That was basically what we were all told back in the 1990's was Michael Dell's "stroke of business genius".
Right; and it ended up screwing him. The right to screw yourself is fine. That he screwed other people in the process is where it may begin to be wrong.
Even if Dell Computer, Apple and the rest now made "moral choice" an imperative in their industry, wouldn't that be asking everyone who might want to get into that business to work with constraints imposed by competitors who now dominate the market basically because they never faced those same constraints?
Right; but it would also be making their life proportionally easier since Apple's cost base will be higher. In pure market theory your choice to pay more for products made in better ways should simply support both new and old companies which choose to behave morally and not penalize them relative to themselves. Of course the idealized free market doesn't really exist and in practice there may be non-linear effects. I'm not sure in which direction they will work though.
That's like North Americans trying to force South Americans not to clear-cut the rain forest as a matter of environmental concerns even though a large part of our economy was built on the very same practice.
In a sense exactly right. It's a good idea if the South Americans learn from the mistakes that the Northerners made during development. That's why North Americans and others that can afford this should support protecting South American rain forests. In effect you are paying the South Americans to keep the forests which it is too late for you to keep yourself and without which you will all die. Paying someone else to keep you alive is not stupid, even if you end up helping that person.
I believe Apple and other companies do as much as can reasonably be done as foreign private entities
The thing is that they aren't just equal.
Cisco actively developed systems for the great firewall of China and is thereby complicit in censorship and torture
Microsoft cooperates to the level required by Chinese law including compromising many things to get more buisness there
Apple hasn't compromised that much but definitely deliberately goes to cheaper more "flexible" places at cost of labor protection
Google has even gone up against censorship and been forced to withdraw
Other companies have deliberately avoided China for moral reasons.
Lots of the corporates that would end up high in that list want us to just ignore these differences. By buying and supporting companies low in that list you gently but effectively push for change. Wherever in the world Apple chooses to make iPhones and iPads will quickly become one of the "biggest in the world" so what they choose to do or not do makes a big difference. If put pressure on them for being bad or support them for being good instead of just ignoring the issue that makes a big difference to what they will end up doing.
The same goes for where you work. If you are good at your job and work for Microsoft or Cisco you should seriously consider changing company. By continuing there you are inevitably making the world a worse place even if your own individual contribution seems good. If you work for Apple or Google then try work for change from within. If you work at the better companies then do everything you can to help them succeed.
Just a little bit of pretty painless moral choice makes a big difference.
Perfect example; the ARM IP came out of trying to manufacture first the BBC micro and then the Acorn Archimedes. Even the raspberry PI can be seen as a legacy of that. Now that the UK no longer tries to do such manufacturing the next generation of such systems it becomes relatively much more likely that the next generation of such ideas will come out of China.
Even then, remember the UK has a history of maverick individual inventors with little business success. This is something which is fully culturally accepted and is one of the reasons why there is still a UK car industry based on tiny sports and racing car companies. That same culture doesn't exist in the same way in most other countries which will be even less successful in such an environment.
I don't think they have any moral or legal basis for being upset with that.
Technically you are right. This is why they have better lawyers than you. To ensure you don't "get away on a technicality", like for example being innocent. Basically, when you are risking a jail term based on a misunderstanding it's just not worth it.
I don't want to pick nits with what was an excellent answer to the standard "there's nothing we can do" excuse. However, if you have MLS then even information which is needed for your job is likely to be protected. By running the email in one security zone and the customer information in another (they don't even need to be low and high) you can ensure that information does not leak from one to the other.
Of course, by the time you are doing this, the idea of allowing automatically executable content in email would be laughable, so likely you wouldn't be speared in the first place.
Since when did google ever have to give a statement to what they're doing outside of what they already did?
They said "we will not sue people with our patents". And have they ever sued with their patents, offensively?
Citation needed; I have never seen that stated clearly. I have seen them give certain specific patents to certain specific patent pools but I haven't seen them give such a blanket statement. To be frank, they would be stupid to since it would rule out protecting small android companies from other companies which were threatening them in novel ways.
