You say that governments print money and control the money because government wants more of it. In America, my friend, the government is the people. In the words of the great Republican Abraham Lincoln, "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Our government is not an entity of its own, clawing away for every advantage. Our government is a body of leaders representing all people living within our nation: a Republic.
Therefore when one thinks of the ways that our government takes away our wealth, takes away our freedoms, takes away our dignity, we must not think of it as a great leviathan, secure in itself by virtue of its ability to lay waste to the lesser people. It is not some abstract deity that takes from us. It is ourselves. It is the political circus we have all become part of. And whether or not all the elephants recognize them, every circus has ringleaders.
Who benefits from all this taking? Who benefits from the government printing money while still taxing it from the people who earned it? Who really holds the power that is being sucked into Congress? You're right about one thing: it's not us. But I guarantee you that if the government itself reaped the benefits, we would not have a deficit in the trillions.
*sigh* no mod points today. I may disagree with the basis of roman_mir's assertions, but I don't think the post should be voted down. It's not nasty; the closest thing to vitriol is calling the book a "piece of shit" (which reads more like a thesis statement than an ad hominem). I know that a lot of fucking crazy Republicans (or more likely trolls masquerading as such) have been posting some pretty steamy piles of shit around here lately, but this post definitely is not one of them.
By 'prescription', I mean approval by a homeopath. Obviously there is no licensing set up to ensure such people to be legitimate. I considered suggesting to set one up, but since homeopathy is not a science it's not really possible to do so practically.
What I would like to see is for homeopathic remedies to require the statement "these claims have not been approved by the FDA" and prevent them from using "Drug Facts" labels that make them look legitimate. This would not affect "real" homeopathy as far as I can tell; practitioners ought to be trusting the person concocting their prescription, not the drug companies. It would only affect the shams. And it shouldn't preclude the FDA from following the manufacturing processes either.
It's about damn time something was done to fix this homeopathic mess. Read the Wikipedia article on Homeopathy for a moment. The thing that struck me about it is not the "diluting makes it stronger" part. Everybody knows that. What struck me is that "homeopathic remedies" are basically always prescription-only.
Why do we allow non-prescription drugs to bypass FDA inspection because they are labelled "homeopathic"? I mean, truly homeopathic drugs should not be any cause for concern, but then they should also only be taken by prescription. What we have instead is a menagerie of sham drugs claiming to be "homeopathic" to avoid drug testing. Nothing 1x or 2x diluted should ever seriously be sold as "homeopathic".
It's about damn time to get rid of the special treatment altogether. Slapping a "homeopathic" label on a drug must not be enough to excuse it from proper testing. I could understand it it was diluted 10x, but then that only applies to the "active ingredient". What we have here is a drug with an "inactive ingredient" that happens to be penicillin (whether it was intentionally added or not - and excuse me, but what part of diluting a homeopathic drug involves "fermentation"?).
Alternative medicine is one thing, but it's something else if the producers themselves mix the product with real medicine because they think it is actually snake oil.
I know you were talking about equal pixel density, but I don't think AC was:
Yet I would kill to have those kind of resolutions on my 12" laptop.
"Resolution" generally refers to the number of pixels on the whole screen, not the number of pixels per area. So the field of a 12" screen at 2560x1440 will not drop by over a factor of four over a 5" screen at 2560x1440. I get your point though that a 12" screen more like 6400x3600 to have a similar DPI would have a terrible yield.
God dammit when will these resolutions be available on normal-sized desktop screens? If they can pack 2560x1440 into a 5" screen for $600, why does it have to cost more than that to get any desktop monitor with that many pixels? It shouldn't have to be 27". All kinds of laptop screens are racing towards 4K-like resolutions, but you simply cannot get the same 3200x1800 resolution at any size on the desktop you can in 14" laptops. At least until you get to 4K TVs.
2560x1440 or even better, 2560x1600 is a magical resolution for a computer screen. It's the resolution where you can fit two programs side-by-side with a full 1280 pixels of horizontal space, which has been the standard available for the last 15 years. Unless something is designed for wide screens (and then hey, it will probably scale to the whole massive space of your desktop) it's like having two screens side-by-side, except with amazing vertical space, no bezel in the middle, and a cinematic capability for displaying video and games.
