Anatomy of a patent troll who wants $1000 from every scanner user in America: patents are totally, utterly broken

Joe Mullin's Ars Technica piece, "Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners," is an excellent, blood-boiling piece detailing the ease with which the US patent system can be used for pure extortion. A company -- its identity is shrouded in mystery and hidden behind several layers of obfuscation -- has a series of junk-patents allegedly covering any time anyone scans a document over a network and attaches the scan to an email. That may not, in fact, be what the patents say, but they're written in such absolutely tortured fashion that it's impossible to say.

The company -- and its many alphnumerical subsidiaries -- send invoices to small and medium business, threatening to sue them if they don't pay a per-employee license fee. Any company that fights risks having to pay triple damages for "willful infringement," though the companies that do fight win -- the patents are garbage, there's tons of invalidating prior art. But they still have to pay thousands in legal fees for the privilege of fending off these creeps.
When patent-troll apologists tell you that the patent system is necessary to protect "invention," ask them why the acceptable cost for this protection is allowing any unscrupulous scumbag to use the court system to extract windfalls from productive companies on the basis of having claimed to invented commonplace, existing, obvious technologies.

Vicinanza was able to get in touch with several other Project Paperless targets, suggesting that Project Paperless lawyers were indeed targeting companies based on the list.
Reactions to the letters varied. “Without question, some people were livid,” said Vicinanza. “Some of the smaller ones were scared out of their wits, in addition to being livid.”
Some were ready to fight back, while others had no intention of doing so. One mid-sized Atlanta business in the process of being acquired by a major Silicon Valley tech company paid the Project Paperless demand, no questions asked. Some companies just ignored the letters; others talked to an attorney. It isn’t clear the companies that did speak to their lawyers about the situation actually fared better.
“The patent attorneys typically have a whole different set of objectives,” said Vicinanza. “Now they’re in settlement mode. If the company does end up getting sued and the lawyer said ‘ignore them,’ a company could find themselves paying treble damages. Even my attorneys told me, settle it, you’re crazy to fight.”

Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners 

CounterEarth

Connecticut paper runs gun show ad next to Newtown story

From the "Totally Classless" Department":

The Hearst Connecticut Media Group apologized Thursday because one of its newspapers ran an ad for an antique gun show next to an article about the Newtown school shooting.

A statement released by Group Publisher Paul Farrell said the ad's placement in The Advocate of Stamford was the result of an oversight.

"Our newspapers should not be running gun ads — including ads for antique and collectible gun shows — next to stories about Sandy Hook. It's insensitive, and it shouldn't have happened," the group said in the statement referring to the Dec. 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. "We have taken steps to make sure it doesn't happen again."

The ad for the East Coast Fine Arms Show appeared Thursday beside an article about students at the school. The promoter for the gun show, which is scheduled to begin Saturday in Stamford, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
The gunman, Adam Lanza, killed 20 first-graders and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook. He also killed his mother on the morning of the rampage and committed suicide as police arrived. Police have not offered a possible motive.
Adam's father, Peter Lanza, lives in Stamford. He issued a statement the day after the shooting expressing sympathy for the victims' families and saying the family was trying to make sense of what happened.

The truth be told

NRA Web site glorifies violent Hollywood movies after NRA chief criticizes violent Hollywood movies

The NRA has been caught glorifying gun violence in Hollywood movies a little more than a week after NRA head Wayne LaPierre blamed those same movies for helping cause the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre in Newtown, Connecticut in which twenty 6 and 7 year olds were murdered by a proud lover of the Second Amendment.Gosh, you mean the NRA might not have been sincere about trying to curb the real causes of out-of-control gun violence in America? Shocking.
You might recall that on December 21, the Friday after the young “sportsman” shot twenty children to their deaths – each child receiving three bullets in order to absolutely positively guarantee that they were dead a week before Christmas – NRA leader Wayne LaPierre held an infomercial in which he blasted violent Hollywood movies, among other things, for helping to cause the Sandy Hook massacre.
Here’s what La Pierre had to say at the time:

And here’s another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal. There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows [sic] violence against its own people through vicious, violent video games … Add another hurricane, add another natural disaster, I mean, we have blood-soaked films out there like “American Psycho,” “Natural Born Killers.” They’re aired like propaganda loops on “Splatterdays” and every single day…And then they all have the nerve to call it entertainment. But is that what it really is? Isn’t fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?

