Outlier now - uncommon, but statistically significant when fire fighters have a profit motive to set fires.

The whole point of this case is that patents aren't subjected to a presumption of validity. The law, as it currently stands, is that it is jurors job to decide whether the patent office was right or wrong in granting a patent by a preponderance of the evidence. If SCOTUS rules for microsoft, it may change that and give patents a presumption of validity.

What I said in the GGGP is that this is really irrelevent, because while the law may say that jurors are to basically give no presumption to the patent office's judgement (i.e. they decide a patent's validity based on the preponderance of the evidence) in reality, juries already strongly weigh the PTO's decision so effectively it already takes "clear and convincing evidence" to invalidate a patent.

well, the E.D. Tex. is chosen by plaintiffs least as much for the speed at which litigation is resolved (which is nominally a good thing and a function of judges) as for the jury pool. Additionally while E.D. Tex. has very knowledgeable judges on patent issues, if you are a senior user it is very open to debate whether you want E.D. Tex.'s particular variety of knowledgeable judge.

That's the worst of both worlds approach. Nobody is happy with how ERs are financed. Not free market conservatives, not government intervention liberals, not the doctors, and not the patients. The only people who like ER's cost structure are insurance companies, because they only pay for healthy people who don't cost money and pass the buck to the government on sick, poor, and old people.

Extending your analogy, if we took the ER model to firefighting, rich neighborhoods would be hugely profitable and have plenty of fire fighters (because they're willing to pay and don't burn very often) and poor neighborhoods would either burn or be covered by government subsidies, meaning the rich people pay for fire service twice, once directly (for which they get very little) and a second time through taxes to subsidize the poor (for which they get nothing). Everyone would be better off if everyone paid into the same pool, since now the fire companies aren't taking a cut off the top for the minimal service they deliver to the rich, while not reinvesting for coverage to the poor - because there's nothing in it there for them.

Government's most important role is that it doesn't answer to anyone when it use force. In order to maintain that monopoly it has to prevent non-governmental entities from using force. This means a police force or army. A police force or army costs money. Money has to come from somewhere. Without a restriction on the use of force, the thug who shakes down your business doesn't answer to anyone.

This also means that governments will inevitably arise spontaneously in power vacuum. They may not be benevolent or efficient governments, but as soon as they exercise control over a population, they are a government. The first thing a nascent government does is to charge taxes (i.e. extort protection money) the second is that excludes others from taking your money (i.e. restrict the use of force) - because if someone else has a claim to your money, that's less for them, and it flouts their authority - if competing entities try to take resources from the same area you get a war.

This scales from warlords in Somalia to welfare states in Scandinavia.

Next, lets talk about the incentive structure for firemen who get paid by the fire.

In the gilded age many fire services were privately run and competition was fierce. Strangely, this did not result in the best service for the lowest cost.

Imagine you have fire coverage with Fire Company A and your neighbor has coverage with Fire Company B.

Your neighbor's house catches fire - Fire Company B promptly responds, but not before the fire has spread to your house. Fire Co. B could put out your house - but you haven't paid them. However for a one time fee of $extortion, they'll be happy to put out your house as well - or you could just wait until Fire Co. A arrives - but then again Co. B is using the fire hydrant and blocking the street, so they may not be able to get here at all.

And sometimes sabotaging each other on the way. After all, your house is on fire, are you going to wait for the company you contracted with (and paid a retainer to) to show up? And you'll pay anything you can afford to the guy who gets their first - especially after he parks his fire wagon in the middle of the street so no one else can get to your house.

Probably not a big deal, and here's why:

Juries have a strong preference for senior users, so when you bring an infringement suit, you demand a jury trial.

Juries make gestalt decisions - seriously, can you explain what the difference between "clear and convincing" and "preponderance of the evidence?" Technically, clear and convincing may be higher, but can you think of a situation in a jury room where the jury deliberates and decides - you know what, I really feel like the preponderance of the evidence was on Microsoft's side, but I'm not sure it was clear and convincing.

This might have some small effect on bench trials, because judges tend to like to wax poetic about small legalistic differences, but all that means is that there are likely to be fewer bench trials as junior users try to take this out of the hands of the judge.

And which society to you live in?

