The judge recognised in the case that what had been ruled could lead to an injustice, especially with the way technology had changed since the Sale of Goods Act was made law. "The judge said that if there was any injustice, it was up to parliament to change the law and not for the court," Gunning said.
He knows that. He's said it's wrong. That's just not the way the law was written. The article even says that there is draft legislation to address this.
Do you trust anyone to release HTML5 support for your 2-year-old mobile phone? Do you trust your mobile OS provider to pay licensing fees to MPEG-LA for your 2-year-old mobile phone?
Yes. I have Firefox on my phone. Even if they don't pay the license fee, I live in a patent free area and will add my own codec if I wish.
All signs point to h.264 as the HTML5 video codec of choice. There's nothing non-proprietary about it. It just so happens that Apple is part-owner.
That's not a "just happens"; that's a perfect example of them doing to you what they'd never let you do to them. Apple isn't worried about what happens after five years when commercial MPEG-LA licenses go up into the sky since even if they were having to pay up, I'm sure their returns will be greater.
I hate Flash as much as the next coder, but at least it's widely used already, proven to do particular things very well, not caught in the middle of an uncertain future (h.264 vs. Theora vs. VP8), and not currently threatening a patent war, the consequences of which are not yet known but will likely create their own bag of hurt for both developers and consumers.
Flash uses H.264 for video also. I don't see why Adobe should be more patent proof than Apple, though, to be honest, I haven't really studied them. Why do you think Flash will be safe? The only format there which has been specifically engineered to be patent free is Theora. It's also the only one for which nobody has identified a specific patent it infringes. That's going to be key when it comes to infringement since it means that you pay only damages (approx == to license fee), not for wilful infringement. Use H.264 commercially, however, and unless you are big media and already involved in the MPEG-LA, you will be breaking your patent license (which will only allow personal and non commercial use).
HTML5 will only be good if it's final implementation is good. The idea behind it is nice, but right now it has a lot of corporate fingers in it, playing for their own interests over yours. It will be a miracle if we can all come out of this without practically renting the web from MPEG-LA.
don't let them tell you the fight is lost. There's still lots to win in this. Many content producers are not stupid and won't want to pay licenses and it doesn't matter if 99% of computers have H264 as long as 90% or more have Theora.
And let me guess; you're a designer, but you've never really got design. Probably the type of person who thinks using a bit of computer generated text to make a photo is new and "edgy".
The web is RULED BY DESIGNERS.
No; the web is ruled by Google. With a little input from Microsoft and a beginning of a Facebook Military Junta in some of the less developed countries. It's key to understand that it is not an accident that none of these "big brands" mentioned have any important web presence. They are all brands which use the web as a supplement to their brand away from the internet. To some extent that's a choice; even wise; internet stuff can definitely cheapen a quality brand. To another extent it's a failure and a sign that within a generation these brands will die. Compare with brands like Apple or even Microsoft which existed before the internet but had the technical knowledge to transfer.
The kind of person, like you, who I'm sure designs flash pages without alternate texts is the kind of person who ends up with his clients pages unloved and unused. Hell, you probably worship at google conferences whilst failing to understand that the brilliance of Google's homepage design is it's lack of overdesign.
Designers easily realize those things you said if you explain it to them, but the fact remains: not all of them can learn/are equipped to be coders and they just don't have the tools to bang out HTML5 websites/Interactive CD/DVD-ROMs in the same amount of time they can do it in Flash.
Well duh. That's why they call it a "design house" and you don't go to an individual for your corporate needs. If your designer is too stupid to hire a programmer when he needs one (and for basic HTML we aren't even talking about that) then he isn't a good designer.
You should try interactive web design some time and have some big clients (for example, Nike, Motorola) who want whiz-bang shiny websites that have sound-enabled buttons + video (cue linux crowd/minimalist developer groans) delivered on ridiculously short timelines. No way can some of those be done in a timely manner in HTML5 right now with the tools available (text editor.)
