lrs

What's the idea behind that "Submit a Story" uncollapsible floating tab on the left side of the page? Seems like you're obstructing a pretty important, content-dense part of the screen with something unimportant and obnoxious that doesn't even generate revenue. Please reconsider this design.

EDIT: It's come to my attention that this only appears to be an issue at 1024x768, which I'm currently using because I'm at work and my employer's computer hardware is ancient. This is probably not a problem for the typical user.

Great post - really brilliant tactical thinking, and it's always a delight to see smart moves pay off.

I feel like it should be noted that it's quite dangerous to threaten a move like this unless you're actually prepared to follow through with it if the gambit fails. If this move hadn't worked and the prospect had responded with something like "please reconsider, we believe there is still a good chance things can work out," I think it would have been disastrous for this company's credibility going forward if they had actually continued working on this prospect. Part of the reason this was a great move for them in this situation is that they were legitimately ready to cut their losses with this prospect and move on. When that's the case, even the smallest chance of jamming a sale through is pure value over their best alternative.

Assuming you're referring to Marie's scolding of Megan, I think the quote is closer to "Not every little girl gets to do what she wants - the world could not support that many ballerinas." Which is even closer to what this article is saying.

This rings painfully true.

No sarcasm; just a lot of regret and self-loathing.

It seems like the root of our disagreement is our differeing expectations for the cognitive and decisionmaking abilities of teenagers. As other posters have mentioned, there are lots of social factors at play in the college decision, and I think those factors can be far more powerful than what's necessary to lead a straight-A high school student astray.

If we pared away all of the people who were susceptible to making bad decisions based on what they're told or who are focused on the past successes of others, only the tiniest sliver of the population would remain as viable candidates for college. Maybe this is the point you're making - maybe you think we should shut down almost every university and tell everyone outside the enlightened sliver to go figure out something else to do. (Might actually not be that bad of an idea.) Or maybe you have a different view of people's cognitive abilities at age 17.

The approach that you personally took toward your college decision is, I think, pretty exceptional, and puts you toward the top of the top 1% of rational 17-year-old decisionmakers. I hesitate to condemn people as clueless and undeserving of our sympathy because they fall short of that lofty standard.

I think the OP's characterization of the decisionmaking process that leads to crippling educational debt is somewhat unfair. It's definitely driven by the parents and children who he condemns as "clueless." But I think it's important to consider that many of these "clueless" have been told their entire lives that "education is a great investment" and "graduates of prestigious universities all become successful and rich," and have never really been confronted with any reason to question these pronouncements, which have appeared consistent with their own observations and experiences. Colleges and universities don't hesitate to trot out these tropes in their recruitment literature, though I suppose it's a mark of the "clueless" that they hold educational institutions to a different standard of credibility than used car salesmen or carnival barkers.

I see a parallel to the recent mortgage crisis. Sure, fundamentally, the crisis was just huge numbers of people defaulting en-masse on their mortgages. They all made "clueless" decisions by taking on more mortgage debt than they could handle. Maybe they deserve what they get, and maybe the appropriate response is to be angry at these entitled whiners who made worse decisions than the OP. But these decisions were facilitated by lenders and securities brokers who were acting in less than good faith.

I'm inclined to view both the homeowners in the mortgage crisis and the students and families struggling with education debt right now more as victims of poor information availability and outmoded decision heuristics that fell behind the times, and less as entitled whiners.

I guess I should note that I also went to the University of Chicago (hi Jesse) and it's fairly clear by now that it was a terrible choice for me. So maybe I'm just grasping for rationalizations while desperately fleeing from the crushing psychological weight of the responsibility for that choice and the long and uninterrupted sequence of related bad choices that have more or less ruined my life.

I'll add to the chorus of voices requesting the ability to add a price constraint.

To generalize from this very good point - perhaps a future iteration should include a fully-blinged-out "Advanced" settings menu that lets you add constraints for a wide variety of dietary restrictions, including micronutrient requirements, food allergies, and various modes of vegetarianism.

Kind of a derail, but would you care to share the rationale behind the 60/20/20 macro ratio?

Whoops, my mistake - thanks for the correction.

