Even if it is a good idea as a case material(which isn't entirely clear, that plastic isn't going to be any more fun to recycle because of the tree guts mixed in, and the tree guts aren't going to be any more biodegradeable for the plastic encasing them, and any pigments, release agents, flame retardants, and other miscellanious additives aren't going to be any friendlier than they were in the usual ABS or polycarbonate...), the billing on the website as "the solution to e-waste" seems deeply overblown.
Case plastics aren't made of bunnies and happy thoughts, true, and mixed plastics are often not recycled(and if they are, issues like the difficulty of getting the color of the recycled material right out of an already-pigmented feedstock often consign the recycled material to low-value applications); but much of the really nasty stuff is happening on the circuit boards, and in their manufacture, not in the case. Particularly for a portable, where the case is vital to protecting the guts, and keeping the machine from creaking and generally falling to bits, the durability of the case is a major factor in how many years of use you get from the device. It seems like compromising on the case, to make it incrementally less unpleasant, is a bit of a false economy if it decreases the service life of the nastier(and more expensive) components inside.
I get the impression that, no matter how rosy the state of the industry or how sweeping the existing state powers, the push for harsher 'anti-piracy' legislation will continue until such time as the primary task of the world's security forces will be the summary execution of those suspected to be guilty of insufficient music purchase during the preceding fiscal year.
Bethesda has some sort of company policy against releasing games that aren't hugely ambitious and deeply buggy with fairly high resource requirements. I'm not sure why; but Morrowind, its two expansion packs, Oblivion, its two expansion packs, Skyrim, Fallout III, and New Vegas, all followed this pattern.
Unfortunately for the consoles(and pretty shamelessly on Bethesda's part) it is rumored that some of the nastier issues with Skyrim on the consoles are more or less unfixable; because 512MB of RAM just doesn't go very far. They are still bugfests on the PC; but between the eventual patches and the unofficial mods(less helpful on core crash bugs, have done wonders with annoying in-game scriptbreaking stuff), it is much more likely that they'll eventually reach fully playable status...
Now, I'm assuming that absolutely nothing whatsoever will come of the investigation into the hacking, as usually seems to be the case. However, the bit about Nortel knowing that they had been cracked good and hard and not telling buyers is the sort of thing that the SEC might take an interest in. Potentially(depending on the level of regulatory capture, of course...) a very strong, very personal interest in.
That could get rather uncomfortable for anybody involved in their asset sale. I'd imagine that some of the buyers are sniffing around for blood as we speak.
Bah. You Cyber-Stick vendors cannot hope to compete with my Industry-Leading Integrated Cyber-Stick Management Solution.
Is your Cyber-Stick Proactive? Does it Synergistically Integrate Intelligence across Multiple Threat Vectors, allowing you Drill Down through a Real-Time Data Matrix and turn Information into Actionable Intelligence? Does it support Robust Delegation, for Interdepartmental Collaboration and Public/Private Security Partnerships?
Well, seeing how brilliantly his forays into the fields of political science and politics have gone, I'd be willing to consider the notion that he ought to consider a change of field...
At least his little RC toys appear to actually fly, don't cost billions of dollars, and haven't yet crashed into a morass of delusionally bad decision-making.
I doubt that elitism is the basis of their displeasure(if they were elitists, wouldn't they be gleeful at the very thought of the unwashed being made to suffer for their pitiful lack of sophistication?).
Rather, the notion that their preferred music is considered to be a nonlethal deterrent, and used as such against those who you would really prefer to pass your tastes on to, likely has something to do with it...
Unless your train stations have better PA gear than ours do, you Do. Not. Want. any music you like to be played on it.
The golden rule of PA design, empirically speaking, appears to be "ensure that the system is powerful enough to induce pain; but weak enough that even tin-eared gits can hear the distortion at about 20% of peak volume"...
My impression was that, already, identifying linux-by-distro was largely the domain of geeks and server jockies, while the majority of the world's linux instances toiled silently either in various plastic boxes with a few blinking lights and a web interface or in assorted phones and consumer electronics behind some interface that hides essentially all the guts.
