Same on my HTC Evo 4G LTE. Some of the Sprint crapware is also undisableable.

Worse, in my opinion, is the stupid Facebook for HTC Sense app. You can't uninstall it without rooting, and even disabling it won't let you install the stock Facebook app, which means that you perpetually have this stupid notification icon that harasses you to sync Facebook with Sense (so it can update your contacts with all your random Facebook friends).

I don't care if it was the worst contracting company in the world, the best contracting company in the world, or just CGI Federal. When your customer refuses to release to you in a reasonable time frame the finalized spec for a huge multisystem programming and integration project with a fixed completion date, things are going to go horribly wrong.

I think a better system would be one where the USPTO took an active role in managing certain aspects of litigation. Initial issuance of patents could remain similar to how it is now (although anything that can be done to improve quality is still a good thing). But during litigation, the first two things that should be done are (1) a focused PTO re-exam complete with a Request for Comments to solicit possible prior art from the public, and (2) a PTO determination of the proper scope of the claims, rather than leave this up to the push-and-pull of the plaintiff and defendant.

In a lot of cases, the applicants/attorneys don't actually do a search, because doing a search means that if they fail to tell the Office about something they find, they could be on the hook for it later. So it's safer to be willfully blind.

As for the USPTO, we do what we can in the time given. There's only so much searching we can do, and if we can't find and present evidence that something was already known publicly, we can't just send out rejections based on how many Slashdotters think it's obvious. Issued patents aren't perfect, but when you compare the claims that get issued with what was originally filed, you'll see just how much worse the system could be if we actually did just rubber stamp everything.

Just the fact that there were 55 different contractors working on healthcare.gov is reason enough to suspect that major security flaws crept in.

The fact that the website was opened before any appreciable amount of testing was done is reason enough to suspect that most of those flaws are still undiscovered and uncorrected.

The government's project managers didn't even come up with a full specification for the largest contractor until this past Spring, with the expectation that everything would be done and ready for business on 1 October. It's a total clusterfuck, the true scope of which likely won't be discovered for several months.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/why-the-healthcaregov-train-wreck-happened-in-slow-motion.html

You had to look this up? Now I feel old. Also, get off my lawn!

The problem isn't that you have a bunch of squabbling engineers who can't even figure out how to split a lunch check. It's that you have a bunch of executives and attorneys that want to get as much of their company's IP piled into the standard as possible.

It's okay, though - once you factor in the unskippable FBI warning, unskippable trailers, and unnecessarily elaborate menu intro, that bootup time turns out to be negligible.

Finally, a package that the delivery guy will really, really regret drop-kicking off the back of the truck.

Are patent suit costs in Canada paid for by the losing party? This is one of the big problems in the US - each side usually pays its own costs, even when the patentee loses.

I disagree. As long as the third-party submitted prior art is submitted as early as possible - as in, before the examiner has picked up the case and started examining it - then the examiner has a huge incentive to carefully look at the third-party art. Good art submitted in this fashion will save the examiner a huge amount of time in searching the case.

Prior art submitted after things are under way, however, may get put on the back burner because there are some situations in which changing the prior art being relied upon would result in the examiner getting no credit for the next one or two actions in the case.

Well, most (not all) computer software related patents run maybe 20-25 pages double spaced, plus figures. As a printed issued patent, they're a good bit shorter than that page-wise. Very few go a thousand pages long, because it costs extra.

The real problem in the courts is, as you say, that the judges have very little expertise in the relevant arts. Thus, each side presents its expert witnesses who say the exact opposite thing from each other (look hard enough and you can find an "expert" to support just about any argument you might have), and the judges are none the wiser.

At the PTO, you're right that attorneys draft applications to intentionally confuse. Claims are drafted using vague language for the sake of vagueness, which results in claims that cannot practicably be fully searched. The objective is in many cases not to get a good patent, but just something with a patent number on it, because attorneys know that even a bad patent has value if nobody is willing to pony up the cash to challenge it. The PTO is hamstrung in addressing these issues by the case law, which says that vagueness is not the same as indefiniteness, and so we can't reject claims solely for being vague if the scope of the claims can be discerned.

The only place we get any real sanity is (in sparing quantity) from the Supreme Court, who occasionally say things like, this is clearly an abstract concept, so it's not patentable, or this is just common sense, so it's obvious, or what have you. When this happens, it helps the PTO and the courts weed out some subset of the bad applications and patents. But out of all the patent cases litigated every year, maybe one or two of them make their way to the SCOTUS, so arriving at eventual sanity will take a long, long time.

Back in my college Medieval History class, our instructor explained to us that the "Speak now, or forever hold your peace" line in wedding ceremonies has its roots in a Catholic church prohibition at the time which disallowed marriages between sixth cousins or closer. If you knew that the couple were more closely related than that, then you piped up right there and put the kibosh on the arrangement.

But nearly everyone in England at that point was at least that closely related to each other, so the prohibition was generally ignored.

I'm glad somebody else recognizes this, because I'm tired of fiscal responsibility being painted with the same brush as Michelle Bachman's ilk. When the Tea Party first started getting media attention, I was interested in subscribing to their newsletter, but now they're basically just the Christian conservative message wrapped up in some anti-tax stuff. By taking a minority viewpoint and acting like they have some sort of political mandate, they're spelling an early doom for the GOP-ers who are willing to play ball with the Dems. (The GOP would likely collapse eventually anyway, but it would have taken a lot longer for the demographics to shift without the help of the new "Tea Party".)

What I don't get is why the federal exchanges exclude those people who aren't eligible for insurance through their employers. They ought to be available for everyone to choose an insurance plan from, with the employer paying their share to whichever insurance plan the employee chooses.

Next up: the app that uses accelerometers to detect sudden deceleration and encourages you to throw your cell phone against the wall as hard as possible.

Because, really, why take chances when you can have a sure thing?