693 karma · joined November 25, 2007
Not sure why a crafts store must provide contraception (I read a few times to make sure I got it right), and IMO they are just grasping at legal straws to fight off a ridiculous suit.
But, like you say, it's the people who run these corporations. Were I the judge, I'd be looking into the articles of incorporation which, I'm sure, say nothing about religion.
I can tell from experience that the Australian taxation authorities make the US taxation authorities look like a gift-giving Santa. I also dealt extensively with Europe, and Europe is by far worse than Australia in that respect. (A note to the dear Americans, I am not an American who went to Australia, it's the other way around.)
And then they mix in mandatory pension contributions for some, which makes the comparison even weirder.
Also note that this comparison is for long-term residents, not for expats or entrepreneurs that are there for a few years and may not be as interested in the social programs.
I mean, it may not be very interesting in the beginning when the earnings are not very far from zero, but as the startup grows, and the stock incentives become more tangible, it's becoming relevant. I was personally looking at Barcelona once but the moment I looked at how much taxes they pay, I dropped the idea.
I keep hearing that but what does it even mean?
Corporations don't have religious beliefs, people do. Can the corporation be Muslim and have 100% Mormon employees?
The only controversial bit I could locate in a different source was the corporate political spending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood - but there is a bajillion plus loopholes to do that without the need to resort to legal fiction.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/17/philip-seymour-...
* server-side web
* first web-based payments
* VoIP
* first mobile devices
* e-commerce
* text messaging
* music piracy... I mean, sharing
* search engines
And I could go on forever.
Sorry for the dumb question, but...
He was in his 60s during WWII when he was captured?
I haven't been there physically but observed it from the distance. Google or not, wasn't the Silicon Valley of the 1990s more about creating new technologies and less about kissing VC asses, repackaging crap, pumping valuations, and screaming "innovation"?
I agree with most of your post, but I can't agree with this:
> the regulatory issues are probably about the same
The issue is, flying cars are by far more dangerous than road vehicles.
Sadly, transportation advances come at a cost of human lives.
Today we take road fatalities for granted. Think of the dangers of crossing the road 150 years ago vs now.
But even today getting injured or killed by a motor vehicle requires being near a road or a thoroughfare where it can pass. Imagine taking it to a whole new level: even if you're standing on your balcony or even inside your apartment, you can get killed by an idiot flying his mini-plane on ecstasy. Tiny drones with toy functions and limited traffic are already dangerous. Imagine super-powered flying machines that can lift a ton.
There is no such thing as an international patent.
IANAL, just was curious about the identity and did some amateur sleuthing. Results below...
The GTX Corp in Wikipedia seems like a real trading company but there is a couple of odd things about it. It's a public company made of 7 (seven) people; they have tracking products and 80 patents. Theoretically, it could be that they supplement the legit business with patent trolling. But yes, it's not very likely.
So I went to look up the patent info instead. If you google "US patent 7,177,838", you see that it's somewhat of a holy grail for the patent trolls. It was used to sue Amazon, Apple, Visa, News Corp, Starbucks, and the whole alphabet of multinationals. Many of these settled, as the lawyer of Playsaurus mentioned. The name of the suing entity was Actus, LLC (https://www.socialgameslaw.com/2010/06/actus-sues-for-virtua..., https://www.law360.com/articles/124471/apple-amazon-out-of-a..., https://www.law360.com/articles/165880/visa-m-t-bank-resolve...). They don't seem to have any presence online, although there is a website for Actus (http://www.actus.company) but even though it looks like a front for foreign intelligence operations, it does not seem to have anything in common with that Actus.
The patent public record is here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7177838B1/en?oq=7%2c177%.... It contains a history of assignments, giving a clue to what GTX actually is.
The first re-assignee was GTX Corporation (Arizona). The current one is GTX Corporation (California). Between that, it was PayByClick and Actus, which is when the mega-suits were filed. It seems improbable that the two GTX companies are completely different.