Apparently, there’s an even dirtier little truth.  The NRA proudly glorifies violent movies in its “National Firearms Museum” at its headquarters in Northern Virginia.
Oops.
From a new report by Tom Diaz, who visited the NRA’s museum, which was still up and running after the NRA’s LaPierre excoriated those who glorify Hollywood violence.  (Embarrassing.)

For over a decade the NRA has glamorized the use of guns in violent movies. One prime vehicle for the NRA’s promotion of guns and violence has been a series of two exhibits in the National Firearms Museum at the NRA’s national headquarters, located in Fairfax, VA, a suburb of Washington, DC. Both exhibits featured guns used in movies that were described by critics as among the must brutally violent ever made, featuring the sort of grisly mayhem that NRA executive Wayne LaPierre piously denounced as “the filthiest form of pornography” in his December 21, 2012 attack on the movie industry.
As of December 29, 2012—more than a week after LaPierre’s accusatory rant—a personal visit to the museum by the author confirmed that the latter of the two exhibits (“Hollywood Guns”) was still going strong. The NRA was peddling the exhibit brochure in its museum shop.

And there’s even an NRA Web site extolling the museum:

Oh but it gets better. Among the movies the NRA is touting in its exhibit, and showcasing on its Web site, are “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs,” two of the most violent movies ever made.

Yeah, no violence in that image.

Here’s a nice clip from Pulp Fiction in which they’re washing a man’s brains and skull out of the inside of their car.

Now who’s the pornographer?

Eating Spaghetti with a Spoon

The New York Times sat down with the owners of three Manhattan Italian restaurants to discuss the correct way to eat pasta. They mostly agreed on a few rules: you don't put cheese on a seafood-based dish, you don't break pasta before cooking it, and you don't eat spaghetti with a spoon.

As to the use of a fork plus a spoon for eating pasta, all those at the table were adamant. Spoons are for children, amateurs and people with bad table manners in general.

Egi Maccioni recalled her childhood days of eating pasta. ''My grandparents spent hours teaching me how to eat pasta without using a spoon, how to twirl my fork so that not a strand of spaghetti would be hanging down as I lifted that fork to my mouth.''

Does anyone really ever eat spaghetti with a spoon? The article begins with 1975 advice from Elizabeth Post recommending it, but I'd never heard that before. How you do eat spaghetti? More

Color of Food Container Makes The Food and Drink Tastier

How delicious is that cup of hot chocolate? The answer may lie in the color of the cup as much as the drink itself:

"The colour of the container where food and drink are served can enhance some attributes like taste and aroma," as explained by Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain). Along with her colleague Charles Spence, from the University of Oxford (UK), the scientist has come to the conclusion in the case of drinking chocolate.
Both conducted an experiment in which 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four different types of plastic cup. They were the same size but of different colors: white, cream, red and orange with white on the inside.
Published in the Journal of Sensory Studies, the results reveal that the flavor of chocolate served in orange or cream colored cups was better for the tasting volunteers.

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The Surprisingly Manly History of Hot Cocoa

Before chocolate candy was developed, cocoa was almost always a drink. And far before chocolate milk became a kid's staple, cacao was a manly beverage, reserved for warriors.

Cacao was cultivated and consumed by the Olmecs and Mayans, but is most famously associated with the Aztec civilization. Montezuma the II, who kept a huge storehouse of cacao (supplied by conquered peoples from whom he demanded the beans as tribute) and drank 50 golden goblets of chocolate a day, decreed that only those men who went to war could imbibe cacao, even if they were his own sons. This limited chocolate consumption to royals and nobles who were willing to fight, merchants (their travels through hostile territory necessitated their taking up of arms), and warriors. For the latter, chocolate was a regular part of their military rations; ground cacao that had been pressed into wafers and could be mixed into water in the field were given to every solider on campaign. The drink provided long-lasting nourishment on the march; as one Spanish observer wrote, “This drink is the healthiest thing, and the greatest sustenance of anything you could drink in the world, because he who drinks a cup of this liquid, no matter how far he walks, can go a whole day without eating anything else.”

