This seems like an antitrust violation in the making.
The key thing is that it's open to everyone and it's likely to benefit the consumer. Even if the companies could just claim the believed it would help the consumer that would be enough. Anti-trust law does not apply here. Think of, for example, open standards like GSM or Ethernet. A big bunch of "competitor" companies agree to work together. However, that's okay because it's for everyone's benefit and anybody can join.
By joining a consortium that has a bunch of similar patents to the one I'm claimed to be infringing, it requires a hell of a lot more lawyer time to figure it out....
How so? The patent troll doing the suing has only to examine the claims of their patent, examine the device and show that there is a match. The other patents are completely irrelevant.
For instance, the purchase of patent portfolios by Google was usually explained to me as a way to make the legal situation so complicated that suing was just unappealing.
this is for a very specific case where a huge company with lots of software business (Microsoft) has been stupid enough to start a patent war. Google's is a winning move becuase Microsoft lives in fear of having a year or two during which they are not allowed to sell MS Windows and/or MS Office. Whilst Google's business could probably something simlar, Microsoft's would have no hope.
RPX "will never use [their] patents offensively" with patents "available for members to use in a counterclaim against any non-member who initiates litigation". Seems to me that makes it essentialy useless for defence against patent trolls which are essentially invulnterable to counter claims.
But more; If someone completely different has a patent; someone you don't know whatsoever; you can still use that patent to invalidate the patent troll's patent. It makes no difference whatsoever whether you are in the patent pool that permits you to use that patent or not. If that's all you are going to use patents for then you might just as well publish the ideas you have in well known journals or even just on the internet (make sure archive.org picks them up). Once you've done that anyone can use them to destroy patents.
The only use for patents is suing people. If you don't plan to sue people then forget patents. Just publish.
If you have license to patents that cover the same thing you are being sued for, you have a much stronger defense.
a) By definitiion patents can't be for exactly the same thing. If they were, the first one filed would be "prior art" for the second one. b) a product can infringe multiple patents. The fact you have a license for one patent doesn't have any influence over whether you need a license for a different patent.
Counter suing is the only weapon currently available to reduce the incentive for software developing entities to their patents involved in lawsuits. It's very important to note that you may have to counter sue a quite different company from the company which sues you.
E.g. Microsoft gives it's patents to "Intellectual Ventures"; intellectual ventures settles for $10 per software package you sell. You approach Microsoft who demonstrates that their software development doesn't infringe your patent so they don't pay up. You sue Microsoft's customers which then claim indemnity from Microsoft. Microsoft then settle for the equivalent amount of mone to the amount "Intellectual Ventures" settled for + legal expenses. Microsoft now learns that the patent wars cost them money and don't sell future patents to "Intellectual Ventures".
Please be clear; this is a patent war. It is not some pleasant countryside hunting trip.
You can be infringing two patents at the same time. The fact you have another patent won't do you any good. This is especially true for "Standards Essential" patents, which are needed in order to implement a standard which specifies one particular implementation matching the patent and which are quite common (look at H.264). The patent troll doesn't care that someone else has a patent on the same device, they just sue you over your use of their patent.
I think you need some reading comprehension. The rot in hell was not targetted at Apple, but against the people running the lawsuit who can trivially put in a compassionate exception till the end of the suit and tell Apple about it but choose not to. The relevance of Apple's record is less than zero.
This is the least of it. This license seems to me quite dangerous. Actual patent infringment is unlikely to take place in patent creating entities in future. Imagine Microsoft split into "Microsoft Enforcers" (hoards patents, makes patent trolls) "Microsoft Software" (sells software ordered from Microsoft Developers, buy's "covenant's not to sue" from Microsoft Enforcers) "Microsoft Developers" (sells software/people to Microsoft Software; sells patents to Microsoft Enforcers) "Microsoft Troll(n)" (loans patents from Microsoft Enforcers, makes lawsuits - one troll per patent;).
N.B. I have probably got some of the details wrong, and you may have to use a company registration for Microsoft in a non-software patents jurisdiction to transfer the software from Microsoft Developers to Microsoft Software but you get the idea.