Still baffled by how answers.com expects to get $270M of financing to buy about.com. To anyone who has ever clicked a link to either of those domains from a Google query, the headline must seem Onion-like.

Unreal. How can such an awful website have $270 million on hand, and how can they be willing to spend it on another awful website?

I remember having this same thought when I learned about the existence of "Islamic finance." Apparently, Islam has a strong doctrinal prohibition against charging interest, and there's an entire thriving sector of Islamic law and business dedicated to structuring transactions in ways that don't technically charge interest but still yield a return on principal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking

This reminds me of a little kid beating up his classmates on the playground being told by the playground monitor to stop touching them, and then turning around going back to tormenting them by starting to punch them and stopping just short of making actual contact, and saying "neener neener, I'm not actually touching you." Except here, instead of a playground monitor, it's...an omnipotent creator deity.

I am so fascinated by the idea that these people exist. I would love to read an interview with one of them.

Seems consistent with what we're seeing in this case. Very hard to imagine any VC greenlighting this sort of "it's the principle" litigation; very easy to imagine a founder doing so.

I didn't look at the claim construction order so I don't know if anything particularly remarkable happened at that stage, but based solely on the SJ order, it looks like they did get a very favorable construction in light of Ricoh v. Quantas. They were able to get all of the claims construed in such a way that their own behavior wasn't covered.

This then allowed them to deploy a very elegant (IMO) "fork" tactic. Having established, in light of the the claims and the Ricoh case, that they couldn't possibly be direct infringers, they were also able to make winning arguments based on an RPX license (unfortunately redacted) that established that none of their users could possibly be infringers.

So they were able to cement all of the legal bricks together into a solid wall that completely closed off any path to victory the Troll could have taken.

Really wish I could see the redacted language from the license agreements.

I think a good trial lawyer would probably be able to get a jury to a level of at least rudimentary understanding of the technology over the course of a multi-day trial. But I agree with the spirit of what you're saying. Reliance on trial by lay jury is just one of the many, many ways the American patent system is broken.

It's very expensive. Kaspersky almost certainly paid its lawyers much, much more to take this case through summary judgment and trial prep than Microsoft paid the Troll to go away.

Don't get me wrong, I'm with you. But...it's easy to pontificate on the virtues of taking a principled stand against trolls when you're not responsible to greedy shareholders.

Does anyone know who owns Kaspersky? It would be interesting to note who was on the Board that OK'd the decision to open the company coffers to fund a fight against a patent troll.

The public documents in this case are heavily redacted, because the relevant underlying facts involve confidential or sensitive information about licensing agreements. That, plus my unfamiliarity with the underlying technology, makes it tough for me to put together a complete picture of how this litigation actually unfolded. But, as best as I can tell from a brief initial review of the papers:

The Troll was alleging many different "flavors" of infringement that broadly fall into two categories: direct and indirect. Direct infringement would be if Kaspersky itself were violating the patent, for example by using patented software itself. Indirect infringement would be if Kaspersky were inducing others to violate the patent, for example by selling patented software to customers.

Kaspersky moved for summary judgment, which is essentially asking the Court to rule in your favor without a trial because the evidence is so overwhelmingly in your favor that no reasonable jury could find against you and a trial would just be a waste of time.

Kaspersky successfully argued that it wasn't directly infringing on the patents because the patents described a method for having a computer carry out some process, and in order to infringe, Kaspersky would have had to actually carry out that process, rather than selling software that carried out that process.

Kaspersky successfully argued that it wasn't indirectly infringing on the patent because all of its customers were covered by preexisting license agreements. Unfortunately, the key facts on this claim are redacted.

The Court granted summary judgment to Kaspersky on these grounds on most of the Troll's claims, but there were a few remaining claims that fell outside of Kaspersky's arguments. (These seemingly related to specific manipulations of computer hardware? Not really sure, don't understand the technology and don't want to learn it, already wasting too much time on this LOL)

After the Court granted summary judgment, the Federal Circuit handed down some new case law that was directly on-point. This new law made it clear that Kaspersky was going to win on those few claims that survived through summary judgment.

