Have you heard of SLAPP suits. They are very much alive in the US but some states have taken measures against them at least.

The lollacup episode on Shark Tank had some interesting tidbits about contracts with marketing firms. To summarize, do not give your marketers exclusivity to profits for a market (asia for instance) and make sure they profit from their contributions to the market success of your product. The Lollacup creators had good business sense but still managed to make a contract with a marketing firm which took advantage of them.

I can't figure out the specific company that made a presentation video about this exact situation but it was posted here on slashdot about a year ago if anyone remembers it. I thought it was Pixar but searching the web for the video didn't turn up much. The gist of the process was that 10 CS Doctors worked on an algorithm for 3 years to greatly improve speed and believability of rendering light interactions with objects. They patented each promising attempt but it still took 3 years to perfect the algorithm and apply for their final patent.

If the evolution of the algorithm had no missteps then requiring code at each stage would have been fine for them but they had many missteps and not all of their patents are useful compared to the last one they published. Imagine someone got wind of what their abstract, non-coded idea was and hired a bunch of programmers to make a very poor version of it and then patented it. They would lose their economic incentive to finish the project and we'd all be stuck with a really bad implementation of their good idea. I guess alternatively they could just go ahead and waste time coding up a very bad version of their idea and then rewrite all the code correctly later.

The project I'm working on right now for a well known company has about 50 engineers working on it and has been going almost a year now. We had working code after 3 months for the basic idea but we still don't have code demonstrating the ultimate vision of our product. So that works out to roughly 5 man-decades before we'll have a fully coded implementation of the patent filed several years ago. The last company I worked for had a much larger software team working on an even more complex project but the basic idea had been patented long ago and we were just making small incremental improvements on it, some of which we patented.

Do you have some proof that people were thinking about creating a one-click checkout before amazon patented or implemented it on their website? A forum post or user group discussion would be sufficient. Many innovations appear obvious after they are invented, not before.

That's quite true that they're limited by their fingers but the difference of a few rounds a second is considerable if the spree goes on for a few minutes which most do; 2 extra shots per second x 60 seconds/minute x 2 minutes = 240 extra bullets. I don't think we should be comparing your fire rate to a pro like the guy in the youtube video but there has to be someone with equal pistol/file skill that has compared fire rates including reloads. It's such a simple thing to test and would put this whole argument about clip capacity limits to rest.

The guy in the video managed to average 3 rounds per second using his 6 round clip. This is much slower than what can be done by a carbine and that's not taking into account the fact that he can only store so many clips in a position on his body which can be quickly taken from without looking at it. You're argument also assumes that Torres was trying to shoot as many bullets as fast as possible which is dubious considering his firing speed. Finally, even marines and people who frequent firing ranges can't speed reload like that. It takes a lot of practice and most people will fail miserably at it when the adrenaline kicks in.

I'll admit that I was only thinking of the last couple shootings which were committed using carbines but overall pistols do come out ahead by a small margin compared to assault rifles/carbines. I say small margin because even though in many cases the suspects were also armed with pistols, their primary weapon was a rifle.
http://www.nycrimecommission.org/initiative1-shootings.php

They're using mortars and AK's, neither of which are legal in the USA. The gun-rights advocates are defending possession of firearms which are decidedly not capable of equaling military firepower. I most definitely want us to keep high caliber small arms and sniper rifles as a deterrent against tyranny but carbines really aren't needed and are the weapon of choice in mass shootings.

Afghanistan was costly for the USSR because they were fighting rebels armed with the latest US military hardware and training. Check out "Charlie Wilson's War" for the docudrama about the conflict.

Right, but it may have in fact meant something outside of College so I was covering both bases with my comment. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear from what I wrote. I also assumed you fit into the category of people for which you were referring because you made such a negative comment in response to what I wrote. It was a calculated guess but you really didn't give me much information to figure out why you were calling me a stoned pinhead. I should have just ignored your negativity and tried to address the confusion but that's hard to do when someone pisses you off.

The personal attack response isn't a US thing as far as I know. The research I've read so far on the subject indicated that It's caused by disassociation from community. In essence people don't realize that there really is another person on the other side of a text based conversation.

If your point was simply that some people want to go through life in a different order then I totally agree with you. On the other hand, if your point was that they are enjoying themselves more by choosing a path that either doesn't involve college or involves a education track which doesn't develop a marketable skill-set, then I'd say they're being shortsighted and should re-evaluate both their goals and plan to accomplish those goals.

I have no idea how you you would think I was baked based on what I wrote.Are you trying to protect your lack of accomplishments through the use of humor?

College is very enjoyable. It may be challenging at times but most people would never trade their college experience for anything. I love what I do for a living as result of my degree but I'm happy that society values my skills so much.

I went to Oregon State University and paid in-state tuition which has a massive discount. Like I wrote earlier that was per year and it did take me 5 years to complete my BS. I did complete 2 years of internship level engineering work while going to school as well though.

There are cheap but excellent schools out there. I paid 12k/year (all-inclusive) for an engineering degree that paid for itself in just one year. The people with all this debt aren't good higher education shoppers, both in terms of school selection but also degree selection. Or maybe they just weren't cut out for getting one of the degrees that actually pays off.

I think there's an analogous practice for ISPs, Gym's, Clubs and Telecoms. They all charge a subscription fee for their services but if everyone actually tried to use their service at the same time, they couldn't, because in all of these markets the suppliers over-subscribe their services. This allows them to be more efficient and charge less for their services. In the case of banks, they don't charge anything for most of their services and even pay us for keeping our money safe. Just as described in what you quoted from wikipedia.

I'm sure there are other industries with similar practices but they aren't coming to my mind immediately.

Regarding the emergence of central banks. They are largely private enterprises and could have been created by private industry had it had the foresight to do so. The greatest problem with our modern banking system is accountability. The banks know that the Fed will bail them out and bank customers know that the FDIC will give them their money back if the bank doesn't. This leads to banks with very low liquidity taking even greater risks with their customers' money. To solve this problem congress could bring back Glass-Steagal, raise liquidity requirements and break up bank monopolies so that no bank is large enough to hold our economy hostage.