If anything, public visibility of these 'nontraditional distributions' has increased because of competition in the consumer electronics area. Heck, you can find $50 routers that have their WRT compatibility printed right on the shiny package, and distinguishing between 'devices that will run cyanogenmod' and 'devices that won't' has brought distro-war enthusiasm to the phone geek scene...
Just look at the MSDS for ether! and they propose to allow our precious children to spend their days in schools snaked through with cables carrying this menace?
You must be thinking of the various bloodstained and headless subatomic particles that Schrödinger's damn cat keeps leaving just outside the lab door, after batting them around for its amusement...
Given that the Higgs is theorized to be vital to matter having mass, it is probably the case that it is impossible to weaponize without the Higgs(if it exists). Massless ammunition, after all, is almost as effective as massless armor...
Given that we don't "Know" anything of note for sufficiently rigorous definitions of the word(arguably, capital 'K' "knowledge" seems to alternate between being a philosopher's dream and being a straw man...), 'know' makes pretty decent shorthand for the somewhat unwieldy long-form account of the precise flavor of the information provided by science.
I apologize if I was insufficiently clear on this aspect of the 'price' argument:
Historical legal norms, governing what is/isn't protected, what does/doesn't require special permission, etc. are crafted in response to the situations that the lawmakers have to confront, either hypothetically, when crafting legislation, or in actuality, when a case comes before a court. In no small part, those actual and hypothetical situations are influenced by technology, what it costs and what it can do. If something is impossible or economically prohibitive in virtually all cases, there isn't any impetus for legal norms or institutional protections to grow up and prevent it.
Consider, for example, the notion that things done in public spaces are fair game without any sort of warrant. Historically, that seems plausible enough: cops are a limited resource, and people have lousy memories, so everybody who is acting normally enough to be forgotten quickly, and isn't interesting enough to justify the expense of having one or more agents tailing them with a notebook is safe. Thus, in practice the historical standard was not'anything is fair game in public', it was 'anything notable enough for Joe Citizen to remember it later, and anyone worth the expense of tailing manually is fair game'. If, through some innovation in cameras and machine vision, say, it becomes technologically and economically viable to track everybody all the time, the formal 'in public, no problem' standard hasn't been violated; but the previous actual 'only stuff of note, and people suspected enough to spend real money on for some reason' standard is overwhelmingly weakened.
Overflights would be a similar thing: as long as aircraft time costs some hundreds of dollars or more an hour(depending somewhat on your chosen craft and method of cost accounting), the de-facto standard for aerial observation is actually fairly high. It doesn't demand a warrant; but it demands some internal explanation good enough to move those resources. If flyovers cost $10/hour or $1/hour, that de-facto standard would vastly weaken.
That's the real core of the argument: outside of specific, dramatic, cases(like getting evidence stricken from a trial because it was illegally obtained, where your protections are essentially purely legal, since the practical side has already happened and gone against you), the real standards that governed relations between people and the state(or one another) have always been governed to a great degree by logistics, with law stepping in in situations where logistics seemed to be providing a bad result. If you merely examine those accumulated legal fixes, without reference to the logistical situation under which they were enacted, you grossly distort the actual protection(or lack thereof, as in the stereotypical gossipy small town where everybody knows everybody) which a given legal standard implied in practice. Technological change tends not to attack specific, legally formulated, protections/nonprotections very much, it just massively changes their operational significance.
You can be pretty sure that a 'revolutionary' is against the previous regime and at least some of its policies; but that's about all the assurance you get.
It's not as though every revolutionary is magically also an Enlightenment libertine or something... It'd be nice; but that just isn't how it works.
Now, seeing as these particular revolutionaries are intimately familiar with the fact that a technological system of censorship, once established, can be used to suppress more or less any category of material with equal ease... there isn't anything architecturally different between the tools needed to block pictures of naked people and the tools needed to block pictures of the interior ministry special squads executing people, nor is there much besides dropping in a new dictionary file that separates squelching 'incitement to violence' from squelching 'criticism of the state'; one would hope that they would understand that such a system is simply too dangerous to be allowed to exist. Even if they get to bask in the warm glow of saving the children from smut today, they'll be maintaining and improving the system that will be turned back against them as soon as the wind shifts.
