... as long as US is the most powerful military power in the world. Since 2-nd World War oil (and by extension - USD backed by oil) was used as primary mean for US to control other countries and as asource of extraordinary benefits. Any nation trying to contest this state of affairs was pushed back with all possible means ("bringing democracy" included). Now as we've reached peak oil, US grip on the rest of the world will weaken unless they find some other means to maintain it. My bet is that IP in general and GMO's IP in particular is main contender to replace oil as USD collateral. Expect all countries trying to get rid of US-mandated IP laws to be forced back in line with all possible means (with "bringing democracy" included - if necessary).
What a bunch of fucks. It seems that we won't get rid of attempts of pushing more or less fascist copyright regulation (with censorship attached) until we get rid of them.
... if other charges won't stick. Given how "just" is their DoJ, I think they'll lock him down forever the moment he appears in US, citing some obscure laws plus more or less fabricated "evidence" (or even without charges). They will keep him locked (in solitary confinement if needed) as long as he pleads guilty and signs a list of charges pre-written for him by US authorities. In his case going to a country whose legal system has morphed into something akin banana republic is a legal equivalent of suicide.
I haven't thinking it this way (till now). This seems to be an issue with everything financial industry touches today. Be it IP, medical costs, external costs pushed by business onto public (GoM, Fukushima), external costs caused by asset stripping etc. - most of these things (and many others) can be interpreted as a form of "inflation" caused by bad incentives resulting from bad accounting. Financials are propably the root cause of most of these abominations and should be decimated before we move on to solving things like overpriced trivial patents.
My (somwhat conspirational) take is that this is intentional. At the beginning of this chain are investors, bankers etc. who are pulling all strings (by investing, lending etc.) - finance sector in general. At the end of it are consumers who suffer all negative consequences of this mess (indirectly) and pay lawyers' bills. From the point of view of financiers the best company is the one they've most invested in and in our case this is Apple by far. So, financeers will use all their influence to make Apple bigger, which - given their current huge market share and profits - means monopoly. The same wall street estabullshitment that was able to steal trillions of dollars in (more or less direct) bailouts will use its influence to make sure Apple remains so profitable, regardless of mayhem caused in the process. Will this mean killing all the innovation, let's be it. In this particular case ITU will ensure that all competitors currently bullied by Apple will remain toothless. It this won't help, expect some crazy legislation aimed at preventing competition in mobile space. This is crony capitalism at its best - wall street crooks protecting their shiny, "fruity" investment.
Think of it as "money is speech" issue. With their infinite pockets they're able to ram through UPSTO any kind of crap they want. Plus now that they're too big to ensure future growth conventional way, they are moving to rent-seeking - with monopoly rent being the most attractive options for them. Getting rid of any competition and then squeezing last drops od market (hopefully for them - monopolized) is the only way forward for them and they'll try to accomplish this with any possible method/tool at their disposal.
In a non-corrupt system someone caring for free-market being in fact free should decide splitting them into a few smaller entities the moment they've started their dirty patent games. In reality it is not going to happen. With virtually every major hedge fund/pension fund/investment bank having at least some Apple stock entire Wall-Street estabullshitment is now behind them. And by extension - all government sock puppets of Wall Street will also support them to the last possible moment (and given how they treat bankers - it means forever).
Expect this dirty patent skirmish to continue forever - at least in forseeable future.
Actually I'm using CentOS at some deployments and Red Hat at others. Some customers require official paid support and I don't mind recommend them paying Red Hat for this - they tend to use this money to develop better products and do release source code for most of them. Contrast this with M$ where money you pay is often used to pay off patent lawyers running their shakeout operations, BSA etc.
What I'm trying to say is that there is a significant omision in their support matrix and this is clearly political decision.
Red Hat apparently not supported. Yet CentOS is. And lots of others. The biggest and most important one omitted for some reason. Me thinks it smells like divide & conquer. Anybody (still) believes in M$ intentions ? "Honest Microsoft" ? Isn't it an oxymoron ?
I'm still reading about "religious zealots" but IMHO zealotry alone wouldn't make such big impact. There is big money behind this "zealotry" and someone sponsoring it: lobbyists, think-tanks, corrupt governors won't do anything without sponsorship. It's pretty much like most of radical muslim terrorists US pretends to fight with that are sponsored by billions and billions of petro-dollars from Saudi Arabia (yet US government pretends Saudis to be their ally). Me think our old neocon friends with their corporate buddies are sponsoring it: for example, mixing science and beliefs would would let them declare wars they perpetrate as "holy" cutting off any discussion and squashing dissent. Thus I thing fighting off this creationist crap and all stuff and other stupid things spewed by religious right should be top priority for any wise person. Not letting them expand is a must. Otherwise or we'll see religious right installing nazi-like facism at some point.
