Warning: cultural clash. In Europe, many rights cannot be signed away through TOS regardless of text in the aforementioned TOS. In US, you can even sign away your right to trial by jury.
As a result, attempts to cross-jury-rig comparisons are quite pointless.
This is the entire point of legislation - it's a "court order" without having to go to court every time (which is prohibitive for individual and society) on specific kind of information storage.
Unfortunately most US-based folks would likely not understand this any more then average afghani can understand equality of women. When you never had any expectation of privacy in your culture, another culture with significant presence of such expectation would seem very alien.
Strange, patenting software is only legally allowed in what, three countries in the world? China is most certainly not one of them. Why should they care about it any more then a US woman cares about getting stoned for adultery?
FYI, Jacob Nielsen is the #1 name in usability, and has been that for decades now. Most of the improvements that you see in apple products for example are based on implementing his teachings.
Nielsen is also author of most of the reading that any decent university course on usability will give you.
As I pointed above, XP SP3 is pretty much in the same boat. It almost never crashes and only needs to be restarted when updates require it to.
No idea on mobile windows though, never really used it long enough to form an opinion. Longest time I got to play with WP7/8 was an hour or so messing around with a friend's phone to notice that had less features important to me than my positively ancient nokia 5230.
Seven doesn't really crash at all. Same for SP3 crashes very rarely if ever. Hence "last decade".
I know I took it to a habit to hibernate my windows machine about four years ago because it doesn't really crash anymore. No need to reboot for any other reason then windows update requiring system restart to apply some updates.
Add-ons for it existed in firefox for ages as well, mostly mimicking opera functionality and adding stuff on top of it.
It's not that popular of a feature though, mostly because mouse with point and click is just that good of a controller scheme. It allows minimal motion to control wide variety of input.
And the point you missed on, which justifies the "patronizing tone" is that it was also preventable through bare minimum upgrades that plants constructed after 1980s received, such as higher seawall and backup diesel generators not sitting the basement ready to be flooded without any protection from floods.
It's hard not to be "patronizing" when people simply refuse to use common sense because of their emotions.
I warmly welcome you to read some of the rather insightful commentary on that particular article. Especially considering that this particular article shows up with different links that support "microsoft is finally dying" hypothesis under different names on slashdot whenever something happens at microsoft. For last ten of fifteen years at least.
As noted above, wake me up when I actually see those AAA games I love to play on other platforms. Until then, it's just as much of a speculative ranting as it was back in the old days of slashdot.
Now if you excuse me, my insomnia is annoying enough to go play a round of LoL.
No matter how open the approval process is, the garden remains walled so long as that is the only proper way to get your software. To rephrase, it's only a matter of "height" of the walls. It's still going to be a walled garden, even if walls are low.
Kindly explain how "being able to prepare for accident" and "cleaning up after preparations were meant for something hundred times weaker because of a number of reasons and failed" are related?
Also, nothing else? Really?
Are you at all familiar with (from top of my head):
1. Long term toxicity from specific forms of power generation, such as for example oil shale in Estonia, where current waste deposits of heavily toxic cement*like substance are large enough to be visible from the Moon with NAKED EYE? 2. Long term toxicity from extraction and transition of oil in Siberia? 3. Same in Niger delta?
Just a few examples I can think during this insomniac period. There are countless others.
Finally, the biggest fish in the barrel, the conclusion that Fukushima in fact showed us how safe modern nuclear power plants can be is a conclusion that many experts in fact reached. Google for it. The explanation in a nutshell is that we understand what happened in Fukushima. It was metered for a quake of 7 magnitudes. It was hit with hundred times more powerful earthquake. Its survived it. It took a tsunami hitting the diesel generators which were idiotically positioned, combined with several other factors of bad design that were long phased out in modern power plants to actually allow for Fukushima to go into partial meltdown.
Essentially we now know with high degree of certainty based on lessons of Fukushima that modern nuclear power plant would survive a magnitude 9 followed by tsunami of that size with mostly minor issues. The argument "but it's nuclear power so it's the same thing" is equivalent to "well ford's T model wasn't safe enough for a modern highway so no car is". Instead many experts point out that it's a solid warning that we need to phase out those old, first and second generation plants in favor of modern ones.