This screen resolution is practical on a desktop computer. If we can get it on 5" screens where it's nothing more than marketing (more than 300dpi is a waste) why can't we get it somewhere useful?
If you go from a 4" screen to an 8" screen, with the same number of pixels, your yield will *not* drop by a factor of four. A lower DPI screen is less likely to have defects. I'm not sure exactly how much it might drop though, or if the yield might even increase.
And more power used by the screen. Powering the screen and its backlight are over half the battery consumption in any smartphone, and it's only more power hungry with more pixels. Even the backlight has to work harder.
I should hope the scout leader doesn't need the phone to play Angry Birds during the camping trip. If it is for the sole reason stated - emergencies - then having contact with the rest of the world is a very important safety precaution. Just because it didn't exist before doesn't mean it should be foregone. Emergency communication can save your life in situations where before cell phones the rescue teams would find corpses by the time they knew to look.
Of course rehabilitation is not the goal. The person is talking about life sentences. The person is talking about punishment, about vengeance. It's natural for some people to seek vengeance against people who have done truly unspeakable things, but it's not constructive. What would be more constructive is to remove them from society, figure out why they did what they did, and try to keep it from happening again.
The concern I'd like to address is purely economic: is it right to spend more money just to make the criminal's life more miserable? Because then everyone paying taxes is paying the price. What if the most painful torture was liquid gold injections (and it had to be gold)? If you're already determined to use torture, would it really be worth the extra expense over, say, pulling fingernails? Developing new, inventive ways to make people suffer is the realm of six-fingered villains from The Princess Bride. This has no place in our society.
You're certainly right about the AAC/256 part (at least if it's properly encoded). But there are a lot of other things mentioned that cause the sound "at the mixing board" to be superior. In fact, most of them are the mixing itself. Perhaps in the quest to make "the best mix we can to translate to whatever sorrowful playback medium of the average customer" you have actually mixed a brick wall soulless mockery of what you were listening to.
But I understand there's no going back now. It's probably for the best if recording studios start releasing lossless 24/192 audiophile versions, because they might actually be better mixes. I'd buy that for the mix and immediately down-sample to 16/44 so I can have 4.5x as much music.
Read that, or at least accept for a moment that 24/192 is pointless and that a well-encoded MP3 is audibly indistinguishable from a lossless recording in double blind tests.
The whole "confirmation bias" thing is actually terrible for music. It's what makes audiophiles. Somebody tells you music is better with X audiophile feature, and plays it for you. It sounds better. Probably because it's your friend, or the equipment is obviously really nice, or you're used to listening to 128kbps muzak on your earbuds. Once you start believing, there's no limit to the set-ups that can be ruined by not having X feature. Can you ever listen to music again without a $20,000 system?
Audiophilia is like Scientology. The more you believe in it, the more money you have to spend just to be happy again. Demand scientific proof.
A vinyl rip. That's just great. Why not just download a 320kbps MP3 and resample it to 256kbps? Then resample it again a few times? Maybe convert it to FLAC at the end so it's "lossless"? Not to belittle the gain you get from a superior mix. It's just that you shouldn't have to do that.
But what if you want to use your 128gb music player as your actual portable music library? Something that you can hook up to a much larger and more expensive system in an otherwise quiet environment?
I think my fix highlights several things about computer security. One, the consequences are financial loss at the worst, not bodily harm. Two, you can be easily victimized for common behaviors. Three, installing anti-virus (bars over your windows) will not do anything to save you from bad password security (key under the welcome mat), no matter what the "helpful" bloatware on your new PC tells you.
You know it probably costs more than building another 20TB RAID when the web site says "Contact Sales Assistance on +1-888-672-2534 to quote or purchase this product".
Let me guess, the writer was uneducated and using a very outdated term? Because the only people calling cyber criminals "hackers" are the under educated media and luddites that have not been paying attention to what has been happening in the world.