Let's assume for a moment that most people didn't really believe in this creationist crap but were conformist enough to respond this way. Now let's assume that the same radical-christian-creationist-freaks who spew this creationist crap all over the place would like to burn some scientist because in their opinion he's a heretic ? What would this "silent majority" do ? Would they be conformist like in this poll ? Would they show enough determination to stop radical idiots from killing others for their misguided beliefs ? How does it differ from casual good muslims becoming conformist or passive to actions of radical isamists ? Why is majority of people passive to something that might push us into dark ages once again ?
We are entering dangerous times. Someone is investing lots of money in order to make hard facts and beliefs blend. See all those mega-churches that are in fact nothing more than just dangerous sects, see all those "museums", publications. See lobbyists and their money pushed to politicians in order to make creationism credible and taught in schools. Such big money does not come from nowhere. Who needs it and for what purpose ?
Having used up all my karma points yesterday, I can only second this. With one clarification: even for mechanical physical devices contemporary patent system is a scam designed to protect rich crooks / big corps, protect them from competition of small inventors and rip small inventors off their work. Newest "achievments" in patenting-everything-under-the-sun field seem for me even to be designed to block progress, so estabilished big fat corporation would do nothing (except of "cost cutting" a.k.a. externalities), yet earn their God-given big fat profits.
I've seen harm from patent system first hand - it bankrupted two small inventors just because they were naive enough to try playing to the rules. They invented quite significant efficiency improvement (exceeding 10% according to their calculations) to combustion engines. They filed patent applications in some more important regions and this thing alone drained them financially to the point they were unable to do anything else - it seems that cost awarding patent on single invention in important patent offices is in order of hundreds of millions of dollars and can easily exceed a million. At this point those folks were unable to do any real work on it, so they've sent offers to a few car producers. Car producers responded with offering them 10% of that they've paid for patent applications and decided to sit down and wait until those folks (indebted at this point) will become desperate. Those folks had no other way - shoud they omit an important patent regime, some big fat will patent their invention here and effectively block them from trying to sell invention to anyone else, sit down and wait until they give away all their work for pennies on the dollar. You see - either way you end up in the same fucked up position of bankrupcy (for them it effectively means debt serfdom as our local bankrupcy laws are so broken).
This is how this system works. It is designed to royally fuck every small inventor and protect corporate scums who prefer raping small investors who happen to be naive enough to play by the rules. It is designed to transform small investors into modern debt serfs or to give away their valuable inventions to big fat cats. In some areas, like medicine it is even more egregious - it allows corporations to patent publicly funded research results, it allows patenting substances that can be used to research/produce medicaments that can save lives, it allows patenting genes and blocking further research on them. It propably costs us hudreds of thousands of lives a year and hudreds of billions (if not trillions) dollars every year.
Given amount of propaganda spewed by virtually every media outlet I can understand why so many people still think patent system is so great. I also understand that some individuals are smart enough to find loopholes and profit from it (that's why you have professors living off patents they've granted using financial support of their universities - but in most cases not pursuing any meaningful work after they've awarded a patent). But in terms of ways patent system impacts our everyday life - I would say it actually harms it in a huge way. Getting rid of it in its entirety (not just software patents) would make so many important things developing much, much faster.
For almost 50 years we lived under threat of instant vaporization. Both NATO and Soviets assumed that opponent army reinforcements will be stopped at Vistula line by tactical nuclear strike. Revealed war plans assumed that two million Poles will die in such strike and most parts of central Poland will become useless, radioactive wasteland for a number of years. Here in Poland we were trained how to survive nearby nuclear strike on a regular basis.
Things changed in 1990, when Cold War was finally over. Everyone became a friend. Some we liked some more [Americans] than others [Russians] for obvious reasons but it didn't really matter much.
Now, after 20 years of relative safety some psychotic US leader came here and started messing around with their 'anti-missile' shit. Arms race is back. Let assume that they'll install a system that will intercept 50% of russian missiles. Rational response I would expect from Russian is to have, say, twice as many nuclear tipped missiles they have now. I know this, Russians know this. Psychotic US politicians know this as well. So we have to live once again under threat of (instant) vaporization just because some dysfunctional psychopaths who happen to have too much power in their hands decided to pursue their geopolitical games. Having seen how these games have played out in, say, Middle East I'm really scared. Various "developments" since 2001 made me confident that United States will spark 3-rd world war sooner or later. I was hoping that in all the mess between US, Russia, China and Middle East - Poland will become a kind of place everyone forgot about, so we'll be relatively safe. Now I'm losing that hope - some whilte collar fucks along with our local puppet government placed us back into spotlight.
My message to US politicians and millitary: get the fuck out of here NOW. Take your anti-ballistic toys with you and shove them deep into your ass. You killed millions of people in the Middle East, destroyed so many countries. We don't want you to pursue the same psychotic games in Poland.
