We went through this with the butterfly ballots in Florida. People who thought they knew how to design ballots did not actually know how to design ballots. The idea that design only affects how pretty something is is wrong. Apple succeeds in large part because its designs make the products enjoyable to use. There are some people who can handle the entire chain of abilities, but that is not by and large how the economy works. And the bosses have to know this also. Arguably you should cut functionality before design, because without design functionality often becomes inaccessible (that is to say, non-functional). What good is a book if you get a headache reading it?

Actually, office holders did take office in January, but the beginning of the calendar had been March 1 (spring, new beginnings). That is why DECember was the 10th month up until then.

IBM makes something like $1 billion a year from licensing its patents, many of which are software patents. Also, a big pile of patents constitutes a defensive patent portfolio. A potential plaintiff has to ask whether IBM has patents that would hurt more in a counter-suit. IBM is the biggest recipient of patents in the U.S. They probably have something on the order of 50,000 active U.S. patents.

I represent generic drug companies. I can tell you that brand operations do not go after, and would not go after, individual doctors. It would be impractical. Interestingly, the Caraco v. Novo Nordisk case heard on Monday by the Supreme Court was exactly about a situation where Novo Nordisk was going after Caraco not because of anything Caraco did, but because of what doctors and patients would do. So much for that straw man. The Supreme Court is dealing with a line-drawing problem in Mayo v Prometheus. You can't patent gravity but you could have (long in the past) patent a pile driver. The Prometheus patent is about titrating medication levels for a certain class of prior art drugs using prior art tests. Too low, and the medicine is ineffective, too high and it is toxic. Nobody denies that Prometheus was the first to make the investment to come up with the decisional protocol it claimed. There is no doubt that if the claim had added the step "and administering an appropriate dose to a patient" or something like that it would be patent eligible subject matter. This is an important question. Drug companies do expensive research to find new indications to treat with a drug all of the time. Anti-psychotics often will treat other conditions, but who knows which ones? At what doses? If you cannot patent the process of treating the new disease, you cannot get a patent: the molecule is already patented. We are talking high-8 to low-9 figures here to find that out. Let me assure you, nobody will ever know if you cannot patent the result. None of the attorneys offered help to the Supreme Court in how to word the drawing of the line so that it can be applied. The Supreme Court does not take a case to take a case. It takes it to solve a problem in the law. Here, the decision will apply to non-medical as well as medical patents. As another poster pointed out, the problem that Chas complains about has been solved by Congress. It would have been impractical to sue doctors in any event. Companies go after competitors, in this case a competing testing lab. This is just about the Benjamins to both of them.

Well, not being misused is one reason why the Scientologists copyright their materials, and sue anyone who uses the material to criticize the organization. But copyright is subject to fair use. So a parody of his speech, to the extent it is transformative, could be protected and thought to be a misuse of the material. In fact, the more misused it is, the arguably more transformative the misuse is. E.g. "The Wind Done Gone." As always, one needs to consider the commercial impact of the use. While say, "Hamlet" could become "Hamlet the Musical" and be transformative, it also might cut into the draw of Hamlet since they tell the same story.

Considering that TiVO sues just about everything in the set-top box area, that raises its own patent problems.

I have seen mixed things about this, which I attribute to reporters glossing some things over. Some talk about it integrating with the advance army radio system, which Motorola Solutions would obviously do. I also see things about using local cell phone coverage, which would be the Motorola Mobility strength. I find it hard to believe that the U.S. Military would make itself dependent on easily destroyed, easily snooped cellular networks. But hey, it would be cheap, right?

Um, Motorola Solutions is the government radio company, not Motorola Mobility.

Let's be clear here. In Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992), the Supreme Court required a state to have nexus with someone to tax them. In that case, it included Quill paper's business through catalog sales into North Dakota. North Dakota could not exercise taxing authority over Quill because of the dormant commerce clause. But the Court said: "This aspect of our decision is made easier by the fact that the underlying issue is not only one that Congress may be better qualified to resolve, [n.10] but also one that Congress has the ultimate power to resolve." So there. If Congress does something, it is fixed. If not, it is not. Pretty simple, no?

I think that it is pretty clear that your average consumer wants the lighting in his house to make things look nice. Right now, they know if they take an incandescent of a certain wattage and put it into socket A, they are going to get the result they want. That is not the consumer experience of CFLs. Absent the ability to predict how the light will perform in the home, they are not going to want to switch. They will be fine with saving money if they can get the quality they want without becoming a lighting professional. Since Congress' legislation basically does nothing to address consumers' genuine needs, it is stupid. They also need to outlaw sucky lighting options so that everything on the shelf is as good as, or better than, incandescent unless it has big letters saying "this lighting sucks."