The article itself was not very clear about it. It really says the down payment was enough to cover the newly opted 700 shares at $100 per share, but it doesn't say what was the total price for all of the shares. I assumed it was $100 per share, but I don't really know...

TSR, a small company dealing in the fringe hobby of "war gaming" got hugely popular at the beginning of 1980's thanks to an unexpected publicity from a hoax that got propagated by the national media.

The company owners and executives, Gygax and the Bloom brothers were no skilled businessmen and they projected this sudden jump in the company's revenue into the next years, expecting it to grow tenfold in a year. They went on a hiring and acquisition spree accordingly.

As the miraculous growth didn't come, TSR ran into financial problems, running on a $750k deficit by the mid 80's

The Bloom brothers tried to get a big outside investment to get the company out of the red numbers but Gygax opposed - he didn't want non-gamers to control the company. To this effect he executed an ancient option he got when the company was formed, gained a (very narrow) majority of the company's shares and thus the power to strip the Bloom brothers of their executive positions and void the investment by the outsiders.

In response the Blooms wanted to execute the option of selling all their shares back to the company for a large (but not outlandish) sum of some $500K but TSR could not afford it.

Half a year later the Blooms executed the same option Gygax did before to gain a slight majority in the company and sold all of their shares to Lorraine Williams for a third of the price per share, making her the largest and a majority shareholder.

One day later Gygax was stripped of all his executive positions in the company

He fought the decision in court, but really had no case and eventually sold off his shares in order to finance his new business.

How Gygax lost his copyright to D&D and Grayhawk the article does not say

All in all a really boring story

Plus, the article does not seem to understand the drugs it's talking about. Caffeine is definitely a workaholic's drug and I can see how it could be upgraded to cocaine. But oxycodone and other opiates? Those will not help you pull another over-nighter. They'll knock you out instead.

Either you obesity causes you to have some real disabling condition like joint damage or breathing problems in which case you don't need a special 'obesity disability' to be considered disabled, or it doesn't cause you any disabling conditions and again, you don't need to be considered 'disabled.

It's like saying everybody that has been in a car crash should be defined as disabled.

You are wrong. 100% of cases is a higher intake of calories then output of calories. Anything else would suggest that perpetual motion is possible.

This is not really the best solution. There are still legitimate businesses using patent laws in legitimate ways to protect themselves - pretty much all industry involved in chemistry, biotechnology and material science. It takes a lot of initial resources to develop a new material or a new drug even though the eventual manufacture of them might be cheap. It would just not make any sense to invest in these things if the minute you get the new drug out of the door a dozen other companies would start selling it for half the price because they didn't have to cover the research and testing costs.

A much more elegant solution would be to pay for the patent protection. It could work like this:
- you choose the $ amount others have to pay you to use your technology (covered in the patent)
- others can just pay you that amount and use it (you cannot decline)
- you have to pay 1% of that amount per year to the authorities or lose your patent

That's the basic idea. You could maybe extend it with things like changing the amount, or limiting the timespan during which the people can use your patent after they pay etc.

It wouldn't harm the honest users - the big pharma could easily pay a couple hundred thousand per patent, the small inventor could easily pay 100 bucks per year and get some money back (because under current laws it's practically impossible for an individual to enforce his patent). And the trolls that have tens of thousands of trash patents on their portfolios would fold.

Unfortunately there would probably be much less litigation going on so the lawyers will lob aggressively against any attempt to introduce such a system.

A little bit. Specifically issues regarding intellectual property that got escalated up to our CEO. What did I learn of it?

CEOs of big companies listen to their lawyers very carefully and don't second guess them. At least in tech companies they don't.

Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't the CEO's at the biotech and pharma firms that decided they needed to dump money on congress on this issue as if they didn't have better use for their capital. Guess who convinced them to do it...

Plus, the trial lawyers played no small part in this. Read the article.

The ars technica article does. You are probably talking about the opensource.com article - that one really does not say 'why', just 'what'.

Here's the meat part:

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Fucking. Lawyers.

Is it really cheap? You need a lot of manpower that you wouldn't if you'd use an electronic system. And manpower is typically where the most of the costs come from.

Not in the same shape though.

It might not impact you much if you are going to one conference, but if you fly to multiple destinations within a week, it will build up. Your back/joint pain, stress level, lack of sleep will show. It might mean that you will save 5k on the boarding passes of your exec but then pay millions for the bad decision she makes.

You went overboard with this statement.

You don't show each and every element of a crime to get a conviction. There's means, motive and opportunity. Often proving just two of those can get a guilty verdict.

Also there is collecting stamps and there is trying to legislate stamp collecting as mandatory in schools, going to war in the name of stamps, giving medical advice based on stamps etc.

No. If they measured correlation between exposure to light and *reduction* of BMI, I wouldn't mind, but as it is, interpreting that statement that way is some snake oil salesman level of dishonesty (why not say "Weight can influence the amount of exposure to the sunlight people get"?).