For a FREE education from MIT, go to prep.ai.mit.edu.

I think a jury would be more $ympathetic to a person scammed by a website that claims to filter out scams than a person scammed by a website which claims caveat emptor.

Unless you have some sort of employment contract that specifies otherwise, you live in an at-will state and can be fired at any time without cause.

Like when a woman is raped by her brother and then arrested for adultery? But then it becomes international news and the court will let her out if she marries her brother? Yeah, maybe they'll commute his sentence to life in prison after then kill him.

but I used to think patents were for the specific implementation of an idea, not the idea or the end result itself. Which is to say, someone else could (and is encouraged to as it promotes the arts and useful science) get the same end result using a different technique.

Let's say wifi-enabled mousetraps that detect when they've caught one are the next big thing. I might hook my mouse trap up to a scale and patent it. You might hook yours up to a motion detection camera and patent it. But claiming a vague patent for the idea of detecting a dead mouse doesn't advance anything.

Salary is subject to FICA taxes (7.2%+-) up to $106,800 or so. As his salary was $500,000, his effective FICA tax rate was only 1.4% or so. Seems like a trivial amount to me, but then again, the rich are different than us. For example, they do everything possible to reduce their tax burden and then complain that it's too low.

next year, his salary is $1

Perhaps the most hilarious thing is H.264. Google dropped H.264 support from Chrome and Android because they're afraid of patent trolls. To date, the only H.264 patent troll is ... Motorola. So Motorola will stop patent trolling after the acquisition is complete? Not according to Google's lawyers.

In TSA security tests, the X-Ray screeners missed 90% of knives and guns sent through the xray machine. The 10% they found was only because they mistook it for a vibrator or crack pipe and wanted to attach a boorish post-it note.

How many times have you heard the term "scratching an itch" thrown around when talking about Open Source? Well, he's got an itch. Sometimes scratching it means starting a new open source project, sometimes it means contributing to an existing open source project, and in this case, it means starting his own open source company so he can have an open source job.