Patent disputes magially 'settled' just prior to invalidating Microsoft's bogus patents. Abandoning Android in favor of yet-to-be-developed Microsoft's software (hello, Nokia!). Now pulling off Linux-related magazines. It seems that Micro$oft's $300M "investment" into B&N starts paying off immediately.
I only partially agree with this. Starving big corps was possible few years ago. Then 2008 meltdown came and it became apparent that if they won't get money from you voluntarily paying for some goods/services, they'll get it anyway from you taxes (eg. bailouts), lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts (army) or by forcing bills for phony services down your throat (eg. Obama's healthcare 'reform').
Add ever-rising intimidation of citizens to this (TSA, so called "war on terror", militarization and brutalization of police forces, ever-rising incarcerated population), add dual-standard when it comes to law enforcement (Corzine/MF Global fiasco etc.) and what you get at the end is corporate fascist state. So much for freedoms and constitution.
If those corporate fucks won't get what they want from you voluntarily, they'll get it by other means. I'm not sure there is a good way to get out of this trap - peaceful civil disobedience is propably the only thing left.
And their "overreaction" was a little bit late. They let this device get onto plane and then "panicked" when someone left it.
My feeling is that those TSA pigs wouldn't be happier. They found justification for their crap existence and secured some more of future funding for their parasitic operations.
Regarding all this "terrorist" stuff american crap-media is pushing down our throats every day: stop bombing those folks in Middle East and stop covering Israel's criminal actions and you'll neutralize way more terrorist threat than with all these expensive TSA thugs and equipment.
Sony's incompetent executives seem to be stuck in 90s - they're dinosaurs, just like all this RIAA crap-management folks. The only thing that would push them back to reality (or burn them down) is strong competition from NEW technologies (not just cheaper knockoffs like Xbox).
I would like to see speedy chips like Tegra3 built directly into TVs (by Samsung and others) and Android running these chips. I would like to see well ironed out gaming API for such devices, maybe even some standard gaming engine (or two) with some kind of 'tech 5'-like algorithms/tools that would enable easy game development across whole spectrum of devices and screen sizes. With easy to use and effective authoring tools (why not use kinect-like device paired with some camera to quickly generate objects and content for a game?).
I would also see it as open as development tools for Android are today and as easy to buy games as Android Market is today. I would like to see Sony crap-executives feeling heat from actual competition, not from other dinosaurs like Microsoft.
You see, all hardware puzzles to above vision are already in place. That is needed is some will, work and innovation (and Sony/M$ not trying to take it down with some kind of crap-lawsuits).
Geez. Those so called "captains of industry" are worse than soviet "nomenklatura" 30 years ago. They're openly pushing things against the will of "we the people" (and I'm not talking about government but about big business acquiring real power over us). Those fucks even don't hide it anymore.
My feeling is we should not stop when they stop - we need to force them out of their powerful positions and bring them to justice. Should current laws be enforced, most of them would land in prison. If most of our big banks and corporations bring us nothing but corporate crime, we'd be way better without them. Forget about this "economies of scale" and "benefits of globalization" crap - indirect public costs associated with this seem to be way higher than gains thanks to "externalities".
If you look more carefully how it actually looks. In fact, they have around 10B in actual cash (or cash equivalents), around 15-20B in what they call "short term marketable securities" and the rest (~70B) in something they call "long term marketable securities". Since they crossed 30B, virtually all of their surplus goes into that third category. What do they mean by "cash equivalents" ? Do, say, treasuries count as cash equivalents or marketable securities ? The question that is most interesting to me is: how good are these "long term marketable securities" ?
One option would be some long term national bonds or other very liquid stuff and this would be fine. If they'd need this cash at some point, they'd be able to use it in an instant.
Second option is that these are some crap quality, illiquid stuff they buy from financial institutions, having their stock prices pumped and all government beurocrats bought in exchange. In other words - they feed Wall Street institutions with real money (as opposed to some illiquid derivative instruments) and have their stock price pumped in exchange.
There might be more options, but fundamental question for me is that about quality of their "long term marketable securities".
Latest developments in crisis/bailouts/etc. arena indicate that "average outcome from a mob" can't be worse than decisions made by corrupt governments on behalf of their cronies and sponsors.
Look at Iceland. Angry mob stood up and managed to override government's attempt to push whole nation into debt peonage. As a nation they won ! Their recession is behind them and their future prospects are pretty good. Compare this to Greece where angry mob did not manage to override their government attempt to put Greeks into debt peonage. They're now fast approaching 3-rd world status and now they have a bunch of eu/bankers' appointees instead of democratically elected government.
Having said that, I'd rather respect "mob's decision" than that of corrupt government.
Direct democracy ? Now that we have all necessary means to perform referendums in cheap and efficient way, we can limit governments to merely doing paperwork and let "we, the people" make actual decisions.
... brought to you by your lovely government. You may think of it as of some kind of conspiracy theory but we are here. Degradation of our freedom of speech is directly linked with degradation of our (western) economic system and in my opinion this is just the beginning as long-term economic deterioration shows no signs of slowing down.