All Aztecs thought of both blood and chocolate as sacred liquids, and cacao seeds were used in their religious ceremonies to symbolize the human heart – harkening to their famous ritual in which this still-beating organ was torn from a sacrificial victim’s chest. The connection between blood and chocolate was especially strong for warriors, and it was served at the solemn initiation ceremony of new Eagle and Jaguar knights, who had to undergo a rigorous penance process before joining the most elite orders of the Aztec army.

As chocolate was carried around the world, it was changed considerably, but still made into a manly beverage as nutritious sustenance for Arctic explorers and soldiers at war. The Art of Manliness has an extensive history of hot cocoa and its use, including tips for making yours better.

The true story of the woman who performed mercy abortions at Auschwitz

Gisella Perl was Romanian and Jewish. She was a gynaecologist at a time and place where very few women went into the medical professions. In 1944, she and her entire family were shipped off to Auschwitz, where Perl was instructed to provide medical care for her fellow inmates — medical care that was supposed to happen without even the most basic medical supplies.
In this position, she was officially employed by Josef Mengele, and she saw what happened to women who entered Auschwitz while pregnant. The short answer was death. The long answer was that those deaths were often horrifying and drawn-out. So Gisella Perl gave herself a new job — protecting women by helping them hide evidence of pregnancy and by performing abortions with her bare hands.
I'd never heard Perl's story before. It's heartbreaking. And it's riveting. The Holocaust History Project has a long and well-cited version.

Old-fashioned Analog Film Editing

This contraption is a Steenbeck flatbed editor, used to edit motion picture film before it all went digital. The process was unwieldy compared to modern computer editing, but the old methods gave us a hundred years of art.

The table doesn't actually do any editing in and of itself. It merely controls playback. You would shuttle back and forth to the frame around which you wanted to make a cut, then you would place the film into a splicer which would cut the film with a blade and stamp a piece of tape over the seam. So primitive! We were told as film students that editing the old fashioned way at first would force a more sophisticated understanding of editing. Is that true? Does writing on paper force a greater understanding of the written word?

I can't speak to film editing, but as far as sound editing and writing go, I can say that learning it the old-fashioned way first gives a person a great respect for the individual elements of the art. It also helps one to appreciate the ease of more modern methods! Gizmodo has more, including a video of editing film by splicing.

Inside L.A.'s lost subway

I always forget that Los Angeles has a subway at all, let alone the fact that it used to have a much more extensive one.
Parts of that old subway have sat, abandoned, beneath streets and buildings for decades. They've become part of the stratigraphy of the city, as humans do what humans have always done — build the new on top of the old and forget about what we covered up under there. It's no different than the way Rome was built, with the columns of old buildings serving as the foundations of new ones.
Back in May, blogger Gelatobaby got to go on a tour of one part L.A.'s lost subway, exploring a secret world exposed by renovations on a building that was once the city's main subway terminal. Her photos — including the one posted above — are amazing. Go check out the whole thing.

Lost Cities Forgotten By Time

It's hard to imagine how an entire city can get lost but that's exactly what has happened to the cities on this list. There are actually many reasons why a city has to be abandoned. War, natural disasters, climate change and the loss of important trading partners to name a few. Whatever the cause, these 34 lost cities were forgotten in time until they were rediscovered centuries later.

The 2013 Smart Guide: Arctic melt will spark weird weather

by Fred Pearce for New Scientist

Read more: "2013 Smart Guide: 10 ideas that will shape the year"

Melting, rather than warming, is likely to be the big climate issue of 2013.

Predictions that a major El Niño warming event - and the coming solar maximum - would help make next year the warmest on record now seem wide of the mark. All eyes will probably be on the Arctic instead. Some say the record loss of sea ice in summer 2012 was a one-off, others that it was the start of a runaway collapse. If the latter, summer sea ice could virtually disappear as early as 2016. What is certain is that the ice reforming now will be the thinnest on record, priming it for destruction next summer.

A new record melt would allow scary satellite images of an even bluer Arctic to coincide with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's next assessment, due in September (though a draft has been leaked - see "What leaked IPCC report really says on climate change"). Such pictures will be a sombre backdrop as the IPCC raises its previously cautious estimates of future polar melting and the speed of sea-level rise.