My money is on 'Ha. Ha. No they won't. "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!?!?! wins every time"'. A pity
Hypothetically, for an entity larger than some smallish business just trying to keep its head down, wouldn't not travelling light provide more useful information?
Any device you bring, and your good buddies then bug, is now a device that you cannot trust; but also a device that can be analyzed for insight into the state of bugging techniques. Turning unknowns into knowns is generally a Good Thing(tm), and ought easily to cover the cost of a bit of burner hardware.
Since you are dealing with threats that don't necessarily wait for you to get on the plane(they can go over the internet, or even in person, if the reward is large enough), it would seem that gathering samples of the attack techniques, exploit kits, etc. in use would be a good idea...
how exactly can a drone invade your privacy any more then a manned plane?
Lower cost. Virtually all of your privacy(especially if you are just Joe Sixpack) isn't protected by some fancy set of 'rights' or a 'judicial system', it's protected by the fact that watching you is too expensive to be worth the likely results.
The cheaper surveillance gets, the further down the food chain you can expect it to go, and the more frequent(and effective, unlike the grainy camera at EZ-mart that has been recording over the same grungy VHS tape since 1997...)
Unless surveillance has some atypically wonky demand curve, which doesn't seem to be the case, lowering the price will increase the amount done.
The issue is not the (inconvenient, but mostly a problem for developers who are paid for that stuff) fact that you can't easily write one piece of software that suits two or more processor architectures and UI paradigms, at least not well; but the fact that the various emerging platforms are locked down hard.
Yup, just dumping your desktop application onto a phone isn't going to work out too well, even if it is architecturally possible. Fair and natural enough. The problem is that all the various up-and-coming devices(with unpleasantly limited exceptions) are shipping deliberately crippled. Purely for architectural reasons, nothing on OSX would run on iOS without a recompile, and very little would be pleasant to use without a UI redesign; but that is largely irrelevant because you need a cryptographic blessing to even execute. Windows-on-ARM appears to be going the same way, and, while Android lacks such a centralized dictate, your average carrier phone has a few locks in place.
Portability is an engineering and UI/UX hassle. The fact that you can't even try to execute a binary without the blessing of the platform's master is Serious.
Why? So far t his is just the ARM version. It sounds more like they just are going the cheap route, and not fulling integrating the ARM version with their Intel version.
Basically to my thinking:
A) Other Win8 versions have these features, then this is laziness. No borg icon warrented.
B) All Win8 versions lack these features (then why the big deal about the ARM version?), then this is a closing of the walls intentionally for a purpose. Borg icon deserved.
There is another possibility: Microsoft has massive legacy commitments. Practically all the world's boring corporate stuff that isn't old, specialized, or hip, enough to be running on some sort of intimidating big iron or linux/web/cloud/thingamawhatsit. Most of that software is absolute dreck, and rather boring, but much of it is also quite critical to a variety of high value operations and impossible or uneconomic to port or even modify very much. For this reason, Microsoft's walled-garden options on x86/64 are pretty minimal. Architecturally they could roll it out tomorrow(Software Restriction Policies are basically that, but under the control of your domain admin); but the customers that matter would scream like nobody's business.
However, since there isn't any legacy Windows software or legacy Windows device drivers, on ARM, since it has never run on ARM before, there is no legacy market to worry about. Microsoft has a free hand, more or less. As with the xbox, the other recent situation where MS started clean, without legacy impediments, they apparently see a walled garden as their best option.
It remains to be seen how long the momentum of more-or-less-open x86 IBM compatibles will carry them into the future; but so long as the legacy/in-house/custom demand is there, they'll be hard to kill entirely. However, I'd say that it is "outlook not so good" for open platforms any time somebody starts a new one from scratch...
Nest is a status symbol, not a HVAC management system. It looks cool. It creates the illusion that it's doing something "green". It probably helps a little.
It was produced by an ex-Apple employee's startup, after all...
Patent hold get to license the technology or not, based upon their own preferences. You can't FORCE a company to share it's patents.
As it happens, not only can you, a great many of the patent law systems of the world do to some degree or another(it seems to be even more common with copyrights; but also happens with patents). All Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property signatories(1883-Present) possesses the right to create compulsory licenses under certain circumstances.