So what you're saying is that the author was writing to the 95% of normal people rather than to the 5% of people who have "been paying attention to what has been happening in the [technology] world". If everyone would rather read Slashdot than the sports section, there would be no sports section.
Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA, and while I agree with the headline and summary, it's not for the same reasons and I actually have a lot of respect for real hacking.
I agree that it's time to stop glorifying hackers. Not real hackers that find SSL vulnerabilities, or who hack the mainframe, or who embed assembly in their compiled programs. No, those people deserve all the glory they get (which is very, very little). No, I'm talking about the "hackers" that are always stealing peoples' passwords.
A figurative 99% of security breaches happen because a password got stolen. That is not hacking. That is stealing a password. It requires no more technical competence than the average user possesses. If you write your password down and throw it away, the garbage man can find it and log into your email. Does that make him a hacker? No, it makes him an unethical, opportunistic garbage man.
Password security is not equal to computer security. Real hackers compromise computer security, possibly resulting in a stolen password, or possibly resulting in access that renders the stolen password irrelevant. And if someone steals a banker's password and uses it to do things the banker is allowed to do, then there wasn't anything wrong with the computer security.
That's not to say the user is automatically at fault for the password security. I mean, sure, the user could have handled the password better, but if that user understood that in the first place then there never would have been a problem. Password security is a policy detail. That's probably why it's usually the weakest link. Only the geeks understand enough to design an effective policy, but the geeks don't usually design good policies for non-geeks.
Seriously. Like when someone finds the key you keep under the welcome mat, walks in through the front door and steals your TV. What were you expecting when you don't put bars over your windows?
And how do those different parties build on each other? By having access to the device. If I came and showed you a working flying saucer, and said, "You too can travel by this exclusive method," how would you be able to duplicate it? All that you now know is that it is possible. Even assuming that every major technology involved is out in the open (which, again, would be theoretically in jeopardy in an unpatentable world), as they say, the devil is in the details. I've probably worked for years on picking components, integrating, miniaturizing, debugging, and iterating over this process until I had something that was commercially viable. In the worst case, it would take somebody else equally as inventive equally as long to bring a competing product to market, and even then that person (who may not exist for some time) may simply set up a competing service instead of selling it directly. And it's not worth thinking about the best case because human beings, especially very inventive ones, tend to be easily taken in by our ideas about how long we can keep a secret. Why would we even have all this patent troll/perpetual copyright bullshit if people didn't think they were entitled to exclusivity for the rest of their lives?
Many inventions are actually much more profitable when the device can be sold, legally protected from reverse engineering, than if the details of how it works had to be protected as trade secrets. Can you imagine a world where cars were only sold to people willing to protect their secrecy? Not only would cars have not developed and improved as quickly as they did, but manufacturers would sell several orders of magnitude fewer cars. Instead of every person in a town of a million owning a car, you'd have maybe an elite group of chauffeurs serving the top.5% of that population, or about 500 people. It's ultimately more profitable for the device to be patent protected and sold than to be protected solely as a trade secret.
You misunderstand. The good of the people is not served by stealing somebody's invention. The good of the people is in not letting this guy take credit for something several other organizations invented simultaneously, all of which except him chose to sell products based on the invention rather than wait until somebody else did and sue them.
They'd certainly like to reject the patents, but this guy's got a history of having good lawyers. If they reject it, they will be sued. And they don't want to pay him $388 million like the state of California has to for trying to collect taxes on his outrageous earnings.
Patents exist for very specific situations, of which none of the obvious "patent troll" patents fulfill.
Firstly they exist for technologies which could be made secret, but would benefit society more if they were made open. That's why patents are supposed to expire after several years; so the inventor can make some good money, but then it's opened up to everyone else to build upon. The classic example is the cotton gin; without it the cotton is worthless until a lot of labor has gone into hand-picking through it. Even early 19th century slave labor cost more (in food and..."management" costs) than purchasing and using such a machine. But if the inventor didn't get a monopoly on selling the devices, there would be cheap knock-offs almost immediately. Therefore the most profitable option is to form a guild of cotton gin operators to keep the device a secret and charge a premium for its use.
