I'll eat em right now.

Mmmm. Lobster. Crawfish. Mmmm.

Indeed. In the USA you can hand your stuff to a "standards body", then stab anyone who uses it in the back if your patent gets approved later (see also: Submarine Patents and Rambus's dishonesty a decade ago that drove up DRAM prices for a long while).

People can complain about the European patent system but they do a lot of things better than the USA:
- Stopping submarine patents and patent trolls.
- Actually doing due diligence on first-discovery vs. the nonsensical "first to file"
- Actually doing due diligence to keep the Obvious and Trivial patents out
- Actually doing due diligence to be sure someone isn't trying to patent something already patented

In fact, overall the US patent office doesn't do "due diligence" on almost anything anymore. I can't blame them since they are far underfunded to handle the glut of patent-slamming from major US corporations, but it does kind of make the US patent system a laughingstock elsewhere in the modern world.

Seriously, what sort of incompetence do you have to have on display to have someone actually manage to patent the peanut butter and jelly sandwich?

The problem is when people who DON'T need kickstarter clog the pipe up. Spoiled brat kids of overpaid, undertalented music acts "kickstarting" their 2nd or 3rd album for instance. James Franco wanting people to "kickstart" his vanity-movie project.

Shit like this clutters up the site and makes it impossible to find the people who have interesting projects that actually need the help.

I like the idea of Kickstarter, but I think a lot of people have co-opted it and it's becoming much less useful for finding really nifty projects. Too many corporate "we're too lazy to handle our own preorders" stuff on it these days.

Maybe that's a feature, not a bug, to the Kickstarter people but it's turned me off from browsing. Finding the diamonds in the rough is a lot harder with the corporate invaders adding so much more rough.

How about "because the pirated product is actually better quality and more functional than the so-called genuine article"?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/when-piracy-offers-a-better-product-the-legitimate-for-pay-versions-will-al

Good music was pirated to death

Actually, no, the heyday of music sales was also the heyday of Napster. Music sales drops directly correlate to (A) the lowered number of premiere band and album launches and (B) the music industry's lack of ability to forced-obsolescence much of their product compared to past years. Tapes wore out; Vinyl required great care. The music industry enjoyed a massive boost with CDs largely because they could resell the same old crap, plus all their "new acts", on CD and people would actually buy the various greatest-hit collections and album re-releases on CD because their old copies were degrading and not playing back at the same quality.

The nice thing about digital, though, is it doesn't degrade. And people have learned about transferring things device to device, and their RIGHT to do so.

There's also the nice rise of the single again, with people able to buy just the TRACKS they want rather than having to buy a shitty-ass album to get the one track they liked that was way overplayed on the radio from this summer's one-hit wonder. Great for consumers, lousy for coke-addled music execs who counted on selling CD albums at $19.99 forever.

The music industry is in decline because all they are producing is Biebers, Gagas, and twerking bimbos rather than elevating the best new acts. They do this because they can get the Biebers, Gagas, and twerking bimbos cheap and sign them to a long term contract early (much like Disney's "this is how we sell sex to 5 year old girls" tools, the Jonas Brothers, or the former trajectory of most Boy Bands).

What it would take for the music industry to stop the decline is to start producing a better product again. "Piracy" did not cause the Biebers, Gagas, etc. The relentless drive of one-hit wonder crap albums, tweeny-pop boybands, twerking bimbos, Lesbos Like Bieber, and on and on caused people to be leery of buying product sight-unseen.

"Isreali"

Sure sign the anonymous coward is a neo nazi lying shitwad racist: they can't even spell the name of that country correctly for fear "the jews" will see them talking about it.

But then how would they drive up the ticket money to pay for unneeded "new cars" and bribe money for their pockets?

Come on now. If you see a traffic cop, he's not there to "protect and serve." They are the Badged Highwaymen, state-sanctioned assholes whose job it is to flip the lights on behind random people in the universal cop-sign for "stick em up and hand over your wallet, brownie."

Maybe it's because the collection of theocratic asswipes that run the Iranian government have promised to wipe certain countries off the face of the planet and been caught lying many times about their supposedly "peaceful *coughbullshitcough*" nuclear program.

The world didn't understand the end result of nuclear weapons before the only two ever used in war were used. Since then we've learned so much more and we've come to the conclusion that they are too dangerous, destructive, and their impact far too long-lasting to ever be used again.

Letting Ayatollah Assaholla, or any of the clerics, or some crazed nutjob like Ahmadamnnutjob have access to nuclear weaponry would be like walking Hannibal Lecter into a butcher's supply store and saying "here, help yourself." And for all that their new president is sounding better, he's a mullah's cough away from being on his ass and replaced by someone far worse. He's playing the snake game talking out of two sides of his mouth right now, trying to blame "Israel" for every bit of shitty sectarian muslim-on-muslim warfare and every act of stupidity that has been made by the tin-pot dictator crowd that runs the various Arab states in general.

I'd be more scared that the US has these weapons right now than of some backwater country.

Tea Party kooks full of Cold War insanity and outdated worldviews aside, the US is a rational actor. The US has no purpose or reason to use nuclear weapons.

To contrast, Iran is not - and has not been since the 1970s - a rational actor. That is the key difference. Iran's government rules by fear and theocracy, signing themselves up when convenient with certain other nations and generally being the little shitty chihuahua dog that barks a lot and occasionally actually bites someone because it thinks it can get away with it and to prove its miniscule "power." Iran is highly likely to not just "have" nuclear weapons but actively use them out of fright, or spite, or just because they think it will make them look "powerful" on the world stage.

I'm still not sure what the takeaway from this is, save the fact that in addition to being a senile old coot, racist, anti-semite, and all-around waste of oxygen Scalia is also clueless about technology.

In fact, generally assuming Scalia is wrong about everything will serve you well.

Adjuncts are great for teaching FRESHMEN because freshmen are mostly getting remedial math, remedial english, and remedial other-subjects to try to get them to college level thanks to GOP looting and plundering and systematic damage of the education system.

Tenured profs who actually do research are much better for teaching seniors, Masters level, and PhD level students because the tenured profs actually have to know what the fuck they are talking about and the students at that level need someone who can do more than stand at a lectern and read from a book written by someone else.

There's no point sugarcoating it when someone is just a moron like you.

Far from it. I argue that we need regulations. It's not a bad thing to evaluate a regulation to see if it's served its purpose and should be removed either, but plenty of the regulations we have removed that were direct responses to Gilded Age abuses have come back to bite us.

Glass-Steagall's slow whittling away and repeal is a great example. Without GS, we got a nice little boom/bust cycle and put ourselves right back to Black Monday (1987) and then Black Tuesday (1929) and now we're stuck trying to claw our way back out of the same sort of problems that created the gap of the 1930s.

History repeated because the "libertarian", "anti-regulation" tantrum wing of the GOP got their way and removed regulations that were actually needed. Deregulate first, think later is a bad policy and only those too dumb to understand history think otherwise.

"Free markets as a tool for economic efficiency"

And you're one of the naive idiots who can't see how this necessarily leads to the "economic efficiencies" of monopolism and vulture capitalism.

To be truly "competitive", a market has to be properly regulated. A "free market", in the sense the libertarians call for (laissez-faire capitalism) leads to the Gilded Age all over again. And those of us who have studied history understand how truly bad in all senses the Gilded Age was and never want to repeat the mistakes that naive, ideologically childish idiots like you would have us repeat.

There are two kinds of Libertarians.

Idiots who are too naive to understand that libertarianism leads to monopolism and vulture capitalism, and

Monopolist Vulture Capitalists.