Governments (and their corporate sponsors) always wanted to shut down or marginalize independent media that show the world as it is, not as government + corporate oligarchy wants us to see. But freedom of speech was too deeply embedded in our culture and social costs associated with such moves tended to be too high compared to potential gains. Everything changed last year. Since Arab Spring and subsequent Occupy protests spreading like a wildfire, traditional media losing credibility caught again and again (thanks to blatant lies & omissions) and deteriorating economy pushing more and more people onto streets, our ruling class realized that time is running out.
Efforts to shut everybody up went into turbo mode last year - SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, tens of bigger or smaller initiatives in various countries. Sadly, I expect that this year will be even worse. I expect further economic deterioration as most of world economy is dying under crushing debt with no chances of discharging it (thanks to our corrupt politicians and their sponsors), let alone paying it off (we don't have enough natural resources to pay it off!). Ongoing financial "world-war" Jim Rickards writes about in his excelent book makes things even worse. What we desperately need is a round of healthy (if possible - orderly) defaults that will clean up most of this debt (odious or not) and let the economy restart. Iceland took this route and now they have real, healthy recovery with good prospects in the future. Note how silent our corporate media are about Iceland. Greece on the other hand is being fucked the same latin american style used in 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Once again corporate media blatantly lie about this urgent 'need of austerity' and 'Greeks fault' but when you look at it closer - it's good old, well tested latino scenario which turned up to be fraud long time ago. Thanks to banksters and their stooges (that is, politicians) few years from now Greece will become a regular 3-rd world country.
My sad feeling is that in order to keep current (broken) system running our ruling elites will block any possibilities to resolve this situation and will cover up all frauds and crimes of themselves and their friends. Economic situation will slowly deteriorate until must of us reach 3-rd world conditions and our ruling elites will treat us with Radio-Yerevan-style propaganda backed by cooked economic numbers to show how wonderfully great our economy is, completely ignoring reality for 99% of citizens. All voices of dissent will be silenced, marginalized, blatantly censored or marked as "terrorists" and held in jail.
Welcome to 'iron fist' phase every civilization comes through before it dies (yet it's still not too late to overturn this).
You assume that they provide liquidity which is not true with HFT and that $.01 a share cheap which is also not the case for HFT traders.
Regarding liquidity, HFT provides an illusion of liquidity. When a bunch of computers banging, say, 500 shares between themselves over and over again 500 times a day will generate 250000 volume but this does not mean that market is so deep. You see, there are only 500 shares in use. When some big, traditional (institutional?) investor fooled by this artificially high volume decides to sell 100000 shares, it will impact market much higher than if that 250000 (or even half of that) was a real volume. To make thing worse, computers trading these shares will propably detect and try to take of this incurring even more losses to investor (potential gains for HFT trader) and potentially cause some form of flash crash. In the end, traditional investors typically get much worse off with HFT than without HFT, even seeing [lack of] real volume.
Regarding $0.01 - remember that this is $0.01 times billions. It results with hundreds of millions of dollars getting sucked off market by HFT operators instead of being directed into actual, productive investments (thing that stock markets are supposed to be created for). That this money is sucked off penny by penny does not matter. It's still real investments deprived of hundreds of millions of dollars every day by Goldman Sachs and its cronies.
In my opinion HFT is a fraud, nothing more. The fact that it's (still) legal is just a sign how corrupt whole system is.
I'm not against nuclear power but we still have serious issues to be solved. Most serious one is corporate negligence (a.k.a. "cost cutting") and general corruption at NRC. In AP1000 case nobody addressed issues resulting from Fukushima fiasco.
Heh, this is the exact reason I've switched in other direction: from Ubuntu to Debian. After two failed upgrades to 11.10 (both resulted in unbootable system that requires tweaking to bring it back and then left me without true-and-tested classic GNOME desktop, I've happily switched to Debian which now provides some of the best parts Ubuntu developed in recent years. Debian 6 reminds me Ubuntu 8.04 which IMO was the best Ubuntu distribution ever released (in terms of stability).
So our lovely government is carefully listening to every tweet, text message and slashdot comment - ready to bust you as soon as they find something that makes you 'suspected terrorist' - and keep you locked without charge and without recourse to court of law (see latest NDAA).
On the other hand, Mr Corzine was able to directly steal more than $1bln from his customers and the same government fucks are unable to track it and they try to convince everybody that this money has been 'vapourized'. This is despite the fact that all electronic financial transactions are logged to the point that you're able to track every penny at any time.
Having said that, any form of apologizing such "anti-terror" actions tells you how out of touch apologist is. If this does not show you how low your government has fallen, then nothing will.
