A whole new world!

I forgot to note, several days ago, that my home state of Virginia, while still forcing doctor's to rape patients thinking of having an abortion, has at least decided to end sanctioning of bigotry towards gays.

Actually, one thing I don't know about.  Recently ex-governor (and recently indicted) Bob McDonell, as one of his first actions in office, struck out the phrase from the executive order forbidding discrimination that made it apply to homosexuals (and transexuals, I imagine, although I don't remember for sure about that.  Maybe they hadn't been included in the original ban).  I haven't heard anything about McAuliffe restoring that, although I hope he has.

Anyway, with a Democrat winning the AG position in the last election, the state stopped defending the suit challenging Virginia's ability to keep gays from marrying.  The result of that was that, three days ago, a judge down in Richmond decided in favor of those seeking marriage.  Kudos to Judge Arenda Wright Allen for that.

I should try to find out if our old next-door neighbors have decided to get married.

Connecting Dots

I listened to Nina Totenberg's story about the FISA court this morning with some mixed feelings.  There was some good information in there, but there were some very important things missed entirely.

There were two critical items missed.  The first is that the FISA court approves almost all requests (99.97%, over the past five years.  100% over the past three.  This is several thousand requests, including, apparently, at least one request to monitor everyone).  So even if their purview has been limited, they haven't been fulfilling their duty within their sphere of operations.

The second point missed (repeatedly, actually) is that Congress doesn't have effective oversight.  They should, but there is substantial evidence that the intelligence services have directly lied to Congress about what they are, or are not, doing.

For evidence of this, look at what Senators Wyden and Udall were saying during debate, the last time the Patriot Act came up for renewal.  They knew (due to their positions on the Intelligence Committee) at least some of what was going on, and tried to tell others in Congress about it.

You could also listen to what a number of others (who were not on either of the Intelligence Committees) said during that debate, as it has been concretely contradicted by what has come out recently.

You could also check the testimony that the DNI recently gave, which he later admitted was "the least untrue" summary he could give.  Yeah, we don't want "least untrue".  We want the facts.

And one simple fact is that Congress has not been able to give effective oversight of these programs.  (There is, of course, the follow on question of whether Congress would, if given the opportunity, and that would be a fair question.  Color me skeptical, personally.  But that's neither here nor there, at the moment.)

Patently Obvious

[This, also, I wrote a couple of days ago.  Not only that, but I also did not anticipate a verdict coming back so quickly.]
I've been getting more and more educated on the patent system for the past several years, and I must admit, the more I find out about it, the less needed I think it is.

So it's with some ambivalence that I look at the current battle royale between Apple and Samsung (over phone and tablet appearance, mostly). I do favor Apple products. The Samsung models just have no interest for me (largely for software reasons).

So you'd think I'd be happy to see what's happening, as Apple seems to have a very strong case (I was pretty skeptical until some of Samsung's internal documents came out). And short-term, I'd rather Apple get more money, I suppose.

But I think the loser in this will inevitably be the consumer; I think it'll lead to fewer choices, and it will strengthen software patents, which I have to admit to being particularly strongly against (I think I've just about always been against software patents; definitely, I've been against them for far longer than I've even considered whether the whole system is broken).

I've just never heard of a software patent that I thought was truly innovative.

And again, since patents are legal monopolies, the inevitable loser of bogus patents are the consumers. It slows down innovation, and subjects truly innovative companies to costly suits by patent trolls (and others, but especially by trolls).

Update:  Now that the verdict is in, and Apple has won (though the award dropped nearly to a third of what Apple was asking), yeah, I don't find myself too happy about what happened.  Lots of lawyers made lost of money, and less went into technological innovation.  Just not a win for anyone (except, perhaps, for Apple.  And I'm not even certain that they did; it might have removed some of their motivation for further innovation.  We'll have to wait and see on that one).

Of course, there's also the fact that this will certainly get appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.  Maybe the Supremes will knock out the patents.  We can hope.  Because again, the appeals benefit no one but the lawyers.