Note that this does not apply to something like a cell phone; even if you formed a guild of cell phone operators, it would be far too expensive to have them around and they wouldn't sell enough to be profitable. It would, however, apply to something like a printer, and without patents then future advancements in printing technology could conceivably be sold only to printing shops (Kinko's et al) with exclusive and confidential contracts. One can imagine a world where, without patents, the Xerox machine never made it into the office. Where would we be if paper copies were still possible, but three times as expensive? In this case, maybe it's a better world...but think of the poor paper companies!
Secondly patents exist for technologies which would be nearly impossible to keep secret, but which cost huge amounts to develop in the first place. The poster child for this is pharmaceuticals. There is no free market profit incentive for developing new medications if Wal-Mart could produce generics on day one. None of the R&D costs would ever be recovered and we wouldn't get hardly any new drugs. Most of the R&D cost is sunk into FDA testing, however, and this particular case could probably be handled by the FDA granting pharmaceutical patents directly.
But what about, say, CPU technology? With the right equipment I could buy a top-of-the-line Intel processor, dissolve away the non-operative parts, and examine the silicon wafer directly. Then I could make copies and sell them. Do you think it really costs $600 to produce the top mobile i7 CPU? Certainly not; much of that cost is going towards their R&D which produces new designs every couple of years. Sure, the concept of a multi-core processor, or the concept of turbo boost, or any other concept in those units shouldn't be patentable. But the exact way they made it work? What if Apple, or Dell, or Lenovo, or whoever else took those designs, manufactured their own copies (possibly with a cheap third party chip manufacturer like TSMC) and cut out Intel entirely? Well, the argument is that Intel would never have been able to design those chips in the first place.
And what if there were no patent or copyright protections at all? Perhaps instead of selling the physical CPU to consumers, they would sell processing minutes instead. Would the PC revolution have took off without patent protection? Or would all of the advances in microprocessors have stayed in the mainframe? I'd like to think we'd still have PCs, and maybe the market would have been forced to respect our computing freedoms, but hope might not make it so.
Slashdot Mirror
You say that governments print money and control the money because government wants more of it. In America, my friend, the government is the people. In the words of the great Republican Abraham Lincoln, "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Our government is not an entity of its own, clawing away for every advantage. Our government is a body of leaders representing all people living within our nation: a Republic.
Therefore when one thinks of the ways that our government takes away our wealth, takes away our freedoms, takes away our dignity, we must not think of it as a great leviathan, secure in itself by virtue of its ability to lay waste to the lesser people. It is not some abstract deity that takes from us. It is ourselves. It is the political circus we have all become part of. And whether or not all the elephants recognize them, every circus has ringleaders.
Who benefits from all this taking? Who benefits from the government printing money while still taxing it from the people who earned it? Who really holds the power that is being sucked into Congress? You're right about one thing: it's not us. But I guarantee you that if the government itself reaped the benefits, we would not have a deficit in the trillions.
*sigh* no mod points today. I may disagree with the basis of roman_mir's assertions, but I don't think the post should be voted down. It's not nasty; the closest thing to vitriol is calling the book a "piece of shit" (which reads more like a thesis statement than an ad hominem). I know that a lot of fucking crazy Republicans (or more likely trolls masquerading as such) have been posting some pretty steamy piles of shit around here lately, but this post definitely is not one of them.
By 'prescription', I mean approval by a homeopath. Obviously there is no licensing set up to ensure such people to be legitimate. I considered suggesting to set one up, but since homeopathy is not a science it's not really possible to do so practically.
What I would like to see is for homeopathic remedies to require the statement "these claims have not been approved by the FDA" and prevent them from using "Drug Facts" labels that make them look legitimate. This would not affect "real" homeopathy as far as I can tell; practitioners ought to be trusting the person concocting their prescription, not the drug companies. It would only affect the shams. And it shouldn't preclude the FDA from following the manufacturing processes either.
It's about damn time something was done to fix this homeopathic mess. Read the Wikipedia article on Homeopathy for a moment. The thing that struck me about it is not the "diluting makes it stronger" part. Everybody knows that. What struck me is that "homeopathic remedies" are basically always prescription-only.
