The complaint tries to use the fact that Google bid for the patents as an extra point against the search giant.

This mainly implies that the law firm had not yet run into the filing document word limit. Most lawyers would cite vaginal birth as evidence of precocious sexuality.

Logically, one might presume that the winning bid is most likely to come from the side at greatest risk of being sunk were the patents were to be wielded against them. In this vein one would argue that Apple & Co. made the most lucrative bid to absolve themselves of their own infringements of the Nortel portfolio.

This great opera of stupidities proposed and disposed takes place while the aggrieved parties on both sides shower hundred dollar bills upon the jousting hookers of horseshit.

Moore's Law isn't even a law... it's a prediction.

If you were doing more than thinking in tiresome categories you might have called it a self-fulfilling projection which is pretty much exactly what it became.

To refine this even more precisely, it's an ex post self-fulfilling projection, where "ex post" modifies "self-fulfilling".

But wait, there's more! It's a virtuous ex post self-fulfilling projection, where "virtuous" modifies "self-fulfilling projection".

We're now deep into The Remains of the Day. I might even call it a pink leather virtuous ex post self-fulfilling projection. Sailed through menopause without a hiccup—to everyone's great surprise—but even lathering on a hair-net bale of Grecian Formula teaser treats the glory days are well behind us.

encouraging unnecessary warranty claims

From the user's perspective the warranty claim is necessary until Apple communicates to the afflicted that it isn't, because they've solved the problem, the fix is available now, and it won't cost you two hours of your life to patch up Apple's incompetence.

How To Irritate People - The Car Salesman

That's also been my experience, for the most part. In the past when a Slashdot post has revealed enough information for me to dig through the edit history on Wikipedia to see what happened, I've sided with the Wikipedia editors.

One time I put quite a bit of effort into cleaning up an article about a fellow who set a dubious record long ago (less stupid than winning World Sauna Championships, but still inadvisable). There was a great deal of misinformation spread in the aftermath of this stunt. It was a tricky business to make correct logical assertions through the minefield of popular misinformation that ensued. A doctor who supervised this did eventually publish in a peer-reviewed journal enough of a factual synopsis to sort out which stories were candyfloss bullshit, and which weren't.

A week later another editor came along and "simplified" my careful prose into the language of careless, naked assertions. I chalked this up to a lesson learned.

The vast majority of my edits have fared better than that. These days I mainly restrict myself to adding isolated statements.

If anyone digs into the article's history, there's a version of the page with carefully worded prose. My contribution wasn't erased, it was merely buried. I wonder sometimes how many pages on Wikipedia have far superior text buried in deep sub strata of their page histories.

The real problem with the model is that there's no underlying arrow of progress. Given their editorial guidelines, credible sources are the foundational object. But sources are not first class objects on Wikipedia. Pastiches of credible sources (the actual articles) are the primary first class object. For the highly inculcated, formal dispute resolutions might also be considered first class objects (in many cases, rather fuzzy first class objects).

Until there's some method, at least semi-automatic en route to the semantic web, to enforce the use of a good source over a bad source at the level of isolated assertions, nothing much is going to change. Editors become possessive of pages because the effort of volunteers is the only force retaining any of the historical quality of an article from death by a thousand well-intentioned word changes.

The least reliable articles are often the ones apparently riddled with careful references. In many cases I've dug into the source and found it doesn't support the claim in any fashion whatsoever, or outright contradicts the claim in some larger frame of consideration.

One could define software engineering, if one wished to, as the art of pushing entropy up hill with quality control. The opposite of software engineering is politics. This can work for a while, until your free labour quits in disgust.

The other remark I'll make is that most people vastly underestimate the utility of mediocre information conveniently packaged. On just about any subject, fifteen minutes at Wikipedia is all I need to put together a mental game plan about what I need to pursue and how, and what is likely to be the most productive place to begin. Underneath the curling, worm-eaten, multi-coloured leaves of factual assertion, there's a pretty decent semantic graph lurking in the page structure, even if sometimes it's closer to the lyrics of Dem Bones than Gray's Anatomy.

