#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Does Romney want to kill Americans?
Former U.S. presidents seldom publicly criticize the current occupants of the White House. It is even more unusual for them to criticize a sitting president who belongs to their own party. But this did not prevent Jimmy Carter from criticizing Barack Obama’s policy asserting the president’s right to murder Americans at will without due process in an article he wrote for the New York Times.
It would appear fairly obvious that Apple’s patent infringement award will not only be appealed, but reversed and thrown out.
Apple v. Samsung juror Manuel Ilagan said the nine-person jury that heard the patent infringement case between the companies knew after the first day that it believed Samsung had wronged Apple…. The decision was very one-sided, but Ilagan said it wasn’t clear the jurors were largely in agreement until after the first day of deliberations.
“It didn’t dawn on us [that we agreed that Samsung had infringed] on the first day,” Ilagan said. “We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents, but we were debating about the prior art [about the same technology that Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted]. [Velvin Hogan] was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself. In the beginning the debate was heated, but it was still civil. Hogan holds patents, so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent — what was prior art –because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn’t something out there before Apple.
“In fact we skipped that one,” Ilagan continued, “so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down.” …
“Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents,” Ilagan said, “it’s easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel…then you go down the products to see if it had a bezel. But we took our time. We didn’t rush. We had a debate before we made a decision. Sometimes it was getting heated.”
Regardless of what you think of patents or Apple, the fact that the jury didn’t even look at all the prior art should be sufficient to get a judge to look at this again. And the jury foreman sounds like an Apple plant, or at least fanboi.
Powerline exposes the latest iteration of a stupid old Democratic trick:
It happens all the time in talk radio: a caller will say that he is a lifelong Republican, and will recall fondly how he voted for Ronald Reagan. Then he says that today’s Republicans have gone too far, and for the first time ever he is voting for a Democrat! These callers are nearly always lying. If you look them up, you likely will find that they are Democratic Party precinct chairmen.
The Obama campaign is trying to perpetrate the same deception. It has just released a video called Republican Women For Obama, which features four or five women who claim to be Republicans, or to have been Republicans until recently. But, of course, they are appalled by Mitt Romney–it is hard to say why, apart from a couple of discreet references to abortion, but did they really just now figure out that the Republican Party is pro-life? The ad is surprisingly ineffective, but it is also dishonest. At least one of the women who pose as “Republican women for Obama” is a long-time Democrat.
Her name is Maria Ciano, and BuzzFeed finds that she has been a registered Democrat in Colorado at least since 2006.
Of course, there is an easier way of knowing that the woman isn’t a Republican than combing through her Facebook page and voter registration. First, she is an unmarried Hispanic woman. Second, one has to be a pretty extreme Democrat to be appalled by Mitt Romney’s “right-wing” ways.
UPDATE: Obama is clearly getting desperate. President Barack Obama said Mitt Romney has locked himself into “extreme positions” on economic and social issues and would surely impose them if elected, trying to discredit his Republican rival at the biggest political moment of his life.
Romney is a flip-flopper, not an extremist, and everyone knows it. Obama’s 2012 campaign is looking more hapless than Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic 2008 team.
The initial results of the religion and paternal age survey have been intriguing, so much so that it may justify a more methodical investigation into the hypothesis. However, we need a bit more information in order to tease out the strength of an effect called the demographic confound.
So, if you don’t mind answering the following questions, please do so, but keep the following instructions in mind: Answer only for yourself. Not your siblings, your children, or your parents. Also, Anonymous responses will not be counted.
Name. (Not real name, just make something up so we can keep things straight.)
Birth year.
Age of father at birth
Age of mother at birth
Sex (M/F)
Parents married through age 18 (Y/N)
Strength of belief on the Spectrum of Theistic Probability. (1-7). The milestones are as follows:
1. Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C.G. Jung: “I do not believe, I know.”
2. De facto theist. Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. “I don’t know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.”
3. Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. “I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.”
4. Completely impartial. Exactly 50 per cent. “God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.” Agnostic.
5. Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. “I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.”
6. De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero. “I don’t know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”
7. Strong atheist. “I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung knows there is one.”
Science thanks you for your assistance.
It’s indeed unfortunate that Neil Armstrong should have died, so suspiciously, just when he was on the verge of coming clean about the faked Moon landings. The media is reporting “complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures”, which we all know is merely cover for “Obama sent a drone to silence him.”
Also, if it is later determined that Armstrong was doping during the flight, will NASA strip him of credit for the first Moon landing?
