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.

And as Joe Arpaio has so beautifully demonstrated, once you've bought a toy like that, you have to find a use for it. Even if it's busting into a chicken coop with a light tank.

police (deputies, etc.) over the past five years have been attacked with IEDs?

Alternately, how would something like this have helped the cops in Las Vegas this weekend?

Might remember to do so at the same process node.

An Intel x86 chip build on 22 nm stands a very good chance of blowing the doors off of an ARM (or MIPS, or ...) built on 45 nm. However, this is not a decisive win for the x86 ISA.

Whose DRM is it, then? Hint: Amazon can disable your access to the book after you've bought it and downloaded it (and has done so in the past.)

And yet somehow even books from Baen and Tor (who don't DRM their books) end up on Amazon indistinguishable from those from other publishers.

Nice hypothesis. As it happens, Mr. Stross' most recent books have been published by Tor -- which does not do DRM.

Facts. Annoying things.

Tor and Baen don't do DRM. That's a very good start.

There may be others, too, but it's remarkably hard to find out who they are without buying a book to find out you can't read it. Anyone care to contribute to the list?