I'm not asking for a complete denial though, so please link to this statement of yours and I will see.
Now; why should they give such a statement? Because people may be working in areas related to Google's patents and might choose not to release free software because they are afraid of being sued by Google. A statement from Google that that won't happen to people who agree not to initiate patent suits against Google and their partners and/or who release their software under free software licenses could be designed to make those people feel safe whilst at the same time leaving the value of the patents open for Google's defense against outside threats.
no.
Apple sure as hell has. Samsung sure as hell has fought back. Barnes and Noble fought back.
Google isn't like American Politics, that's exactly why every "evil" company in the US hates them and has tried to shut them down continually, via corruption/bribery/lobbying/outright lies.
So yes, they made a statement, and you're a fucking troll.
My user name says "troll" so that's hardly like you came up with an amazing new insult, but my message is clear and if you can't address it clearly then it's you who's losing the debate.
To be 100% clear; If you can find a statement by Google that the guarantees not to sue at least free software authors who are not involved in the IP wars and really all companies which remain neutral then I will apologise here unreservedly. If there isn't such a legally binding statement then the build up of a patent stockpile at Google will always represent a threat for the future in that their company or their patents can end up in the hands of someone else. This is a threat that they can instantly neutralise but have, according to my understanding, chosen not to.
It's an interesting link; I've seen similar before but not thought about it much. When you look at it it really looks like Samsung is copying Apple. Very interesting is the change in the unboxing experience. It looks completely convincing.
Then you remember your first Nokia N95; a product released before the iPhone was available. Look at the Nokia unboxing experience which happens to be captured on the internet. Suddenly the audacity of Apple in claiming this as their own takes your breath.
Nothing under the sun is original; this is outrageous.
In some sense both Apple and Samsung win. Small startup companies coming into this area now have to explain how they would take on either of these companies in an IP lawsuit and / or get licenses which will be so expensive their products become uncompetitive. The entire group of major technology patent holders is a cartel working together to steal from consumers by increasing prices and reducing the ability of the market to change faster than they are able to keep up with. With patent lawsuits like this running around they can afford to reduce R&D and just make money together with more limited competition.
Sure, Apple and Microsoft are deeply evil, but Samsung is a at least bit evil too, and Google is building up a huge load of patents whilst failing to give a clear statement and guarantee to protect free software companies, so even they are having evil effects. This is a bit like American Politics. Just because one side is bad, doesn't mean the other side isn't bad too. You don't become fair and balanced by asking a wolf and a hyena whether the sheep wants to be eaten.
The problem is that if you limit licenses to 5% of nothing, and make licensing compulsory, then free software is competing unfairly,
That is like arguing that the atmosphere competes unfairly with commercial suppliers of breathing gas. It's 100% true, and it's 100% missing the point. The right to use free software with the source code is a matter of fundamental freedom of speech and should be allowed no matter what. This is also the only way that things can work since most free software authors simply don't have the resources to hire lawyers to check if the patents exist. If patents, as a system, can't cope with that, then patents, as a system, must be eliminated.
and you have the problem of commercial software using free software that uses patents.
That was what I tried to address in my previous post. I don't see it as a problem if the total maximum license fee is limited. It's a commercial product, they can pay for the patents.
The purpose of the patent system is to incentivize creation, and if you are going to have software patents, then letting free software ignore the patents really defeats that purpose by giving the licensee a major disadvantage over free solutions.
I agree that the proliferation is a problem.
Free software is a better creation; available for anyone, rapidly Freely and normally for free or low cost. It also helps other creation by being directly available for use in other products and by being examinable so that even commercial products can easily use all of the ideas embedded in software that they can't use directly. Much of free software is created by volunteers or as a side issue by firms that get no benefit other than a good name from it. If the patent system interferes in any way with creation of free software, even by making a free software author think for an extra few minutes during creation of that software, then the patent system should be reviewed and considered for elimination.
