I'm a big believer in applying common sense when it comes to questions of what's right or decent. It's obvious that if he contributed all of it that he'd be making a statement worth sitting up and taking note of. It's also obvious that donating $1000 and not talking about it except when others bring it up is quite the opposite.

Not in the least! Far from it, I think that taking a personal, principled stand and choosing to boycott a product or service is a great way to respond to someone's belief with which you disagree when the person stands to personally profit from having you as a patron of their business. That is a proportionate response. But Eich didn't stand to profit here, his stance wasn't related in any way to the business he (briefly) ran, and boycotting him only served to harm Firefox, yet we still saw stuff like OKCupid blocking all Firefox users from using their site.

There is no possible argument for what's happened here being a proportionate response. There were tens (hundreds?) of thousands of donors, many of them more vocal in their support and donating much larger sums. Why is this guy, who donated a small amount and has made every effort to keep personal and professional life separate, being targeted when they are not? If you think this response is proportionate, the LA Times has a searchable database for Prop 8 donors that makes it easy to find names, so why haven't you used it yet to level the same "proportionate response" to everyone else who donated in support of Prop 8? Go forth and prosper in your witch hunt if you think what's been happening here is reasonable.

Or maybe you can instead recognize that this guy has just as much right to privacy as you do, that we should respect personal/professional boundaries since everyone we meet has some belief we disagree with, and that your patronizing his business in no way supports nor detracts from the cause that he happens to personally believe. If people want to quit, I'm okay with that (I apparently edited out some verbiage in my previous post that made that clear, so I apologize for any confusion), but most of these responses are WAY out of proportion.

You and I must have different ideas of what that term means.

It's one thing to look through the donation records for big donors or organizations that got involved, but if you're looking through donation records to see if a specific someone donated any amount of money at all, that's not following the money, that's a witch hunt. This guy donated $1000 out of something like $30,000,000 that was donated in support of Pro 8. That's not something that comes up when you're following the money; that's something that comes up when you're specifically searching a database for the guy in an effort to discredit him.

So, no, you should not be expected to "follow the money", any more than you should try and use the fact that someone donated to fight AIDS or tithed to their local church as a way to try and discredit them, since either of those are objectionable to some people too. So long as they don't broadcast their activities, their small donation to support a privately-held belief should remain between them and the organization to which they are donating.

Truth or not, if nothing else, there's simple professional courtesy being violated here. The vast majority of us hold at least one belief that is contrary to that held by the majority, and so, as a society, we've established that because we both value the person's right to hold those beliefs but also recognize that we need to get work done, we'll generally keep our beliefs to ourselves when in a professional environment. So long as you leave your private beliefs at home, I'll leave mine at home and we can work together. It's basic professional courtesy, and it's a fundamental aspect of doing business with others who may have wildly differing viewpoints.

I fully support the rights of others to speak out against him, protest, or even quit, but that doesn't mean that I think they should be doing so, particularly because of the precedent it sets for ousting someone because they privately hold to an unpopular belief. The utter and complete lack of professional courtesy towards someone who not only has a history of professionally upholding the principles of the organization for which he works (principles which, apparently, run contrary to his personal ones), but also had never made any attempt to bring his personal life into work, is absolutely appalling.

That's probably because businesses are IBM's customers, not people. Businesses tend to be motivated by bottom-lines a lot more than emotions.

It's called a "hostile environment". People quit their jobs for that reason all the time.

By no means am I suggesting that these people were justified in vilifying this guy (I actually believe quite the opposite, in fact); I'm merely pointing out my disagreement with much of what you used to illustrate your point.

A person doing something that is by its very nature public, such as campaigning, advertising, or speaking for a cause, has crossed the line you're talking about by tying themselves to that topic in public. They're fair game. On the other hand, if someone simply makes a donation that happens to be a matter of public record, that's between them and the recipient of their donation. It's not a platform they've campaigned for, a cause they've staked their reputation on, or a fight they have tied themselves to. It's simply something that they privately and quietly support. Making a big stink of it says more about the people dredging it up than it does about the person themselves.

Quite likely, and mere moments after I submitted the comment I realized that I had completely failed to consider or address that topic.

Color me naive, but I think I'm actually okay with an aid organization providing services that most of the rest of the world enjoy to people trapped within a country that rules over them as a dictatorship. That sounds a lot like aid to me, and if they need to engage in shenanigans to get that aid to the people, I'm okay with that too. After all, when a government stands in the way of its people receiving basic services, you have to do stuff like that. And if they're hoping that the people will use that service in a way that benefits the organization? You know what, that's really no different than any other aid they offer either, when you get down to it.

I'm all for giving the US a hard time over its spying and whatnot, but this? I really don't have a problem with this unless they were actively using it to try and incite a Cuban Spring, rather than merely passively providing it and letting things develop on their own.

