I was hoping at the bottom of the article it would say that Professor Utonium accidentally added Chemical X.

The fines should be proportional to actual damage caused (ie: 100% coverage of any interest on loans, any extra spending the person needed to do in consequence, loss of compound interest, damage to credit rating along with any additional spending this resulted in, and any medical costs that can reasonably be attributed to stress/anxiety). It would be difficult to get an exact figure per person, but a rough estimate of probable actual damage would be sufficient. Add that to the total direct loss - not the money that went through any individual involved, and THEN double that total. This becomes the minimum, not the maximum. You then allow the jury to factor in emotional costs on top of that.

In such cases as this, the statutary upper limit on fines should not apply. SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that laws and the Constitution can have reasonable exceptions and this would seem to qualify.

If a person has died in the meantime, where the death certificate indicates a cause of death that is medically associated with anxiety or depression, each person invovled should also be charged with manslaughter per such case.

You'd think with the successes of the original 16-bit Apple machines, then the Mac platform, full of third party software of every kind imaginable, it should have been self-evident that third party apps would be natural and beneficial. But people like Jobs just can't help themselves: their instinct is to control their platform and exclude everyone else. So they indulge the Reality Distortion Field hard enough to convince themselves that such a scheme is viable, all evidence of history to the contrary, and capture all the money.

The jail breakers are the real heros. They're the ones that pierced the Field and corrected this dysfunction, where no amount of explaining had any impact. They left Apple with two choices: go to war with jail breakers and become a pariah, or correct the bad thinking that prevailed to that point. Fortunately they chose the latter.

Or maybe unfortunately. The residual tyranny that did survive is more than I've ever considered tolerating. Maybe it would have been better if Apple had self-immolated the iPhone with Jobs' vision.

There is nothing about such a mission that mandates obsolete, 2x order of magnitude money torching. Please stop it with your commie shilling.

It doesn't really matter in the long run. Sooner or later the US with elect another (D) president and the teacher's union and/or some other pressure group will once again cut NASA's space program and take the money. After than, NASA or whomever will be forced to adopt cost effective solutions.

Yeah, it was cool watching those four $146,000,000/each RS-25 engines return to the landing pad. Stupid capitalists.

I suggest:

First offence: Have to watch CSPAN for 5 hours a day, for a week, without sleeping through it - evidence to be provided in court

Second offence: Have to sing Miley Cyrus songs and Baby Shark on TikTok - sober

Third offence: License to practice and all memberships of country clubs and golf courses revoked

They tried that with Apollo 13. And.... that actually did work, sorta.

U.S. Patent No. 10,855,990
This is old technology, but was used extensively in JPEG and JPEG2000. All these patents are and have been long expired. There is no novel approach in U.S. Patent No. 10,855,990. More specifically, all the claims they're making in terms of the specific violations of this patent were covered in ITU-13818-2. Though ITU-https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H.263-200501-I/en hammers the last nails in the coffin. I have read and reviewed the claim and the patent and the technologies presented in 10,855,990 are just reiterations of earlier work with scrambled wording to try and give a new name for variable sized macroblocks. They novel approach implemented in H.264, H.265 and H.266 was the method of selecting which specific pattern of "coding units" to apply. I have not checked for reuse of this, but this is neither in 10,855,990 or the claim. So, I believe they checked and found out that there was no violation. Oh and to be clear, they're completely fixated on the sharing coding parameters between blocks. Their approach is almost, barely, kinda novel, but the fact is, I'd make a strong argument that this is obvious, it's basically just macroblock grouping which has been part of standard video coding as far back as MPEG-1 and ASF. And the method applied could easily be argued to be an almost direct copy of LZW compression.

U.S. Patent No. 9,924,193
I couldn't find a copy of the original text (not wearing my glasses) and frankly their description was so TL;DR that they just started making things up. Ok... here's the argument against this. This has been a core features of all DWT based compression methods since the start. It was even the reason we used DWT. JPEG2000 is almost entirely based on what they're claiming here. If I spent an hour on this one, I could tear it to pieces without even trying. And skip mode... what in the world do you think something like Google Earth is?

U.S. Patent No. 9,596,469
Encoding data in a way that would allow independent parallel decoding of different portions, bands, blocks whatever of the image ... blah blah. Back to JPEG-2000 and Google Earth and stuff like that. The first time I saw this personally was at Disney Epcot Center when there was a Cray Supercomputer on display showing off a google earth like experience. The computer was streaming data at different spatial representations in parallel to hundreds of CPU cores who were all decoding and texturizing. The number of patents filed and expired on this one tech is immense. I haven't dug up specifics, but I can guarantee that the JPEG2000 patent pool clearly invalidates this

I just doom scrolled through the rest of this. I highly doubt I'm the only signal processing and video/image compression historian out there. I'm guessing that the LLMs could easily tear this crap apart too. But I'd be willing to make a few bucks as an advisor on this. I've either worked with, against, for, on, etc... on every technology being claimed here and I did this 15-20 years ago... and the tech was already old.

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Lol, I was thinking of this instead ;)

People forget that the primary concerns about Kessler Syndrome were about geosynchronous orbit, which used to be where all the most important satellites went (many of course still go there, but not the megaconstellations). It takes a long, long time for debris to leave GEO. But LEO is a very different beast.

They said it's internal rather than a collision, so probably a failed COPV would be my guess.

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.

I didn't really use Works, but I supported enough PCs that had it that I had a lot of exposure to it. I didn't use it because the file formats for it were annoying when I had access to Office.

It was pretty common OE software on new computers too.

If I didn't have access to Office, I tended to use WordPad. It was nearly always good enough honestly.

Why does everybody think I'm a lawyer?