There is one crucial and dominant situation where free software must be commercial software. Where companies need a guarantee. At this point, there is a commercial entity involved in the free software and the license should be assessed as a percentage of the fee for the guarantee. Fortunately this exactly matches with the point at which there is no longer a need to protect the freedom and working practices of volunteers delivering software for no cost.
One thing that would be a problem with it as applied to software patents is how to deal with free software when a company would not have been willing to license its patent for free.
I don't really see that that's a problem. If you limit licenses to 5% of sales price, then 5% of nothing is nothing. If you are talking about free software companies that are selling software for money then I don't see that it's much more of a problem for them to pay 5% than for another proprietary software company to pay 5%.
The real problem comes, and this is one of the things which shows why patents should never apply to software in the first case, when you start to apply fixed costs per patent. If there was just one patent in a software product, as is typical for a normal physical product, that might work. When you start to add five patents with every library you use it becomes totally stupid. That's the trouble with having software lumped in with a system which is designed to guarantee funding for pharmaceutical companies.
There's something that seems unsavory and wasteful about a business environment in which a company's stock value "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing."
No, there's not. Do you see the bulk of silicon made in the USA? Thought so. Buy any consumer-grade electronics, and it will say Made in China. Made in Taiwan is already higher-end. I've been given some Christmas candy that was friggin' made in China. The only thing left is R&D. Research should lead to inventions, which should lead to patents.
In the end, if you are not doing your own manufacturing to some level you are in deep shit. To the extent that patents work as you described they are making the problem worse by putting of dealing with it. Innovation and R&D largely (though not completely) come from being inspired by practically involved in making, building, designing and manufacturing. For some time, people who used to be involved in those will be able to put out patents, but that is already slowing down (China is already starting to produce more patents than the US; within a few years they will start to produce better quality patents than the US). In the meantime, the "pure R&D" companies push the proper manufacturing companies out of the economy and mean that in the medium term, when those R&D companies begin to lose contact with real innovation, there will be a large collapse of the US.
This is an unhealthy environment, even for people in China, because the US still has the most massive military and the idiot politicians might start throwing that around more and more as a way of distracting from their serious problems at home. Serious wars have often been started by bad economic situations in countries with large armies.
What I really like about your comment here is that you begin by using grammar to make it clear that the word "property" means something completely different to you from what it means to the average Slashdot reader. I would normally say "patents are property" but I have this horrible feeling that you are legally right:-)
Other than that your comment is completely sensible in the context of patents as they are. However, I think what most of us are arguing is that patents are simply too powerful. If someone has developed a product which is later discovered to have been subject to a patent they shouldn't be at risk of losing the whole development costs. It's totally wrong that a person who has come up with an invention independently is completely limited by the patent that they have had no benefit from. There are plenty of ways of making patents softer; e.g. enforcing patent licensing and making a maximum patent license cost for all patents together of 5% of the product sale price. These would make patent rights much less of a direct "property" and more valuable as an incentive for real innovation.
Anyone seriously think that Apple wouldn't be making money from the iPhone if there were no patents at all? They can still prevent fakes and copies with trademark and copyright laws.
Which also applies to ARM. The primary protection of a processor design is copyright, and by the time you have gone away sufficiently from the design to no longer be covered by copyright you would probably be easier to start over. There's definitely plenty of extra difficulty in starting over caused by patents, but getting rid of them definitely doesn't rule out a business like ARM.
Why is the headline of this article focussed on Microsoft and the Xbox 720? Surely this is pure conjecture and can just as easily be applied to *any* PC or console game? I haven't RTFA as it'll be a load of made-up crap by the author.
Yes; it does seem that reading is a skill beyond many of the people stepping up to defend Microsoft from this accusation. From the fine article:
“I’ve heard from one reliable industry source that Microsoft intends to incorporate some sort of anti-used game system as part of their so-called Xbox 720,” Kotaku’s Steven Totilo wrote on Wednesday morning.