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... as long as US is the most powerful military power in the world. Since 2-nd World War oil (and by extension - USD backed by oil) was used as primary mean for US to control other countries and as asource of extraordinary benefits. Any nation trying to contest this state of affairs was pushed back with all possible means ("bringing democracy" included). Now as we've reached peak oil, US grip on the rest of the world will weaken unless they find some other means to maintain it. My bet is that IP in general and GMO's IP in particular is main contender to replace oil as USD collateral. Expect all countries trying to get rid of US-mandated IP laws to be forced back in line with all possible means (with "bringing democracy" included - if necessary).
What a bunch of fucks. It seems that we won't get rid of attempts of pushing more or less fascist copyright regulation (with censorship attached) until we get rid of them.
... if other charges won't stick. Given how "just" is their DoJ, I think they'll lock him down forever the moment he appears in US, citing some obscure laws plus more or less fabricated "evidence" (or even without charges). They will keep him locked (in solitary confinement if needed) as long as he pleads guilty and signs a list of charges pre-written for him by US authorities. In his case going to a country whose legal system has morphed into something akin banana republic is a legal equivalent of suicide.
Mod parent up.
I haven't thinking it this way (till now). This seems to be an issue with everything financial industry touches today. Be it IP, medical costs, external costs pushed by business onto public (GoM, Fukushima), external costs caused by asset stripping etc. - most of these things (and many others) can be interpreted as a form of "inflation" caused by bad incentives resulting from bad accounting. Financials are propably the root cause of most of these abominations and should be decimated before we move on to solving things like overpriced trivial patents.
My (somwhat conspirational) take is that this is intentional. At the beginning of this chain are investors, bankers etc. who are pulling all strings (by investing, lending etc.) - finance sector in general. At the end of it are consumers who suffer all negative consequences of this mess (indirectly) and pay lawyers' bills. From the point of view of financiers the best company is the one they've most invested in and in our case this is Apple by far. So, financeers will use all their influence to make Apple bigger, which - given their current huge market share and profits - means monopoly. The same wall street estabullshitment that was able to steal trillions of dollars in (more or less direct) bailouts will use its influence to make sure Apple remains so profitable, regardless of mayhem caused in the process. Will this mean killing all the innovation, let's be it. In this particular case ITU will ensure that all competitors currently bullied by Apple will remain toothless. It this won't help, expect some crazy legislation aimed at preventing competition in mobile space. This is crony capitalism at its best - wall street crooks protecting their shiny, "fruity" investment.
Think of it as "money is speech" issue. With their infinite pockets they're able to ram through UPSTO any kind of crap they want. Plus now that they're too big to ensure future growth conventional way, they are moving to rent-seeking - with monopoly rent being the most attractive options for them. Getting rid of any competition and then squeezing last drops od market (hopefully for them - monopolized) is the only way forward for them and they'll try to accomplish this with any possible method/tool at their disposal.
In a non-corrupt system someone caring for free-market being in fact free should decide splitting them into a few smaller entities the moment they've started their dirty patent games. In reality it is not going to happen. With virtually every major hedge fund/pension fund/investment bank having at least some Apple stock entire Wall-Street estabullshitment is now behind them. And by extension - all government sock puppets of Wall Street will also support them to the last possible moment (and given how they treat bankers - it means forever).
Expect this dirty patent skirmish to continue forever - at least in forseeable future.
Actually I'm using CentOS at some deployments and Red Hat at others. Some customers require official paid support and I don't mind recommend them paying Red Hat for this - they tend to use this money to develop better products and do release source code for most of them. Contrast this with M$ where money you pay is often used to pay off patent lawyers running their shakeout operations, BSA etc.
What I'm trying to say is that there is a significant omision in their support matrix and this is clearly political decision.
Red Hat apparently not supported. Yet CentOS is. And lots of others. The biggest and most important one omitted for some reason. Me thinks it smells like divide & conquer. Anybody (still) believes in M$ intentions ? "Honest Microsoft" ? Isn't it an oxymoron ?
I'm still reading about "religious zealots" but IMHO zealotry alone wouldn't make such big impact. There is big money behind this "zealotry" and someone sponsoring it: lobbyists, think-tanks, corrupt governors won't do anything without sponsorship. It's pretty much like most of radical muslim terrorists US pretends to fight with that are sponsored by billions and billions of petro-dollars from Saudi Arabia (yet US government pretends Saudis to be their ally). Me think our old neocon friends with their corporate buddies are sponsoring it: for example, mixing science and beliefs would would let them declare wars they perpetrate as "holy" cutting off any discussion and squashing dissent. Thus I thing fighting off this creationist crap and all stuff and other stupid things spewed by religious right should be top priority for any wise person. Not letting them expand is a must. Otherwise or we'll see religious right installing nazi-like facism at some point.