In the specifically US context, it's worth noting that patents and copyrights are listed as something Congress may create(but is not in any way obligated to) and specifies only that these be of limited duration. They aren't treated at all as though they belong in the 'natural rights' set.
As a matter of fact, I find it rather unlikely that Nest has a chance of getting a compulsory license; but that's just a matter of particular law, not some sort of foundational principle of jurisprudence: the only place you'd really see it articulated would be by somebody who has been inculcated with both historical natural-law justification of property and quite contemporary 'intellectual property' maximalism. Not a forbidden position; but actually quite an atypical one...
I'm assuming that the Nest and some Institutional/industrial networked HVAC controller made by Honeywell(probably one where 'web based' still means "serves a java applet that requires a JVM five years old to run, after authentication in plaintext with a password of no more than six characters, for an extra license fee we'll turn on the SNMPv1 interface..." both implement some concepts that would be familiar to anybody who has perused a control theory textbook and/or some things that programmers building network applications have forgotten that they remember...
I'm guessing that this isn't exactly a 'look and feel' lawsuit(though the iconic round, bimetallic spring, mercury tilt switch design was Honeywell, that's sort of their last brush with being on the leading edge of intuitive thermostat interfaces...)
Don't you remember that everything one can do with a computer is magically novel and patent worthy each time you change the context even slightly?
It was patent-worthy when "on a mainframe" was appended(though much of that has expired by now, so it isn't a matter of significant practical concern)
It was again patent-worthy when done on a PC.
You'd better fucking believe that doing it "on the internet" made it patent-worthy all over again and then some.
On a 'smartphone'. Oh you know it, and twice as shiny...
Given the painful uselessness of CRLs as presently implemented(we obviously need some way of revoking the things; but the present one is agonizingly broken), I'm just not too sad about the prospect of no longer telling Verisign every time I visit one of their SSL-cert customers(the same is true of all the other certificate mongers who publish CRLs)...
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it is a good idea as a case material(which isn't entirely clear, that plastic isn't going to be any more fun to recycle because of the tree guts mixed in, and the tree guts aren't going to be any more biodegradeable for the plastic encasing them, and any pigments, release agents, flame retardants, and other miscellanious additives aren't going to be any friendlier than they were in the usual ABS or polycarbonate...), the billing on the website as "the solution to e-waste" seems deeply overblown.
Case plastics aren't made of bunnies and happy thoughts, true, and mixed plastics are often not recycled(and if they are, issues like the difficulty of getting the color of the recycled material right out of an already-pigmented feedstock often consign the recycled material to low-value applications); but much of the really nasty stuff is happening on the circuit boards, and in their manufacture, not in the case. Particularly for a portable, where the case is vital to protecting the guts, and keeping the machine from creaking and generally falling to bits, the durability of the case is a major factor in how many years of use you get from the device. It seems like compromising on the case, to make it incrementally less unpleasant, is a bit of a false economy if it decreases the service life of the nastier(and more expensive) components inside.
I get the impression that, no matter how rosy the state of the industry or how sweeping the existing state powers, the push for harsher 'anti-piracy' legislation will continue until such time as the primary task of the world's security forces will be the summary execution of those suspected to be guilty of insufficient music purchase during the preceding fiscal year.
Bethesda has some sort of company policy against releasing games that aren't hugely ambitious and deeply buggy with fairly high resource requirements. I'm not sure why; but Morrowind, its two expansion packs, Oblivion, its two expansion packs, Skyrim, Fallout III, and New Vegas, all followed this pattern.
Unfortunately for the consoles(and pretty shamelessly on Bethesda's part) it is rumored that some of the nastier issues with Skyrim on the consoles are more or less unfixable; because 512MB of RAM just doesn't go very far. They are still bugfests on the PC; but between the eventual patches and the unofficial mods(less helpful on core crash bugs, have done wonders with annoying in-game scriptbreaking stuff), it is much more likely that they'll eventually reach fully playable status...