There is a difference between "New Google account users forced to join Google+" and "New users tricked into joining Google+ but they can leave immediately if they want to". It's not a big difference; in a sense it's a totally stupid thing to be arguing about and you could easily have spun it for your side (try "the delete account option is hidden behind one mouse click and might be confusing to my cat"). It ends up, though, giving away the game. This is not about some people coming to tell us the news that Google has gone evil. This is about desperate people who are trying to make it seem as if Google is as evil as they are.
The thing about this is, that any serious news organisation would have contacted Google and got someone there to explain this. There explanation would have been lax; even pathetic, but it would have meant that instead of publishing a lie, you could publish a misrepresentation which could never be proven as a lie. What is with the mad rush to be evil? Even Satan knows that by holding off a bit you can get more evil for your money.
We all care; If Bing has to try to beat Google by getting better then there is hope of better things. If Google loses to Bing by getting worse then Microsoft won't feel any need to work to improve things.
Remember that Netscape, once they realised that Microsoft had found a way to destroy them with illegal market manipulation, panicked and started to rewrite their whole product which meant that, even if the US justice department had intervened earlier, there would have been little left to save.
I just went through the Google registration process. The whole article is a lie, of course; as you would expect from any Microsoft associated publication; your Google+ account is only activated later on by explicitly signing up. Unfortunately even I, who have done Google registration quite a few times, didn't realise that until after I had signed up for Google+ with my new account. I have verified that even if you make the same mistake as I did you can trivially delete your Google+ features from your Google account.
Summary: as usual recently the first post is someone who manages to get Microsoft sponsored lies into place. Unfortunately Google opened themselves up for this by having an unclear registration process.
Try feeding Facebook pages through Google Translate as I did recently trying to follow up a foreign news story. You will find that Facebook does a considerable load of blocking to make life difficult for Google. We also know that Twitter wants to charge for access to the data. This whole story is attempting to blame Google for the evil that Facebook and Twitter have done to themselves.
It's really funny the way that there's this big campaign recently by several companies which are obviously evil (Microsoft, Facebook etc.) against Google. I'm guessing that they are afraid that if someone started insisting that more companies weren't evil they would lose their competitive edge?
I'll pedantically disagree; simple questions ("is there a god" / "why are we here") can be very complex to answer. I was mostly just trying to say that I am not criticising their actions as being immoral, just saying that I think they are ineffective. Low cost ineffective actions are okay, but there is a real possibility that they pay a high legal cost because what they are doing is illegal.
What you have shown is morally wrong - it's breaking the intent of the law (and good citizenship) without crossing the threshold of being convictable in a court of law.
These are both "legally" wrong. If someone could prove that you did it; for example because you boast to that someone about it later and they manage to tape record the discussion; then you could be taken to court for the wink and the nod. Please remember law often deals with intent much more than action.
If I own/operate a Taxi service and someone uses it for illegal activities, I am not responsible.
That depends on whether or not I "induce" them to use my taxi for those illegal activities.
Example 1: I advertise my taxis as "the fastest way to get around town"; a hitman decides to use my taxi as a getaway vehicle. - this is okay.
Example 2: I advertise my taxis as "the best way for hitmen to get away from the scene"; A hitman phones up, explains he has a planned hit but wants to have a private way to pay for the taxi to make it difficult for the police to trace him. I answer that sure we can do that; anything for the customer; whilst we're at it would he like to hire a second taxi as a decoy? - this is not okay.
A hitman, or a conspirator in a murder, is something entirely different. That's an action (planning with or paying out to the perpetrator, specifically for said act).
The basic point in this case, if the police are to believed, is that they actually caught Megaupload in the process of helping people to use their service for uses they consider illegal. That makes megaupload much closer to Example 2.
Do me a favour if you will/can. Please name the airline and give a link to the accident report.
Generally I agree with your point; many people try to hide wherever they can; customers may not be able to get what they demand; but that doesn't mean that customers shouldn't make the demand in the first place.