They were willing to put up with being used as vehicles for product promotion in order to attain a little publicity for themselves, their industry, and the things they believe in. What they weren't willing to put up with was being used to further harmful stereotypes that go against everything they stand for.

It's one thing to put people under pressure and focus on the drama when making a reality TV show. We expect that. They expected that. It's an entirely separate thing to press as hard as you can on a nerve, attempt to fabricate drama, and poison the nature of the show in the pursuit of that drama.

It actually is difficult to work out, just as pretty much any idiom is to those who are unfamiliar with them. Even if we understood what it meant in a literal sense, it still wouldn't connote the idea that the person is refusing to work, merely that they had ceased to work. To an American, it sounds like they're simply taking a break and will be back after lunch. People who quit do not merely "put" their tools down, after all, they "throw" them down, "drop" them, "rid themselves of" them, or do something else similarly aggressive with their tools.

Do you try to find meaning in something that makes no sense, or do you try to get the basic gist and assume that the person merely misspoke? To most Americans it meant nothing at all, because as you said, the only other ways of interpreting "downing" (e.g. "down a drink", "down a plane") made no sense whatsoever. To us, it sounded like someone misspoke or left out a few words. The fact that the original version of the summary also misused the word "projection" in place of "production" only served to further enhance the notion that someone had made a mistake. I got the basic gist from the context, but the phrase itself looked wholly incorrect to me.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a friend a few years back. Having grown up in India, he learned British English as a second language. While talking one day, I used a phrase along the lines of "he got off of the bus" in conversation. My friend politely questioned whether I should have used "of" in the phrase. I informed him that it was correct, but when he challenged me by asking if "get on of" was acceptable as well, I had no immediate answer, since "on of" sounded ludicrous. We eventually did some research and realized that "off of" is simply an Americanism with which he was unfamiliar.

Well, now I know how he felt. And hopefully you'll have a better sense for how others might see the situation too.

1g is roughly 9.8N/kg. With a torus a mile across, that's a lot of mass, meaning that's a lot of force pulling away from the center. I was suggesting that not only would it be difficult with the tether that was being discussed, it'd be difficult period. Spinning it up wouldn't be particularly difficult, it'd just take some time and a lot of fuel.

Sounds to me like the American financial sector is a case study in why you shouldn't allow this practice to occur, rather than a reason for allowing it elsewhere.

I can see arguments for both sides.

We're all aware of some of the asinine judgments that jurors and judges have passed down when they don't understand the technology or science at play.

On the other side, however, only allowing doctors to serve as jurors for doctors or engineers to be jurors for engineers can get into some dangerous territory quickly. For instance, what's to stop them from looking out for their own? Doctors could get sued for malpractice and never be found to be at fault. Engineers could be sued for cutting corners and then get off the hook because "it's simply too complicated for a normal person to understand". Having a jury of your peers that includes laypeople ensures that such things aren't possible. Having a random sampling also helps to ensure everyone is treated more equally, otherwise some people will be playing under a different set of rules than the others.

That said, having laypeople is fundamentally at odds with the patent system, which specifies the idea of non-obviousness in terms of whether or not it's obvious to one "skilled in the art", i.e. someone with domain knowledge. A layperson isn't really qualified to judge non-obviousness without first receiving sufficient instruction to become skilled in the art, which simply isn't feasible. As such, it seems like it may make sense to bring in professionals for such cases.

One result I can pretty much guarantee for you is that if they do start bringing in professionals instead of laypeople to deal with these cases, the patent system will get overhauled in short order, simply because the professionals won't want to be getting dragged into court constantly to serve as jurors a disproportionate amount of the time compared to a typical person. Any changes that need to happen to get things fixed will suddenly happen when you start inconveniencing everyone in the field.

There's a quick video montage of inventions starting at the 2:55 mark which features an old polycarbonate MacBook (or a late-model iBook?), an iPad, and an iPhone, but the logos are not visible on any of them. To be perfectly honest, despite having owned an iPad and that model of iPhone, I didn't even recognize them as being Apple products until I re-watched the video, just because of the angles they were shot at and the actions the scenes were focusing on. Had I not been looking for them, I wouldn't have seen them.

The only Apple product that is on-screen for any length of time, as well as being the only one with the logo clearly visible, is what appears to be a MacBook Pro being used by the actor portraying an inventor, but in no way was it suggested that the computer itself was the invention. Rather, the invention was some CAD diagram he had on his computer. Even so, the computer does get quite a bit of screen time with the shining Apple logo clearly visible.

Just to put it in perspective, IIRC from my high school days as the president of the school's Space Settlement Design Team (don't laugh, we qualified for the international-level finals every year we competed back in the very early 2000s!), a torus a mile in diameter needs to rotate once a minute in order to achieve 1g. Tethers or not, it's hard to keep something like that together.

Not only that, but I'd be willing to bet that with the vaccine scares, vaccinations actually went down during that time. And yet, what happened? Autism rates skyrocketed by 30%. Correlation != causation, of course, but anyone crying that vaccines are the cause will need to explain how the two can have an inverse relationship like that.

