or "technical lead" or "team leader" or whatever who was organizing how all the pieces fit together, and reviewing the team members' designs to ensure they're compatible with each other and the rest of the system.

It's a management failure that they didn't assign somebody to be in that role (or otherwise have the team choose who within the team will be the technical lead).

If loading software turns a general-purpose computer into a new machine, the patent for that "new machine" should include all the internal details to make it work, particlularly the source code. Then if somebody else implements the same concept with different source code and different algorithms, they made a different machine so it's not infringing.

Just like amputee athletes have prosthetic legs specialized for running which they don't use for walking around on a day-to-day basis, she might benefit from a prosthetic specifically made to hold a paintbrush, or one where the end of it actually is a paintbrush. That could be both cheaper and more usable than a prosthetic hand which attempts to use intricate finger controls to try to hold a paintbrush.

"Someone wrote a bit back that 70% of their applicants, who passed the HR screening I believe, couldn't even code fizz-buzz."

That looks like a problem with HR's ability to screen.

It can extend beyond 6 years with a pending green card application.

Yes, it's true that the patent is only on the isolated gene, and not the gene in the form as it exists naturally in the body.

However, the process for isolating this gene is something that has already been done for years with other genes, so there is nothing patentworthy in isolating this gene.

" Your hypothetical construction worker just didn't have that negotiated into his contract or written into law somewhere. Instead, he negotiated to be paid upfront, rather than not getting a wage at all for his hard work and promised the mere possibility of future profits if the building actually made any money down the road."

You're missing the big difference here, which is that the law by default gives the artists a lifetime entitlement of royalties, whereas the construction worker doesn't have that default right embedded in the law. The law is giving strong preferential treatment to one type of creator over the other; it's not just about their negotiating abilities.

Probably a total of a half-dozen times in the 3 or 4 years it was in effect. But that's largely because there was so much code already written before the policy was in effect, and it wasn't enforced rigorously enough. For example, code reviews didn't require going through a diff from the previous version, and code reviews weren't always done consistently and thoroughly.

By contrast, there were a few dozen times when I was painstakingly searching through old versions to figure out if something was deliberately deleted vs. the programmer forgot to put it there in the first place. Appropriate comments would have saved time there. That was made worse by the horrible version control system in use.

At a previous employer, there was a *written* rule for deleting significant blocks of code.

If a properly functioning block of code already in production was being deleted due to changes in business requirements, a comment should be inserted at or near the point of deletion, which mentions that some code was deleted and the original code can be found in version x.xx, and preferably a phrase saying what it did.

However, if the code was not yet released to the production system, or was being deleted because it's buggy, it was acceptable to simply delete it without leaving a comment (if somebody needed to research an old bug they could look in the bug tracker, which would show which version of the code last had the bug, so there was no need to mention the bug-deletion in the code).

Read the article. The bigger-brained guppies were smarter in the tests they were given.

Because you'd be free to use other people's older music to make derivative works.

But in reality, being able to claim "It's made by Cisco" is the reason they DON'T get fired or demoted.

Guatemala wants to deport him to Belize, but he is a US citizen. Instead of trying to stay in Guatemala, I would think he has a better chance of convincing them to return him to the US (at his expense, due to the greater distance compared to Belize) than of being allowed to stay in Guatemala.

But I see no sign that he's trying to go back to the US. Did he surrender his US citizenship?

I was referring to going back to the US from Guatamela. Once he's in Guatemala, he could either seek to get on a plane to the US like a regular passenger, or ask Guatemala to deport him to the US at his own expense.

If Belize is a problem for him, why doesn't he move back to the US? He still has his US citizenship, and Guatemala will seek to deport him to the US.

How can he have a valid asylum claim if his country of citizenship isn't giving him a problem? Or is he going to claim that the US will extradite him to Belize?