Necessary Roughness

The dry topic of employment posters was lightened a little bit by Lori Torriero, of Downes, Hurst & Fishel.

Failure to post is a 4^th degree misdemeanor, though there are no records of someone going to jail because they didn’t post proper information regarding minimum watch, equal opportunity employment, etc. Enforcement of this rule usually comes on the tail of other employment violations, such as wrongful termination.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday was the first day of the Continuing Professional Development Conference put on by the Engineers Foundation of Ohio. The entire conference provides enough continuing education hours for me to keep my P.E. license another year. Some material I’ve heard before, but there were a couple of topics that were enjoyable despite their subject matter.

Brad Bennett, Esq., of Downes, Hurst, & Fishel, started the day with a two-hour presentation on proposed and actual changes in employment law. He made no secret of it; with Democrats in charge, there is bound to be more employment law.

Read the rest of this entry »

I do owe Starfox a little bit of fairness. He wasn’t saying that I would be against interracial marriage because I was against gay marriage. He was saying that I shouldn’t be against gay marriage because I wasn’t against interracial marriage.

I really think this issue would be over if first, California and other states had just gone for civil unions with the same legal rights as marriage, and second, if the courts had let the legislatures handle it. Alas, the courts decided to write law. Gavin Newsom and same-sex proponents wanted the right to change the definition of a word and, perhaps more importantly, showed more hate for their opponents than was ever displayed by the Mormons, Saddleback Church, or Delta Township church in Lansing. The Bash Back group seems to be the Westboro Baptist Church of the Left.

The sexual morality horse is out of the barn. Even if 100% of gay civil unions ended up in legal dissolution, it doesn’t come close to the half of U.S. marriages ending in divorce. We have our own house to clean up. Call it specks and logs, if you will. Oops, there’s that Bible again.

As long as there are no discrimination laws that impinge on the free speech rights of pastors and my responsibility as a parent to instill right and wrong in my children, I’m actually quite open to the civil union debate.  Just don’t call it marriage.

Google Logo for Veterans Day

I am impressed.

Google, who took a little heat for not providing a custom logo for Memorial Day, has come out with a logo for Veterans Day.

Good on you, guys.

Thanks also to the men and women of our Armed Forces, who give up more than we know in the defense of our country. Thanks especially to Dad, my uncle, and my father-in-law.

HT: Slashdot

PatentlyO, a blog that discusses patent law, has an article about a Halliburton patent application that patents methods for someone to get a patent even though someone else did the research.

The purpose does seem funny, but I wonder if we have some people in our law department that remember the fiasco regarding foam fracturing.

Halliburton was the first in the oilfield services industry to offer foam fracturing service. Instead of fracturing with just liquid, we introduce either nitrogen or carbon dioxide gas to generate bubbles and reduce the amount of water used to flood the formation. Foam fracturing is particularly useful in water-sensitive and low pressure lithologies. Most foams I pumped in Duncan ran around 65-70% gas (v/v).

As I was told by my first boss, HAL has the patent to pump foam fluids with 42% or greater of nitrogen gas or carbon dioxide gas. Our competition figured out a way around our patent, by pumping foams with two gases, each less than 42%. Thus we couldn’t keep a total lock on the foam fracturing market.

Fortunately for us single foam technology is superior: there’s less equipment, less complexity in the foam design, and greater ability to design the foam for what it is supposed to do.