Again, this requires putting populistic scaremongering aside and thinking about the subject logically. Something that engineer must be able to do. You may be an engineer, but sheer amount of emotion in your posts shows that you're not thinking like one about this subject. You inject emotion into engineering problem, and if you truly are an engineer, you know exactly where that road leads to.
Allow me to re-iterate this point: emotional anti-nuclear response is one of the main factors that stopped old first generation plants like Fukushima from getting mid life upgrades. If Fukushima's safety measures were even up to standards of plants built in 80s, as they would have been if they got their mid life upgrades, the partial meltdown would not have occurred. That is a well established and very sad fact that you can draw from reading the IAEA report.
I blame english being my third language. Meltdown wasn't nuclear. Instead they have a shitload of molten sand in the reactor building which is what they were dropping into the reactor to put the fire out. That melted, deformed, and combined with water that seems through the cracks eroded the concrete sarcofagus that was erected around the reactor building. This didn't make it any more dangerous in short term, but it became obvious that it would be useless for long term protection, which is why they're building that big containment thing on rails.
Then you live in a world of your own, the world where engineers do not exist.
Fact is, engineers plan for disasters. Various disasters, big ones, small ones, medium ones, you name it, they likely have a plan for it on major power plant sites. Fukushima for example was planned to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake and tsunami of certain height, both huge disasters. Problem was that it got hit by a hundred times stronger earthquake and a tsunami four times higher then their seawall. Other plants in the vicinity of that particular natural disaster that had higher seawalls stood. Most of them are ready to be restarted, if not for sensationalism attached to the Fukushima.
You see, there's this thing called "probability". For example, you certainly cannot plan for a large comet to hit the planet where the nuclear plant stands. Or you can, but if you do you should consider that damage from comet will far eclipse the potential fallout.
Same thing happened in Fukushima. Tsunami essentially wiped out all infrastructure in "thousands of square kilometers". It killed 30.000 people. It made hundreds of thousands to millions homeless. Japan, one of the most developed nations in the world and arguably the most prepared to earthquakes and tsunamis still cannot repair the damage tsunami wrecked on the country tears after it happened. Not damage to just the power plant, but the damage that disaster itself that caused, among other things, the Fukushima incident. Damage far away from Fukushima. Because it was a disaster of a century for a country that prides itself on being able to function while existing on the area where earthquakes and tsunamis are a norm.
Reality is, while there is no way to fully prepare all your local infrastructure for such a tsunami, there are ways to make plants safe in event of them occurring. If someone told you otherwise, know that they are lying to your face. Fukushima for example would have been fine if it had either a higher seawall or electric backup that would be positioned not to be easily flooded in event of tsunami going over the seawall, such as higher parts of reactor building. The problem is costs vs risk assessment. In case of that particular tsunami, the damage from tsunami itself was simply so great that Fukushima is barely a blip on the radar. The reason we're talking about it now is not because it was actually worse then tsunami itself, but because media thrives on certain stories, and while most of us live in parts of the world where tsunamis of that height simply do not occur, many live close enough to a nuclear power plant to be affected by potential fallout.
Additionally there was the issue of the local East Asian culture, the concept of "saving face" (i.e. not admitting problems) and the fact that with nuclear having serious image issues after Tsernobyl and Three Mile Island (not to mention connection to A-weapons), development and modernization of nuclear power plants has been lagging.
In the end, the biggest problem with the issue is sensationalism that actually exacerbates the problems by preventing effective solutions from being fielded.
Actually those can be prevented just as well. Fukushima plant that blew up was a 1st gen 1960s plant. If it was upgraded to modern tech from today, it would likely not have suffered critical malfunctions that it did. Many of their backup systems are still from those times. Entire plant was in fact build to last magnitude 7 earthquake. It took a 9 and survived it. Only the tsunami that followed the disaster, killing over 30.000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless managed to destroy its power generation capability to extent where it could not be restored fast enough.
As is often pointed out, Fukushima plants weren't the only one hit by the tsunami and earthquake. There were others who took almost as much of a hit. But they were newer (not even by much) so they didn't lose power due to better and newer backup systems, better seawall and better security practices. A modern plant built today would have easily survived the magnitude 9 and followup tsunami, just like a modern coal plant doesn't cause acid rains. It's the progress of technology, and one of the biggest self-defeating problems with anti-nuclear movement is that it blocks the development and implementations necessary to make these plants safer.