I you aren't right, but this is a simple empirical question. Either these protests have a good effect or they don't. Let's come back to that question in a year or two. We might still not be able to agree, but at least we will have some practical facts to judge by.
Slashdot Mirror
That was basically what we were all told back in the 1990's was Michael Dell's "stroke of business genius".
Right; and it ended up screwing him. The right to screw yourself is fine. That he screwed other people in the process is where it may begin to be wrong.
Even if Dell Computer, Apple and the rest now made "moral choice" an imperative in their industry, wouldn't that be asking everyone who might want to get into that business to work with constraints imposed by competitors who now dominate the market basically because they never faced those same constraints?
Right; but it would also be making their life proportionally easier since Apple's cost base will be higher. In pure market theory your choice to pay more for products made in better ways should simply support both new and old companies which choose to behave morally and not penalize them relative to themselves. Of course the idealized free market doesn't really exist and in practice there may be non-linear effects. I'm not sure in which direction they will work though.
That's like North Americans trying to force South Americans not to clear-cut the rain forest as a matter of environmental concerns even though a large part of our economy was built on the very same practice.
In a sense exactly right. It's a good idea if the South Americans learn from the mistakes that the Northerners made during development. That's why North Americans and others that can afford this should support protecting South American rain forests. In effect you are paying the South Americans to keep the forests which it is too late for you to keep yourself and without which you will all die. Paying someone else to keep you alive is not stupid, even if you end up helping that person.
I believe Apple and other companies do as much as can reasonably be done as foreign private entities
The thing is that they aren't just equal.
Lots of the corporates that would end up high in that list want us to just ignore these differences. By buying and supporting companies low in that list you gently but effectively push for change. Wherever in the world Apple chooses to make iPhones and iPads will quickly become one of the "biggest in the world" so what they choose to do or not do makes a big difference. If put pressure on them for being bad or support them for being good instead of just ignoring the issue that makes a big difference to what they will end up doing.
The same goes for where you work. If you are good at your job and work for Microsoft or Cisco you should seriously consider changing company. By continuing there you are inevitably making the world a worse place even if your own individual contribution seems good. If you work for Apple or Google then try work for change from within. If you work at the better companies then do everything you can to help them succeed.
Just a little bit of pretty painless moral choice makes a big difference.
Perfect example; the ARM IP came out of trying to manufacture first the BBC micro and then the Acorn Archimedes. Even the raspberry PI can be seen as a legacy of that. Now that the UK no longer tries to do such manufacturing the next generation of such systems it becomes relatively much more likely that the next generation of such ideas will come out of China.
Even then, remember the UK has a history of maverick individual inventors with little business success. This is something which is fully culturally accepted and is one of the reasons why there is still a UK car industry based on tiny sports and racing car companies. That same culture doesn't exist in the same way in most other countries which will be even less successful in such an environment.
I don't think they have any moral or legal basis for being upset with that.
Technically you are right. This is why they have better lawyers than you. To ensure you don't "get away on a technicality", like for example being innocent. Basically, when you are risking a jail term based on a misunderstanding it's just not worth it.
[...] beyond what is necessary for their job [..]
I don't want to pick nits with what was an excellent answer to the standard "there's nothing we can do" excuse. However, if you have MLS then even information which is needed for your job is likely to be protected. By running the email in one security zone and the customer information in another (they don't even need to be low and high) you can ensure that information does not leak from one to the other.
Of course, by the time you are doing this, the idea of allowing automatically executable content in email would be laughable, so likely you wouldn't be speared in the first place.
Since when did google ever have to give a statement to what they're doing outside of what they already did?
They said "we will not sue people with our patents". And have they ever sued with their patents, offensively?
Citation needed; I have never seen that stated clearly. I have seen them give certain specific patents to certain specific patent pools but I haven't seen them give such a blanket statement. To be frank, they would be stupid to since it would rule out protecting small android companies from other companies which were threatening them in novel ways.
I'm not asking for a complete denial though, so please link to this statement of yours and I will see.
