Maszman Speaks!

As nice as it is to see any­one bring this up, but the Pres­i­dent chastis­ing Wall St. CEOs over their extrav­a­gant bonuses is sort of like chastis­ing Yao Ming for being tall. Greed and self­ish­ness are as much a part of them as dunk­ing with­out hav­ing to jump is to Yao.

I did, how­ever, get a laugh out of an inter­view this morn­ing on NBC’s Today, where some ana­lyst was list­ing out Wall St.‘s argu­ments in favor of the bonuses. She men­tioned that they would claim that the bonuses are nec­es­sary to keep top tal­ent. Appar­ently, they’re unable to read the Dow or the news­pa­pers (or the web or talk to any­one not in their imme­di­ate vicin­ity but I digress). It’s “top tal­ent” that’s got­ten us into the hor­ri­ble mess, the best thing they could do would be to let them go and replace them with any­one else. It’s hard to imag­ine they could do a worse job.

In a way, you have to hand it to the Rochester Rhi­nos. Not only did they man­age to con­vince peo­ple that they needed their own sta­dium (they didn’t) and that build­ing it in one of the most decrepit neigh­bor­hoods in the city was a great way to attract fans from the sub­urbs (it wasn’t), but now they’ve man­aged to get a $4 mil­lion state grant for lux­ury suites from a state mired in seri­ous finan­cial issues.

Think about, the sta­dium that no one wanted, in a place no one wants to go will now have lux­ury suites for those wealthy fans who won’t come to the sta­dium with­out an armed guard. And they used state money to do it.

And I’d be remiss in not men­tion­ing the Rochester Fiasco Con­nec­tion™: The sta­dium was once named for PAETEC, the tele­com com­pany that was going to build a 30-story office on the site of Mid­town Plaza but due to declin­ing busi­ness is now maybe only build­ing a 10-story office.

Yes I know that the House GOP mem­bers all refused to vote for the stim­u­lus bill because it lacked tax cuts. But let’s be hon­est with our­selves, tax cuts don’t help you if you don’t have a job. And right now, that means mil­lions of peo­ple (with the ranks of the sud­denly unem­ployed increas­ing by tens of thou­sands every day).

‘Last One Out, Please Turn On the Light’ — Richard Nichol­son sur­veys the remain­ing pro­fes­sional dark­rooms in Lon­don. Film is not dead, but it’s cer­tainly become a niche market.

Did you know that the US Supreme Court actu­ally ruled in 1972 that algo­rithms could not be patented? Unfor­tu­nately, it wasn’t their only rul­ing on soft­ware patents. In 1981’s Dia­mond v. Diehr, the Supreme Court con­sid­ered a patent on a software-controlled rubber-curing machine. This time, the Supreme Court allowed the patent in a 5 – 4 deci­sion. It was this last rul­ing that opened the flood­gates on soft­ware patents. How­ever, it’s likely that the present court will take a strong stance against soft­ware patents, hav­ing begun to over­turn Fed­eral Cir­cuit Court rul­ings back in 2006. This could mean the begin­ning of the end for soft­ware patents and the trolls who exist only to extort money from true innovators.

FTC slaps Do Not Call Vio­la­tors with $1.2 Mil­lion in penal­ties | Net​work​World​.com Community