HTML 5 is not even standardised yet. Already it's coming into much more than just text editors. All HTML editors will have support for it in a short time or will die themselves. Furthermore, there's a crucial difference at this stage. A whole load of the "design" you have to do in Flash just doesn't exist in HTML5. The video play stuff is directly part of the browser and you don't have to do it again. Basing your answer on a situation which is beginning to change at a mad rate is crazy.
The short answer on whether HTML5 will kill flash is summarized here:
Oh what originality; what a funny joke. Wow, a shame nobody ever thought of a page with just the word no for the LHC. The irony of a person who's afraid even to use flash to give his message is just superb. Not that I'd have been able to read it if he had. That a person as desperately committed to Flash as you appear to be has that is his best argument is sad. Being more serious though, of course Flash is going to hang on for some time. Cobol is still not dead. N However, within a year or two it's not going to be something you want to have on your CV.
It's the difference between a reputable used car and a cut and shut job. One will keep going for years. The other may just break in half and kill you. Trust your local nerd. Don't by Flashed computers.
And what designers often fail to realise is that the "web" is a creation. It's a "new" technological niche; soon it will be a very old one and then in some sense it will be dead. Of course, it will still be called the "web" but it will be a new niche with new tools and new situations. These technological niches are created by commercial interests and chosen by consumers influenced by marketing, sales people and the feelings of other people using them. Those other people include coders who are choosing where to target the next set of design tools.
The fundamental reason that Apple isn't using Flash is not whether it does things exactly according to their standard or not. The reason is that from the very start they have to start negotiating with another company who may or may not see things their way. Flash doesn't work on most mobile phones; it doesn't have a 64bit version for windows Windows. It doesn't have a version for Debian ARM. If you are developing a new technology; you can't rely on Flash to support it unless it's important to Adobe. Whether it's important to your company or not is more or less irrelevant unless you are willing to pay Adobe big bucks.
For end users, it's worse than that; what happens if you do get flash for your platform? They go and upgrade it. Do you trust Adobe to release the new version of Flash for your two year old mobile phone? Basically, if they choose not to, there's going to be nothing you, your friends or fellow phone users can do about it. For a company like Apple which likes to keep it's customers in upgrades, that's not the best situation.
In other words; Apple won't put up with the trouble of using proprietary software. Now, given what they deliver their customers, that's a bit hypocritical, but still it makes sense. It's the same reason that everybody who can should also be opting out of Flash.
Note: I take it for granted that all car analogies are bad, those two states are obviously mutual.
I want you to think of it like this. The bad analogies are the cars without V8 engines. The car analogies are like the cars with full stereo systems. Most analogies don't have V8 engines (are bad) and most analogies are car analogies (have a stereo). However, there are some analogies which have both stereos and v8 engines. Most importantly, there are only a few analogies which have V8 engines, but no stereo (good, non-car analogies).
There; a perfect example of a good car analogy. Vrooommm..
It won't be some do-gooder crusade bogged down by people that thing [sic] government should by [sic] your nanny.
Without the "doo-gooder crusade", wind power would never have got to the stage of being economic. That it's now becoming one of the cheapest forms of power is something that some lobby groups have been campaigning to try to stop for years.
Ah yes; the "I didn't sign this license agreement, my cat did" argument. I'm sure that'll help you lots when the MPEG-LA death squad come round your house. "You've got no right to torture me. It was my camera that did it. No; no please, not Battlefield Earth infinite loop."
If it were true that only the manufacturer had a license, you wouldn't have the right to create an H264 video at all. In theory every use of the patent; both manufacturing and actual video creation; requires an explicit license from the patent owner. In practice, normally, the manufacturer gets a license which covers all possible use of the equipment and covers you too.
However; at the present moment the MPEG-LA isn't really making much money out of H264. They are just growing the market. So they are giving out very cheap and very limited licenses for now and planning for worse later.
Think of this as being like GIF, where Unysis let the format become popular and then later started charging royalties. Except this time around, you don't get the chance to claim you didn't know about the patents because you've already accepted their free time limited license offer.
That was getting me really annoyed with the teacher's unions until this broke the spell..
The teachers union did not defend him.
"The current system works for no one," United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said, adding that the union "has made repeated attempts to work with the administration to resolve the rubber-room issue, but the administration has preferred to grandstand rather than solve it."