Considering that Chernobyl had working reactors sitting next to the one that melted down up until 2000 I'd say that it worked good enough. And closure wasn't for technical reasons at all - it was a political decision taken under heavy pressure from EU.
What it wasn't good for was long term containment, because it was eroding faster then planned.
This is a common issue across Fennoscandia, which sits on the world's oldest rock. We have a lot of uranium deep in the crust and radon gas that fills basements comes from its natural decay.
It's one of the main reasons why most building permits nowadays require proper ventilation of basement levels. Radon in miniscule amounts as it seeps in is essentially harmless, but it tends to concentrate in unventilated areas.
The latter can be prevented, but costs for plants that burn stuff are pretty steep. My father works for a burner-based power plant manufacturer (I've seen them make stuff ranging from burning coal to burning trash to burning the weird ass crap which is about 30% oil and 70% crushed rock), and one of the things he did was handle certification and maintenance of the new plants across EU that had to comply to rigorous norms.
For example, the main cause of acid rains of the past, SO2 and NOx emissions are currently ZERO on some modern burner plants. Reason for this is extreme degree of burning process control (i.e. they can create burning conditions where certain gasses do not form, instead burning process forms far less harmful gasses such as CO2). Particles nowadays can be handled by filters which also have near-100% efficiency for particles they're responsible for. Basically they get particles out of the exhaust air and store it in a solid form which is then taken away to the appropriate dump.
This stuff is really expensive though, so only new plants get the appropriate upgrades due to rigorous standards applied to them. Older plants still crap on the environment, same thing as old nuclear plants being far more risky when major disaster occurs then new ones.
1. It is. We have this across EU. It's a problem in BRIC to a smaller extent (all of them). It's a big problem in Japan and South Korea exacerbated by local culture of "do not make waves" and "be a part of a big whole" where "big whole" is usually one of the megacorps.
Hell, the only places where it isn't a problem are countries where there isn't much of a court system. I.e. it's not much of a problem in Somalia.
2. The system is bent in favor of large players, to an extent where it comes as newsworthy article when major corp actually fails to buy its way. Such at that particular article.
3. Who is this "everyone else" you're talking about? Even moderators seem to upmod both of our statements in about equal measures, even considering just how clueless most of the people on slashdot are about things outside US. Not to even mention that facts aren't elected by majority. This isn't a "shall we teach intelligent design" argument.
Granted your way of arguing your point is exceptionally similar to those particular pundits. "You are wrong and every I know thinks so too, therefore you're wrong and facts and reality can go to hell".
In companies size of microsoft, there's always a replacement for your role ready and set. It's the smaller companies that can't afford this model that need "transition" period. There is also a possibility that we weren't informed about the transition period and it was pending for a while.
So while he may have been "thrown out of the window", it's by no means a guaranteed thing.
And yet, this legal problem is the same across the world. In fact, surprisingly US fairs fairly well in this regard in comparison to many places in the world where corrupt justice system is far more influenced by money thrown at it.
And the subject wasn't changed at any point. But I guess when you argument your "doesn't like being wrong", you're really just forgetting to look in the mirror. I don't know if you misread something at some point, but the entire point of discussion was that suggested solution would be loved by those big companies, and completely crush the small inventor. This was the topic from my reply to the post #3 of the thread, which you apparently mistook as a reply to you.
And btw, to answer your question in #2, the reason for patent extensions is typically in that they are granted in exchange for information. For example, in medical field single patent can cover many implementations of which only one is found working. Information of which implementation is the one that is found to be working and how it works is what grants you the extension. Essentially you're meant to exchange accurate (and in some cases difficult to get such as medicine) information in exchange for extra protection from society. It's a fairly well thought-out part of the system, which serves both rewarding the inventor and incentivizing the inventor to share exact details of the invention with society. We had a story on slashdot recently where pfizer tried to game this by asking for extension and not revealing enough detailed information in Canada. They were taken to court and lost fight and the patent extension.
All in all, you make several big assumptions such that is US is the only place where system is stacked against the little guy, or that little guy apparently doesn't matter because legal system is stacked against him regardless, elevated these assumptions to factual status and started to look down on everyone arguing against your "facts".
It's something you commonly see on cheap talk shows that cater to lowest denominator of the society.