Let's assume for a moment that most people didn't really believe in this creationist crap but were conformist enough to respond this way. Now let's assume that the same radical-christian-creationist-freaks who spew this creationist crap all over the place would like to burn some scientist because in their opinion he's a heretic ? What would this "silent majority" do ? Would they be conformist like in this poll ? Would they show enough determination to stop radical idiots from killing others for their misguided beliefs ? How does it differ from casual good muslims becoming conformist or passive to actions of radical isamists ? Why is majority of people passive to something that might push us into dark ages once again ?
We are entering dangerous times. Someone is investing lots of money in order to make hard facts and beliefs blend. See all those mega-churches that are in fact nothing more than just dangerous sects, see all those "museums", publications. See lobbyists and their money pushed to politicians in order to make creationism credible and taught in schools. Such big money does not come from nowhere. Who needs it and for what purpose ?
Having used up all my karma points yesterday, I can only second this. With one clarification: even for mechanical physical devices contemporary patent system is a scam designed to protect rich crooks / big corps, protect them from competition of small inventors and rip small inventors off their work. Newest "achievments" in patenting-everything-under-the-sun field seem for me even to be designed to block progress, so estabilished big fat corporation would do nothing (except of "cost cutting" a.k.a. externalities), yet earn their God-given big fat profits.
I've seen harm from patent system first hand - it bankrupted two small inventors just because they were naive enough to try playing to the rules. They invented quite significant efficiency improvement (exceeding 10% according to their calculations) to combustion engines. They filed patent applications in some more important regions and this thing alone drained them financially to the point they were unable to do anything else - it seems that cost awarding patent on single invention in important patent offices is in order of hundreds of millions of dollars and can easily exceed a million. At this point those folks were unable to do any real work on it, so they've sent offers to a few car producers. Car producers responded with offering them 10% of that they've paid for patent applications and decided to sit down and wait until those folks (indebted at this point) will become desperate. Those folks had no other way - shoud they omit an important patent regime, some big fat will patent their invention here and effectively block them from trying to sell invention to anyone else, sit down and wait until they give away all their work for pennies on the dollar. You see - either way you end up in the same fucked up position of bankrupcy (for them it effectively means debt serfdom as our local bankrupcy laws are so broken).
This is how this system works. It is designed to royally fuck every small inventor and protect corporate scums who prefer raping small investors who happen to be naive enough to play by the rules. It is designed to transform small investors into modern debt serfs or to give away their valuable inventions to big fat cats. In some areas, like medicine it is even more egregious - it allows corporations to patent publicly funded research results, it allows patenting substances that can be used to research/produce medicaments that can save lives, it allows patenting genes and blocking further research on them. It propably costs us hudreds of thousands of lives a year and hudreds of billions (if not trillions) dollars every year.
Given amount of propaganda spewed by virtually every media outlet I can understand why so many people still think patent system is so great. I also understand that some individuals are smart enough to find loopholes and profit from it (that's why you have professors living off patents they've granted using financial support of their universities - but in most cases not pursuing any meaningful work after they've awarded a patent). But in terms of ways patent system impacts our everyday life - I would say it actually harms it in a huge way. Getting rid of it in its entirety (not just software patents) would make so many important things developing much, much faster.
For almost 50 years we lived under threat of instant vaporization. Both NATO and Soviets assumed that opponent army reinforcements will be stopped at Vistula line by tactical nuclear strike. Revealed war plans assumed that two million Poles will die in such strike and most parts of central Poland will become useless, radioactive wasteland for a number of years. Here in Poland we were trained how to survive nearby nuclear strike on a regular basis.
Things changed in 1990, when Cold War was finally over. Everyone became a friend. Some we liked some more [Americans] than others [Russians] for obvious reasons but it didn't really matter much.
Now, after 20 years of relative safety some psychotic US leader came here and started messing around with their 'anti-missile' shit. Arms race is back. Let assume that they'll install a system that will intercept 50% of russian missiles. Rational response I would expect from Russian is to have, say, twice as many nuclear tipped missiles they have now. I know this, Russians know this. Psychotic US politicians know this as well. So we have to live once again under threat of (instant) vaporization just because some dysfunctional psychopaths who happen to have too much power in their hands decided to pursue their geopolitical games. Having seen how these games have played out in, say, Middle East I'm really scared. Various "developments" since 2001 made me confident that United States will spark 3-rd world war sooner or later. I was hoping that in all the mess between US, Russia, China and Middle East - Poland will become a kind of place everyone forgot about, so we'll be relatively safe. Now I'm losing that hope - some whilte collar fucks along with our local puppet government placed us back into spotlight.
My message to US politicians and millitary: get the fuck out of here NOW. Take your anti-ballistic toys with you and shove them deep into your ass. You killed millions of people in the Middle East, destroyed so many countries. We don't want you to pursue the same psychotic games in Poland.
Regards,
Citizen od Poland.
Patent disputes magially 'settled' just prior to invalidating Microsoft's bogus patents. Abandoning Android in favor of yet-to-be-developed Microsoft's software (hello, Nokia!). Now pulling off Linux-related magazines. It seems that Micro$oft's $300M "investment" into B&N starts paying off immediately.