With warming of at least 2 °C now unstoppable, politicians at the recent Doha climate talks spent much time discussing how to adapt. What they need is predictions for individual countries. But the IPCC will admit that it still cannot say whether many regions will get wetter or drier. And it will quietly bury its confident predictions, made in 2007, of more frequent droughts, which turned out to rest largely on flawed analyses.

There is growing uncertainty, too, about the outlook for the northern hemisphere. Research in 2012 implicated the fast-warming Arctic in a slowing of the jet stream. This is bringing extreme weather to mid-latitudes, including prolonged cold spells in Europe, Russia's 2010 heatwave, and record droughts in the US in 2011 and 2012. Watch out for more weird weather in 2013.

Extraordinary snowfall needed to relieve drought

When his drought-stricken Nebraska farm was blanketed with several inches of snow, Tom Schwarz welcomed the moisture. But it wasn't nearly enough. He had hoped for a wet, snowy winter. Instead, he's watched with worry as the sky spits mostly flakes that don't stick.

"I just shudder to think what it's going to be if we don't get snow," Schwarz said. "A friend told me it would take 150 inches of snow to get us back to normal precipitation."

Despite getting some big storms last month, much of the U.S. is still desperate for relief from the nation's longest dry spell in decades. And experts say it will take an absurd amount of snow to ease the woes of farmers and ranchers.
The same fears haunt firefighters, water utilities and many communities across the country.
Winter storms have dropped more than 15 inches of snow on parts of the Midwest and East in recent weeks. Climatologists say it would take at least 8 feet of snow — and likely far more — to return the soil to its pre-drought condition in time for spring planting. A foot of snow is roughly equal to an inch of water, depending on density.

Many areas are begging for moisture after a summer that caused water levels to fall to near-record lows on lakes Michigan and Huron. The Mississippi River has declined so much that barge traffic south of St. Louis could soon come to a halt. Out West, firefighters worry that a lack of snow will leave forests and fields like tinder come spring, risking a repeat of the wildfires that burned some 9.2 million acres in 2012.

Scores of cities that have already enacted water restrictions are thinking about what they will do in 2013 if heavy snows and spring rains don't materialize.

For a while, it seemed no snow would come. Midwestern cities including Chicago, Milwaukee and Des Moines, Iowa, had their latest first snows on record. How much would it take to make things right?

"An amount nobody would wish on their worst enemy," said David Pearson, a National Weather Service hydrologist in Omaha, Neb. "It's so out of this world it wouldn't make much scientific sense (to guess). It would take a record-breaking snowfall for the season to get us back on track."
That's why Schwarz is worried about his 750 acres near Lexington in south-central Nebraska. To save his corn last summer, he pulled water from deep wells and other sources in his irrigation district, but the alfalfa he couldn't irrigate died, something he's never had happen before.
The soil was so dry he didn't even try to sow winter wheat, a crop that's planted in the fall and goes dormant over winter, relying on snow as a protective blanket.
"If we don't get snow, we'd better get rain this spring or we're done," Schwarz said.
The 150 inches — more than 12 feet — isn't likely to materialize. That would be about four times the average winter snowfall in Chicago, a city famous for its storms. Schwarz's area usually gets about 29.5 inches of snow during the winter. As of Dec. 27, it had just 6.5 inches.
Even if a massive storm developed, the temperature would have to be right for farmers to benefit. If snow melts on frozen ground, the water will run off into rivers and streams, instead of being absorbed into the soil.
Runoff would be welcome in Sioux Falls, S.D., which was among countless communities that clamped down on water use last summer as rivers and lakes that supply power plants and households grew shallower.

South Dakota's biggest city imposed its first water restrictions since 2003 as the Big Sioux River, which recharges its aquifers, dropped. Homeowners were limited to watering lawns once a week. Washing outdoor surfaces like sidewalks, driveways and parking lots was banned.

"This is the driest year in our town's history since the early 1950s," Mayor Mike Huether said as 2012 drew to a close.

With just 5 inches of snow and some rain so far this winter, the conservation efforts will be back in place for 2013 "unless we get one heck of a snowfall and bust this drought," Huether said.

Western states rely on snow and ice that accumulate in the mountains during the winter for as much as 80 percent of their freshwater for the year, according to the Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service. The melting snowpack replenishes streams, rivers and reservoirs and provides water for cities and crops.