Now, I'm assuming that absolutely nothing whatsoever will come of the investigation into the hacking, as usually seems to be the case. However, the bit about Nortel knowing that they had been cracked good and hard and not telling buyers is the sort of thing that the SEC might take an interest in. Potentially(depending on the level of regulatory capture, of course...) a very strong, very personal interest in.
That could get rather uncomfortable for anybody involved in their asset sale. I'd imagine that some of the buyers are sniffing around for blood as we speak.
Bah. You Cyber-Stick vendors cannot hope to compete with my Industry-Leading Integrated Cyber-Stick Management Solution.
Is your Cyber-Stick Proactive? Does it Synergistically Integrate Intelligence across Multiple Threat Vectors, allowing you Drill Down through a Real-Time Data Matrix and turn Information into Actionable Intelligence? Does it support Robust Delegation, for Interdepartmental Collaboration and Public/Private Security Partnerships?
See you at the trade show, suckers!
Ah, but he totally redeemed himself with his lucidity and insight during his PNAC years...
Well, seeing how brilliantly his forays into the fields of political science and politics have gone, I'd be willing to consider the notion that he ought to consider a change of field...
At least his little RC toys appear to actually fly, don't cost billions of dollars, and haven't yet crashed into a morass of delusionally bad decision-making.
I doubt that elitism is the basis of their displeasure(if they were elitists, wouldn't they be gleeful at the very thought of the unwashed being made to suffer for their pitiful lack of sophistication?).
Rather, the notion that their preferred music is considered to be a nonlethal deterrent, and used as such against those who you would really prefer to pass your tastes on to, likely has something to do with it...
Unless your train stations have better PA gear than ours do, you Do. Not. Want. any music you like to be played on it.
The golden rule of PA design, empirically speaking, appears to be "ensure that the system is powerful enough to induce pain; but weak enough that even tin-eared gits can hear the distortion at about 20% of peak volume"...
My impression was that, already, identifying linux-by-distro was largely the domain of geeks and server jockies, while the majority of the world's linux instances toiled silently either in various plastic boxes with a few blinking lights and a web interface or in assorted phones and consumer electronics behind some interface that hides essentially all the guts.
If anything, public visibility of these 'nontraditional distributions' has increased because of competition in the consumer electronics area. Heck, you can find $50 routers that have their WRT compatibility printed right on the shiny package, and distinguishing between 'devices that will run cyanogenmod' and 'devices that won't' has brought distro-war enthusiasm to the phone geek scene...
It's even worse than that!
Just look at the MSDS for ether! and they propose to allow our precious children to spend their days in schools snaked through with cables carrying this menace?
You must be thinking of the various bloodstained and headless subatomic particles that Schrödinger's damn cat keeps leaving just outside the lab door, after batting them around for its amusement...
Given that the Higgs is theorized to be vital to matter having mass, it is probably the case that it is impossible to weaponize without the Higgs(if it exists). Massless ammunition, after all, is almost as effective as massless armor...
Given that we don't "Know" anything of note for sufficiently rigorous definitions of the word(arguably, capital 'K' "knowledge" seems to alternate between being a philosopher's dream and being a straw man...), 'know' makes pretty decent shorthand for the somewhat unwieldy long-form account of the precise flavor of the information provided by science.
I apologize if I was insufficiently clear on this aspect of the 'price' argument:
Historical legal norms, governing what is/isn't protected, what does/doesn't require special permission, etc. are crafted in response to the situations that the lawmakers have to confront, either hypothetically, when crafting legislation, or in actuality, when a case comes before a court. In no small part, those actual and hypothetical situations are influenced by technology, what it costs and what it can do. If something is impossible or economically prohibitive in virtually all cases, there isn't any impetus for legal norms or institutional protections to grow up and prevent it.
Consider, for example, the notion that things done in public spaces are fair game without any sort of warrant. Historically, that seems plausible enough: cops are a limited resource, and people have lousy memories, so everybody who is acting normally enough to be forgotten quickly, and isn't interesting enough to justify the expense of having one or more agents tailing them with a notebook is safe. Thus, in practice the historical standard was not'anything is fair game in public', it was 'anything notable enough for Joe Citizen to remember it later, and anyone worth the expense of tailing manually is fair game'. If, through some innovation in cameras and machine vision, say, it becomes technologically and economically viable to track everybody all the time, the formal 'in public, no problem' standard hasn't been violated; but the previous actual 'only stuff of note, and people suspected enough to spend real money on for some reason' standard is overwhelmingly weakened.