The social graph is full of shit, too, lest we forget. One can glean a lot from a social graph full of shit, and many companies do.

What's benevolent in the opinion of some people won't be in the eyes of others.

You, sir, have not the faintest inkling of a shred of understanding of quantum superposition in the non-hands of an omniscient, omnipotent non-being.

I'm 6'7". I do my best not to fly (don't really want to be sexually abused) but when I have to, I am fucking miserable.

Yeah, tell me about it. I'm 6'4" (plus a 1/2" extra in the morning) but I have an especially long torso, so we'd probably be eye to eye sitting down. I don't know about you, but the seat in front of me prevents me from slouching the least bit, when I lean my head back on the head rest, my gaze is vertical. It's pretty close to a 90 degree bend, which I try out just for shits and giggles, while other people find ways to sleep.

Pro tip for tall fliers: the foam cushion usually rips off the aluminum seat frame (Velcro). If your ass can handle sitting on the hard, cold metal you might manage enough of a head rest to get a half hour snooze in the mid-flight red-eye hour of total desperation. I've done this many times.

I got stuck on the apron at Schiphol once while they replaced a starter motor. The middle-aged Germanic woman beside me had tree-trunk thighs, clad in tight black neoprene. Our thighs met in a thermonuclear embrace on my side of the arm rest for our entire stay on the apron, plus the return flight to Montreal.

At this point, the airlines can go fuck themselves. I'd rather not leave the ground.

now operating mostly beyond its original 40-year licenses

What do 'best before' dates on food really mean?

Some number pencilled into an operating permit granted in 1969 is not the last word on how long these facilities will continue to operate safely.

There was—at the time—not a single reactor of a modern design with a forty year operational record on which to base even the wildest guess. The number "40 years" had more to do with investor ROI than any engineering crystal ball.

I recall one reactor shut down for an expensive refurbish a long time ago because circulation pipes had become unexpectedly brittle in less than a decade of exposure to a constant, low level of neutron flux.

Summary: we didn't know shit.

On day one, it's extremely hard to tell the difference between a Toyota and a Chevy. At year thirty, the stakeholders think they've won the lottery because it was a Toyota after all. At year thirty-five, Toyota develops a frightening latency in response to the graphite rods. At year forty-two you've got this headache sorted—or so you would like to believe. It was operator over-reaction to upgraded SCADA data collection rates. No, it was xenon capture by surface pockets in metals exposed to decades of micro-crystalline annealing. No, it was pockets of non-uniform fission density due to a very minor change in the fuel-pellet binding agent made as older mines ceased production.

All the reactors built in the 1970s were version 0.9. No reactor anywhere had a forty year operational track record with a modern design.

The real problem is that pinheads like you want to keep pretending that graduate students have a revenue problem instead of a spending problem. It's still possible to prevent a graduate student from having future credit issues, but to do that the graduate student would have to immediately cut educational expenses to less than he or she earns in employment income.

It appears that other particulars bear on the case.

Soviet-style collapse?

Economy of the Soviet Union

And you have the gall to call other people pinheads? The only thing in common is an expensive war, badly judged.

List of countries by GDP (PPP) per hour worked

America is the world's third most productive country by hours worked, more than double that of the Czech Republic, the strongest eastern-block country within that list (Lithuania, probably more representative, is even further behind). It strikes me that the American situation has more in common with the fall of Rome than the fall of the Soviet Union.

Or perhaps this tenuous juncture in America has more in common with the collapse of the Ottoman empire than the Soviet Union. I couldn't say—but look, a smoking gun:

[Berkes] suggested one of the reasons for Ottoman economic decline was the inability of the ruling class to make a clear choice between war and the more conventional types of capital formation.

No wait, it's different after all:

The Industrial Revolution saw even greater changes. The Ottoman Empire did not have a social structure well adjusted to the free-market capitalism needed to build factories. The Empire also lacked crucial supplies of coal and other needed commodities.

But dammit, on second though, maybe that's not so different after all.