The search in the California register turned nothing meaningful (https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/CBS/SearchResults?SearchTy...). It's either the entities are named somewhat differently or dissolved.
The search in Arizona, on the other hand, produced interesting results. This is the right GTX: http://ecorp.azcc.gov/Details/Corp?corpId=F00380025. Founded in 1987, business type: technology. Details below.
The patent was filed by Marvin Ling on Jan 26, 2000. Already in May it was reassigned to GTX. A family or an acquaintance? Let's see: the current CEO is Andrew Ling. From the foundation until 2008, however, the president was Marvin Ling, including the year 2000 when the patent was filed and reassigned. Andrew Ling appears to be a lawyer in Arizona; his LinkedIn profile confirms that he is the right person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewlingattorney. And the website actually exists where it's supposed to be, just not liked by Google: http://www.gtx.com/about/press/aml_president_pr.asp.
The patent itself was reassigned to Pay By Click (sounds like an entity materially interested in the patent) in 2002, after which the annual report filing became irregular. In 2005, GTX received a notice with a threat of the license revocation; same happened in 2013 and 2014. It became better after that which coincided with the reassignment of the patent.
Summary. It looks like it's not a proxy set up by lawyers to sue. It appears to be an old family business which was dormant for a while and now wants to capitalise on an old patent that either someone else or a different structure used to shake down a few giants.
While the GTX is registered in Arizona where its owners live, it seems to be a Delaware corporation. I don't understand why they hired a law firm in Boston to threaten a company in California. The guy is a lawyer; does it mean he is not serious about the lawsuit? Does he expect you to haggle and offer, Russell Peters style, $34,500 as the last price?
Good luck.
A home visit of a physician is hardly a new concept.
If I'm not mistaken, it's a norm in France, and I know that it functioned that way in the USSR (not sure about the modern Russia). The doctors were indeed complaining about the number of visits but somehow it functioned: while booking a specialist or finding quality equipment was an issue, there was rarely an issue to book a visit of a family doctor within a couple of days' notice, at least in a big city.
Having said that, there might be a way. From their FAQ:
> It might well be possible to make it work using Cygwin or MinGW / MSYS, or the recent Ubuntu on Windows development though. We aren't doing this work ourselves because we don't have any Windows machines, but we're happy to accept PRs in that direction.
Not sure I want to use a platform which the dev team can't test (and there are other alternatives), but it might work after all.
A side remark, the link posted below in this thread contains an awesome "awesome" list. For those interested, here is a (truly) awesome list of dataset resources: https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets.
https://www.amazon.com/Polystate-Thought-Experiment-Distribu...
So, no changes then? It's just a matter who else will buy their software?
But apart from this, KPIs aside, the Chinese landscape is amazingly scarce innovation-wise. If one has to tout bikesharing as innovation, it sounds like there's not much to brag about. I am puzzled at Kai-Fu Lee's claims, he's not just another VC.
Spoiler alert: I wouldn't want any other country to follow the example of China. Sometimes, human lives are more important than KPIs and being first...
Some interesting parts:
> The Chinese ministry of health has to approve all gene-therapy clinical trials in China, but these regulations appear relatively relaxed. According to the WSJ, at Hangzhou Cancer Hospital, for example, a proposal to test a cancer treatment that modifies patients’ immune cells was approved in a single afternoon. One member of the hospital’s approval committee told the WSJ that she did not really understand the science laid out for her in a 100-page document, but was told that the side effects were mild. This was enough for her to give it the go-ahead.
...
> China is taking the lead in the global race to perfect gene therapies.
> Scientists have genetically engineered the cells of at least 86 cancer and HIV patients in the country using Crispr-Cas9 technology since 2015, the Wall Street Journal reports (paywall). Although no formal scientific papers have been written about these experiments, doctors told journalists at the WSJ that some patients have improved. There have also been least 15 deaths, seven of which were in one trial.
86 (!!!) patients.
So I guess it means about 2-3 years from now.
I hope it won't become another graphene, a discovery with enormous potential that would never leave the lab.