Perhaps you should read the articles you quote to the end???
When you buy an h.264 license, you're only indemnified against the patents the consortium holds, and you're explicitly not covered against anything else that was infringed along the way.
Not even that. If you notice, almost all H264 licenses, even those in expensive professional cameras, only cover personal and non commercial use. Don't dare use it on your web site, you could easily end up in breach of your H264 license.
typical terms:
Use of this product in any manner that complies with the MPEG-4 visual standard is prohibited, except for use by a consumer engaging in personal and non-commercial activities.
It's true; I have no idea what you mean by break standards, and I'm sure that, following MSs example, you can find a meaning that I didn't think of in advance and then claim I'm wrong. However, I think in this case, we can actually say every reasonable sense of "break standards" MS breaks the standards. E.g. MS's implementation of CSS in IE6 behaved in a way that was not according to the standards for many standards conformant CSS texts (MS's CSS implementation "broke the rules of the standard"). When these faults were reported to MS, despite having claimed conformance to standards, MS failed to fix IE6 (MS "broke it's promises to follow the standard").
Coming onto ODF and OOXML, we can start with the fact that there was one clear standard, ODF, that everybody had agreed on. Instead of joining an open process and ensuring that it's own needs were included, Microsoft "broke away from the standards process". Having done that, first Microsoft "broke the standards organisations" by ensuring that committes which had previously mainly consisted of technical experts were overloaded with Microsoft's commercial cronies. Then Microsoft "broke the standards it was trying to have implemented" by ensuring that the standards were at the same time incomplete ("do this as MS Word 2000"), inconsistent and unimplementable. Next Microsoft "broke the interoperability you would expect the standard to deliver" for ODF when Microsoft implemented ODF. Just recently, Microsoft has completed the circle by delivering an OOXML implementation which "broke the rules of the standard" by not following it. Microsoft has promised to to deliver a standards conforming implementation in 2015. The only question is, will Microsoft "break with it's standard practices" or will it "break it's promise to follow the standard?
Did you have another meaning of "break the standard" in mind?
At one point in time IE6 had the best standard conformance of any browser.
This point was after they had broken Netscape's back and at the point where they were afraid of anti-trust actions during development. In other words they are standards compliant when it doesn't help anyone else and as long as they are threatened with serious legal consequences. Their recent attacks on ODF and the scandal of OOXML shows that the claim that MS 'breaks standards' is completely reasonable. Ignoring standards is just one tool in many that MS uses to break standards.
Compare "There was an article in Time magazine about it 40 years ago" with the statement "30 years ago scientists were predicting a second ice age" (or for that mater "30 years ago a group of eminent climate scientists agreed that a second ice age is very likely in the near future"). Consider, as an equivalent example, the comparison between "Fox News reported a Ford Mustang found on the moon" with the statement "The SETI institute, with the backing of NASA has announced the discovery of an alien Ford factory on the moon".
maybe we should let patents expire once R&D costs are covered
That sounds fun. I can see lots and lots of parties^W complex development meetings in tech companies to ensure the costs are sufficient to never ever let the essential patents run out. I guess though the lawyers will get even more fun ensuring that you mostly pay copyright and trademark licenses whenever you want a new technology "IP" license so that nothing ever ever goes out of patent.
Considering AUO is a chinese company, maybe we should ignore their patents until they stop ignoring everybody else's.
Well, perhaps that's just a little hypocritical. The USA has been running around the world getting everyone to follow their patents. You have to "set an example" if you want to be convincing. China is, in a real way, just following your lead from the times when you used to ignore European imaginary property. Maybe after a hundred years or so of you showing your respect for their property, they'll show the appropriate respect for yours. More hopefully, maybe you'll realise that most of the idea is stupid in the first place.
And, the government backed industrial espionage while we are at it.
Perhaps ignoring the "government backed industrial espionage" isn't the best way to counteract it. Maybe you could begin by asking the CIA to stop spying on European (and other foreign civilian) firms and handing that information on to US based companies. Once that's done, maybe some general international agreements for everyone to stop and penalties for those that continue, combined with arresting CEOs and CTOs of companies that fail to implement effective security measures would help.
