That is an inherent feature of feudalism. The result has nothing to do with justice or fairness, just who is stronger and it makes no difference what happens to peasants caught in the crossfire.

Are you suggesting they sue the court? Good luck with that. ISTM the fundamental problem is that the US courts have become the corporations bitches. Who are you going to sue and where are you going to sue them?

The book Econned explains how people with a far right economic agenda have been stacking the US courts for years. The result is what you see, basically a feudal systems where corporations are treated like lords and everyone else is a serf.

What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

That argument is obvious nonsense. The problem is that the same software can run on lots of different hardware. Are you suggesting someone would need a separate patent for each possible hardware the software could run on? I don't think so. You want one patent to cover all possible hardware implementions. That is clearly patenting an idea, not a device/implementation.

Those are not good reasons for granting patents. A lot of effort goes into making many useful things but the effort and the usefulness do not make those things patent-eligible.

For example, in the fine article you linked to, Gene Quinn says:

This is BS. Software that can run on different architectures cannot be described in terms of the physical hardware the software runs on. At best the patent that resulted would only be valid on the specific hardware that was described. I grant you, Microsoft (IIRC) did argue this nonsense successfully in a courtroom once but just because they were able to buffalo some lawyers and judges, that doesn't make it true.

Gene Quinn? Yes, an excellent reminder of how much we need PJ to cut through the BS for us. Thank you.

We need someone who is familiar with the law to explain this to us techies. PJ we need you!

It is normal for it to be "unlikely to find a tenure-track job". It would be extremely unusual for it to be otherwise unless students in general embarked on a policy of assassinating at least one professor after getting their doctorate.

From the article you linked to:

Even if it were not so controversial, Searle's argument does even come close to proving the creation of sentient machines is impossible. We do not yet know if it is possible or not. The GP makes a good argument that it might be possible but certainly doesn't prove it. As many others have said before, the Chinese room argument is not pertinent to the discussion of what is possible with AI.

This was a lie when it was said about Chelsea Manning and it is a lie when it is said about Edward Snowden. Neither one of them did a "massive document dump" although they both had the opportunity. Instead, they did the responsible thing and disclosed what they found to news organizations to let the news organizations decide what was safe to publish and what wasn't.

If the only way you can support your world-view is with outright lies, perhaps you need to reconsider your world-view. Of course, those who most need to reconsider almost never do.

You could get statistics by scrapping this page list of British police officers killed in the line of duty. I think it is roughly 71/248 or about 30%. I would not be surprised if the GP was correct and the percentage of British police officers killed by guns is greater than the percentage of US police officers. This could be due to the fact that British police don't have guns.

But the percentages are terribly misleading if you don't look at the absolute numbers or per capita numbers. In the US, 500 people per year are killed by the police while in Britain only 30 people total have been killed by the police (up until 2005). Since Britain has 1/5th the population of the US, the total (over all years) per capita number of people killed in Britain by police is less than 1/3rd of the per capita killed in the US every year.

Over 100 US police officers are killed in the line of duty each year while according to the page linked to above, the number of British police officers killed in the line of duty is 2 per year (this century). So on a per capita basis ten times as many US police officers get killed on duty than British police officers. If, as the GP states, roughly 30% of US police deaths on duty are due to firearms then it is 10 times more likely for a person in the US to gun down a police officer than someone in Britain.

Whatever the exact numbers are, it is clear that the amount of police related gun violence in Britain is drastically lower than police related gun violence in the US on a per capita basis.

This is completely false. Oracle changed the rules around for what it means to be "compatible" so that only projects that Oracle likes will be deemed compatible. Apache is being forced into a Java Fork:

Apache: I know my rights. I want my compatibility certification!

Oracle: How can you get a certification if you can't take the test?

You are so far off base, you are on the wrong planet. The Koch bros are about screw the planet, screw everyone else, even screw themselves for a little short-sighted short-term monetary profit.

There are certain harsh economic realities that unfettered markets do not deal with correctly. Generating energy from coal has great negative externalities. IOW, the Koch bros are not paying for the cost of dealing with all the pollution their plants generate.

Another thing unfettered markets don't deal with correctly is limited resources. Those resources might be fossil fuels in the ground or the capacity of the atmosphere to hold carbon emissions without disastrous effects on the human race. If the wisest policy involves not using up these resources as fast as possible then unfettered markets don't do the right thing.

Even if we accept your unstated assumption that the subsidies of the fossil fuel industries do not dwarf those of renewables, it still makes sense to subsidize renewables. Partly due to the current subsidies, the cost of renewables is dropping. It is in the best interest of the human race to switch over to renewables before we run out of non-renewables and before the waste products of non-renewables make the planet uninhabitable.

Blind faith in the infallibility of markets is part and parcel of the greed is good mentality that continues to wreak havoc on our economy and on our social stability. These are the harsh economic realities the Koch bros are ignoring.

By your logic, a premium that went up by 1% from $100 to $101 would be a 101% increase.

Does it run Linux?