Chase is committed to making your banking experience enjoyable,
trouble-free, and, above all, safe. Which is why you should strike your
computer with 20 to 25 forceful blows from a pipe wrench as soon as you
reach international waters, toss the plastic and metal shards into the sea,
and then immediately sink the ship you’re on. And then, once you dive to
the sea floor, grab the scattered computer pieces, and shove them all
inside living clams, you’ll be able to rest easy knowing you’re banking
smarter and safer.
—
Patent trolls know this and as a result, they sue companies in droves and
make settlement demands designed to maximize their financial take while
making it cheaper and less painful to settle than to devote the resources
necessary to defeat their claims. The current system lets them do so even
with claims that are unlikely to prevail on the merits. That is because,
whether win lose or draw, the rules effectively insulate trolls from
negative consequences except perhaps a lower return than expected from any
given company in any given case. They can sue on tenuous claims and still
come out ahead. And so the broken system with its attendant leverage allows
trolls to extract billions in blackmail from U.S. companies and, in the
final analysis, consumers.
—
In the aftermath of the Boston bombings -- cameras were everywhere there -- which while horrendous and tragic, killed and injured fewer people than just a few days of "routine" gun violence here in the USA, we're hearing the predictable calls for vastly expanded government-operated video surveillance networks, even though virtually every study shows that while these systems may be useful in solving crimes after the fact, they are of little to no use in preventing crime or terrorism in the first place. This has proven true even in cities like London, where there's a camera focused on pretty much every individual pimple on each Londoner's face.
In some cities, like New York, the surveillance-industrial complex has its fangs deeply into government for the big bucks. It's there we heard the Police Commissioner -- just hours ago, really -- claim that "privacy is off the table."