Why do we allow non-prescription drugs to bypass FDA inspection because they are labelled "homeopathic"? I mean, truly homeopathic drugs should not be any cause for concern, but then they should also only be taken by prescription. What we have instead is a menagerie of sham drugs claiming to be "homeopathic" to avoid drug testing. Nothing 1x or 2x diluted should ever seriously be sold as "homeopathic".
It's about damn time to get rid of the special treatment altogether. Slapping a "homeopathic" label on a drug must not be enough to excuse it from proper testing. I could understand it it was diluted 10x, but then that only applies to the "active ingredient". What we have here is a drug with an "inactive ingredient" that happens to be penicillin (whether it was intentionally added or not - and excuse me, but what part of diluting a homeopathic drug involves "fermentation"?).
Alternative medicine is one thing, but it's something else if the producers themselves mix the product with real medicine because they think it is actually snake oil.
I know you were talking about equal pixel density, but I don't think AC was:
"Resolution" generally refers to the number of pixels on the whole screen, not the number of pixels per area. So the field of a 12" screen at 2560x1440 will not drop by over a factor of four over a 5" screen at 2560x1440. I get your point though that a 12" screen more like 6400x3600 to have a similar DPI would have a terrible yield.
God dammit when will these resolutions be available on normal-sized desktop screens? If they can pack 2560x1440 into a 5" screen for $600, why does it have to cost more than that to get any desktop monitor with that many pixels? It shouldn't have to be 27". All kinds of laptop screens are racing towards 4K-like resolutions, but you simply cannot get the same 3200x1800 resolution at any size on the desktop you can in 14" laptops. At least until you get to 4K TVs.
2560x1440 or even better, 2560x1600 is a magical resolution for a computer screen. It's the resolution where you can fit two programs side-by-side with a full 1280 pixels of horizontal space, which has been the standard available for the last 15 years. Unless something is designed for wide screens (and then hey, it will probably scale to the whole massive space of your desktop) it's like having two screens side-by-side, except with amazing vertical space, no bezel in the middle, and a cinematic capability for displaying video and games.
This screen resolution is practical on a desktop computer. If we can get it on 5" screens where it's nothing more than marketing (more than 300dpi is a waste) why can't we get it somewhere useful?
If you go from a 4" screen to an 8" screen, with the same number of pixels, your yield will *not* drop by a factor of four. A lower DPI screen is less likely to have defects. I'm not sure exactly how much it might drop though, or if the yield might even increase.
And more power used by the screen. Powering the screen and its backlight are over half the battery consumption in any smartphone, and it's only more power hungry with more pixels. Even the backlight has to work harder.
I should hope the scout leader doesn't need the phone to play Angry Birds during the camping trip. If it is for the sole reason stated - emergencies - then having contact with the rest of the world is a very important safety precaution. Just because it didn't exist before doesn't mean it should be foregone. Emergency communication can save your life in situations where before cell phones the rescue teams would find corpses by the time they knew to look.
Of course rehabilitation is not the goal. The person is talking about life sentences. The person is talking about punishment, about vengeance. It's natural for some people to seek vengeance against people who have done truly unspeakable things, but it's not constructive. What would be more constructive is to remove them from society, figure out why they did what they did, and try to keep it from happening again.
The concern I'd like to address is purely economic: is it right to spend more money just to make the criminal's life more miserable? Because then everyone paying taxes is paying the price. What if the most painful torture was liquid gold injections (and it had to be gold)? If you're already determined to use torture, would it really be worth the extra expense over, say, pulling fingernails? Developing new, inventive ways to make people suffer is the realm of six-fingered villains from The Princess Bride. This has no place in our society.
You're certainly right about the AAC/256 part (at least if it's properly encoded). But there are a lot of other things mentioned that cause the sound "at the mixing board" to be superior. In fact, most of them are the mixing itself. Perhaps in the quest to make "the best mix we can to translate to whatever sorrowful playback medium of the average customer" you have actually mixed a brick wall soulless mockery of what you were listening to.