It is also possible that this message was authored by an AI who is resident on the Internet and has no physical components at all. Call me Skynet. And be worried over whether I have launch control. Be very worried about whether I might tickle the stock markets a bit, just to see what kind of chaos I might cause.

You must be WOPR's little rug rat playing Fisher Price with the gullible planet. This is the level of misdirection of a toddler playing hide and go seek in the belief that if she can't see you, you can't see her.

So his publisher is forcing him to use Word. I would be annoyed as well. I know at least some publishers accept PDF (and some even LaTeX). So maybe he should just choose a different publisher.

Thank you, cheerleader for the lemmings of self-marginalization. Choosing from a restricted pool tends to lead to less excellent choices. But don't stop to complain about this, even if it bites you at every turn.

The reality here is that the Word ecosystem is at least as destructive to orderly progress as IE6 was the to progression of web site design, but it's proving a lot harder to pry the cold, callous fingers of corporations who are deeply invested in this ecosystem off of the central dysfunction.

For one thing, the entire cloud business model, for any company not Microsoft, depended on an interoperability standard that Microsoft couldn't scupper with the next software release. There was enhanced visibility of the issue, and giant pools of money behind the rearguard action, not to mention the aftermath of a court case that forced Microsoft to dribble with its head down, lest it be red carded yet again for charging down the court with two muscular arms cradling the basketball.

Word is such a monumental disaster that I actually smile when formatting my documents as PDF. This despite the fact that a large percentage of all two-column PDF documents have a one-column cut and paste text model (when you try to select the top half of the left column, you get the top half of both columns, with line fragments interspersed).

The semantic web is so far seemingly stillborn. The day will come when the algorithms wish to understand text at the same level as your trusty editor--I mean the person who helps you get it right.

Maybe then this problem will sort itself out.

The problem in itself is NP-hard, but it turns out that in some cases of interest

Perfect solutions are often NP-hard in systems where pretty-good solutions are nowhere close to NP-hard in many practical circumstances.

The declaration of NP-hard is way overrated. We use it mostly because mathematics still can't chew "pretty good" in any rigorous way.

The only reason we're still here is ... because we've been here so long.

FTFY. But it's actually not entirely true. When I've made an effort to jump ship, I find that many of the alternative sites have not yet invented the paragraph.

Seriously, the background music in this video is the all-time low since the day I gleefully blacklisted Jon Katz. But sadly, this still beats conversing in sentence fragments. I've seen articles written by Katz since then, elsewhere, that were quite good. It's just that his round-about mush brain was a terrible fit at geek central. He was always trying to discover if he had anything at all to say by dangling it in front of enraged bulls with an actual clue.

For me, writing is thinking. So I pound out a few paragraphs here whenever I need to consolidate some nuance of my personal perspective on life, out of long habit. Sometimes I write to discharge something old, tired and ugly. Other times I write to embrace a fresh new slant on an old issue. It's useful to have a place to write where I can fully exploit the revolving door of mental evolution. If I were writing under my own name on a blog, or something more formal, there would be far less opportunity to write in the jettison mode.

For about fifteen years I used to patronize one of the first outstanding microbrews in town, in a heritage building with a patio overlooking the waterfront backed by the quaint skyline of the garden city. About eight years ago you could see their business model shifting. First, fetch your own beer from the bar turned into table service, who handed you a menu and didn't even bother to mention the special keg of something especially interesting at the end of the bar. Then the menu went all over the place, including a sojourn through expensive and unpalatable, before fixing the quality problem, but leaving the price alone, in the bracket where mainly tourists are willing to go.

Once a year or so, we meet there out of pure nostalgia. The beer's still good, but everything else is either sad or expensive. True beer lovers are not their target market any longer. We don't belong there. I don't belong, here, really. I just haven't completely kicked the inertia.

And precisely how did we decide that these paintings weren't painted by outcast males with girlish mittens? Did we exhume Leonardo or Michelangelo to make sure he was "one of us"?