Telling people you know better then them (even if it is true) doesn't get policy made. The fact of the matter is that nuclear power is a great idea even for, and maybe especially for, luddite societies that can't be bothered to worry about things like greenhouse gasses and dependence on foreign oil. But unless you can explain to them what we're doing different post-Fukushima, and be able to do so convincingly, we're going to be starting new "state of the art" coal plants, and never see new nuclear technology unless we fly to China.

I see, you really must be living in some alternate society where the Three Mile Island "disaster" didn't derail the nuclear industry.

From your link:

Outrageous - someone was convicted for having encryption on their computer. ...

Yeah ... I bet that the fact that he had PGP on his computer made all the difference. Maybe the fact that PGP was installed on his computer is borderline irrelevant - but it's a judgment call. A judge would probably admit evidence that the door to the apartment where 200 kilos of cocaine was found was a reinforced steel door with five deadbolts - even if the door was open at the time the cops entered. And it would carry approximately equal weight with the jury as the presence of PGP did in this case.

The point is that Fukushima's location isn't very good. Ocean cooling might be easier, but finding another cooling solution is a better answer than risking a tsunami. It's unclear whether we knew that before or after the disaster. As for sea walls, I don't think they work - Tsunamis wrap around whole islands, I'm reasonably sure the generators would have been useless with or without a seawall.

I get that Fukushima isn't as bad as Chernobyl, but you can't look at the damage it has caused and say that everything worked as intended, or that this was an acceptable risk. There's a lot more to worry about from Fukushima than just medical problems, including serious economic disruption. There is a 12 mile exclusion zone - how many people have been displaced, and how long before they can return. What's the clean up cost? And probably most significant, there is the social impact - I'm all for education, and actual information on the scope of the medical risk from this radiation release can only be helpful, but if you ever want to see another nuclear power plant built in your lifetime, the message can't be that the disaster wasn't that bad, so we don't need to take any remedial actions. And for whatever reason, people just won't believe you if you tell them that the above-background Cs-137 in their spinach isn't a health risk - I don't care how many toxicological studies you have.

We have to take something away from this, people in policy positions need to be communicating that this won't happen again. From what I've read, the most sensible thing to do is explain that Fukushima was struck by two disasters, either of which it could have withstood, but together overwhelmed the safeguards. Therefore, now that we've recognized this failure mode, we are taking safeguards to prevent it from happening again. That means (1) designing/retrofitting reactors in seismic areas to withstand 9.0 magnitude quakes, (2) not building reactors in areas that can be struck by both large magnitude quakes and tsunamis, and (3) changing SOP so that if the reactor needs to be vented, it will be vented directly into the atmosphere and not into the containment building (and explaining that the N-13 that spiked the radiation detector is of no risk to anyone who isn't sitting on top of the vent pipe.)

If the tsunami hadn't washed away the generators this would be almost a non-issue. Just don't build plants on tsunami prone sea shores. Had Fukashima been one mile inland, it would have been much more manageable.

They screwed up venting the the reactor into the containment building because they were afraid of needles moving on radiation detectors half a mile away. They though they were doing good PR, buying time for very short half-life isotopes to decay, but instead they got an explosion. From a structural point of view it doesn't matter, but from a practical point of view it is harder to work in a building in which there has been a recent explosion than one that hasn't. Oh, and the PR backfired, explosions suck more than temporary radiation spikes.

The pressure had to be vented, and they made the wrong call.

The story of Fukashima is don't build nuclear plants in places that can get hit by both an earthquake and a tsunami. Nothing more, nothing less.

Maybe in theory, where all the jurors are rational actors who carefully weigh the evidence.

In reality, where things like race play a major part in jury votes, you're asking for majoritarian tyranny.

In a large portion of trials, especially high profile cases, there will be some evidence that the average person would not understand. That's what expert witnesses are for, not jury selection.

If you are charged with insider trading, you're not entitled to a jury of accountants, MBAs, and I-bankers. You get the same "average" jury as everyone else. Then both sides call experts who explain the technical details in a way a lay person can understand. There is an art to presenting the "right" amount of technical information so that the jury understands the crime, without becoming bored. So, consequently experts who can explain complicated material to lay persons who may or may not have any interest in the topic without sounding condescending, boring, over the top command very high fees.

Even in mundane cases like "possession with intent to distribute" the words don't always comport to a lay understanding. E.g. "Intent" has very little to do with future plans.