I only partially agree with this. Starving big corps was possible few years ago. Then 2008 meltdown came and it became apparent that if they won't get money from you voluntarily paying for some goods/services, they'll get it anyway from you taxes (eg. bailouts), lucrative taxpayer-funded contracts (army) or by forcing bills for phony services down your throat (eg. Obama's healthcare 'reform').
Add ever-rising intimidation of citizens to this (TSA, so called "war on terror", militarization and brutalization of police forces, ever-rising incarcerated population), add dual-standard when it comes to law enforcement (Corzine/MF Global fiasco etc.) and what you get at the end is corporate fascist state. So much for freedoms and constitution.
If those corporate fucks won't get what they want from you voluntarily, they'll get it by other means. I'm not sure there is a good way to get out of this trap - peaceful civil disobedience is propably the only thing left.
And their "overreaction" was a little bit late. They let this device get onto plane and then "panicked" when someone left it.
My feeling is that those TSA pigs wouldn't be happier. They found justification for their crap existence and secured some more of future funding for their parasitic operations.
Regarding all this "terrorist" stuff american crap-media is pushing down our throats every day: stop bombing those folks in Middle East and stop covering Israel's criminal actions and you'll neutralize way more terrorist threat than with all these expensive TSA thugs and equipment.
Sony's incompetent executives seem to be stuck in 90s - they're dinosaurs, just like all this RIAA crap-management folks. The only thing that would push them back to reality (or burn them down) is strong competition from NEW technologies (not just cheaper knockoffs like Xbox).
I would like to see speedy chips like Tegra3 built directly into TVs (by Samsung and others) and Android running these chips. I would like to see well ironed out gaming API for such devices, maybe even some standard gaming engine (or two) with some kind of 'tech 5'-like algorithms/tools that would enable easy game development across whole spectrum of devices and screen sizes. With easy to use and effective authoring tools (why not use kinect-like device paired with some camera to quickly generate objects and content for a game?).
I would also see it as open as development tools for Android are today and as easy to buy games as Android Market is today. I would like to see Sony crap-executives feeling heat from actual competition, not from other dinosaurs like Microsoft.
You see, all hardware puzzles to above vision are already in place. That is needed is some will, work and innovation (and Sony/M$ not trying to take it down with some kind of crap-lawsuits).
Geez. Those so called "captains of industry" are worse than soviet "nomenklatura" 30 years ago. They're openly pushing things against the will of "we the people" (and I'm not talking about government but about big business acquiring real power over us). Those fucks even don't hide it anymore.
My feeling is we should not stop when they stop - we need to force them out of their powerful positions and bring them to justice. Should current laws be enforced, most of them would land in prison. If most of our big banks and corporations bring us nothing but corporate crime, we'd be way better without them. Forget about this "economies of scale" and "benefits of globalization" crap - indirect public costs associated with this seem to be way higher than gains thanks to "externalities".
If you look more carefully how it actually looks. In fact, they have around 10B in actual cash (or cash equivalents), around 15-20B in what they call "short term marketable securities" and the rest (~70B) in something they call "long term marketable securities". Since they crossed 30B, virtually all of their surplus goes into that third category. What do they mean by "cash equivalents" ? Do, say, treasuries count as cash equivalents or marketable securities ? The question that is most interesting to me is: how good are these "long term marketable securities" ?
One option would be some long term national bonds or other very liquid stuff and this would be fine. If they'd need this cash at some point, they'd be able to use it in an instant.
Second option is that these are some crap quality, illiquid stuff they buy from financial institutions, having their stock prices pumped and all government beurocrats bought in exchange. In other words - they feed Wall Street institutions with real money (as opposed to some illiquid derivative instruments) and have their stock price pumped in exchange.
There might be more options, but fundamental question for me is that about quality of their "long term marketable securities".
Or Switzerland ? They have direct democracy.
Latest developments in crisis/bailouts/etc. arena indicate that "average outcome from a mob" can't be worse than decisions made by corrupt governments on behalf of their cronies and sponsors.
Look at Iceland. Angry mob stood up and managed to override government's attempt to push whole nation into debt peonage. As a nation they won ! Their recession is behind them and their future prospects are pretty good. Compare this to Greece where angry mob did not manage to override their government attempt to put Greeks into debt peonage. They're now fast approaching 3-rd world status and now they have a bunch of eu/bankers' appointees instead of democratically elected government.
Having said that, I'd rather respect "mob's decision" than that of corrupt government.
OK - so what's your alternative?
Direct democracy ? Now that we have all necessary means to perform referendums in cheap and efficient way, we can limit governments to merely doing paperwork and let "we, the people" make actual decisions.