Microsoft Software does all the infringement; it could even potentially join the DPL. It never sues anyone so the DPL causes it no problems.
Microsoft Enforcers never does any software; both it and the Microsoft Trolls that it spins off cannot be sued for infringement since they never do.
The only defence against this is that, if Microsoft Troll(527) sues you, you have to sue Microsoft Software back. The DPL and other similar patent pools can endanger that.
Basically, if you don't reserve the right to sue any apparently "innocent" entity which has taken a patent license or even taken advantage of a "covenant not to sue" then you may not be able to use patents defensively. It's probably an absolute requirement that you be able to sue Microsoft's customers for things that Microsoft related entities do. Anything else will leave you vulnerable to a troll suit that, even if you manage to settle, allows your competitor to force you out of the market by charging you per system you deliver.
This is the least of it. This license seems to me quite dangerous. Actual patent infringment is unlikely to take place in patent creating entities in future. Imagine Microsoft split into "Microsoft Enforcers" (hoards patents, makes patent trolls) "Microsoft Developers" (sells people to Microsoft Development; sells patents to Microsoft Develpment) "Microsoft Software" (sells software ordered from Microsoft Developers, buy's "covenant's not to sue" from Microsoft Development) "Microsoft Troll(n)" (loans patents from Microsoft Development, makes lawsuits - one troll per patent;).
N.B. I have probably got some of the details wrong, and you may have to use a company registration for Microsoft in a non-software patents jurisdiction to transfer the software from Microsoft Developers to Microsoft Software but you get the idea.
Microsoft Software does all the infringement; it could even potentially join the DPL. It never sues anyone so the DPL causes it no problems.
Microsoft Enforcers never does any software; both it and the Microsoft Trolls that it spins off cannot be sued for infringement since they never do.
The only defence against this is that, if Microsoft Development sues you, you have to sue Microsoft Software back. The DPL and other similar patent pools can endanger that.
Basically, if you don't reserve the right to sue any apparently "innocent" entity which has taken a patent license or even taken advantage of a "covenant not to sue" then you may not be able to use patents defensively. It's probably an absolute requirement that you be able to sue Microsoft's customers for things that Microsoft related entities do. Anything else will leave you vulnerable to a troll suit that, even if you manage to settle, allows your competitor to force you out of the market by charging you per system you deliver.
the only lawful thing for them to do is to remove it from their store.
There is another option; Apple can ask the court or the patent holders for a temporary permission to distribute this to pre-existing owners whilst they wait for the court case to be resolved. Now I don't know whether Apple has attempted this, so I can't know if I should fully blame Apple. I do know that Apple has driven forward and supported software patents so I know they have some of the blame for this situation. I know for sure that the owners of the patents are aware of this situation and have knowingly, maliciously and gratuitously failed to stand up and grant that temporary license. For this I wish I could become religeous so I could believe they would rot in hell.
In other words, if I receive just two DMCA notices, and I am hosted on GoDaddy, then my entire GoDaddy account is suspended? If so, you are seriously ok with that??
On Slashdot pretty much everyone who is anyone (and all true Scotsmen) have been boycotting GoDaddy since their SOPA debacle. We mostly think that anybody who is still with GoDaddy deserves all the shit that can possibly come their way from their decision. Hell, having thought about it I'm going to look up some of my own photos and file DMCA notes against random GoDaddy customers and I think everybody else here should do the same.
This just isn't going to work. WiFi solves the easy problem (range 0-30 metres - you can just pull a cable if you are desperate). The difficult problem is the middle range; 100m -> 10km (or up to about 50km to 100km in country areas). At that kind of range sensible size links are expensive enough that they have to be shared, but there aren't enough people and money to easily afford a dedicated group to maintain them. At one point this was handled by individuals and little mom & pop companies in many places, but those have all been bought out now.
This is a social and technical problem. How to get enough people together to form a decent negotiating block whilst keeping the people who don't care but are needed to pay for it interested.
In reality it SHOULD be different getting something from a local network verses a more remote store.
