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RespectYourself

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To provide more specifics:

Red ripped off JPEG2000, and the derelict USPTO awarded them a patent on it... which was upheld at some point by some equally ignorant judge.

It's such a blatant rip-off that you can actually use an off-the-shelf JPEG2000 decoder to read Red's files.

Until software patents are ruled invalid (as they were supposed to be from the beginning), corporations will continue to use the patent system for exactly what it was supposed to prevent: the theft of other people's work.

Nikon managed to "prevail" over Red in a dispute over these patents, but not in a public-benefiting way. Red folded, but unfortunately their patents were not invalidated. So nobody should be crowing too loudly over this deal.

Epic isn't squeaky-clean, but Apple is making dangerous and dumb decisions in this whole debate.

Banning third-party payments was one thing, but then Apple banned publishers from TELLING people about the ability to pay through a Web site.

That is not just unnecessary from a business standpoint (since the vast majority of people opt for the most convenient thing); but it's so offensive that it invites crackdowns, implemented by ignorant politicians and legislative bodies... hurting Apple's bottom line.

Apple is tarnishing its image and earning it a place among the true offenders of "big tech," a place it mostly doesn't belong because it's not a gatekeeper to huge swaths of the Internet and commerce the way Google, Amazon, and Meta are.

Amen. I have also rearranged attempts at building a "maze" that deliberately waste customers' time. If I'm in a shitty enough mood, I'll move entire displays so I can walk directly where I need to go without detouring around them (when it's clear that they are only arranged to be an impediment).

It was too late to repel them. The chairs were rife with brown-widow nests.

Anyway, now I just blast these areas with a hose from time to time. Individual spiders I will relocate if they're in an area where people are likely to sit.

There's a tiny baby spider roosting in my oven hood right now. The two last evenings he has descended on a web to look around. I considered putting him outside, but it's too cold so I just let him return to his hiding place.

Same. It can get tiresome in CA though! I'll take widows over recluses any day.

On the one occasion where I found an infestation too extensive to relocate (under almost every one of my outdoor chairs), I tried bug spray. Horrible. Thanks to CA's hysterical bans on everything, the spray is ineffective and merely tortures the spiders and often leaves them alive but maimed. I felt terrible. Never again.

Actually, that's my mistake. The examples I was thinking of turned out to be one and the same: It was a California proposition originally titled the "California Marriage Protection Act." That was the one where a judge forced it to be renamed to "Eliminates Rights of Same-Sex Couples to Marry. Initiative Constitutional Amendment"

Nice comparison. And also certain political factions in the USA try to hide the shamefulness of laws they propose by giving them names that are directly opposed to what they'll do.

The "Defense of Marriage Act" comes to mind. There was one so bad that a judge ordered the authors to change it, but I can't find it at the moment.

#3 is certainly bullshit, but Yahoo failed because of #1. Forcing a user to drill down through hundreds or thousands of categories to do a search is absurd, don't you think?

What other buttons do you want?

But for sure Google has crippled its core product. First they removed the + option, which forced the inclusion of words (their excuse was that it "interfered" with their stupid "Google Plus" product which is now gone). Yes you can use "allintext:" but come on. I'm not even sure that's honored anyway.

And the removal of the ability to exclude certain sites from results.