Agreed 100%. However, the main thing to remember here is it's exactly "like any large group dedicated to a cause". The fact that you hear so much about these people all the time whilst nobody mentions anti-environmentalist crazies should etc. etc. be the sign you need to know which side the media is on.
Actually I think this is quite typical for "science based" activities. It's very frustrating to be a doctor, be asked "what should I do to save my child; A or B?" and have to answer "no idea; neither is known to help". You end up justifying a whole load of pseudo science with "well, it won't hurt and might help; I need to do something". Look up "evidence based medicine" one day for an interesting take on the subject.
Yes and no. Both actually mainly deal in feelings and money. Case in point: does anyone actually know the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of any action or object ?
yes.
Is it better to get a $30 light bulb, or a $0.5 one and give $49.5 to a charity ?
Stupid straw man; a typical energy efficient light bulb is below $4 and actually saves you money over it's lifecycle. Give the money you save by going energy efficient to charity. Note that even mercury emissions are lower with CFL than with incandescent bulbs (something I just learned reading up for this comment).
Is planting a tree in my garden and then watering it a "good" move ?
They say there's no such thing as a stupid question, but that was one. It depends where your garden is. If it's in a region where trees grow naturally, it will soon stop needing water, so yes plant it. If it blocks out natural light on your balcony and you start needing to use electricity don't. If you live in a desert, plant a cactus instead. If you are watering it lots then don't. If you don't know and really care, hire an environmental scientist to tell you.
Actually, should I not actually use more water, because the profits generated go into improving supply and efficiency ? and so on...
broken window fallacy which has been covered on Slashdot so often I think your post could count as a troll; if you have spare money put it into charities and companies developing renewable energy which is starting to become truly cost effective.
At least for most companies I know (and this is basically straight from the ITIL standards) that's impossible. There is basically one correct point of contact. No matter what your issue, you call customer support (as Chen did) and then they are responsible to route the call on. You can't "call the wrong department". They don't have a public phone number.
My company sells serious technical support to serious people. If a customer calls us and says they've found something strange and want advice, we send someone round to visit. Needless to say, this costs (literally) millions per year and isn't quite relevant in this case:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Right; but that was done custom for Nokia. It isn't available for general Debian.
Read The Fucking Article.
The judge recognised in the case that what had been ruled could lead to an injustice, especially with the way technology had changed since the Sale of Goods Act was made law. "The judge said that if there was any injustice, it was up to parliament to change the law and not for the court," Gunning said.
He knows that. He's said it's wrong. That's just not the way the law was written. The article even says that there is draft legislation to address this.
Do you trust anyone to release HTML5 support for your 2-year-old mobile phone? Do you trust your mobile OS provider to pay licensing fees to MPEG-LA for your 2-year-old mobile phone?
Yes. I have Firefox on my phone. Even if they don't pay the license fee, I live in a patent free area and will add my own codec if I wish.
All signs point to h.264 as the HTML5 video codec of choice. There's nothing non-proprietary about it. It just so happens that Apple is part-owner.
That's not a "just happens"; that's a perfect example of them doing to you what they'd never let you do to them. Apple isn't worried about what happens after five years when commercial MPEG-LA licenses go up into the sky since even if they were having to pay up, I'm sure their returns will be greater.
I hate Flash as much as the next coder, but at least it's widely used already, proven to do particular things very well, not caught in the middle of an uncertain future (h.264 vs. Theora vs. VP8), and not currently threatening a patent war, the consequences of which are not yet known but will likely create their own bag of hurt for both developers and consumers.
Flash uses H.264 for video also. I don't see why Adobe should be more patent proof than Apple, though, to be honest, I haven't really studied them. Why do you think Flash will be safe? The only format there which has been specifically engineered to be patent free is Theora. It's also the only one for which nobody has identified a specific patent it infringes. That's going to be key when it comes to infringement since it means that you pay only damages (approx == to license fee), not for wilful infringement. Use H.264 commercially, however, and unless you are big media and already involved in the MPEG-LA, you will be breaking your patent license (which will only allow personal and non commercial use).