But I understand there's no going back now. It's probably for the best if recording studios start releasing lossless 24/192 audiophile versions, because they might actually be better mixes. I'd buy that for the mix and immediately down-sample to 16/44 so I can have 4.5x as much music.
Monty (of Ogg and Vorbis fame) on 24/192 Music Downloads, and why they make no sense.
Read that, or at least accept for a moment that 24/192 is pointless and that a well-encoded MP3 is audibly indistinguishable from a lossless recording in double blind tests.
The whole "confirmation bias" thing is actually terrible for music. It's what makes audiophiles. Somebody tells you music is better with X audiophile feature, and plays it for you. It sounds better. Probably because it's your friend, or the equipment is obviously really nice, or you're used to listening to 128kbps muzak on your earbuds. Once you start believing, there's no limit to the set-ups that can be ruined by not having X feature. Can you ever listen to music again without a $20,000 system?
Audiophilia is like Scientology. The more you believe in it, the more money you have to spend just to be happy again. Demand scientific proof.
A vinyl rip. That's just great. Why not just download a 320kbps MP3 and resample it to 256kbps? Then resample it again a few times? Maybe convert it to FLAC at the end so it's "lossless"? Not to belittle the gain you get from a superior mix. It's just that you shouldn't have to do that.
But what if you want to use your 128gb music player as your actual portable music library? Something that you can hook up to a much larger and more expensive system in an otherwise quiet environment?
I think my fix highlights several things about computer security. One, the consequences are financial loss at the worst, not bodily harm. Two, you can be easily victimized for common behaviors. Three, installing anti-virus (bars over your windows) will not do anything to save you from bad password security (key under the welcome mat), no matter what the "helpful" bloatware on your new PC tells you.
You know it probably costs more than building another 20TB RAID when the web site says "Contact Sales Assistance on +1-888-672-2534 to quote or purchase this product".
So what you're saying is that the author was writing to the 95% of normal people rather than to the 5% of people who have "been paying attention to what has been happening in the [technology] world". If everyone would rather read Slashdot than the sports section, there would be no sports section.
Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA, and while I agree with the headline and summary, it's not for the same reasons and I actually have a lot of respect for real hacking.
I agree that it's time to stop glorifying hackers. Not real hackers that find SSL vulnerabilities, or who hack the mainframe, or who embed assembly in their compiled programs. No, those people deserve all the glory they get (which is very, very little). No, I'm talking about the "hackers" that are always stealing peoples' passwords.
A figurative 99% of security breaches happen because a password got stolen. That is not hacking. That is stealing a password. It requires no more technical competence than the average user possesses. If you write your password down and throw it away, the garbage man can find it and log into your email. Does that make him a hacker? No, it makes him an unethical, opportunistic garbage man.
Password security is not equal to computer security. Real hackers compromise computer security, possibly resulting in a stolen password, or possibly resulting in access that renders the stolen password irrelevant. And if someone steals a banker's password and uses it to do things the banker is allowed to do, then there wasn't anything wrong with the computer security.
That's not to say the user is automatically at fault for the password security. I mean, sure, the user could have handled the password better, but if that user understood that in the first place then there never would have been a problem. Password security is a policy detail. That's probably why it's usually the weakest link. Only the geeks understand enough to design an effective policy, but the geeks don't usually design good policies for non-geeks.
Seriously. Like when someone finds the key you keep under the welcome mat, walks in through the front door and steals your TV. What were you expecting when you don't put bars over your windows?
Fixed that for you.
Scammer no scamming! Scammer no scamming!
Aw, man.
And how do those different parties build on each other? By having access to the device. If I came and showed you a working flying saucer, and said, "You too can travel by this exclusive method," how would you be able to duplicate it? All that you now know is that it is possible. Even assuming that every major technology involved is out in the open (which, again, would be theoretically in jeopardy in an unpatentable world), as they say, the devil is in the details. I've probably worked for years on picking components, integrating, miniaturizing, debugging, and iterating over this process until I had something that was commercially viable. In the worst case, it would take somebody else equally as inventive equally as long to bring a competing product to market, and even then that person (who may not exist for some time) may simply set up a competing service instead of selling it directly. And it's not worth thinking about the best case because human beings, especially very inventive ones, tend to be easily taken in by our ideas about how long we can keep a secret. Why would we even have all this patent troll/perpetual copyright bullshit if people didn't think they were entitled to exclusivity for the rest of their lives?