... brought to you by your lovely government. You may think of it as of some kind of conspiracy theory but we are here. Degradation of our freedom of speech is directly linked with degradation of our (western) economic system and in my opinion this is just the beginning as long-term economic deterioration shows no signs of slowing down.
Governments (and their corporate sponsors) always wanted to shut down or marginalize independent media that show the world as it is, not as government + corporate oligarchy wants us to see. But freedom of speech was too deeply embedded in our culture and social costs associated with such moves tended to be too high compared to potential gains. Everything changed last year. Since Arab Spring and subsequent Occupy protests spreading like a wildfire, traditional media losing credibility caught again and again (thanks to blatant lies & omissions) and deteriorating economy pushing more and more people onto streets, our ruling class realized that time is running out.
Efforts to shut everybody up went into turbo mode last year - SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, tens of bigger or smaller initiatives in various countries. Sadly, I expect that this year will be even worse. I expect further economic deterioration as most of world economy is dying under crushing debt with no chances of discharging it (thanks to our corrupt politicians and their sponsors), let alone paying it off (we don't have enough natural resources to pay it off!). Ongoing financial "world-war" Jim Rickards writes about in his excelent book makes things even worse. What we desperately need is a round of healthy (if possible - orderly) defaults that will clean up most of this debt (odious or not) and let the economy restart. Iceland took this route and now they have real, healthy recovery with good prospects in the future. Note how silent our corporate media are about Iceland. Greece on the other hand is being fucked the same latin american style used in 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Once again corporate media blatantly lie about this urgent 'need of austerity' and 'Greeks fault' but when you look at it closer - it's good old, well tested latino scenario which turned up to be fraud long time ago. Thanks to banksters and their stooges (that is, politicians) few years from now Greece will become a regular 3-rd world country.
My sad feeling is that in order to keep current (broken) system running our ruling elites will block any possibilities to resolve this situation and will cover up all frauds and crimes of themselves and their friends. Economic situation will slowly deteriorate until must of us reach 3-rd world conditions and our ruling elites will treat us with Radio-Yerevan-style propaganda backed by cooked economic numbers to show how wonderfully great our economy is, completely ignoring reality for 99% of citizens. All voices of dissent will be silenced, marginalized, blatantly censored or marked as "terrorists" and held in jail.
Welcome to 'iron fist' phase every civilization comes through before it dies (yet it's still not too late to overturn this).
You assume that they provide liquidity which is not true with HFT and that $.01 a share cheap which is also not the case for HFT traders.
Regarding liquidity, HFT provides an illusion of liquidity. When a bunch of computers banging, say, 500 shares between themselves over and over again 500 times a day will generate 250000 volume but this does not mean that market is so deep. You see, there are only 500 shares in use. When some big, traditional (institutional?) investor fooled by this artificially high volume decides to sell 100000 shares, it will impact market much higher than if that 250000 (or even half of that) was a real volume. To make thing worse, computers trading these shares will propably detect and try to take of this incurring even more losses to investor (potential gains for HFT trader) and potentially cause some form of flash crash. In the end, traditional investors typically get much worse off with HFT than without HFT, even seeing [lack of] real volume.
Regarding $0.01 - remember that this is $0.01 times billions. It results with hundreds of millions of dollars getting sucked off market by HFT operators instead of being directed into actual, productive investments (thing that stock markets are supposed to be created for). That this money is sucked off penny by penny does not matter. It's still real investments deprived of hundreds of millions of dollars every day by Goldman Sachs and its cronies.
In my opinion HFT is a fraud, nothing more. The fact that it's (still) legal is just a sign how corrupt whole system is.
Seems that we didn't learn much (yet). AP1000 has its own set of flaws nobody in NRC cares about.
I'm not against nuclear power but we still have serious issues to be solved. Most serious one is corporate negligence (a.k.a. "cost cutting") and general corruption at NRC. In AP1000 case nobody addressed issues resulting from Fukushima fiasco.
Heh, this is the exact reason I've switched in other direction: from Ubuntu to Debian. After two failed upgrades to 11.10 (both resulted in unbootable system that requires tweaking to bring it back and then left me without true-and-tested classic GNOME desktop, I've happily switched to Debian which now provides some of the best parts Ubuntu developed in recent years. Debian 6 reminds me Ubuntu 8.04 which IMO was the best Ubuntu distribution ever released (in terms of stability).
So our lovely government is carefully listening to every tweet, text message and slashdot comment - ready to bust you as soon as they find something that makes you 'suspected terrorist' - and keep you locked without charge and without recourse to court of law (see latest NDAA).
On the other hand, Mr Corzine was able to directly steal more than $1bln from his customers and the same government fucks are unable to track it and they try to convince everybody that this money has been 'vapourized'. This is despite the fact that all electronic financial transactions are logged to the point that you're able to track every penny at any time.
Having said that, any form of apologizing such "anti-terror" actions tells you how out of touch apologist is. If this does not show you how low your government has fallen, then nothing will.