You do realise that Google has been using its Motorola patent portfolio to sue the exact same companies that are suing it, right?
http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/08/googles-motorola-files-new-german.html?m=1

Google can't claim to be the good guys here.

"and threatened to file criminal charges — unless they settled the civil case immediately"

Threatening criminal charges to gain the upper hand in a civil case is against the rules of ethics for attorneys. Every state has its own flavor of rules but they are derived from the ABA model rules.

Mr. O'Connor should immediately file a complaint with the (every) state bar in which this attorney is licensed.

If the only thing you have received as a class action settlement is coupons, you have never been involved in a class action for grown ups.

You clearly do not understand how class actions work. 1000 people harmed for $100 is not worth litigating individually. Lump that together into a $100,000 suit and it is worth the time to do it. Plus most class actions are contingency lawyers get like 30%, if the plaintiffs lose they don't have to pay the attorneys.

toss some scraps $70 is better than $0.

I don't see how forcing the taxi drivers to pay union dues will increase their paychecks.

Contract worker versus employee has nothing to do with the workers, it has to do with the company trying to avoid employment taxes. If you are a contract worker, the employer does not have to pay employment tax on you, and the employer cannot set your hours worked in a day.

If you are a contract employee and your employer tries to control your hours, quietly make a phone call to the state/ federal tax authorities.

OH but if they find out they will fire me. Then you have a whistle blower suit against the company.

That is wrong also.

A fast food restaurant cannot put their trash bags in the paper recycling bin, no, but a few pizza boxes are not going contaminate an entire batch of recycled paper, unlike plastic where dissimilar plastics will contaminate and entire batch.

Paper recycling handles food residue without a problem. To recycle paper you throw it all in a gigantic vat, boil it, and everything breaks down. Inks, Fat, Oil and grease float to the top and are skimmed off, solids like staples and plastic are filtered out.

Unlike plastic where there is no economical way to remove the inks used to make white/blue/green containers and if you mix PET and ABS, you get garbage.

Wrong.

Household waste plastic other than clear plastic PET is not worth recycling. The plastic lobby has pulled the wool over your eyes. Plastic can be easily recycled when sorted, is like saying you can easily walk to work when someone gives you a piggyback ride.

While I agree with your sentiment, what you propose is much more difficult than you think.

The present copyright term and "automatic rights" instead of "rights after registration" are not spontaneous American ideas, they are requirements of the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty.

You will have to get the whole of Europe/ Asia to sign on to whatever changes you propose.

Or America could withdraw from the treaty, but that would mean Americans would lose their rights in treaty countries.

The author fails to realize that most the the rights he cites as reasons for the fifth amendment being unnecessary, are based on the fifth amendment. You do not have a spontaneous right against police beatings to extract a confession, the confession elicited through beatings would be inadmissible because it violates the fifth amendment, therefore police would not beat people. Yes i know people still get beaten, but the fifth amendment is the root of the law which says you can't beat people, if you actually read the law that says you can't beat people, BECAUSE it violates the 5th amendment.

This is like saying we don't need a root directory because we have all these other directories that can hold stuff just as well. It is easy for a 1st year CS student to criticize a system he doesn't grasp, at all.

I guess i FAIL0 on this. Throw the constitution out the window! Bennett Haselton will tell us what our rights are! It must be so hard being the smartest guy in the room. A thousand tears for you.

If someone discovers a flaw in a system, you are not barred from ever fixing that flaw in the future. Whether or not the person that discovered the flaw is a minor is irrelevant.

If they offer a potential code fix you can chose not to use their code and avoid all liability.

You can try to fabricate a strawman argument to try to prove your point, but what you said is just plain wrong.

More likely this is a function of the internet, and the ability to search for prior art in a matter of minutes.

In the past a party looking to get a patent would go back and forth with the patent examiner at the USPTO a number of times, because the USPTO had a vast library of prior art that your average person doesn't have access to. Every time the examiner came up with prior art the patent would have to be rewritten to shrink it claims.

Now with the internet, anybody can search just about any database, this means the first draft patent will include more examples of prior art, a patent with less broad claims, and less for the patent examiner to object to.

A better measure of whether the USPTO is lowering its standards is the number of broad claims versus narrow claims in a patent. As well as the number of prior art examples cited in the patent, by definition if the prior art describes an aspect of the patent, that aspect is not patented, it is cited as a reference to what the patent DOES NOT cover.

That is completely wrong and the word inventor doesn't mean what you think it means.

Assuming you are right, if the inventor "needs to be part of the network" then 99% of patent holding companies would be NPEs, because as I said before - Big corporations do not "own" the patents. A shell company in a tax haven like Ireland owns the patents and license them back to the parent, and other licensees. If the Open Invention Network is considered an NPE then so are these shell companies.

No that sounds completely wrong.

1. The Open Invention Network actively licenses the patents it holds, so it would not be considered an NPE.
2. The SCO litigation was about copyright, not patent.
3. Your statement about unequal protection is false, a non sequitur, and illogical. Big corporations do not "own" the patents it. A shell company in a tax haven like Ireland owns the patents and license them back to the parent, and other licensees. If the Open Invention Network is considered an NPE then so are these shell companies.
4. Attorneys fees to a defendant are already allowed in many types of cases when it is determined that the plaintiff had no business filing suit, including patent litigation. Revising the patent law so that a bond has to be placed before the suit can go forward ensures the wrongfully accused defendant will actually get paid and the plaintiff can't just vanish after they lose, thus leaving the defendant with the attorneys fees.

Your visceral knee jerk reaction to a concept that you do not understand is absurd.

The ocean is freezing, the sub is well insulated, that traps heat. Even if you stop the rapid oxidation of the material in the compartment the heat does not dissipate instantly, so as soon as you open the compartment the fire will start again. Also the stored heat will continue to deform/ weaken the material that makes up the compartment.

Look at the coal fires that have been raging underground in PA for decades.

That is not to say that they did not seal off compartments, just that the whole situation is more complicated than just sealing the compartment until there are no visible flames.