Like DEC and Sun Microsystems, Nokia is a lesson to future people on how not to run a business. The reasons for all of those companies to fail is different, but the bottom line is that the business around them changed quickly and they all had no answer for it.

Prior to iPhone coming out, I had Nokia phones. If you're a young person, you might be shocked at how phones were before the iPhone. There was no touch screen. You had to use the number pad to input letters. To spell "cat" you had to press 2 three times to skip A, skip B and get to C. Then press 2 once to get A. Then press 8 once to get T. I remember buying a pretty expensive Nokia phone that was state of the art but I bought it months before the iPhone came out. I remember being stunned at how much better the iPhone was with its touch screen and actual keyboard you could use. Nokia literally had no answer for this. None of their phones could do this. A few years earlier, Nokia had driven out almost all their competition. Ever heard of Ericsson? They were big at one time but they couldn't keep up with Nokia. Nokia crushed them. Nokia was all things to all people. You want an expensive state of the art phone? We can sell you that. You want a garbage quality cheap phone that only makes phone calls and can barely send and receive text message? Here at Nokia, we are the freaking kings of garbage phones! No market is so small and so terrible that we won't compete in it. Apple did not care about selling "phones that are only phones" in, say, Burkina Faso. They let Nokia have it. And then stole Nokia's share in more developed countries and it reached the point where all Nokia had left was the garbage phone market in the most undeveloped countries on earth.

So back in the days of the sub-prime mortgage bubble bursting, I read an online article from a guy who gets paid to write online articles about investing. He said that his dad told him "Son, when stupid money enters a market, it's time to leave that market." He said he realized that the property market and everything around it was going to burst when he went to a restaurant he liked to eat at and his favorite waitress gave him a card showing that she was now also a real estate agent on the side. Here's my question.

Hasn't even stupid money figured out that there's no money to be made in NFTs? I get why Emirates may want to take Bitcoin payments because it is theoretically possible that by doing so, they'll make more money over time if Bitcoin goes up in value. But I really don't get why they think anybody is going to want to buy their NFTs. I thought they were supposed to be one of the smart airlines, but here they are arriving at the NFT party years after it closed down.

Unfortunately, your first sentence is too vague, which somewhat detracts from what otherwise is really great post. It's already led one responder to misunderstand what you mean here.

What is meant by "hardware" is a VCR. Not a capture device. Yes, capture devices are plentiful. The last VCRs were made over a decade ago and eventually with a lot of archival use, the ones left will break down. There may still be some shops with old enough employees who have the ability to do repairs - if they can get the right parts. But this is a task that really should have been started years ago. I guess now is better than anytime in the future.

Judges are supposed to have clerks working for them. These are usually just out of law school graduates who have the ability to do exactly what you suggest - check the citations to make sure they actually exist and apply to the case on hand. Could be that the judge's clerk was too lazy to check and expected to get away with it. If the judge didn't have a clerk, then it's up to the judge to check.

I have lots of friends who are lawyers and they explain things to me about the legal system. The legal system is very hesitant about punishing lawyers for anything. So the $2,500 fine, which to us non-lawyers is a joke, is probably about as "tough" as they are going to get. Almost nobody gets disbarred or seriously punished no matter how bad they were.

While I think there is some truth to this, I read a compelling case for why he has gone to the Trump side of things. One of Elon's children from his first marriage is now a trans woman and it seems that Elon has sort of gone bat shit crazy in terms of dealing with this. Instead of trying to find some way to accept this, he went to Trump simply because he knew Trump would bash trans people (doing so was a very effective part of his 2024 TV advertising). I think it may honestly be that simple.

The last time I remember this actually happening was in the 2000s. I do sometimes buy CDs and I honestly can't remember the last time I bought one that seemed to have any copy protection on it. Unless you want to give specifics, I think you're talking about how things were a long time ago and assuming incorrectly that they never changed. I think pretty much everybody figured out quite a while ago that people who actually want to buy physical product aren't the enemy and treating them like potential thieves was counterproductive.

No.

You asked.

