If true - how is this not a flagrant antitrust violation?

Company X provides a device that collects personal data.

Company X announces a standard that prevents anyone from using such data for purposes such as advertising without the user's consent.

Company X exempts its own services from this restriction, such that its services - which otherwise compete on par with third-party services - can utilize such data notwithstanding, or even contrary to, the user's explicit withholding of consent.

Company X's services therefore have an unfair competitive advantage that is directly leveraged on Company X's sale of the device to users.

This is pretty much the definition of unfair competition in the form of tying, If the FTC / DoJ Antitrust Division had any teeth and, er, other body parts, it would be all over this.

"The Commonwealth must have the express written assurance from Ark Encounter, LLC that it will not discriminate in any way on the basis of religion in hiring."

Umm... anyone else reminded of this:

Agnes: Pinkie promise?

Gru: Oh yes, my pinkie promises.

I posted an article describing the "why" a month ago. Totally not surprised that the current reform efforts exhibited the same arc.

That general model is exactly why this initiative collapsed as well. Several aspects of this reform - such as "attributable owner" rules, i.e., implementing laws that require patent applications to reveal the real party of interest in the case, as a measure addressing shell companies - were supported by large interests that benefited from them, and opposed by large interests that didn't. The result is stalemate, just as we've seen countless previous times in the patent "reform" discussion.

The only measures that make it through the "reform" system are mild improvements that don't affect some entities differently than others. And even those can be difficult - e.g., the first-to-file change in the America Invents Act is great for well-funded enterprises, but more problematic for small businesses. In that case, large enterprises simply steamrollered the opposition with lobbying cash.

The upshot is that the "reform" sytem is, itself, deeply dysfunctional. An additional tragedy is that efforts that would objectively improve the patent system for everyone, such as giving examiners more time to perform their examination and implementing more accountability for technically incorrect arguments, get lost in the struggle.

The key to this dilemma comes down to one word:

"Microsoft will face an unenviable choice: Stick to plan and put millions of customers at risk from malware infection,"

I don't think that Microsoft actually considers these people "customers." I think MS very distinctly considers them non-customers of their flagship product, since they have not purchased any of the four latest versions (Vista, 7, 8, 8.1). All of Microsoft's customers should have followed its exhortations over the last five years to spend a few bucks and upgrade dump their now-13-year-old OS.

It's indisputable that across the computing industry, the perceived mandate of legacy support for next-gen OSes is increasingly feeble. In non-desktop markets - e.g., consoles and phones - the presumption was never there to begin with (starting with the Super Nintendo!) Web programming exhibits similar tendencies - how many Java applications from back in the day won't run on modern browsers? And won't that include the entire Silverlight platform in a few years? The tendency is that the river of upgrades will carry all projects of significance along in its current, and the projects that gather on the banks (i.e., don't receive newest-OS upgrades) are... detritus. For right or wrong, that's the view.

> Flipping the classroom and making you work in teams are completely different things.

That's true, but you've missed my general point, which is: For students who are good at learning on their own - i.e., the cream of the crop - class time spent on verifying that they are learning the material is a complete waste of their time.

That is actually my biggest complaint. Typically, I would spend two hours in a traditional lecture learning, and four hours outside of class with independent learning and skill development. Instead, I now spend six hours outside of class learning everything on my own, and four hours in class proving it.

One of the most important skills to be developed in academia - particularly at the undergraduate level - is the ability to learn independently of a classroom agenda. Being asked to spend several hours per week in class working problems for the instructor, so that he/she can help with problems (or, as in my case, baby-sit the progress of the class), is not only inefficient for people who can learn on their own - it actually discourages the development of this skill: students don't need to be diligent about mastering their skills on their own if the classroom time is solely used to push them through the process.

> It seems to me you have only learned half the lesson this method of pedagogy is meant to teach. Why don't you find the other well-prepared and conscientious students in your class, work with them, and shut out the losers?

Because the teams are assigned arbitrarily and we can't switch. We are required to sink or swim with the other schlumps in our team, irrespective of any differences in effort or intelligence. End of story.

> Count your blessings. You never understand the material half as well as you think you do until you have to explain it to someone else.

I would love to have the option to develop that skill - e.g., voluntarily forming or joining study groups, or signing up as a tutor or teaching assistant. But in my case, I'm essentially required to teach slacking students to protect part of my grade. Thanks to the group structure, there is absolutely no recognition that some students are bailing out other students.

I am working three times as hard as my teammates - learning the material on my own, and then spoon-feeding it to them - and yet, we are all getting the same grade. Please tell me how I am "blessed" to be in this situation.

> You think, you could learn material just by consuming and memorizing them. This is often thought by students just out of high school, sometime even with older students. However, this is bullshit.