Many inventions are actually much more profitable when the device can be sold, legally protected from reverse engineering, than if the details of how it works had to be protected as trade secrets. Can you imagine a world where cars were only sold to people willing to protect their secrecy? Not only would cars have not developed and improved as quickly as they did, but manufacturers would sell several orders of magnitude fewer cars. Instead of every person in a town of a million owning a car, you'd have maybe an elite group of chauffeurs serving the top .5% of that population, or about 500 people. It's ultimately more profitable for the device to be patent protected and sold than to be protected solely as a trade secret.
You misunderstand. The good of the people is not served by stealing somebody's invention. The good of the people is in not letting this guy take credit for something several other organizations invented simultaneously, all of which except him chose to sell products based on the invention rather than wait until somebody else did and sue them.
They'd certainly like to reject the patents, but this guy's got a history of having good lawyers. If they reject it, they will be sued. And they don't want to pay him $388 million like the state of California has to for trying to collect taxes on his outrageous earnings.
Patents exist for very specific situations, of which none of the obvious "patent troll" patents fulfill.
Firstly they exist for technologies which could be made secret, but would benefit society more if they were made open. That's why patents are supposed to expire after several years; so the inventor can make some good money, but then it's opened up to everyone else to build upon. The classic example is the cotton gin; without it the cotton is worthless until a lot of labor has gone into hand-picking through it. Even early 19th century slave labor cost more (in food and..."management" costs) than purchasing and using such a machine. But if the inventor didn't get a monopoly on selling the devices, there would be cheap knock-offs almost immediately. Therefore the most profitable option is to form a guild of cotton gin operators to keep the device a secret and charge a premium for its use.
Note that this does not apply to something like a cell phone; even if you formed a guild of cell phone operators, it would be far too expensive to have them around and they wouldn't sell enough to be profitable. It would, however, apply to something like a printer, and without patents then future advancements in printing technology could conceivably be sold only to printing shops (Kinko's et al) with exclusive and confidential contracts. One can imagine a world where, without patents, the Xerox machine never made it into the office. Where would we be if paper copies were still possible, but three times as expensive? In this case, maybe it's a better world...but think of the poor paper companies!
Secondly patents exist for technologies which would be nearly impossible to keep secret, but which cost huge amounts to develop in the first place. The poster child for this is pharmaceuticals. There is no free market profit incentive for developing new medications if Wal-Mart could produce generics on day one. None of the R&D costs would ever be recovered and we wouldn't get hardly any new drugs. Most of the R&D cost is sunk into FDA testing, however, and this particular case could probably be handled by the FDA granting pharmaceutical patents directly.
But what about, say, CPU technology? With the right equipment I could buy a top-of-the-line Intel processor, dissolve away the non-operative parts, and examine the silicon wafer directly. Then I could make copies and sell them. Do you think it really costs $600 to produce the top mobile i7 CPU? Certainly not; much of that cost is going towards their R&D which produces new designs every couple of years. Sure, the concept of a multi-core processor, or the concept of turbo boost, or any other concept in those units shouldn't be patentable. But the exact way they made it work? What if Apple, or Dell, or Lenovo, or whoever else took those designs, manufactured their own copies (possibly with a cheap third party chip manufacturer like TSMC) and cut out Intel entirely? Well, the argument is that Intel would never have been able to design those chips in the first place.
And what if there were no patent or copyright protections at all? Perhaps instead of selling the physical CPU to consumers, they would sell processing minutes instead. Would the PC revolution have took off without patent protection? Or would all of the advances in microprocessors have stayed in the mainframe? I'd like to think we'd still have PCs, and maybe the market would have been forced to respect our computing freedoms, but hope might not make it so.