Many companies really only care about how much a worker costs. EVERYTHING else, and I really mane EVERYTHING, is unimportant other than making sure that the person seems to be legally allowed to work in the USA or for a US company. My best friend works for a privately held IT company that only does business in one specific US industry. They have no desire to do business in other countries or other industries. He told me that his company stopped hiring people in India because they were "too expensive", so a lot of new hires now are in Nepal. Where do you go when Nepalese people get "too expensive"? Burkina Faso? Equatorial Guinea? My guess is that the remote employees or someone pretending to be them simply used remote tools like Zoom to do any orientation. I'm not saying my friend's company hired any of these people, but I can 100% guarantee you that they wouldn't ask too many questions if a potential employee was willing to work cheap enough to meet their needs. There are probably a lot of US companies like that.

I was thinking about this too. True story from the early 90s in my IT career. I worked as a civilian employee of a branch of the US military. I'm not going to say which one because I actually liked and respected the members. One of my co-workers was assigned to a project that involved trying to make a piece of equipment portable. Today, it would be no problem. But 30+ years ago, it was a big ask. The project was done by a military contractor and there was a requirement to use ADA on it. My co-worker had to learn how to manage the equipment and the company that made it told him that they wrote the whole thing in C and put a very small ADA program on the front end that just called the C program to do all the work. He said they assured him that doing so was in full compliance of the way the ADA requirement was specified.

A couple of months ago at a social event, I got briefly caught up in a multi-person conversation about learning Spanish. I took it in college and have a 2nd major in it and while I don't claim to be fluent, I'm pretty good. It's not a problem for me to use it. This guy's wife said she was using Duolingo to learn Spanish. She's about 30 years old I guess so certainly not too old and not particularly likely to have big struggles if she is serious about learning it. Two of the other people in this conversation are guys I would rate as fluent Spanish speakers, although they native English speakers by birth. She told us that earlier in the day or maybe a day or two ago when she had most recently used Duolingo it asked her to say in Spanish something like "I need to put on a presidential costume". She did not know how to say that. In fact, none of the 3 of us Spanish speakers knew the Spanish word for "costume" with all of us saying we had never had it come up where we had to use that word. It made me seriously question the value of Duolingo to learn foreign languages. If I was going to learn another one, that wouldn't be what I would use. She said she mostly liked it, but every now and then it had useless phrases for her to learn.

The fact that the company continues to use VMware - legally although they can no longer update it - sort of means that they aren't really a former customer. If they stopped using it completely when they decided not to pay Broadcom's subscription fee, I'd agree that they are a former customer. So that probably gives Broadcom the right to audit them. In my career at various jobs we sometimes had to go through this kind of audit as some companies were super paranoid that their customers might be using more copies of something than they paid for. It's been a while so I can't really remember specifics, but I vaguely recall that a company I worked for got busted during a similar audit as some people in another part of the company didn't respect the licensing agreement and just used the product beyond what we paid for and we had to pay some kind of fine/license fee to get straight.

Not this week.

I doubt this can't be appealed. It's more do to with the fact that they couldn't show they suffered any damages (harm) from the infringement:

He cited [PDF] precedents where an award of damages was deemed unnecessary if the plaintiff could not "adequately tie a dollar amount" to the infringing acts.

"Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1," he stated.

For this reason, the portion of WD's Rule 59 Motion regarding damages was declared moot, while the request for a new trial was denied.

Despite the judge denying almost all of the storage firm's post-trial motions, its legal representatives Gibson Dunn claimed the reduction of damages "a significant win."
[...]
He cited [PDF] precedents where an award of damages was deemed unnecessary if the plaintiff could not "adequately tie a dollar amount" to the infringing acts.

"Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1," he stated.

For this reason, the portion of WD's Rule 59 Motion regarding damages was declared moot, while the request for a new trial was denied.

Despite the judge denying almost all of the storage firm's post-trial motions, its legal representatives Gibson Dunn claimed the reduction of damages "a significant win."

"Prior to trial, Western Digital made a successful motion to exclude SPEX's damages expert. SPEX then tried the case and attempted to put on a damages case without a damages expert. Based on damages theories that were never disclosed, and legally improper, the jury awarded SPEX over $250 million in damages," Gibson Dunn claimed in a statement sent to The Register.

So WD did infringe, but I guess because they were just a patent troll with no actual business they couldn't actually show they suffered any damages.

Not sure why they couldn't claim lost licensing revenue, maybe the rule was really made to combat patent trolls and it worked as intended?

Nothing illustrates how seriously Tesla takes safety as paying someone to be a full-time safety driver, but sticking them in the passenger seat so it looks like the car is more self-driving.

Could one ask for a clearer illustration of sacrificing safety (of the passengers and wider public) for publicity purposes?