HTML5 will only be good if it's final implementation is good. The idea behind it is nice, but right now it has a lot of corporate fingers in it, playing for their own interests over yours. It will be a miracle if we can all come out of this without practically renting the web from MPEG-LA.
don't let them tell you the fight is lost. There's still lots to win in this. Many content producers are not stupid and won't want to pay licenses and it doesn't matter if 99% of computers have H264 as long as 90% or more have Theora.
And let me guess; you're a designer, but you've never really got design. Probably the type of person who thinks using a bit of computer generated text to make a photo is new and "edgy".
The web is RULED BY DESIGNERS.
No; the web is ruled by Google. With a little input from Microsoft and a beginning of a Facebook Military Junta in some of the less developed countries. It's key to understand that it is not an accident that none of these "big brands" mentioned have any important web presence. They are all brands which use the web as a supplement to their brand away from the internet. To some extent that's a choice; even wise; internet stuff can definitely cheapen a quality brand. To another extent it's a failure and a sign that within a generation these brands will die. Compare with brands like Apple or even Microsoft which existed before the internet but had the technical knowledge to transfer.
The kind of person, like you, who I'm sure designs flash pages without alternate texts is the kind of person who ends up with his clients pages unloved and unused. Hell, you probably worship at google conferences whilst failing to understand that the brilliance of Google's homepage design is it's lack of overdesign.
Designers easily realize those things you said if you explain it to them, but the fact remains: not all of them can learn/are equipped to be coders and they just don't have the tools to bang out HTML5 websites/Interactive CD/DVD-ROMs in the same amount of time they can do it in Flash.
Well duh. That's why they call it a "design house" and you don't go to an individual for your corporate needs. If your designer is too stupid to hire a programmer when he needs one (and for basic HTML we aren't even talking about that) then he isn't a good designer.
You should try interactive web design some time and have some big clients (for example, Nike, Motorola) who want whiz-bang shiny websites that have sound-enabled buttons + video (cue linux crowd/minimalist developer groans) delivered on ridiculously short timelines. No way can some of those be done in a timely manner in HTML5 right now with the tools available (text editor.)
HTML 5 is not even standardised yet. Already it's coming into much more than just text editors. All HTML editors will have support for it in a short time or will die themselves. Furthermore, there's a crucial difference at this stage. A whole load of the "design" you have to do in Flash just doesn't exist in HTML5. The video play stuff is directly part of the browser and you don't have to do it again. Basing your answer on a situation which is beginning to change at a mad rate is crazy.
The short answer on whether HTML5 will kill flash is summarized here:
Oh what originality; what a funny joke. Wow, a shame nobody ever thought of a page with just the word no for the LHC. The irony of a person who's afraid even to use flash to give his message is just superb. Not that I'd have been able to read it if he had. That a person as desperately committed to Flash as you appear to be has that is his best argument is sad. Being more serious though, of course Flash is going to hang on for some time. Cobol is still not dead. N However, within a year or two it's not going to be something you want to have on your CV.
Cheerios and have a nice weekend!
and yourself; and yourself.
It's the difference between a reputable used car and a cut and shut job. One will keep going for years. The other may just break in half and kill you. Trust your local nerd. Don't by Flashed computers.
And what designers often fail to realise is that the "web" is a creation. It's a "new" technological niche; soon it will be a very old one and then in some sense it will be dead. Of course, it will still be called the "web" but it will be a new niche with new tools and new situations. These technological niches are created by commercial interests and chosen by consumers influenced by marketing, sales people and the feelings of other people using them. Those other people include coders who are choosing where to target the next set of design tools.
The fundamental reason that Apple isn't using Flash is not whether it does things exactly according to their standard or not. The reason is that from the very start they have to start negotiating with another company who may or may not see things their way. Flash doesn't work on most mobile phones; it doesn't have a 64bit version for windows Windows. It doesn't have a version for Debian ARM. If you are developing a new technology; you can't rely on Flash to support it unless it's important to Adobe. Whether it's important to your company or not is more or less irrelevant unless you are willing to pay Adobe big bucks.