Now; why should they give such a statement? Because people may be working in areas related to Google's patents and might choose not to release free software because they are afraid of being sued by Google. A statement from Google that that won't happen to people who agree not to initiate patent suits against Google and their partners and/or who release their software under free software licenses could be designed to make those people feel safe whilst at the same time leaving the value of the patents open for Google's defense against outside threats.
no.
Apple sure as hell has. Samsung sure as hell has fought back. Barnes and Noble fought back.
Google isn't like American Politics, that's exactly why every "evil" company in the US hates them and has tried to shut them down continually, via corruption/bribery/lobbying/outright lies.
So yes, they made a statement, and you're a fucking troll.
My user name says "troll" so that's hardly like you came up with an amazing new insult, but my message is clear and if you can't address it clearly then it's you who's losing the debate.
To be 100% clear; If you can find a statement by Google that the guarantees not to sue at least free software authors who are not involved in the IP wars and really all companies which remain neutral then I will apologise here unreservedly. If there isn't such a legally binding statement then the build up of a patent stockpile at Google will always represent a threat for the future in that their company or their patents can end up in the hands of someone else. This is a threat that they can instantly neutralise but have, according to my understanding, chosen not to.
This tired old rounded corners whine again?
It's about much, much more than that: http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/custom/Apple-vs-Samsung-1-Hardware-Design.html
It's an interesting link; I've seen similar before but not thought about it much. When you look at it it really looks like Samsung is copying Apple. Very interesting is the change in the unboxing experience. It looks completely convincing.
Then you remember your first Nokia N95; a product released before the iPhone was available. Look at the Nokia unboxing experience which happens to be captured on the internet. Suddenly the audacity of Apple in claiming this as their own takes your breath.
Nothing under the sun is original; this is outrageous.
In some sense both Apple and Samsung win. Small startup companies coming into this area now have to explain how they would take on either of these companies in an IP lawsuit and / or get licenses which will be so expensive their products become uncompetitive. The entire group of major technology patent holders is a cartel working together to steal from consumers by increasing prices and reducing the ability of the market to change faster than they are able to keep up with. With patent lawsuits like this running around they can afford to reduce R&D and just make money together with more limited competition.
Sure, Apple and Microsoft are deeply evil, but Samsung is a at least bit evil too, and Google is building up a huge load of patents whilst failing to give a clear statement and guarantee to protect free software companies, so even they are having evil effects. This is a bit like American Politics. Just because one side is bad, doesn't mean the other side isn't bad too. You don't become fair and balanced by asking a wolf and a hyena whether the sheep wants to be eaten.
The problem is that if you limit licenses to 5% of nothing, and make licensing compulsory, then free software is competing unfairly,
That is like arguing that the atmosphere competes unfairly with commercial suppliers of breathing gas. It's 100% true, and it's 100% missing the point. The right to use free software with the source code is a matter of fundamental freedom of speech and should be allowed no matter what. This is also the only way that things can work since most free software authors simply don't have the resources to hire lawyers to check if the patents exist. If patents, as a system, can't cope with that, then patents, as a system, must be eliminated.
and you have the problem of commercial software using free software that uses patents.
That was what I tried to address in my previous post. I don't see it as a problem if the total maximum license fee is limited. It's a commercial product, they can pay for the patents.
The purpose of the patent system is to incentivize creation, and if you are going to have software patents, then letting free software ignore the patents really defeats that purpose by giving the licensee a major disadvantage over free solutions.
I agree that the proliferation is a problem.
Free software is a better creation; available for anyone, rapidly Freely and normally for free or low cost. It also helps other creation by being directly available for use in other products and by being examinable so that even commercial products can easily use all of the ideas embedded in software that they can't use directly. Much of free software is created by volunteers or as a side issue by firms that get no benefit other than a good name from it. If the patent system interferes in any way with creation of free software, even by making a free software author think for an extra few minutes during creation of that software, then the patent system should be reviewed and considered for elimination.