Overflights would be a similar thing: as long as aircraft time costs some hundreds of dollars or more an hour(depending somewhat on your chosen craft and method of cost accounting), the de-facto standard for aerial observation is actually fairly high. It doesn't demand a warrant; but it demands some internal explanation good enough to move those resources. If flyovers cost $10/hour or $1/hour, that de-facto standard would vastly weaken.
That's the real core of the argument: outside of specific, dramatic, cases(like getting evidence stricken from a trial because it was illegally obtained, where your protections are essentially purely legal, since the practical side has already happened and gone against you), the real standards that governed relations between people and the state(or one another) have always been governed to a great degree by logistics, with law stepping in in situations where logistics seemed to be providing a bad result. If you merely examine those accumulated legal fixes, without reference to the logistical situation under which they were enacted, you grossly distort the actual protection(or lack thereof, as in the stereotypical gossipy small town where everybody knows everybody) which a given legal standard implied in practice. Technological change tends not to attack specific, legally formulated, protections/nonprotections very much, it just massively changes their operational significance.
You can be pretty sure that a 'revolutionary' is against the previous regime and at least some of its policies; but that's about all the assurance you get.
It's not as though every revolutionary is magically also an Enlightenment libertine or something... It'd be nice; but that just isn't how it works.
Now, seeing as these particular revolutionaries are intimately familiar with the fact that a technological system of censorship, once established, can be used to suppress more or less any category of material with equal ease... there isn't anything architecturally different between the tools needed to block pictures of naked people and the tools needed to block pictures of the interior ministry special squads executing people, nor is there much besides dropping in a new dictionary file that separates squelching 'incitement to violence' from squelching 'criticism of the state'; one would hope that they would understand that such a system is simply too dangerous to be allowed to exist. Even if they get to bask in the warm glow of saving the children from smut today, they'll be maintaining and improving the system that will be turned back against them as soon as the wind shifts.
My money is on 'Ha. Ha. No they won't. "WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!?!?! wins every time"'. A pity
Hypothetically, for an entity larger than some smallish business just trying to keep its head down, wouldn't not travelling light provide more useful information?
Any device you bring, and your good buddies then bug, is now a device that you cannot trust; but also a device that can be analyzed for insight into the state of bugging techniques. Turning unknowns into knowns is generally a Good Thing(tm), and ought easily to cover the cost of a bit of burner hardware.
Since you are dealing with threats that don't necessarily wait for you to get on the plane(they can go over the internet, or even in person, if the reward is large enough), it would seem that gathering samples of the attack techniques, exploit kits, etc. in use would be a good idea...
how exactly can a drone invade your privacy any more then a manned plane?
Lower cost. Virtually all of your privacy(especially if you are just Joe Sixpack) isn't protected by some fancy set of 'rights' or a 'judicial system', it's protected by the fact that watching you is too expensive to be worth the likely results.
The cheaper surveillance gets, the further down the food chain you can expect it to go, and the more frequent(and effective, unlike the grainy camera at EZ-mart that has been recording over the same grungy VHS tape since 1997...)
Unless surveillance has some atypically wonky demand curve, which doesn't seem to be the case, lowering the price will increase the amount done.
The issue is not the (inconvenient, but mostly a problem for developers who are paid for that stuff) fact that you can't easily write one piece of software that suits two or more processor architectures and UI paradigms, at least not well; but the fact that the various emerging platforms are locked down hard.
Yup, just dumping your desktop application onto a phone isn't going to work out too well, even if it is architecturally possible. Fair and natural enough. The problem is that all the various up-and-coming devices(with unpleasantly limited exceptions) are shipping deliberately crippled. Purely for architectural reasons, nothing on OSX would run on iOS without a recompile, and very little would be pleasant to use without a UI redesign; but that is largely irrelevant because you need a cryptographic blessing to even execute. Windows-on-ARM appears to be going the same way, and, while Android lacks such a centralized dictate, your average carrier phone has a few locks in place.