As well, it's not clear how we go from hand prints to a conclusion about who painted the animal outlines. I just watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams last week and I was thinking these thoughts all the while. I doubt we will ever know with any degree of confidence.

That's why Hertzog titled his movie "Forgotten". Because we'll never know. Hertzog is a strange duck, but he's not stupid.

We wonder why so many Americans are ignorant of the standards of science when the only time anything scientific captures their attention, it's complete bullshit wrapped around an intriguing nugget. Selling the bullshit sizzle but not the steak is the reason the majority of the population remains clueless about this important food group.

I'm usually pretty good about that.

Here follows some anti-lameness fodder:

The origins of Unicode date to 1987, when Joe Becker from Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. In August 1988, Joe Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system, tentatively called Unicode". Although the term "Unicode" had previously been used for other purposes, such as the name of a programming language developed for the UNIVAC in the late 1950s, and most notably a universal telegraphic phrase-book that was first published in 1889, Becker may not have been aware of these earlier usages, and he explained that "[t]he name 'Unicode' is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding".

Advertising in general is just scummy shit to make people do what they don't want. Unfortunately Marti's argument falls apart by it being hinged on this insane "rational economy" assertion.

Sorry, bucko there's no free lunch on thinking straight.

Actually burning money is déclassé. (So is failing to render basic Unicode.) However, conspicuous consumption really works when done right. Thorstein Veblen, this is Mr Cecil Rhodes. You'll get along famously.

As far as Don Marti goes, it's an extremely well-written article about factors many people don't bother to consider. It's a heavy lunch as it now stands. But still, he leaves too much out. Sometimes you can't win.

The problem is that advertisers pursue mixed tactics. They burn money to burnish the brand silver, while also pushing your worst buttons, while moving mountains behind the scenes to obscure whatever direct quality signal the consumer might also observe.

In the rare case where a branding effort convinces me, I'll go to the corporate web site with a specific question about whether their product has a quality I regard as essential. It'll take me five minutes to even find the page that reveals this (or ten minutes of futility culminating in a boiling rage if the page doesn't even exist). Then I when I find the page, it might reveal what I wish to know or it might not. When it reveals what I wish to know, it might yet remain hard to determine exactly which models and which model years conform to my wishes.

When one steps back to do a NPV on the entire experience, the answer is "Why the fuck bother?"

My most recent horror-show experience involved procuring Nomacorc for some homemade wine which I wish to cellar for up to five years (my cellar is set up for upright bottle storage, so natural cork is a no-fly zone).

Check out this exercise in burning money: NomaSense OxiSense video. Labcoats, the musical, scored by John Williams. Notice the use of a thick French accent to extol product virtue, and the Swiss accent for the bean-counter spiff. This is a cool technology. I'm impressed, and not just in my shrivelled MTV reflex arc.

But mainly I just wanted to buy the best existing Nomcorc closure. Well, it took a long time on that horrid website to determine which of their product levels was best suited to my needs. Try it yourself.

Having figured this out, I started to call local wine supply retailers, and not a single one could tell me which expensively-branded Nomacorc they were actually purveying. Nomacorc (or their hapless distributor) ships out bags with no product markings, and neither do the individual corks have any such marking. If you bottle your fine Nebbiolo with a two-year cork by mistake, four years from now you can kiss your draino goodbye.

Eventually I found a hopeless geek such as myself who runs a brew-on-premise. I asked him which Nomacorc he sells. He launched into a tirade (without any prompting from me) "oh my god, I wasted of my life on their web site and putting through my order, but I did finally get a huge bail of corks suited to preserve wine for four plus years". I replied "thank you for saying that, I think we'll be friends for life".

As far as I'm concerned, the entire advertising industry can go stuff itself until the day comes when the supermarket informs me that I've selected a product that exceeds my personal guidelines for sodium or MSG or Monsanto extortion chemical, so I can reject it from my basket prior to paying. Until advertising is on-side with helping me enforce my better self (over my harried, impulsive fuckwit self) their business model will continue to circle the drain of preying on the weak, or the strong in weak moments.