It already is. Every hop in an IP route does it's own traffic management and slows down the connection. The closer you are the faster (in practice; holding all other things, such as link bandwidth and utilisation constant) your traffic goes. That's before you start taking into account that longer distance links tend to have higher latency and lower available bandwidth.
Normally, the way around this descrimination is to connect directly to the ISP where your customers are or to another ISP which has a good enough deal with them by being close enough in enough places. This is fine. The great effect this has is it encourages big internet using compaines like Google to have lots of independent connections to different ISPs and small ones to use a CDN which provides access to the same connectivity.
The descrimination that Comcast and others want is not the same. It's harder to overcome; they choose according to their own commercial benefit; they give their own services free access to this better service and others are lucky if they were able to pay. If there was true competition at the ISP level this would be fine. Unfortunately there can't be. Once one company has a wire to your area it's very difficult even for teleco's to come in and get to be equal with them. This leads to a natural monopooly where in most countries there's only one or two providers available per user. Getting into that monopoly involves digging up public roads, so it's normally very strictly regulated. This means that those companies that have got there have a clear duty to provide equal access and not attempt to use one monopoly to try to create another one.
You're kind of a dick arent you. I already said i dont get it for my use case, but i could see the use case for it. To me its a nicety, but whatever. I gave up caring about monitor resolution when 1080p became de facto.
For me > 1024 pixels vertical is the killer feature. Two things; 1) you can practically view an entire A4 document without paging; 2) you have more lines vertical in your editor than the average joe. If you are understanding someone else's code, you always want to have more lines on screen than he did since it lets you see more of the surrounding code more quickly. Remember it's much harder to add monitors above your current one than it is beside it.
Horizontal resolution is mostly needed for watching videos. That's a completely different issue (though having two A4 side by side and still being able to type in an editor is nice).
Can you say "botnet". Hmm.. I wonder who would benefit from being able to get a few thousands of extra hosts. Most of the big ones would probably never even need to use the same IP range more than twice.
These things are not quite as easy; even if an independent claim is invalidated, dependent claims may still be valid. You want to have lots of prior art which matches each individual claim. Eventually, if just a few claims are left over, the patent may be made invalid as insufficiently original, but remember the applicants often get to rewrite it to avoid the prior art.
It's not enough that they had snippets; they had to have snippets which worked in the same way as described in the patent. More importantly they need to have either patented how it worked or published that. If you do know such a publication putting it up would be really helpful to someone.
So yeah, my apache anti-leaching script in the 90s (That substituted a photo of an erect dick whenever an image was leached) was a total patent thievery acomplished via time-travel or something.
Did you publish it? If so, push the link to Google's lawyers (dropping it on an anti-patent site like Groklaw will do, if you don't want to talk directly to Google). Everyone will appreciate that. It might seem stupid, but it can be really hard to find examples of obvious ideas from the distant past.
Pay no attention to the Sony Vaio X505 behind the curtain!
Which is cited as prior art in this design patent.
Which means, in order to infringe on this design patent you have to make something which looks much more like a MacBook Air than a Sony Vaio X505. It says nothing at all about building something which works the same as an Air let alone weighs the same.
Which is clearly a limitation on freedom of expression; one which is nowhere as onerous as a normal patent and which isn't that much of a big deal. Let's worry about the fact that poor people in medium income countries are dying because of drugs patents first please. And before that let's worry about the fact that random independent software companies can get destroyed by patents they never even knew existed, let alone benefitted from in their software development process. Design patents are a very minor issue.
But various others have pointed out that the "engineering solutions" may not be very far in the future, if we want to implement them. One of the consequences of the accumulated evidence that the recent climate changes are primarily due to human activity is that we know that we're capable of pushing the world' climate around, and we know how we've been doing it. So from an engineering viewpoint, pushing it in a different direction (e.g., stability or slower change) is within our capabilities. Granted, the "Further Research is Needed" mantra applies, but we know enough to take effective action now if we want to.