For end users, it's worse than that; what happens if you do get flash for your platform? They go and upgrade it. Do you trust Adobe to release the new version of Flash for your two year old mobile phone? Basically, if they choose not to, there's going to be nothing you, your friends or fellow phone users can do about it. For a company like Apple which likes to keep it's customers in upgrades, that's not the best situation.
In other words; Apple won't put up with the trouble of using proprietary software. Now, given what they deliver their customers, that's a bit hypocritical, but still it makes sense. It's the same reason that everybody who can should also be opting out of Flash.
Note: I take it for granted that all car analogies are bad, those two states are obviously mutual.
I want you to think of it like this. The bad analogies are the cars without V8 engines. The car analogies are like the cars with full stereo systems. Most analogies don't have V8 engines (are bad) and most analogies are car analogies (have a stereo). However, there are some analogies which have both stereos and v8 engines. Most importantly, there are only a few analogies which have V8 engines, but no stereo (good, non-car analogies).
There; a perfect example of a good car analogy. Vrooommm..
It won't be some do-gooder crusade bogged down by people that thing [sic] government should by [sic] your nanny.
Without the "doo-gooder crusade", wind power would never have got to the stage of being economic. That it's now becoming one of the cheapest forms of power is something that some lobby groups have been campaigning to try to stop for years.
Ah yes; the "I didn't sign this license agreement, my cat did" argument. I'm sure that'll help you lots when the MPEG-LA death squad come round your house. "You've got no right to torture me. It was my camera that did it. No; no please, not Battlefield Earth infinite loop."
If it were true that only the manufacturer had a license, you wouldn't have the right to create an H264 video at all. In theory every use of the patent; both manufacturing and actual video creation; requires an explicit license from the patent owner. In practice, normally, the manufacturer gets a license which covers all possible use of the equipment and covers you too.
However; at the present moment the MPEG-LA isn't really making much money out of H264. They are just growing the market. So they are giving out very cheap and very limited licenses for now and planning for worse later.
Think of this as being like GIF, where Unysis let the format become popular and then later started charging royalties. Except this time around, you don't get the chance to claim you didn't know about the patents because you've already accepted their free time limited license offer.
The teachers union did not defend him.
"The current system works for no one," United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said, adding that the union "has made repeated attempts to work with the administration to resolve the rubber-room issue, but the administration has preferred to grandstand rather than solve it."
Perhaps you should read the articles you quote to the end???
When you buy an h.264 license, you're only indemnified against the patents the consortium holds, and you're explicitly not covered against anything else that was infringed along the way.
Not even that. If you notice, almost all H264 licenses, even those in expensive professional cameras, only cover personal and non commercial use. Don't dare use it on your web site, you could easily end up in breach of your H264 license.
typical terms:
Coming onto ODF and OOXML, we can start with the fact that there was one clear standard, ODF, that everybody had agreed on. Instead of joining an open process and ensuring that it's own needs were included, Microsoft "broke away from the standards process". Having done that, first Microsoft "broke the standards organisations " by ensuring that committes which had previously mainly consisted of technical experts were overloaded with Microsoft's commercial cronies. Then Microsoft "broke the standards it was trying to have implemented " by ensuring that the standards were at the same time incomplete ("do this as MS Word 2000"), inconsistent and unimplementable. Next Microsoft "broke the interoperability you would expect the standard to deliver" for ODF when Microsoft implemented ODF. Just recently, Microsoft has completed the circle by delivering an OOXML implementation which "broke the rules of the standard" by not following it. Microsoft has promised to to deliver a standards conforming implementation in 2015. The only question is, will Microsoft "break with it's standard practices" or will it "break it's promise to follow the standard? Did you have another meaning of "break the standard" in mind?
At one point in time IE6 had the best standard conformance of any browser.
This point was after they had broken Netscape's back and at the point where they were afraid of anti-trust actions during development. In other words they are standards compliant when it doesn't help anyone else and as long as they are threatened with serious legal consequences. Their recent attacks on ODF and the scandal of OOXML shows that the claim that MS 'breaks standards' is completely reasonable. Ignoring standards is just one tool in many that MS uses to break standards.