And yet, even the king of mobile usage, browsing and email is still about 10% of total usage. ARM is dominant in mobile, and can't even touch desktop and server at the moment. x86/x64 rules that roost. Ubuntu is about as much of a distro for a normal person as linux on desktop is for a normal person. That is, not at all. It certainly is one for the least informed, with all the mess with advertisements where they clearly expected their target audience to be as ignorant as average windows user. Considering the shitstorm, I guess both them and you were wrong on this one. And no, gaming isn't leaving "windowze" and moving to linux. At all. Mobile gaming on mobile phones is terrible right now. It's purely casual "five minute fun" with a few exceptions that try to emulate desktop experience and fail. Because the platform is simply not suitable for desktop experience.
Do wake me up when we see games like Deus Ex, Dishonored, Starcraft 2, LoL, WoW, GW2, Mass Effect, XCOM and so on have fully fledged versions on "mobile" and linux. I may agree with you then. But right now, you're trying to join the hype train that isn't even connected to the car with engine yet, and it's pretty unlikely it ever will.
Slashdot Mirror
Warning: cultural clash. In Europe, many rights cannot be signed away through TOS regardless of text in the aforementioned TOS. In US, you can even sign away your right to trial by jury.
As a result, attempts to cross-jury-rig comparisons are quite pointless.
This is the entire point of legislation - it's a "court order" without having to go to court every time (which is prohibitive for individual and society) on specific kind of information storage.
Unfortunately most US-based folks would likely not understand this any more then average afghani can understand equality of women. When you never had any expectation of privacy in your culture, another culture with significant presence of such expectation would seem very alien.
Strange, patenting software is only legally allowed in what, three countries in the world? China is most certainly not one of them. Why should they care about it any more then a US woman cares about getting stoned for adultery?
FYI, Jacob Nielsen is the #1 name in usability, and has been that for decades now. Most of the improvements that you see in apple products for example are based on implementing his teachings.
Nielsen is also author of most of the reading that any decent university course on usability will give you.
As I pointed above, XP SP3 is pretty much in the same boat. It almost never crashes and only needs to be restarted when updates require it to.
No idea on mobile windows though, never really used it long enough to form an opinion. Longest time I got to play with WP7/8 was an hour or so messing around with a friend's phone to notice that had less features important to me than my positively ancient nokia 5230.
Seven doesn't really crash at all. Same for SP3 crashes very rarely if ever. Hence "last decade".
I know I took it to a habit to hibernate my windows machine about four years ago because it doesn't really crash anymore. No need to reboot for any other reason then windows update requiring system restart to apply some updates.
We have geniuses do that all the time.
Then the rest of the humanity hammers them down.
Add-ons for it existed in firefox for ages as well, mostly mimicking opera functionality and adding stuff on top of it.
It's not that popular of a feature though, mostly because mouse with point and click is just that good of a controller scheme. It allows minimal motion to control wide variety of input.
And the point you missed on, which justifies the "patronizing tone" is that it was also preventable through bare minimum upgrades that plants constructed after 1980s received, such as higher seawall and backup diesel generators not sitting the basement ready to be flooded without any protection from floods.
It's hard not to be "patronizing" when people simply refuse to use common sense because of their emotions.
I warmly welcome you to read some of the rather insightful commentary on that particular article. Especially considering that this particular article shows up with different links that support "microsoft is finally dying" hypothesis under different names on slashdot whenever something happens at microsoft. For last ten of fifteen years at least.
As noted above, wake me up when I actually see those AAA games I love to play on other platforms. Until then, it's just as much of a speculative ranting as it was back in the old days of slashdot.
Now if you excuse me, my insomnia is annoying enough to go play a round of LoL.
No matter how open the approval process is, the garden remains walled so long as that is the only proper way to get your software. To rephrase, it's only a matter of "height" of the walls. It's still going to be a walled garden, even if walls are low.
Kindly explain how "being able to prepare for accident" and "cleaning up after preparations were meant for something hundred times weaker because of a number of reasons and failed" are related?
Also, nothing else? Really?
Are you at all familiar with (from top of my head):
1. Long term toxicity from specific forms of power generation, such as for example oil shale in Estonia, where current waste deposits of heavily toxic cement*like substance are large enough to be visible from the Moon with NAKED EYE?
2. Long term toxicity from extraction and transition of oil in Siberia?
3. Same in Niger delta?
Just a few examples I can think during this insomniac period. There are countless others.