One of the fundametal things of taking the scientifc approach to this is to not just assume such statements are true. Experiments have to be done and then we see what can happen. There have been attempts made to control and influence weather and climate since, I guess the 1950s (well, actually much before, for example King Kanute's advisors). The thing about these is that very few have worked. In Russia and China there has been success in making clouds rain slighly earlier than would otherwise be expected. Even then, there was argument to begin with about whether it was working or not (it's now reasonably proven).
Whenever we attempt to make big system level changes, it turns out that we failed to understand the details of the system. Look at biological changes like introducing cane toads to control pests. Look at what happened with GM crops which were supposed to be contained and then turn out to be leaking genes to the environment either through escapees or hybridisation. We are probably going to have to start to manipulate the climate. When that happens there are going to be major disasters (entire countries turned into deserts; millions of people starved; flooding etc). The more slowly and more in control we do it the more chance there will be to limit that; the more it's limited the more chance there is to actually succeed. I think the Nuclear power advocates, who will repeatedly tell you "Nuclear power is now safe; all the problems were just in the previous generation of plants; the next one will be great" can tell you about what happens when a technology gets rushed into production too fast.
Even if, long term, we can start to control climate to compensate for our other activities, we need to buy time now so that that climate control can be introduced safely. If it turns out that it doesn't work, or that the side effects are too large to accept, then we simply need to protect what we have already. We should base that decision on actual evidence and not just a leap into the dark.
This follows from fairly simple Machiavellian analysis. Copyleft was invented for a reason; to stop companies from stealing the software and twisting it to their use. If you fail to use copyleft, you are obviously going to be weaker than someone who does use it. As Machiavelli pointed out: the weak are unable to defend their ideas.
This does not mean that Facebook would be doing the right thing, however it's legal and not particularly immoral (though that might not stop Zuckerberg:-) so I don't see why they shouldn't go for it.
When Google chose an non copyleft license they chose to allow you to copyleft it.
So wait; you trust a googlebomb (how do you think Siri gets it's results?) and a survey taken before WP7 was widely available (at which time most users were MS employees) as sources of quality for a phone. You believe this proves you aren't a dork?? Let's just point out that there are very few good Windows Phone applications now. At the time of that survey there were practically none except for porno site reskins. Yet, this survey showed that the users were satisfied with WP7.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems like an antitrust violation in the making.
The key thing is that it's open to everyone and it's likely to benefit the consumer. Even if the companies could just claim the believed it would help the consumer that would be enough. Anti-trust law does not apply here. Think of, for example, open standards like GSM or Ethernet. A big bunch of "competitor" companies agree to work together. However, that's okay because it's for everyone's benefit and anybody can join.
By joining a consortium that has a bunch of similar patents to the one I'm claimed to be infringing, it requires a hell of a lot more lawyer time to figure it out....
How so? The patent troll doing the suing has only to examine the claims of their patent, examine the device and show that there is a match. The other patents are completely irrelevant.
For instance, the purchase of patent portfolios by Google was usually explained to me as a way to make the legal situation so complicated that suing was just unappealing.
this is for a very specific case where a huge company with lots of software business (Microsoft) has been stupid enough to start a patent war. Google's is a winning move becuase Microsoft lives in fear of having a year or two during which they are not allowed to sell MS Windows and/or MS Office. Whilst Google's business could probably something simlar, Microsoft's would have no hope.
RPX "will never use [their] patents offensively" with patents "available for members to use in a counterclaim against any non-member who initiates litigation". Seems to me that makes it essentialy useless for defence against patent trolls which are essentially invulnterable to counter claims.
But more; If someone completely different has a patent; someone you don't know whatsoever; you can still use that patent to invalidate the patent troll's patent. It makes no difference whatsoever whether you are in the patent pool that permits you to use that patent or not. If that's all you are going to use patents for then you might just as well publish the ideas you have in well known journals or even just on the internet (make sure archive.org picks them up). Once you've done that anyone can use them to destroy patents.
The only use for patents is suing people. If you don't plan to sue people then forget patents. Just publish.
If you have license to patents that cover the same thing you are being sued for, you have a much stronger defense.
a) By definitiion patents can't be for exactly the same thing. If they were, the first one filed would be "prior art" for the second one. b) a product can infringe multiple patents. The fact you have a license for one patent doesn't have any influence over whether you need a license for a different patent.
