The engineers wouldn't have jobs? Do you not have the slightest clue how this works? These were top of their field guys with tonnes of job offers who took _less_ pay in exchange for stock options in a company they believed in. They literally invested their lives in the company in place of their dollars. The through some legal slight of hand it was stolen out from under them. AOL did the same thing when they merged with Time Warner. When you have tens of thousands of dollars taken from you you don't "Just shake it off".

Again as well, supposed serious grown-ups investing other people's money.

and I hope the CEO lost money, but I bet he made out fine. The guy cheated his engineers out of millions. He paid them in stock options while they built the company from nothing and then folded the paper corporation right before the investment money came in.

When it's in response to an obvious joke, yes. Look at the volume and tell me that's not a lot of so-called level headed serious investors acting like someone yelled BOO in a henhouse.

Which Wikipedia article is that? I'd like to follow the cite since other figures suggest much less generics.

Good for you! Pin a rose on your nose! A lot of otherwise reasonable people got sucked in to this by trusting that the person who is supposed to be constrained by ethics was actually constrained by ethics.

Who says it wasn't one of 20 sign here's somewhere in the middle. Did I mention these brokers were fraudsters?

Analogy, overly pedantic kid in middle school who starts every sentence with "Well technically..."

It was bad loans that financially naive people accepted on the knowingly bad advice of mortgage brokers who needed fodder to fraudulently sell off as AAA investments.

Try looking beyond the gates sometime.

Sadly, all that would mean is that you'll be 'asked' to tighten your belt so their constant stream of hookers and blow can continue through a massive bailout.

These people are truly the scum of the Earth.

It goes a long way to putting the lie to any claims of the market being anything but a casino driven by random fluctuations.

You can implement an MP3 decoder in Rust right now, but someone has to pay the patent licensing in order to ship it, which is antithetical to the goals of many software projects and frankly to the Web in general.

Go for it. The playback patents expire later this year - by time you're ready to ship, it'll be free of government imposition.

The encoding patents are a bit more nebulously defined - depends on who you ask and where you live.

At the same time, good luck getting a doctor to suggest a $5 jar of salve over a $200 tube of prescription salve, even if it's the very same stuff.

That's a real problem. Many doctors default to the new name brand X rather than the tried and true generic Y even when just the co-pay for X will cost more than Y. Often, X will be no better than Y for the majority of patients. As a result, some people pay WAY too much and some end up not getting X or Y. A tiny handful avoid mild itching that could have been fixed by switching them to X if they cared to.

I can't see why I - or anyone else - would want this. So what exactly do I gain from getting one or more of these?

It's not hard to imagine use cases. Take, for instance, an 88-year-old senior who is trying to age in place but for whom a trip to the store isn't a trivial undertaking, and who has no interest in a smartphone (and sure isn't going to see a 4" HD screen).

Boom - more detergent shows up the day after tomorrow. Iterate through typical consumables - the UI is damn simple and the button is big enough for somebody with Parkinson's to manage. That's worth the effort for the responsible child to set up.

Now take a new mom who's half-covered in crap and hasn't slept all night. Only 10 diapers left. Boom - nap time.

I'm assuming there's a reasonable "boom" sound effect here. How much are ringtones?