hodar

“Patent Troll” seems to be an unfair label, in this case; based on this quote from the WSJ:

“A few months later, Mr. Kiani said, he got a call from his chief medical officer, Michael O’Reilly, informing him he was joining Apple, which he said had agreed to double his salary and pay him millions in Apple shares […]

Mr. Kiani is one of more than two dozen executives, inventors, investors and lawyers who described similar encounters with Apple. First, they said, came discussions about potential partnerships or integration of their technology into Apple products. Then, they said, talks stopped and Apple launched its own similar features.“

If I am accused of breaking the law, I expect that I will have my day in court.  I will have my chance to plead my case; then I will be either found innocent, or will face the consequences.

Why any agency (Fed, State, County or City) is exempted from this very basic idea, escapes me.  Without consequences, there is zero reason they won't continue, or further encroach on our freedoms, privacy and basic rights.

coolfactor said:

StrangeDays said:

40domi said:

IMO you don't need a survey to know that Apple has had a brain drain, the problem is that they've lost a lot of their top engineers and replaced the with less than average ones, which hardly surprising with the state of Universities in the West, Apple needs to recruit from the Asian countries!
It's clear with the lack of innovation and poor upgrades over the last 2 years ߘ怜t;/div>

That sounds like absolute nonsense to me, not the least because Apple hardware has made impressive updates the past two years. Nobody can compete with the M-series, for example. As for iPhone, it matured many years ago and naturally the improvements are incremental and best examined over a period of time, not year to year. 

I don't know what you consider "innovation" to be, but it certainly isn't PC laptops or android knockoffs. 

Unlike software, it's important to remember that hardware development is a multi-year strategy. What we get in 2023 was likely being worked on in 2020 or 2021, or earlier. So losing workers in 2 year intervals must be a major setback to that.

I agree.  Seems they may have a very high turnover in the lower ranks; but if you survive 3-4 years- you move to the more lucrative and stable levels. 

In the US, non-compete clauses are almost impossible to enforce.  Your mind, is inherently your own.  Your ideas, while employed, may belong to your employer.  But once that employment contract is broken, your ideas are once again your property; primarily because slavery is legal, morally and ethically wrong.

Yes, he may have been shown, taught and worked with superior technologies, and while he was employed at Apple, his job was to learn and become an expert in using these technologies.  But, as anyone can do, you can master a topic, and eventually - in some cases - improve upon it.  Instead of fighting to promote change and the bureaucracy internally, this man chose to cut ties with Apple - and promote his ideas himself.

Good on him.  Roger Ross (creator of RISC computing) started life off with Motorola, and with a small team produced the first RISC 88000 Motorola RISC processor family.  Internal strife within Motorola, in Austin, TX (yeah, I was there at the time) was frustrating.  So he left, and most of the interns that helped him (because Motorola Sr. Managment "re-routed" his Sr. Engineering requisitions) took very high paying jobs with SPARC, and went on to create the HyperSPARC architecture.  At the time, they did very well for a start up.  Motorola tried unsuccessfully to invoke non-competitive clauses to stop Roger, but the principle outlined above, won in Texas court, time and again.

Stabitha_Christie said:

“ It's not clear why Musk failed to do due diligence of the service before offering to buy, which should have included an accurate count of fake users”

Yeah…. His history of being an impulsive jackass certainly doesn’t explain it. 

Umm, you do your Due Diligence by reviewing the SEC forms (10K statements for each quarter).
These are publicly available, and are the OFFICIAL STATEMENT of the company's financials, quarterly expenses, costs, debts, plans and forward mission statements.
They are signed by the CEO and/or the CFO.
These are the forms that Stock Brokers will analyze to set a stock price target, banks will use to determine loan amounts and percentages, and are a base for taxes.  These forms are generally "audited" by a 3rd party, before release.
They are a big deal. A very, very Big Deal.

That's why Elon had a $1 Billion Deposit, so he couldn't walk away.
However, fraud in vitiates everything.  Twitter lied by overstating the actual user base, and instead of the bots being <5% as Twitter claimed, two separate 3rd party audits showed that bots were greater than 19.2% (about 400% higher than claimed).  That's serious, very, very serious.
So, now come the law suits

Elon was defrauded, Twitter lied to him, they lied to the SEC.  Oxley-Sarbanes Act sets up some very severe prison sentences for all involved for this.
So, Elon could walk away, or negotiate a much lower puchase price; due to this fraud
next, we have the stockholders, who will recieve far less share value, because Twitter committed fraud
Finally, we have the advertisers, who overpaid for advertizing, as the consumer base they thought they were reaching, did not exist.

yes, this is catetrophic.