Counter suing is the only weapon currently available to reduce the incentive for software developing entities to their patents involved in lawsuits. It's very important to note that you may have to counter sue a quite different company from the company which sues you.
E.g. Microsoft gives it's patents to "Intellectual Ventures"; intellectual ventures settles for $10 per software package you sell. You approach Microsoft who demonstrates that their software development doesn't infringe your patent so they don't pay up. You sue Microsoft's customers which then claim indemnity from Microsoft. Microsoft then settle for the equivalent amount of mone to the amount "Intellectual Ventures" settled for + legal expenses. Microsoft now learns that the patent wars cost them money and don't sell future patents to "Intellectual Ventures".
Please be clear; this is a patent war. It is not some pleasant countryside hunting trip.
You can be infringing two patents at the same time. The fact you have another patent won't do you any good. This is especially true for "Standards Essential" patents, which are needed in order to implement a standard which specifies one particular implementation matching the patent and which are quite common (look at H.264). The patent troll doesn't care that someone else has a patent on the same device, they just sue you over your use of their patent.
I think you need some reading comprehension. The rot in hell was not targetted at Apple, but against the people running the lawsuit who can trivially put in a compassionate exception till the end of the suit and tell Apple about it but choose not to. The relevance of Apple's record is less than zero.
Please mod down. Pressed submit by accident in the middle of a re-edit.
N.B. I have probably got some of the details wrong, and you may have to use a company registration for Microsoft in a non-software patents jurisdiction to transfer the software from Microsoft Developers to Microsoft Software but you get the idea.
The only defence against this is that, if Microsoft Troll(527) sues you, you have to sue Microsoft Software back. The DPL and other similar patent pools can endanger that.
Basically, if you don't reserve the right to sue any apparently "innocent" entity which has taken a patent license or even taken advantage of a "covenant not to sue" then you may not be able to use patents defensively. It's probably an absolute requirement that you be able to sue Microsoft's customers for things that Microsoft related entities do. Anything else will leave you vulnerable to a troll suit that, even if you manage to settle, allows your competitor to force you out of the market by charging you per system you deliver.
This is the least of it. This license seems to me quite dangerous. Actual patent infringment is unlikely to take place in patent creating entities in future. Imagine Microsoft split into "Microsoft Enforcers" (hoards patents, makes patent trolls) "Microsoft Developers" (sells people to Microsoft Development; sells patents to Microsoft Develpment) "Microsoft Software" (sells software ordered from Microsoft Developers, buy's "covenant's not to sue" from Microsoft Development) "Microsoft Troll(n)" (loans patents from Microsoft Development, makes lawsuits - one troll per patent;).
N.B. I have probably got some of the details wrong, and you may have to use a company registration for Microsoft in a non-software patents jurisdiction to transfer the software from Microsoft Developers to Microsoft Software but you get the idea.
Microsoft Software does all the infringement; it could even potentially join the DPL. It never sues anyone so the DPL causes it no problems.
Microsoft Enforcers never does any software; both it and the Microsoft Trolls that it spins off cannot be sued for infringement since they never do.
The only defence against this is that, if Microsoft Development sues you, you have to sue Microsoft Software back. The DPL and other similar patent pools can endanger that.
Basically, if you don't reserve the right to sue any apparently "innocent" entity which has taken a patent license or even taken advantage of a "covenant not to sue" then you may not be able to use patents defensively. It's probably an absolute requirement that you be able to sue Microsoft's customers for things that Microsoft related entities do. Anything else will leave you vulnerable to a troll suit that, even if you manage to settle, allows your competitor to force you out of the market by charging you per system you deliver.
the only lawful thing for them to do is to remove it from their store.
There is another option; Apple can ask the court or the patent holders for a temporary permission to distribute this to pre-existing owners whilst they wait for the court case to be resolved. Now I don't know whether Apple has attempted this, so I can't know if I should fully blame Apple. I do know that Apple has driven forward and supported software patents so I know they have some of the blame for this situation. I know for sure that the owners of the patents are aware of this situation and have knowingly, maliciously and gratuitously failed to stand up and grant that temporary license. For this I wish I could become religeous so I could believe they would rot in hell.
