Mostly because they're not interested in mandating specific aproaches. Instead of the old-fashioned approach of Nixon's EPA, they're going for market-based solutions: putting a price on carbon emissions, for instance. Or a conservative variant on that, George H. W. Bush's cap-and-trade mechanism updated by John McCain for carbon dioxide.

Or the most recent study's proposal: just eliminating taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels would get us halfway to the 2-degree target.

I suspect that there are more than a few groups and people with influence who disagree. And from the evidence, they're likely to continue to get their way.

.. enormous subsidy that the USA put into highways starting in the 1950s. It was ostensibly to create a transportation system that would not fold up following a nuclear attack, but like all such things it took on a life of its own.

First off, the ping rate for auto traffic is an enormous number of pulse durations or return times -- the radar will ignore returns coming back more than a couple of microseconds after it sends its last ping, and only needs to ping every few tens of milliseconds. That's a window of less than 0.1%.

If a car detects a return in a "forbidden" time slot, it can just switch to not using that frequency. Or use the kind of random backoff that Ethernet has been using now for forty years.

And that's just two solutions.

We already grant that the person wearing the watch has a phone, so why not just keep the watch simple (and thus power-stingy) and slave it to the phone?

That way, if there's a feature you want on the watch, get the phone app to do it.

If all you want from the case is to punish the conspirators (presumably to discourage them from doing it again) then it would be a good ideat to hit them for at least what they got from screwing the employees. Which, apparently, was something like an order of magnitude larger. $324 million is, like the drug lords put it, just the cost of doing business.

If, on the other hand, there is some remote notion of compensating the people who actually got screwed, a settlement that got them, like, some money might be better. And as other commenters have pointed out, hiring your own lawyer to play Don Quixote against multiple giant corporations is not a winning proposition.

And "Junior" is so cute. I'll have to show that to the grandkids.

The trouble with this analysis (and no argument on most of it) is that the CEO is the one who decides that since the Company needs to put another 70 engineers on the new hot project, the place to do it is in Ghana because engineers in Ghana are cheaper than the ones in Prague or Mumbai.

The details, such as Ghana having no engineers who are up to speed with the technology of the new hot project? That kind of thing is, as you say, below his level of concern. But the total price of the new team? That's his. So you get the top-level decision to move the project to Ghana.

Seen it happen too many times. As the old saying goes, "they know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

whatever it is that your developers are producing (other than warm chair seats) then you start talking like management: "Put X engineers on Project Y to get us to the Z man-months required within schedule."

I'm retired now and have never worked for a middle or senior manager who has read Brooks. They live at the man-month metric, and base their hiring on the fact that you can get the man-months you need for less if you get them from fresh-out developers working from a remote site in Afghanistan.

No joke. I've talked to the CEO of a $2B/year semiconductor company and that is precisely as deep as his plaanning goes.

Interesting definition of "older." Rather revealing, in fact, that your horizon only extends to those of us with kids at home.

Leaving aside the fact that not all of us ever had kids, the most discriminated-against group are those whose children have moved out. Who, unlike 20-somethings, don't spend their off-duty time trying to get families. Oh, yeah -- that.

It's not "federal appellate courts," it's the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. There is only one, and it hears all patent appeals. And much as it needs to be smacked around, this isn't the case for it because the SCOTUS affirmed the (IIRC unanimous) en banc ruling of the Federal Circuit.

In short, this case is not nearly the landmark that people are making it out to be.

to explain to a judge that the claimed patent covers something that a human being can do with nothing more than a sufficient supply of paper, pencils, and time?

I'm reminded of how upset the Court got when it turned out that the real heart of one patent was that it claimed infringement by doctors making the mental connection between a lab test and a diagnosis. It wasn't that the lab test was unique, it was that any test that informed the physician of the measured physiological indicator would lead to the diagnosis.

Can't some member of the patent bar get the Court to the same realization with regard to software? Or is it that any party with the warchest to show up before the SCOTUS has too much invested in the current regime?

How much does a plaintiff "get for free" if the settlement just covers legal expenses?

Not my first rodeo, Chief. I've seen some of those class-action settlement checks, and the bank charged more than the face value of the check to cash them.