'What I do not understand is — had the jury determined Eolas's patents valid — why it would be A-OK for dozens of already megarich corporations to get even richer adopting technology they did not invent ..."

The fundamental problem with this guy's argument, and with patents in general, is that aforementioned megarich corporations DID invent this technology... regardless of whether the Eolas patent was valid by today's standards of what is patentable or not, Google, Yahoo and others sure as hell DID NOT COPY this technology from Eolas, their own engineers invented it, even if they were not the first to invent it.

The problem with the whole idea behind patents is that almost any technology is easy to invent once you put your mind to it, but with patents you basically should not put your mind to it, you should first hire an army of attorneys to read all the possibly relevant patents to find if someone has already "invented" it and then license it from them. Then, if you can't find it in existing patents, you can try inventing it, right? But many patents are so obfuscatedly written you could read them 10 times and not realize that they cover exactly what you're looking for.

Indeed, that was a misuse of a Latin abbreviation, i.e. "i.e.". What I really wanted
was a way of abbreviating "for example", e.g. "e.g.". Thanks! I think I've learned it now.

That sentence is absurd coming from a biologist... either it's a misquote, or this professor smoked some strong stuff... Biology is FULL of chemical defences as a response to the threat of predation, and chemical offences for that matter. They are common in the insect world, and practically universal in the plant and microbial worlds. In fact looking at Biology as a whole, the majority of what evolution does on a day-to-day basis is developing new chemical defences as a response to the threat of predation. Perhaps repellents are a little more unusual in the animal (as opposed to plant) world or less well studied, but hasn't he ever heard of i.e. skunks? By the time we narrow this sentence down to something that makes sense it's a big yawner: "This study is amongst the first to show animals incorporating a chemical repellent targeted at specific predators into secretions they use to build external structures (webs)." Hmmm.

If you don't speak SMTP as a second language you probably shouldn't have that feature.

*grin*

:j

...indistinguishable from a PC.

They keep saying that PC's are going to be replaced by: set-top boxes, game consoles, smart-phones, etc. But the moment any of these devices are advanced enough to replace the personal computer they ARE the personal computer.

That's why in the end the only thing that will truly replace the PC is another PC. Doh.

This is really just the logical continuation of our throw-away consume society. Yes, the shop that made this "drive" is committing fraud, but it's just a small step further than most consumer products made by big companies today. Like DVD players that come with firmware that's so buggy that they basically don't work (like one Sony model I bought some years ago) or cellphones that crash 20% of the time when a call comes in (like all 4 of the Nokia 1616s I recently bought).

More and more the products we buy don't really work, or work just long enough that we don't notice how broken they are before we buy the next one because the fashion (or technology) has moved on.

These Chinese con men are really just embracing the highest credo of modern capitalism... profit above product. Can you blame them?

:j

You've heard of WORM (write once read many), now we have WARN (write
always, read never).

:j

The /. post said $200 for a 1W laser... dunno where he got that idea, the wicked lasers site has the Spyder III for $200 for the 50 mW version, a 500 mW version, which seems to be the max they are selling, is $3000! I'd love to have one, but it will have to wait for Christmas, I guess.

I'm not basing my opinion on the comments, I was just pointing to them as examples. And while people may not like to admit that they "acted like pricks" even when they realize it, you don't really have any reason to think that anybody participated in this discussion ever did so.

Folks this "Google-itis" behavior can't be that common precisely because people don't want to look like idiots in front of their doctors or others. Sure there have always been hypochondriacs, and today they are armed with Google which makes them even more annoying to Doctors. But pretty much, that's all there is to this.

Google U? WTF? Look, people with political or religious agendas have always managed to find or manufacture information that supports their viewpoint, this has nothing to do with Google or even the Internet.

As for ignorance and dark ages... long before the Internet there were anti-vacciners, and flat-earthers, and black helicopter conspiracy nuts. But looking at your sig, I have to tell you... there *is* one thing moving is back to the dark ages, and that's the piecemeal enclosure of the noosphere by so-called "intellectual property".