If this actually sticks:

there's no real difference between the business and its owners.

Oh, wait, nevermind, as soon as someone sues them there'll suddenly be a "real difference" again and mommy government will ride in to save them from their actions.

What's next? A coptic efficiency expert? An Irish peacemaker?

A "religion" selling whatever religious views you want your company to become an adherent to. For $10 million, your company can "believe" that minimum wage is evil, or that dioxin regulations are the spawn of the devil.

The number of people who don't get hired because the shrub in their front yard is trimmed crooked is considerably lower than the number of people who don't get hired because they have MS, cancer or some other chronic disease that will cost the company's insurer big bucks and drive up the cost of insurance and cost the company in lost productivity when they're incapacitated. Oh sorry, I meant, don't get hired because they "aren't a good fit with the company culture".

The NSA should have put a clause in his employment contract preventing him from competing against them for the next X years.

Why would anyone sell shovels? If it was profitable, they'd dig everything themselves.

Actually, the real profit is in licensing the shovels with a per-scoop fee.

To put it bluntly, heartbleed was exciting and in security, exciting is bad.

The shipping company would weigh the cost of transport against the risk of losing the cargo and choose a route that wasn't so direct that pirates would expect you to take it, but not so long that the extra fuel and time costs would make it unprofitable.

It would make the pirate encounter all the more surprising, too.

I think you fundamentally misunderstood his statement, thought the random throwaway statement at the beginning about software being covered by copyright didn't help.

He talked about how someone could build a machine with mechanisms (triggered by switches) built into it and patent that machine. But once that machine was invented, nobody else should be able to come along and patent using the machine with a certain set of switches on or off, because the switches and their options were already included in the original invention.

I think it's easy to see where they are going: You take your Amazon phone to the store, snap a picture of what you want, and get it shipped to you. Or not.

Amazon then uses the decisions and GPS coordinates of the people using their phone to discover that store X in your city is cheaper than Amazon. They then lower the price of that item that they show to the people whose phones are or have been in that store, until the people in that store start buying it from Amazon instead.

On the other hand, litigation encourages innovation through design-arounds.

Aside from clear ownership of invention, it's also necessary to understand what is patented. Setting aside Microsoft's "we've patented this but we're not telling you which patents they are" there are cases like the "in-app purchase" patents that have absolutely no mention of purchasing in the claims (the claims are specifically about providing feedback to the developer through an app). Is buying a smurfberry "providing feedback"? I guess we'll have to wait for someone to spend a million bucks to fight it in court in order to find out.

Even when it's clear who owns the patent and how the patent applies, if you do a workaround you'll still likely find yourself on the other end of a C&D letter advising you that your app looks like it infringes their patent and if you don't settle now you'll face an expensive discovery process and have to hand over your source code to us to prove that your code doesn't do what the patent says it does. Not a big deal for OSS, but for proprietary software the prospect of handing over the family jewels to the competition isn't a good one.

And at the end of it all, after you've shown them your source code, shown them your workaround, shown them that you don't do what the patent says it does? They can pull the "Doctrine of Equivalents" card, and claim that despite the fact that the patent doesn't specifically name your workaround in the claims, it still applies. Enjoy your million dollar lawsuit.

The RAM is responsible for damaging the file while it sits in a buffer waiting to be written to the disk in the first place.

the judge upheld the conviction based upon the fact that the cops "didn't believe they needed a warrant"

When it comes to the cops, ignorance of the law is an excuse.

Please remove the "News for Nerds" tag line from your name

They took that off long ago. Now the logo in the corner just says "Slashdot".

So, Samsung is scamming Apple by selling Android phones that compete with Apple's phones?

Only when they violate Apple's patents to do so.

On a more serious side, if Samsung ignored all the FCC regulations and sold untested phones to save a few bucks over Apple's FCC-regulated phones, then yes.

Actually, in New York City, a Taxi Medallion (required on a per-car basis) is around a million dollars.