In other words, if I receive just two DMCA notices, and I am hosted on GoDaddy, then my entire GoDaddy account is suspended? If so, you are seriously ok with that??
On Slashdot pretty much everyone who is anyone (and all true Scotsmen) have been boycotting GoDaddy since their SOPA debacle. We mostly think that anybody who is still with GoDaddy deserves all the shit that can possibly come their way from their decision. Hell, having thought about it I'm going to look up some of my own photos and file DMCA notes against random GoDaddy customers and I think everybody else here should do the same.
The scary thing is just how often this new meme could seem insightful on Slashdot...
peer-to-peer wifi/radio system.
This just isn't going to work. WiFi solves the easy problem (range 0-30 metres - you can just pull a cable if you are desperate). The difficult problem is the middle range; 100m -> 10km (or up to about 50km to 100km in country areas). At that kind of range sensible size links are expensive enough that they have to be shared, but there aren't enough people and money to easily afford a dedicated group to maintain them. At one point this was handled by individuals and little mom & pop companies in many places, but those have all been bought out now.
This is a social and technical problem. How to get enough people together to form a decent negotiating block whilst keeping the people who don't care but are needed to pay for it interested.
In reality it SHOULD be different getting something from a local network verses a more remote store.
It already is. Every hop in an IP route does it's own traffic management and slows down the connection. The closer you are the faster (in practice; holding all other things, such as link bandwidth and utilisation constant) your traffic goes. That's before you start taking into account that longer distance links tend to have higher latency and lower available bandwidth.
Normally, the way around this descrimination is to connect directly to the ISP where your customers are or to another ISP which has a good enough deal with them by being close enough in enough places. This is fine. The great effect this has is it encourages big internet using compaines like Google to have lots of independent connections to different ISPs and small ones to use a CDN which provides access to the same connectivity.
The descrimination that Comcast and others want is not the same. It's harder to overcome; they choose according to their own commercial benefit; they give their own services free access to this better service and others are lucky if they were able to pay. If there was true competition at the ISP level this would be fine. Unfortunately there can't be. Once one company has a wire to your area it's very difficult even for teleco's to come in and get to be equal with them. This leads to a natural monopooly where in most countries there's only one or two providers available per user. Getting into that monopoly involves digging up public roads, so it's normally very strictly regulated. This means that those companies that have got there have a clear duty to provide equal access and not attempt to use one monopoly to try to create another one.
You're kind of a dick arent you. I already said i dont get it for my use case, but i could see the use case for it. To me its a nicety, but whatever. I gave up caring about monitor resolution when 1080p became de facto.
For me > 1024 pixels vertical is the killer feature. Two things; 1) you can practically view an entire A4 document without paging; 2) you have more lines vertical in your editor than the average joe. If you are understanding someone else's code, you always want to have more lines on screen than he did since it lets you see more of the surrounding code more quickly. Remember it's much harder to add monitors above your current one than it is beside it.
Horizontal resolution is mostly needed for watching videos. That's a completely different issue (though having two A4 side by side and still being able to type in an editor is nice).
That's ~300 IP's per fraction of a second.
Good luck with that.
Can you say "botnet". Hmm.. I wonder who would benefit from being able to get a few thousands of extra hosts. Most of the big ones would probably never even need to use the same IP range more than twice.
If he sold off his shares, then I might believe you were anything but a piss-poor Troll. But he hasn't.
Funny you should mention that.
I'd say that Billy has been selling off Microsoft shares as fast as he possibly can without people noticing too much.
So whoever modded this +1, kindly go unfuck yourself before attempting further moderation.
Ah yes. I think we know why you don't have mod points.
These things are not quite as easy; even if an independent claim is invalidated, dependent claims may still be valid. You want to have lots of prior art which matches each individual claim. Eventually, if just a few claims are left over, the patent may be made invalid as insufficiently original, but remember the applicants often get to rewrite it to avoid the prior art.