Draft Time: Sat Sep 1 3:00pm CDT
Bailout Banksters – Larry Fitzgerald, Rob Gronkowski, Matt Ryan
RR Redbeards – Tom Brady, Chris Johnson, LaShean McCoy
Greenfield Grizzlies – NEED 3 KEEPERS
Mounds View Meerkats – Aaron Rodgers, Arian Foster, Marques Colston
Sean – (Cranberry Rhyneaux)
Peter Garstig – (Bane Sidhe)
Boetain – (Green Reverends)
Gapeseed – (Grover Beach Quixotes)
上酒 – (Macau Marauders)
Slack Attack – (Swamp Spartans)
So, if you’re one of the three remaining guys – in bold – who have been assigned a team, email me ASAP and I will send you a league invitation as well as your roster from whom you can select up to three keepers.
“When you go in the lion’s den, you don’t tippy toe in. You carry a spear, you go in screaming like a banshee, you kick whatever doors in, and say, ‘Where’s the son of a bitch!’ If you go in any other way you’re gonna lose.”
– Brian Billick
Kickass wonders about a well-known image:
Could I get an explanation on the flaming sword picture? I thought it was a joke but googled it.
I’ve explained this before, but for those who didn’t know, this picture was one of many from a Star Tribune photoshoot for an article one of its writers was doing about my Eternal Warriors novels. He moved onto one of the big New York papers before he’d finished the piece, if I recall correctly, so it never ran, but the photographer liked them so much that he emailed a few of them to me.
I still remember laughing when he called me up after the interview with the writer and asked if “my characters, like, did anything interesting?” I mean, what was I supposed to say, no, they all sit around and discuss their boring lives? He got really excited when I mentioned that there were these angels and they got in big battles with flaming swords, until he realized that he was, after all, dealing with a writer. Which led to his next question: “You’re not, like, fat or anything, are you?” When I reassured him that I was not the pudgy little novelist he was expecting, he asked me to come down to the Star Tribune building in Minneapolis the next week and bring a sword if I happened to have one.
I didn’t, but there was one at the house at which I was staying – we’d already moved to Europe at this point – which led to the funniest part of the whole thing. It was winter, so it was cold, but it was also a bright sunny day, which led to my walking into the Star Tribune reception wearing a long black overcoat, black gloves, black shades, with a shaved head and carrying a katana. The two female receptionists freaked out and called security, at which point I explained the situation and the guards had a good laugh.
We didn’t end up using the katana, however, as the photographer obtained a few swords from a nearby theatre as well as some flame-paste, so he just picked out a rather Conanesque sword, gave it a quick coat of paste, then set it on fire while I held it. It was a little trickier than it looked because the burning paste tended to drip off, so I had to try to hold still for the photo while dodging the dripping flames at the same time. It was more fun than the usual photo shoot and I shared the photographer’s disappointment that the piece never ran. The reaction to the photo, however mockingly it may be intended, only tends to show that his instincts were correct as it made for a much more interesting author’s photo than most.
I find this criticism of Paul Ryan by Paul Krugman to be richly ironic, coming as it does from a man whose economic philosophy is based on an imaginary science called “psychohistory”:
So far, most of the discussion of Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice president, has focused on his budget proposals. But Mr. Ryan is a man of many ideas, which would ordinarily be a good thing. In his case, however, most of those ideas appear to come from works of fiction, specifically Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
For those who somehow missed it when growing up, “Atlas Shrugged” is a fantasy in which the world’s productive people — the “job creators,” if you like — withdraw their services from an ungrateful society. The novel’s centerpiece is a 64-page speech by John Galt, the angry elite’s ringleader; even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through that part. Yet the book is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it. Some, however, remain devotees for life.
If Ryan wants to silence Krugman’s attempts to attack him in this vein, he need merely point out that Atlas Shrugged is considerably more mature fiction than Foundation, the adolescent science fiction novel that Paul Krugman never outgrew.
The good professor always sends a lot of traffic to Amazon when he links my books, so it only seems fair to help him out in return, especially when it costs nothing to nobody. Download his PDF on the Obamacare decision – no registration or cost required – and apparently he’ll get to count some kind of academic coup or something. It actually makes for pretty interesting reading, and it’s only 21 pages, but more importantly, downloading it will make some leftist professor whose paper on 19th Century Transgender Law in the Third Ruritanian Republic gets bumped down a notch cry.
It’s moderately funny too. Consider the following quote: “This has led some commentators to suggest that Roberts’ holding in Sebelius was, like Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison, a sort of Trojan horse, smuggling in a victory over an important legal principle while shrouding that victory behind a win on the general issue for the other side. There are two problems with this conception: One is with the understanding of Marbury that it embodies, and the other is with the understanding of NFIB that it embodies.”
Translation: “No, you idiot Republicans, it’s exactly what it looked like. Roberts stabbed you in the back, so quit pretending you liked it.”