There is one crucial and dominant situation where free software must be commercial software. Where companies need a guarantee. At this point, there is a commercial entity involved in the free software and the license should be assessed as a percentage of the fee for the guarantee. Fortunately this exactly matches with the point at which there is no longer a need to protect the freedom and working practices of volunteers delivering software for no cost.
One thing that would be a problem with it as applied to software patents is how to deal with free software when a company would not have been willing to license its patent for free.
I don't really see that that's a problem. If you limit licenses to 5% of sales price, then 5% of nothing is nothing. If you are talking about free software companies that are selling software for money then I don't see that it's much more of a problem for them to pay 5% than for another proprietary software company to pay 5%.
The real problem comes, and this is one of the things which shows why patents should never apply to software in the first case, when you start to apply fixed costs per patent. If there was just one patent in a software product, as is typical for a normal physical product, that might work. When you start to add five patents with every library you use it becomes totally stupid. That's the trouble with having software lumped in with a system which is designed to guarantee funding for pharmaceutical companies.
There's something that seems unsavory and wasteful about a business environment in which a company's stock value "fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing."
No, there's not. Do you see the bulk of silicon made in the USA? Thought so. Buy any consumer-grade electronics, and it will say Made in China. Made in Taiwan is already higher-end. I've been given some Christmas candy that was friggin' made in China. The only thing left is R&D. Research should lead to inventions, which should lead to patents.
In the end, if you are not doing your own manufacturing to some level you are in deep shit. To the extent that patents work as you described they are making the problem worse by putting of dealing with it. Innovation and R&D largely (though not completely) come from being inspired by practically involved in making, building, designing and manufacturing. For some time, people who used to be involved in those will be able to put out patents, but that is already slowing down (China is already starting to produce more patents than the US; within a few years they will start to produce better quality patents than the US). In the meantime, the "pure R&D" companies push the proper manufacturing companies out of the economy and mean that in the medium term, when those R&D companies begin to lose contact with real innovation, there will be a large collapse of the US.
This is an unhealthy environment, even for people in China, because the US still has the most massive military and the idiot politicians might start throwing that around more and more as a way of distracting from their serious problems at home. Serious wars have often been started by bad economic situations in countries with large armies.
Patents are a property;
What I really like about your comment here is that you begin by using grammar to make it clear that the word "property" means something completely different to you from what it means to the average Slashdot reader. I would normally say "patents are property" but I have this horrible feeling that you are legally right :-)
Other than that your comment is completely sensible in the context of patents as they are. However, I think what most of us are arguing is that patents are simply too powerful. If someone has developed a product which is later discovered to have been subject to a patent they shouldn't be at risk of losing the whole development costs. It's totally wrong that a person who has come up with an invention independently is completely limited by the patent that they have had no benefit from. There are plenty of ways of making patents softer; e.g. enforcing patent licensing and making a maximum patent license cost for all patents together of 5% of the product sale price. These would make patent rights much less of a direct "property" and more valuable as an incentive for real innovation.
Anyone seriously think that Apple wouldn't be making money from the iPhone if there were no patents at all? They can still prevent fakes and copies with trademark and copyright laws.
Which also applies to ARM. The primary protection of a processor design is copyright, and by the time you have gone away sufficiently from the design to no longer be covered by copyright you would probably be easier to start over. There's definitely plenty of extra difficulty in starting over caused by patents, but getting rid of them definitely doesn't rule out a business like ARM.
Why is the headline of this article focussed on Microsoft and the Xbox 720? Surely this is pure conjecture and can just as easily be applied to *any* PC or console game? I haven't RTFA as it'll be a load of made-up crap by the author.
Yes; it does seem that reading is a skill beyond many of the people stepping up to defend Microsoft from this accusation. From the fine article:
Because now the IT director of the state can put a cloud project on his CV and double his income at his next job.
s/There explanation/The explanation/ ;
There is a difference between "New Google account users forced to join Google+" and "New users tricked into joining Google+ but they can leave immediately if they want to". It's not a big difference; in a sense it's a totally stupid thing to be arguing about and you could easily have spun it for your side (try "the delete account option is hidden behind one mouse click and might be confusing to my cat"). It ends up, though, giving away the game. This is not about some people coming to tell us the news that Google has gone evil. This is about desperate people who are trying to make it seem as if Google is as evil as they are.
