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They pulled this exact stunt on my wife years ago.

Our insurance company refused to settle with them and said we would pay no deductible regardless of the outcome. The insurance company lawyers said they would have no hesitation in taking it to trial. My wife did a video deposition and that was the end of it.

When my brother was a sheriff in Florida he would have to deal with at least a dozen of these "freeman" clowns late every fall as retirees made their way back to their winter homes.

The good news was in virtually every instance, and sometimes with some creativity (usually creative interpretations of "drug paraphernalia" or simply pre-existing warrants) there was something else the squatter could be arrested for ending the tenancy issue then and there.

The bigger issue though was never squatters but meth labs and the local white trash yutes having house trashing parties.

Patent trolling isn't speculation, it is extortion litigation.

Several of my patents are in the hands of patent trolls.

No variation on what is described in these patents has been done anywhere, by anyone in a decade and will never be done again. Arguably you couldn't even infringe on one of the patents without using a proprietary software complier.

But they have filed eight lawsuits claiming infringement. There is no possible way these lawsuits aren't frivolous.

When I retired the company offered to sell me my patents for $1500, but I didn't think they were worth $15.00.

We could take Romney out into the middle of the desert and introduce him to a Navajo who has never watched TV or read a newspaper and I guarantee he will come away from the encounter with our nominee wondering just what the hell was wrong with that guy.

It isn't the media, it is a spectacular history of socially inept behavior. A twelve year old who behaved like Romney would be medicated. Everything that comes out of his mouth sounds like something the SNL version as portrayed by Dana Carvey would say. So is it a Freudian self-annihilation scenario or is he just not right in the head?

Given he is an adherent to a religion invented by a criminal who was never more than two steps away from a noose and is wholly unsupported by the historical record. I'm going to go with not right in the head.

While some might feel obliged to take one for the team and feign respect for Mormonism (at least for a few more weeks) I am not among them.

Fall for what?

Romney is an autistic Gordon Gekko in magic underpants. He couldn't build a rapport with a god damn prostitute. You don't need anything but a couple functioning senses to figure that one out.

Maybe his essence plays better on Kolob but this guy is an alien to any American from any walk of life. But i'm sure if Howard Hughes was alive today he and Romney would get along splendidly.

One of my sons friends suffered a default judgement and garnishment over the debts of another man of the same name. So ignoring them probably isn’t a great course of action.

Been there, done that. $11,600 in legal fees later and I am still not confident another mortgage servicer won't pop up looking to foreclose tomorrow.

There was nothing complicated about this, everything was black and while. The problem was it was simply no competent interface with the mortgage servicer who might receive documents and act on them. And it turns out there is something worse than an Indian call center. A Baltimore call center. Staffed by angry women who could barely communicate. I felt like I needed to hire Ice-T as a translator.

My daughter easily spent $1000 on faceplates for that thing, she seemed to buy a new one every couple of days.

I eventually rationalized that buying her a RAZR would save money because there were no faceplates for it.

There are a million stories like this in consumer electronics.

In the 90's I had a prototype of a Tivo like device in my living room, we called it the VNR or VDR for Video Network Recorder or Video Disk Recorder.

It with a Motorola 68040 based set-top box. Some ex-Apple guys wrote the operating system and proprietary hardware accelerated video codec.

The device could either record to its internal hard drive or to the hard drive of a PC or Macintosh over ethernet. The ethernet could also be used to share the PC's internet connection and CPU power for encoding to the box.

It worked and it worked great, especially married to a Pentium class PC. You could either program it with VCR plus codes from the remote or using a desktop application and an online TV Guide. Among its features was purging commercials (to preserve valuable disk space of course), it could also record music and recognize and catalog songs with the internet connection. You could also import music from CD's using the PC's CD-ROM drive.

The product sat complete for more than a year as management dithered over shipping it. They feared litigation and while our counsel was confident they would prevail over Hollywood in court it was decided it wasn't a worth the trouble for such a niche product - they also thought the networking feature was essential and would be impossible to support. One executive beta tester complained his wife threatened to hang him with the ethernet cable he ran clear across the house. All they have to show for the effort is a few patents.

During this period the Apple guys were hired back by the recently returned Steve Jobs and people scattered to other projects.

At the end of 2001 Tivo had an install base of more than 300,000. The underlying platform of our device was installed on a couple cruise ships to deliver pay-per-view and unceremoniously abandoned a short time later.

Why, because I don’t fault people for being ignorant of local busybodies grandiose if relatively harmless delusions?

Well, he isn't a police officer - so yes, stalking. A gun is known to have been in his possession and he flunked out of community college criminal justice program and called 911 to report open windows.

I think I am pretty comfortable with my description of this crackpot that some people want to elevate into the next Bernie Goetz.