Finally, the biggest fish in the barrel, the conclusion that Fukushima in fact showed us how safe modern nuclear power plants can be is a conclusion that many experts in fact reached. Google for it. The explanation in a nutshell is that we understand what happened in Fukushima. It was metered for a quake of 7 magnitudes. It was hit with hundred times more powerful earthquake. Its survived it. It took a tsunami hitting the diesel generators which were idiotically positioned, combined with several other factors of bad design that were long phased out in modern power plants to actually allow for Fukushima to go into partial meltdown.
Essentially we now know with high degree of certainty based on lessons of Fukushima that modern nuclear power plant would survive a magnitude 9 followed by tsunami of that size with mostly minor issues. The argument "but it's nuclear power so it's the same thing" is equivalent to "well ford's T model wasn't safe enough for a modern highway so no car is". Instead many experts point out that it's a solid warning that we need to phase out those old, first and second generation plants in favor of modern ones.
Again, this requires putting populistic scaremongering aside and thinking about the subject logically. Something that engineer must be able to do. You may be an engineer, but sheer amount of emotion in your posts shows that you're not thinking like one about this subject. You inject emotion into engineering problem, and if you truly are an engineer, you know exactly where that road leads to.
Allow me to re-iterate this point: emotional anti-nuclear response is one of the main factors that stopped old first generation plants like Fukushima from getting mid life upgrades. If Fukushima's safety measures were even up to standards of plants built in 80s, as they would have been if they got their mid life upgrades, the partial meltdown would not have occurred. That is a well established and very sad fact that you can draw from reading the IAEA report.
What makes something a "walled" garden is the concept of walls. I.e. ability to add software from sources other then app store.
"Never speak of user experience again. You clearly have no clue".
See, that is a train that goes both ways, and just because you always rode it one way, doesn't make you the expert on return trips.
I blame english being my third language. Meltdown wasn't nuclear. Instead they have a shitload of molten sand in the reactor building which is what they were dropping into the reactor to put the fire out. That melted, deformed, and combined with water that seems through the cracks eroded the concrete sarcofagus that was erected around the reactor building. This didn't make it any more dangerous in short term, but it became obvious that it would be useless for long term protection, which is why they're building that big containment thing on rails.
Then you live in a world of your own, the world where engineers do not exist.
Fact is, engineers plan for disasters. Various disasters, big ones, small ones, medium ones, you name it, they likely have a plan for it on major power plant sites. Fukushima for example was planned to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake and tsunami of certain height, both huge disasters. Problem was that it got hit by a hundred times stronger earthquake and a tsunami four times higher then their seawall. Other plants in the vicinity of that particular natural disaster that had higher seawalls stood. Most of them are ready to be restarted, if not for sensationalism attached to the Fukushima.
You see, there's this thing called "probability". For example, you certainly cannot plan for a large comet to hit the planet where the nuclear plant stands. Or you can, but if you do you should consider that damage from comet will far eclipse the potential fallout.
Same thing happened in Fukushima. Tsunami essentially wiped out all infrastructure in "thousands of square kilometers". It killed 30.000 people. It made hundreds of thousands to millions homeless. Japan, one of the most developed nations in the world and arguably the most prepared to earthquakes and tsunamis still cannot repair the damage tsunami wrecked on the country tears after it happened. Not damage to just the power plant, but the damage that disaster itself that caused, among other things, the Fukushima incident. Damage far away from Fukushima. Because it was a disaster of a century for a country that prides itself on being able to function while existing on the area where earthquakes and tsunamis are a norm.
Reality is, while there is no way to fully prepare all your local infrastructure for such a tsunami, there are ways to make plants safe in event of them occurring. If someone told you otherwise, know that they are lying to your face. Fukushima for example would have been fine if it had either a higher seawall or electric backup that would be positioned not to be easily flooded in event of tsunami going over the seawall, such as higher parts of reactor building. The problem is costs vs risk assessment. In case of that particular tsunami, the damage from tsunami itself was simply so great that Fukushima is barely a blip on the radar. The reason we're talking about it now is not because it was actually worse then tsunami itself, but because media thrives on certain stories, and while most of us live in parts of the world where tsunamis of that height simply do not occur, many live close enough to a nuclear power plant to be affected by potential fallout.