I think I can handle independent study just fine. I passed two bar exams through study-at-home materials.

MY point is that one of the most important skills to be developed in academia - particularly at the undergraduate level - is the ability to learn independently of a classroom agenda. Being asked to spend several hours per week in class working problems for the instructor, so that he/she can help with problems (or, as in my case, baby-sit the progress of the class), is not only inefficient for people who can learn on their own - it is actually a handicap for this skill: students don't need to be diligent about mastering their skills on their own if the classroom time is solely used to push them through the process.

I'm currently three weeks into a Physics class that's modeled on this concept. Let me tell you what it's like.

In theory: Students review the lecture material on their own time. In class, the instructor presents some Physics problems on the topic. The students work through them together in teams and learn from each other, and the instructor reviews each team's work to help them get past sticking points.

In practice: I review the lecture material on my own time. My classmates do not. They show up largely unprepared, and when presented with a basic problem, simply stare at it until someone else explains the entire problem to them. Typically, that means that I end up teaching my classmates Physics, and then showing them how I solved each of the problems. I need to do that, because a significant part of my grade is based on the performance of my team - i.e., the average of individual quiz scores of the members of my team.

The instructor routinely harangues students to come to class prepared, and is assigning increasing amounts of busywork to be performed outside of class to ensure that work is being done.

So for me - a very reliable self-starter and independent studier - this class model means that in addition to learning all of the material on my own, I also have to (1) spend several hours in class teaching the material to my classmates, (2) have my grade dragged down by my team members' poor performance, and (3) have to complete additional work outside of class to prove that I'm keeping up. In other words, of the 10+ hours a week that this class is requiring, LESS THAN HALF is spent learning the material and honing skills; the rest (including the 4+ hours of class time) is simply wasted, thanks to this poorly implemented learning model.

1) News flash: Competing patent reform bills have been trudging through and/or stuck in Congress for most of the past two decades. It's a constant race among snails to see which one actually crosses the finish line.

This isn't surprising, because patent law serves multiple industries that widely differ in their characteristics and ideal uses of patents. The result is competing bills by big pharma, GMOs, big oil, the semiconductor industry, software companies, etc. The big players in each industry want to skew the whole system in their direction, and don't much care if it adversely affects other industries. (Contrast this with the copyright industry, which is a struggle between ALL media owners and ALL consumers... guess which side wins those struggles, every time?)

2) Like any piece of hotly contested and highly profitable legislation, many of the "reform" bills are intent on "reforming" the patent system straight into the trash. case in point: Many of the initiatives suggested by Barack Obama a few weeks back would rapidly exacerbate the troll problems that they suggest solving.

> Sounds like an ugly hack to avoid modifying software to call the 'set expiration time' function.

Often, what looks like an "ugly hack" turns out to be an elegant, lovely solution for a peculiar scenario.

In this case, the solution doesn't require modifying software, the file system, the network protocol, or other metadata. That might make it more appealing than the "obvious" solutions to the problem.

> Sure, but automatically deleting temporary files ?!?

Is every book entitled "Pirate Adventure" about the exact same story?

You can't just read the title - you have to read the claims. There's a whole lot more specific detail in the independent claims than "automatically deleting temporary files."

> The USPTO is supposed to support itself with fees [uspto.gov]. The largest fee is for reexamination, creating a financial incentive to grant bad patents (which are likely to be reexamined).

That makes no sense when you look at the statistics. About 1,000 reexamination cases are filed every year. By contrast, the USPTO receives about 500,000 new patent applications every year. The total revenue from reexamination wouldn't even put a dent in the examination process.

Here's how it actually works. When you file a new patent application, you pay an examination fee. That examination fee gets you a little ways down the road (typically two office actions), and if the case isn't allowable by then, you pay another fee for a Request for Continued Examination, which gets you another two office actions. Etc. If you reach the point where the application is ready to be issued, you pay an issue fee, and you get your patent.

In other words - the USPTO funds itself by charging you every time it needs to do something for you, and the costs line up with the amount of work required by the PTO. It's exactly like a car mechanic, right? A mechanic has no interest in doing bad work now in the hope that you'll come back with more expensive work later. It just charges you, today, based on the service that you're asking for, today.

> There's a fine line between clever and stupid. If an average programmer reads the explanation, and "Doesn't get it", it could be either. Most patents are very poor explanations for what they are about.

But the "average programmers" here aren't motivated to try to understand it. They are motivated to find that the patent is worthless, because that's what the submitter wrote about it, and that's what they are predisposed to believe. So they are prone to glance at the application and say, "well, the claims have been mangled by lawyer-speak, but it's basically something about deleting temp files, which has been known since the 70's."