Compare "There was an article in Time magazine about it 40 years ago" with the statement "30 years ago scientists were predicting a second ice age" (or for that mater "30 years ago a group of eminent climate scientists agreed that a second ice age is very likely in the near future"). Consider, as an equivalent example, the comparison between "Fox News reported a Ford Mustang found on the moon" with the statement "The SETI institute, with the backing of NASA has announced the discovery of an alien Ford factory on the moon".
Java has forced objectification whilst at the same time lacking proper introversion. Since we most people here prefer lisping, especially the Pailinites that's just not acceptable.
That is a very traditional IBM feature, also directly supported in COBOL for the good reason that it's the way money works.
How is BCD a benefit in this case?
maybe we should let patents expire once R&D costs are covered
That sounds fun. I can see lots and lots of parties^W complex development meetings in tech companies to ensure the costs are sufficient to never ever let the essential patents run out. I guess though the lawyers will get even more fun ensuring that you mostly pay copyright and trademark licenses whenever you want a new technology "IP" license so that nothing ever ever goes out of patent.
And who wrote the law that allowed the person to hire the lawyer to sue? Hint; most politicians have law degrees. This is not a coincidence.
Considering AUO is a chinese company, maybe we should ignore their patents until they stop ignoring everybody else's.
Well, perhaps that's just a little hypocritical. The USA has been running around the world getting everyone to follow their patents. You have to "set an example" if you want to be convincing. China is, in a real way, just following your lead from the times when you used to ignore European imaginary property. Maybe after a hundred years or so of you showing your respect for their property, they'll show the appropriate respect for yours. More hopefully, maybe you'll realise that most of the idea is stupid in the first place.
And, the government backed industrial espionage while we are at it.
Perhaps ignoring the "government backed industrial espionage" isn't the best way to counteract it. Maybe you could begin by asking the CIA to stop spying on European (and other foreign civilian) firms and handing that information on to US based companies. Once that's done, maybe some general international agreements for everyone to stop and penalties for those that continue, combined with arresting CEOs and CTOs of companies that fail to implement effective security measures would help.
Agreed 100%. However, the main thing to remember here is it's exactly "like any large group dedicated to a cause". The fact that you hear so much about these people all the time whilst nobody mentions anti-environmentalist crazies should etc. etc. be the sign you need to know which side the media is on.
Actually I think this is quite typical for "science based" activities. It's very frustrating to be a doctor, be asked "what should I do to save my child; A or B?" and have to answer "no idea; neither is known to help". You end up justifying a whole load of pseudo science with "well, it won't hurt and might help; I need to do something". Look up "evidence based medicine" one day for an interesting take on the subject.
Yes and no. Both actually mainly deal in feelings and money. Case in point: does anyone actually know the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of any action or object ?
yes.
Is it better to get a $30 light bulb, or a $0.5 one and give $49.5 to a charity ?
Stupid straw man; a typical energy efficient light bulb is below $4 and actually saves you money over it's lifecycle. Give the money you save by going energy efficient to charity. Note that even mercury emissions are lower with CFL than with incandescent bulbs (something I just learned reading up for this comment).
Is planting a tree in my garden and then watering it a "good" move ?
They say there's no such thing as a stupid question, but that was one. It depends where your garden is. If it's in a region where trees grow naturally, it will soon stop needing water, so yes plant it. If it blocks out natural light on your balcony and you start needing to use electricity don't. If you live in a desert, plant a cactus instead. If you are watering it lots then don't. If you don't know and really care, hire an environmental scientist to tell you.
Actually, should I not actually use more water, because the profits generated go into improving supply and efficiency ? and so on...
broken window fallacy which has been covered on Slashdot so often I think your post could count as a troll; if you have spare money put it into charities and companies developing renewable energy which is starting to become truly cost effective.
At least for most companies I know (and this is basically straight from the ITIL standards) that's impossible. There is basically one correct point of contact. No matter what your issue, you call customer support (as Chen did) and then they are responsible to route the call on. You can't "call the wrong department". They don't have a public phone number.
My company sells serious technical support to serious people. If a customer calls us and says they've found something strange and want advice, we send someone round to visit. Needless to say, this costs (literally) millions per year and isn't quite relevant in this case :-)