It's not enough that they had snippets; they had to have snippets which worked in the same way as described in the patent. More importantly they need to have either patented how it worked or published that. If you do know such a publication putting it up would be really helpful to someone.
So yeah, my apache anti-leaching script in the 90s (That substituted a photo of an erect dick whenever an image was leached) was a total patent thievery acomplished via time-travel or something.
Did you publish it? If so, push the link to Google's lawyers (dropping it on an anti-patent site like Groklaw will do, if you don't want to talk directly to Google). Everyone will appreciate that. It might seem stupid, but it can be really hard to find examples of obvious ideas from the distant past.
Pay no attention to the Sony Vaio X505 behind the curtain!
Which is cited as prior art in this design patent.
Which means, in order to infringe on this design patent you have to make something which looks much more like a MacBook Air than a Sony Vaio X505. It says nothing at all about building something which works the same as an Air let alone weighs the same.
Which is clearly a limitation on freedom of expression; one which is nowhere as onerous as a normal patent and which isn't that much of a big deal. Let's worry about the fact that poor people in medium income countries are dying because of drugs patents first please. And before that let's worry about the fact that random independent software companies can get destroyed by patents they never even knew existed, let alone benefitted from in their software development process. Design patents are a very minor issue.
But various others have pointed out that the "engineering solutions" may not be very far in the future, if we want to implement them. One of the consequences of the accumulated evidence that the recent climate changes are primarily due to human activity is that we know that we're capable of pushing the world' climate around, and we know how we've been doing it. So from an engineering viewpoint, pushing it in a different direction (e.g., stability or slower change) is within our capabilities. Granted, the "Further Research is Needed" mantra applies, but we know enough to take effective action now if we want to.
One of the fundametal things of taking the scientifc approach to this is to not just assume such statements are true. Experiments have to be done and then we see what can happen. There have been attempts made to control and influence weather and climate since, I guess the 1950s (well, actually much before, for example King Kanute's advisors). The thing about these is that very few have worked. In Russia and China there has been success in making clouds rain slighly earlier than would otherwise be expected. Even then, there was argument to begin with about whether it was working or not (it's now reasonably proven).
Whenever we attempt to make big system level changes, it turns out that we failed to understand the details of the system. Look at biological changes like introducing cane toads to control pests. Look at what happened with GM crops which were supposed to be contained and then turn out to be leaking genes to the environment either through escapees or hybridisation. We are probably going to have to start to manipulate the climate. When that happens there are going to be major disasters (entire countries turned into deserts; millions of people starved; flooding etc). The more slowly and more in control we do it the more chance there will be to limit that; the more it's limited the more chance there is to actually succeed. I think the Nuclear power advocates, who will repeatedly tell you "Nuclear power is now safe; all the problems were just in the previous generation of plants; the next one will be great" can tell you about what happens when a technology gets rushed into production too fast.
Even if, long term, we can start to control climate to compensate for our other activities, we need to buy time now so that that climate control can be introduced safely. If it turns out that it doesn't work, or that the side effects are too large to accept, then we simply need to protect what we have already. We should base that decision on actual evidence and not just a leap into the dark.
hmm.. I doubt it's what you meant but:
This follows from fairly simple Machiavellian analysis. Copyleft was invented for a reason; to stop companies from stealing the software and twisting it to their use. If you fail to use copyleft, you are obviously going to be weaker than someone who does use it. As Machiavelli pointed out: the weak are unable to defend their ideas.
This does not mean that Facebook would be doing the right thing, however it's legal and not particularly immoral (though that might not stop Zuckerberg :-) so I don't see why they shouldn't go for it.
When Google chose an non copyleft license they chose to allow you to copyleft it.
So wait; you trust a googlebomb (how do you think Siri gets it's results?) and a survey taken before WP7 was widely available (at which time most users were MS employees) as sources of quality for a phone. You believe this proves you aren't a dork?? Let's just point out that there are very few good Windows Phone applications now. At the time of that survey there were practically none except for porno site reskins. Yet, this survey showed that the users were satisfied with WP7.