The thing about this is, that any serious news organisation would have contacted Google and got someone there to explain this. There explanation would have been lax; even pathetic, but it would have meant that instead of publishing a lie, you could publish a misrepresentation which could never be proven as a lie. What is with the mad rush to be evil? Even Satan knows that by holding off a bit you can get more evil for your money.
We all care; If Bing has to try to beat Google by getting better then there is hope of better things. If Google loses to Bing by getting worse then Microsoft won't feel any need to work to improve things.
Remember that Netscape, once they realised that Microsoft had found a way to destroy them with illegal market manipulation, panicked and started to rewrite their whole product which meant that, even if the US justice department had intervened earlier, there would have been little left to save.
I just went through the Google registration process. The whole article is a lie, of course; as you would expect from any Microsoft associated publication; your Google+ account is only activated later on by explicitly signing up. Unfortunately even I, who have done Google registration quite a few times, didn't realise that until after I had signed up for Google+ with my new account. I have verified that even if you make the same mistake as I did you can trivially delete your Google+ features from your Google account.
Summary: as usual recently the first post is someone who manages to get Microsoft sponsored lies into place. Unfortunately Google opened themselves up for this by having an unclear registration process.
Try feeding Facebook pages through Google Translate as I did recently trying to follow up a foreign news story. You will find that Facebook does a considerable load of blocking to make life difficult for Google. We also know that Twitter wants to charge for access to the data. This whole story is attempting to blame Google for the evil that Facebook and Twitter have done to themselves.
It's really funny the way that there's this big campaign recently by several companies which are obviously evil (Microsoft, Facebook etc.) against Google. I'm guessing that they are afraid that if someone started insisting that more companies weren't evil they would lose their competitive edge?
I'll pedantically disagree; simple questions ("is there a god" / "why are we here") can be very complex to answer. I was mostly just trying to say that I am not criticising their actions as being immoral, just saying that I think they are ineffective. Low cost ineffective actions are okay, but there is a real possibility that they pay a high legal cost because what they are doing is illegal.
What you have shown is morally wrong - it's breaking the intent of the law (and good citizenship) without crossing the threshold of being convictable in a court of law.
These are both "legally" wrong. If someone could prove that you did it; for example because you boast to that someone about it later and they manage to tape record the discussion; then you could be taken to court for the wink and the nod. Please remember law often deals with intent much more than action.
If I own/operate a Taxi service and someone uses it for illegal activities, I am not responsible.
That depends on whether or not I "induce" them to use my taxi for those illegal activities.
Example 1: I advertise my taxis as "the fastest way to get around town"; a hitman decides to use my taxi as a getaway vehicle. - this is okay.
Example 2: I advertise my taxis as "the best way for hitmen to get away from the scene"; A hitman phones up, explains he has a planned hit but wants to have a private way to pay for the taxi to make it difficult for the police to trace him. I answer that sure we can do that; anything for the customer; whilst we're at it would he like to hire a second taxi as a decoy? - this is not okay.
A hitman, or a conspirator in a murder, is something entirely different. That's an action (planning with or paying out to the perpetrator, specifically for said act).
The basic point in this case, if the police are to believed, is that they actually caught Megaupload in the process of helping people to use their service for uses they consider illegal. That makes megaupload much closer to Example 2.
Do me a favour if you will/can. Please name the airline and give a link to the accident report.
Generally I agree with your point; many people try to hide wherever they can; customers may not be able to get what they demand; but that doesn't mean that customers shouldn't make the demand in the first place.
That should read: "I think you aren't right."
I you aren't right, but this is a simple empirical question. Either these protests have a good effect or they don't. Let's come back to that question in a year or two. We might still not be able to agree, but at least we will have some practical facts to judge by.