Far more likely is that more kids were simply submitted for testing by concerned parents. Jenny McCarthy identified her son as autistic in 2007 (mind you, this is after she identified him as a "crystal child" and herself as an "indigo mom"), and started her campaigning against vaccines in early 2008 with claims on Larry King Live. By mid-2010, Wakefield had had his medical license revoked, his research discredited, and was thoroughly debunked. He was even more thoroughly discredited as we got through 2011, and the anti-vaxxer proponents were on their back foot trying to defend a premise that had had its foundation washed away.

Long story short, this research was conducted during the height of the vaccine scares, when more parents than ever were aware of autism and were looking for it in their children. Rather than better medical screening or more incidents of autism, I'd simply suggest that this is a case of more children being submitted to the medical screening.

The situation is quite a bit more nuanced than that, and you've got your basic facts surrounding the case slightly wrong, since what you've stated Apple should have done is exactly what Apple did do. But, strangely, they also did what you said in your first sentence too. The illegal collusion and price fixing that's happened here revolves primarily around the interplay of two otherwise-perfectly-legal ideas: the agency model and most favored nation (MFN) clauses.

Agency Model: The agency model allows the publishers to set their own prices at the cost of giving the seller's a higher cut, whereas the wholesale model that is more common provides the publishers with a bigger cut at the cost of letting the sellers set the price. Given a perfect world, the wholesale model is more appealing to publishers, since they generally get a larger overall cut.

MFN Clause: An MFN clause is exactly the concept you described at the end of the quote I pulled above. They simply stipulate that they'll give you the same or better prices than they give anyone else. As you said, there's nothing wrong with that, in and of itself.

Background: Prior to Apple's arrival, Amazon had wholesale agreements with all of the publishers. The problem for the publishers, however, was that Amazon controlled over 90% of the eBooks market at the time. As you correctly pointed out, the fact that they had a monopoly wasn't actually an issue, since Amazon's interests (i.e. driving Kindle adoption and buy-in to their ecosystem) were better-served by keeping prices low, meaning that they were not using their monopoly in an anti-competitive manner. That said, they were using their monopsony in an anti-competitive manner, by forcing the publishers to sell their books at unreasonable prices while preserving their own margins, simply because the publishers had no one else they could sell to. In fact, there were several dramatic examples of Amazon using its monopsonistic bargaining position to strong-arm the publishers for better wholesale prices. Amazon was unwilling to discuss switching to an agency model, so the publishers were rather concerned that they may be forced to price themselves out of business.

With Apple—a big player— entering the market, Amazon was forced to negotiate terms that were more favorable to the publishers, namely, switching to an agency model. Such a change would naturally result in prices going up, even without any sort of illegal price fixing or collusion taking place, since the sellers are getting a larger cut with the agency model, which means that the publishers need to raise the prices to preserve their cut. Again, there's nothing illegal about that (in fact, it's what they're all doing now after what they were doing before was ruled illegal); it's simply a costlier way of doing business.

The Illegality: According to the judge, what was illegal in all of this was combining the agency model with the MFN clause. By combining the two, the MFN clause that says "you must give me the lowest price" in effect means "you'll raise the prices customers are paying at competing stores to match mine" (hence why both of your sentences that I quoted were what happened). Had they stuck with the wholesale model, the publishers could only have abided by the MFN clause by changing wholesale prices, so it would have still been up to Amazon and Apple to compete on price by deciding how much of a margin they'd (not) keep. Had they dropped the MFN clause, you'd have what the judge is forcing them to do now, since she's barred them from using MFN clauses with the agency model that the industry has now entirely switched to.

Moreover, court documents indicate that Apple and the publishers knew full well what they were doing and were indeed colluding in ensuring that prices went up in such a way that both the publishers and Apple would get what they wanted, with Amazon unwillingly being dragged along. That's why the judge is also forcing Apple to stagger its renegotiations with the publishers in six-month intervals, that way it's more difficult for them to collude with one another.

My Take: As for my opinion on all of it, I think that there's no one entirely innocent here. Apple and the publishers clearly engaged in illegal activity, and for that there should be consequences, though I think that the amount the judge has suggested in the original (DoJ) suit is unreasonable, since she's placing the burden for the entire increase in price on them, completely disregarding the fact that there were perfectly legal factors that also contributed to price increases during that time. Likewise, I'm wholly in favor of the class action suit against them, since consumers deserve to have a chance to collect what was taken from them illegally. That said, I also wish someone would take Amazon to task over their role in it prior to Apple's arrival. They had artificially pushed prices down through anticompetitive, strong-arm tactics, which is part of why the increase in price seemed so significant.

And as a closing thought, I hate to be put in a position where I'm defending the publishers. I feel filthy doing so, but I still think that the judge has been too harsh on them, even though they deserve to be punished.