A deep snowpack can also make the wildfire season more manageable by wetting forests and fields.

Tom O'Connor, the rural fire chief in Divide, Colo., would relish that after enduring what the governor called the state's worst wildfire season ever in 2012.

O'Connor's volunteer department responded to more than 80 calls in June, compared with the usual 30 calls. Three-fourths of the calls were related to wildfires.

The fires came after Colorado got one of its smallest snowpacks in years — by some accounts tying 2002 as the lowest snow buildup in the 45 years that records have been kept.

Still, climatologists caution that it's too early in the winter to give up hope.

"We could be singing a different tune this winter if a storm system cooperates," said Dave Robinson, a Rutgers University geography professor who's also the New Jersey state climatologist. "Sometimes you get what you wish for."

Feds say delay worsened Yellowstone River oil spill in

  Delays in Exxon Mobil Corp.'s response to a major pipeline break beneath Montana's Yellowstone River made an oil spill far worse than it otherwise would have been, federal regulators said in a new report.

The July 2011 rupture fouled 70 miles of riverbank along the scenic Yellowstone, killing fish and wildlife and prompting a massive, months-long cleanup.
The damage could have been significantly reduced if pipeline controllers had acted more quickly, according to Department of Transportation investigators.
The report, provided to The Associated Press by the office of Montana U.S. Sen. Max Baucus, marks the first time federal regulators have highlighted specific actions by Exxon as contributing to the severity of the spill.
An Exxon spokeswoman said Wednesday the company was reviewing the findings.
The spill released about 63,000 gallons of crude into the river near the city of Laurel. That damage would have been reduced by about two-thirds if controllers in Houston isolated the rupture as soon as problems emerged, investigators said.
Instead, as Exxon personnel weighed the appropriate response, crude drained from the severed, 12-inch pipeline for another 46 minutes before a control valve was finally closed.
Exxon spent $135 million on its response to the spill, including cleanup and repair work.
Spokeswoman Rachael Moore said the company will continue to cooperate with Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and "is committed to learning from these events."
The report chalks up the immediate cause of the spill to floodwaters that damaged the pipeline and left it exposed. Debris washing downriver piled up on the line, increasing pressure until it ruptured.
The "volume would have been much less" and the location of spill "would have been identified far more quickly" if Exxon's emergency procedures had called for the immediate closure of upstream valves, investigators said.
The report also faulted Exxon for lacking a plan to notify pipeline controllers that the river was flooding.
Exxon workers were not blamed, however, for steps taken in the lead-up to the spill.
Exxon's field observations and "depth of cover survey took reasonable precautions to address the flooding of the Yellowstone River it the spring and early summer of 2011," the investigators wrote.
City officials in Laurel had warned Exxon that the riverbank was eroding. The company, however, continued to run crude beneath the Yellowstone after finding that a section of pipeline leading away from the river was still buried more than 6 feet deep.
The report did not address concerns raised by Baucus, a Democrat, and other lawmakers over whether existing pipeline regulations do enough to prevent spills at river crossings.
Under current rules, companies must bury pipelines 4 feet beneath a riverbed and inspect them periodically.
Those rules are being reviewed, and Baucus said Wednesday that "transparency and oversight are critical to making sure we never have to go through the devastation of the Yellowstone River oil spill again."
Landowners along the river have sued Exxon, saying the company didn't do enough to prevent the spill and should have shut down the line during flooding. Exxon is fighting the lawsuits.
The federal investigation into the spill remains open. Whether any citations will be issued is under review, said spokesman Damon Hill with the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
No timetable was available for any such decision, Hill added.

Rare San Francisco river otter stumps researchers

A rapt crowd followed a trail of bubbles that zipped over the surface of a seaside pond in the ruins of a 19th century bath in San Francisco.

San Francisco's newest star — the first river otter seen in the city in decades — surfaced its whiskery head furtively, a mouth full of sea grass. The crowd oohed as large waves pounded rocks just offshore, a briny smell and chill in the air.

The otter ducked back under water and took the sea grass underneath a concrete remnant of the historic baths, where the animal was building a nest.

"We came here to see the baths and this was just a bonus," said Eliza Durkin, who brought her son Jonathan to the site for a school project on historic places.