What happened here seems to me to be obvious,

The paranoid busybody, complete with a pierced ear was stalking the teen, first in a vehicle and then on foot - possibly brandishing a weapon. The teen was aware of the fact he was been followed and probably believed he was about to have his asshole violated in a secluded yard by an armed homosexual.

When the busybody attempted to detain the teen, he fought back resulting in his eventual shooting.

Certainly not a premeditated murder, but I would like to see this paranoid aspiring rent-a-cop out of circulation for a good long time. I think most men and boys confronted by a situation where they perceived a queer to be stalking them would administer a beat down.

My son is going through this very experience right now after reporting to management that their insistence that some unsuitable compressors that they just happened to have sitting around be used on a project would result in unacceptable performance, eventualy total failure and the OEM would dead stop not warrant or support the equipment if used in this way.

So they found a Ukrainian engineer who said it would work brilliantly and his contract which expires March 1st isn't being renewed.

My son is going through this very experience right now after reporting to management that their insistence that some unsuitable compressors that they just happened to have sitting around be used on a project would result in an unacceptable performance, eventualy total failure and the OEM would dead stop not warrant or support the equipment if used in this way.

So they found a Ukrainian engineer who said it would work brilliantly and his contract which expires March 1st isn't being renewed.

When we were growing up and living in New York for a time our next door neighbors were a childless Swiss couple who took a shine to the pair of us. Their "children" were half a dozen European motorcycles and they taught us to ride. I never really took to motorcycles in general but my brother has been hooked on European bikes since then.

This has naturally been a recurring source of tension since he has lived most of his adult life in rural Florida.

This happened to my brother when he returned from Vietnam. All his worldly possessions including a BMW R60 motorcycle were sold off. Fort Irwin was shuttered while he was overseas and all the troops stuff being stored by a local storage company disappeared when the company closed.

He arrived at the airport in Miami and we led him to the parking lot where our grandfather was waiting with a brand new Ducati.

I retired from a company that was pillaged by private equity cocksuckers. The founder passed away and left the business to his worthless children who immediately set about selling it so they could invest in a chain of exclusive nightclubs in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Hollywood where they imagined people would spend $10,000 a year for a membership.

The stupid kids retained no professional help, instead using a lawyer involved with their nightclub ventures and were were short changed millions.

The private equity clowns were fucking useless, a lot of the people working for them had NO previous employment but coincidently all seemed to have gone to Duke or belonged to a certain fraternity. I never saw many of them do much other than goof around on the internet, one particularly brash young man brought in a Playstation 2. At random they would fire people, usually for no apparent reason and usually in a spectacularly unprofessional manner.

In any event they fleshed out a preposterous plan to cease developing our own hardware and highly optimized operating system and to port our software to Linux and run it on roughly the same hardware found in a router or cable box and a completely different platform. This plan amounted to more or less rewriting everything from scratch so that it might run on horribly inferior hardware. This was also based on the belief our customers would actually want to buy this thing.

Around the time they had this mental diarrhea their bosses had their own and instituted a $50,000 bonus for every million dollars of salaries they cut. They began firing people left and right, including just about every last person who might have been able to implement their product line hallucination. Having decimated the hardware and software teams they took the next natural step and outsourced it. For this I had to go to India to train our "overseas team members" on the nuances of our platform so they might port our software that had only ever run on our own proprietary realtime operating system to Linux running on a gutless ARM implementation.

This has yet to produce a shippable product.

Because I had an employment contract with a pre-negotiated severance agreement I could not be fired. When my contract came to an end I decided it was time to retire. On the day I retired the company was bringing in more in revenue from leasing empty office and warehouse space than they were in sales.

As of Dec. 31st all legacy products have been discontinued and the company with only 21 employees is getting into the patent troll business. They actually tried to rehire me to advise them on possible infringements on their patents they might litigate.

I very forcefully declined. In spite of the fact they robbed the founders kids blind I would bet all I have they never realized a profit from this endeavor.

I don't watch it, but only a fool would put much stock in Nielsen ratings in this day and age when estimating the viewership or revenue

The methodology was flawed in 1950 and simply ridiculous today and persists only because advertiser group think won't even contemplate an alternative and likely undervalues ad time in their favor.

I got a cold call from a recruiter a few weeks ago seeking somebody to work on an ARM based Android cable box project. ARM and Android are the hottest tickets going right now in the embedded world.

First and final offer: $48,000 a year, no relocation assistance and lousy benefits.

Recruiter said I shouldn't pass up this opportunity because I may never get another one. Told her to stop wasting my time and just get to Padjuters immigration paperwork.

This will become one of those jobs that executives will be crying their eyes out about on CNBC.

Lab126 on the other hand which is Amazon's in-house research and development operation approached me about a similar position (presumably for what became the Kindle Fire) and was substantially more generous.

Funny, me and wife were just there for some friends fortieth wedding anniversary festivities and we figured we had never seen it cleaner. I don’t think I saw a panhandler the entire time we were there except for the fruits in bad costumes looking for tips.