Portability is an engineering and UI/UX hassle. The fact that you can't even try to execute a binary without the blessing of the platform's master is Serious.
Why? So far t his is just the ARM version. It sounds more like they just are going the cheap route, and not fulling integrating the ARM version with their Intel version.
Basically to my thinking: A) Other Win8 versions have these features, then this is laziness. No borg icon warrented. B) All Win8 versions lack these features (then why the big deal about the ARM version?), then this is a closing of the walls intentionally for a purpose. Borg icon deserved.
There is another possibility: Microsoft has massive legacy commitments. Practically all the world's boring corporate stuff that isn't old, specialized, or hip, enough to be running on some sort of intimidating big iron or linux/web/cloud/thingamawhatsit. Most of that software is absolute dreck, and rather boring, but much of it is also quite critical to a variety of high value operations and impossible or uneconomic to port or even modify very much. For this reason, Microsoft's walled-garden options on x86/64 are pretty minimal. Architecturally they could roll it out tomorrow(Software Restriction Policies are basically that, but under the control of your domain admin); but the customers that matter would scream like nobody's business.
However, since there isn't any legacy Windows software or legacy Windows device drivers, on ARM, since it has never run on ARM before, there is no legacy market to worry about. Microsoft has a free hand, more or less. As with the xbox, the other recent situation where MS started clean, without legacy impediments, they apparently see a walled garden as their best option.
It remains to be seen how long the momentum of more-or-less-open x86 IBM compatibles will carry them into the future; but so long as the legacy/in-house/custom demand is there, they'll be hard to kill entirely. However, I'd say that it is "outlook not so good" for open platforms any time somebody starts a new one from scratch...
Nest is a status symbol, not a HVAC management system. It looks cool. It creates the illusion that it's doing something "green". It probably helps a little.
It was produced by an ex-Apple employee's startup, after all...
Patent hold get to license the technology or not, based upon their own preferences. You can't FORCE a company to share it's patents.
As it happens, not only can you, a great many of the patent law systems of the world do to some degree or another(it seems to be even more common with copyrights; but also happens with patents). All Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property signatories(1883-Present) possesses the right to create compulsory licenses under certain circumstances.
In the specifically US context, it's worth noting that patents and copyrights are listed as something Congress may create(but is not in any way obligated to) and specifies only that these be of limited duration. They aren't treated at all as though they belong in the 'natural rights' set.
As a matter of fact, I find it rather unlikely that Nest has a chance of getting a compulsory license; but that's just a matter of particular law, not some sort of foundational principle of jurisprudence: the only place you'd really see it articulated would be by somebody who has been inculcated with both historical natural-law justification of property and quite contemporary 'intellectual property' maximalism. Not a forbidden position; but actually quite an atypical one...
I'm assuming that the Nest and some Institutional/industrial networked HVAC controller made by Honeywell(probably one where 'web based' still means "serves a java applet that requires a JVM five years old to run, after authentication in plaintext with a password of no more than six characters, for an extra license fee we'll turn on the SNMPv1 interface..." both implement some concepts that would be familiar to anybody who has perused a control theory textbook and/or some things that programmers building network applications have forgotten that they remember...
I'm guessing that this isn't exactly a 'look and feel' lawsuit(though the iconic round, bimetallic spring, mercury tilt switch design was Honeywell, that's sort of their last brush with being on the leading edge of intuitive thermostat interfaces...)
Don't you remember that everything one can do with a computer is magically novel and patent worthy each time you change the context even slightly?
It was patent-worthy when "on a mainframe" was appended(though much of that has expired by now, so it isn't a matter of significant practical concern)
It was again patent-worthy when done on a PC.
You'd better fucking believe that doing it "on the internet" made it patent-worthy all over again and then some.
On a 'smartphone'. Oh you know it, and twice as shiny...
Given the painful uselessness of CRLs as presently implemented(we obviously need some way of revoking the things; but the present one is agonizingly broken), I'm just not too sad about the prospect of no longer telling Verisign every time I visit one of their SSL-cert customers(the same is true of all the other certificate mongers who publish CRLs)...