Beyond tourists, the otter has mystified and delighted conservationists, who are piecing together clues to figure out how he got there. The furry creature was first spotted by birdwatchers in September and has since settled into the City by the Bay.

River otters once thrived in the San Francisco Bay area, but development, hunting and environmental pollution in the 19th and 20th centuries has taken its toll on the once thriving local population.

The critters are a living barometer of water quality - if it's bad they cannot thrive. But new populations being seen north and east of San Francisco are giving hope to conservationists that years of environmental regulations and new technologies are making a difference.

"The fact that this otter is in San Francisco and doing so well in other regions of the Bay Area, it's a good message that there's hope for the watershed," said Megan Isadore, director of outreach and education for the River Otter Ecology Project, a group that studies otter populations further north and in the bay.

The group said until now it had no evidence the creatures had returned to San Francisco, and the last sighting was nearly a half-century ago as best they can tell.

The otter is nicknamed "Sutro Sam" after the old baths, which were named after former San Francisco Mayor Adolph Sutro, who built the building which at the time was an engineering marvel.

The facility opened in 1896 on a cliff facing the Pacific Ocean, its baths fed by the salty ocean tides and a freshwater seep. They were torn down and burned in a fire in 1966, and the building's carcass has long been a tourist draw on the city's rugged, western shoreline.

The aquatic mammal seems to have found the mix of the environment he needs to make a home, to the delight of tourists and local nature lovers.

"They do need freshwater to drink and keep their fur clean," Isadore said. "They are also happy in salt and brackish water — wherever there is food — and he is getting freshwater from seeps behind the baths."

River otters can be found in other regions of the San Francisco Bay area. To the north of the Golden Gate, the researchers are tracking a group in Marin County. They have also found river otters in shore-side San Francisco Bay area communities of Alameda, Richmond and Martinez.

"Habitat destruction had an impact on the river otters," said Dorren Gurrola, a science teacher at the Marine Mammal Center, which studies Sam's relatives, the sea otter. "So it's always exciting to see these animals return to their habitat."

Young males like Sam often are the ones that travel away from groups, looking for food. If they find a new, hospitable habitat, others including females may join and create the basis of a new colony, Gurrola said.

While there is no certain reason for Sam's appearance in San Francisco, Isadore and biologists working to unlock more clues have some leads to go on.

He could have swam across the bay's mouth from Marin County, and scat collected from Sam will be analyzed to see if there's a genetic link to that population. But now, Sam seems to be happy swimming around and munching on small fish, including goldfish discarded in the area.

"We're just trying to piece things together in a logical way," Isadore said. "River otters sometimes even stow away on boats, we just don't know."

Most Awesome Space Images Of 2012

 

Each year, we are simply stunned by the beautiful images of space shot from a growing myriad of eyes that stare toward the heavens. This year was no different.
From views out of the portholes of the International Space Station and landscapes of Vesta and Saturn to the faraway vistas from Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer, sit back and stare in awe at the vastness of the cosmos with this look back at the most awesome space images of 2012.

Eye of the furnace

Hubble captures close-up of spiral galaxy NGC 1097

From NASA's Image of the Day blog: "This face-on galaxy, lying 45 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), is particularly attractive for astronomers. NGC 1097 is a Seyfert galaxy. Lurking at the very center of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our sun is gradually sucking in the matter around it. The area immediately around the black hole shines powerfully with radiation coming from the material falling in."

Woman Sold Ex's Secret Fishing Spots

Selling jewelry or even naked photos of your ex after a bad breakup is understandable. But selling secret fishing spots? Now that's just low.
Read how one Angela Potter exacted revenge on her ex-boyfriend , an avid fisherman, by selling his most prized possession: his secret fishing spots.

Miss Potter was clearing out her garage when she found the GPS markings for fishing spots in the Bay of Plenty and many other areas of the North Island, so she auctioned them off on Trade Me last January and scored herself a whopping $3000. [...]
Miss Potter said she would never have sold the co-ordinates had it been an amicable breakup, however, the man packed his belongings into her suitcase, which had sentimental value, and fled the country.
"When he refused to return my suitcase that's when I sold his co-ordinates," she said. "I didn't list them to be vindictive. I listed them as a bit of a laugh."

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