Kaspersky moved for reconsideration, essentially asking the Court to consider this new case and revise the original summary judgment order to dispose of the rest of the claims as well. Unfortunately, there are some fairly strict timing rules involved in moving for reconsideration and Kaspersky didn't comply with them, so it wasn't able to win this motion.

However, the writing was on the wall at this point, and the Troll apparently realized there was no way it could win at trial. On June 15, the Troll voluntarily dismissed the rest of the claims, effectively giving up and going home.

Congrats on reading this far. Happy to try to answer questions if you have any. Others who might know more about the case should jump in and supplement or correct me if I missed or misunderstood anything.

e: Responsive to the original parent comment in this thread:

1. Given that the Troll voluntarily dismissed its claims - essentially conceding defeat - I would be surprised if the Troll appealed. However, there might be some grounds for appeal in earlier nondispositive motions relating to interpretation of the patent claims.

2. Kaspersky won on noninfringement grounds, but they structured their noninfringement argument in a very elegant and powerful way that essentially renders the patent-in-suit toothless while still technically valid. This isn't legal advice and everyone knows it would be idiotic to rely on a HN posting in making any decisions with potential legal consequences, but I personally would go ahead and "scratch this patent off our lists." One down, several hundred thousand to go...

The Order indicates that Kaspersky won summary judgment on noninfringement grounds, not invalidity grounds.

e: Not sure about this, but the Order also suggests that some of the Troll's claims survived summary judgment and are proceeding to trial, so it's not clear to me how complete of a victory this is. I'll check the underlying order (this ruling was on a motion for reconsideration) and the PACER docket and see what I can figure out.

Plaintiff can definitely appeal a dismissal with prejudice. In fact, Plaintiff would probably have more trouble appealing a dismissal without prejudice, since the implication in a dismissal without prejudice is that Plaintiff can refile.

I don't know, man - I'm no ally of the Plaintiffs in this case, but I don't think I buy that argument.

What Comcast characterizes as "shakedowns" are really just negotiated settlements. The fact that the claims didn't go to litigation doesn't necessarily indicate that they aren't valid; it just means that they were settled before it became necessarily to file a lawsuit.

The fact that Comcast is carrying this banner almost makes me want to switch to Comcast in support. I say "almost" because I quickly remember their frequent random connection drops, slower-than-promised speeds, intentionally misleading promotional advertising, legendarily bad customer service, and ruthless nationwide campaign against affordable municipally-provided high speed Internet access.

Yuuup.

I'm always amused at the predictable trajectory of the comments on any sort of HN posting about Asperger's. In almost all cases, a disproportionate number of the people who comment or read the comments have Asperger's themselves, or at least think they do.

One of them will post this Temple Grandin quote or something along similar lines extolling the technical problem-solving superiority of people with Asperger's, with or without realizing how inflammatory it is.

Someone will point out how insulting it is to technical problem-solvers without Asperger's and to human beings in general, who typically feel pretty bad when they're confronted with what's basically an assertion that nobody like them has ever contributed to the progress of the human race.

That person will immediately be downvoted into oblivion because there are some elements in the tone of his comment that result in it being perceived as an insult in its own right.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted here. Isn't this the same effect Buffett is talking about in the letter when he describes the local paper's advantage in coverage of "local sports?" People will pay to read about their kid's soccer goal; people will pay to peruse the list of people who got picked up for DUIs last week and look for anyone they know. Am I misunderstanding Buffett's position here?

What sorts of policies and practices, if any, do you have in place to prevent your company or clients from engaging in the kind of behavior that you yourself found so personally objectionable that you sued for it?

>So no, I wouldn't call the service "superior"— rather more irritating and intrusive because that's the best way to get a good tip, while pretending to be superior.

This seems to lend more support to the inference that you personally have atypical preferences than it does to the inference that the American tipping system as a whole doesn't result in greater aggregate satisfaction with service.

You acknowledge that most people tip more when their servers do things that you find "irritating and intrusive." To me, this suggests that most people don't find those things irritating and intrusive, and in fact like them, and that's why they're willing to surrender more money when they experience them.

Extremely attractive presentation of interesting data - thanks for this. As for where to go next, why not automate this methodology and do the entire world? :)