-site presence to coordinate with the larger development teams in India or China. Without the H1B program being used like that, either the entire project would be done in the US, or American developers would fill the roles of the on-site technical leads.

Ultimately somebody has to be trusted, but that level of trust shouldn't be placed in the hands of a 29-year-old contractor.

Access to secret data and documents should be on a need-to-know basis, or a practical approximation of it. It's clear that he had access far beyond what he needed to know. If he can't get at the sensitive documents in the first place he can't copy them to USB or use his cellphone to take pictures of them or upload them to his Wikileaks partners.