Additionally there was the issue of the local East Asian culture, the concept of "saving face" (i.e. not admitting problems) and the fact that with nuclear having serious image issues after Tsernobyl and Three Mile Island (not to mention connection to A-weapons), development and modernization of nuclear power plants has been lagging.
In the end, the biggest problem with the issue is sensationalism that actually exacerbates the problems by preventing effective solutions from being fielded.
Actually those can be prevented just as well. Fukushima plant that blew up was a 1st gen 1960s plant. If it was upgraded to modern tech from today, it would likely not have suffered critical malfunctions that it did. Many of their backup systems are still from those times. Entire plant was in fact build to last magnitude 7 earthquake. It took a 9 and survived it. Only the tsunami that followed the disaster, killing over 30.000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless managed to destroy its power generation capability to extent where it could not be restored fast enough.
As is often pointed out, Fukushima plants weren't the only one hit by the tsunami and earthquake. There were others who took almost as much of a hit. But they were newer (not even by much) so they didn't lose power due to better and newer backup systems, better seawall and better security practices. A modern plant built today would have easily survived the magnitude 9 and followup tsunami, just like a modern coal plant doesn't cause acid rains. It's the progress of technology, and one of the biggest self-defeating problems with anti-nuclear movement is that it blocks the development and implementations necessary to make these plants safer.
Considering that Chernobyl had working reactors sitting next to the one that melted down up until 2000 I'd say that it worked good enough. And closure wasn't for technical reasons at all - it was a political decision taken under heavy pressure from EU.
What it wasn't good for was long term containment, because it was eroding faster then planned.
This is a common issue across Fennoscandia, which sits on the world's oldest rock. We have a lot of uranium deep in the crust and radon gas that fills basements comes from its natural decay.
It's one of the main reasons why most building permits nowadays require proper ventilation of basement levels. Radon in miniscule amounts as it seeps in is essentially harmless, but it tends to concentrate in unventilated areas.
The latter can be prevented, but costs for plants that burn stuff are pretty steep. My father works for a burner-based power plant manufacturer (I've seen them make stuff ranging from burning coal to burning trash to burning the weird ass crap which is about 30% oil and 70% crushed rock), and one of the things he did was handle certification and maintenance of the new plants across EU that had to comply to rigorous norms.
For example, the main cause of acid rains of the past, SO2 and NOx emissions are currently ZERO on some modern burner plants. Reason for this is extreme degree of burning process control (i.e. they can create burning conditions where certain gasses do not form, instead burning process forms far less harmful gasses such as CO2). Particles nowadays can be handled by filters which also have near-100% efficiency for particles they're responsible for. Basically they get particles out of the exhaust air and store it in a solid form which is then taken away to the appropriate dump.
This stuff is really expensive though, so only new plants get the appropriate upgrades due to rigorous standards applied to them. Older plants still crap on the environment, same thing as old nuclear plants being far more risky when major disaster occurs then new ones.
1. It is. We have this across EU. It's a problem in BRIC to a smaller extent (all of them). It's a big problem in Japan and South Korea exacerbated by local culture of "do not make waves" and "be a part of a big whole" where "big whole" is usually one of the megacorps.
Hell, the only places where it isn't a problem are countries where there isn't much of a court system. I.e. it's not much of a problem in Somalia.
2. The system is bent in favor of large players, to an extent where it comes as newsworthy article when major corp actually fails to buy its way. Such at that particular article.
3. Who is this "everyone else" you're talking about? Even moderators seem to upmod both of our statements in about equal measures, even considering just how clueless most of the people on slashdot are about things outside US. Not to even mention that facts aren't elected by majority. This isn't a "shall we teach intelligent design" argument.
Granted your way of arguing your point is exceptionally similar to those particular pundits. "You are wrong and every I know thinks so too, therefore you're wrong and facts and reality can go to hell".
In companies size of microsoft, there's always a replacement for your role ready and set. It's the smaller companies that can't afford this model that need "transition" period. There is also a possibility that we weren't informed about the transition period and it was pending for a while.
So while he may have been "thrown out of the window", it's by no means a guaranteed thing.
"Can use" =! "works well".
And yet, this legal problem is the same across the world. In fact, surprisingly US fairs fairly well in this regard in comparison to many places in the world where corrupt justice system is far more influenced by money thrown at it.
And the subject wasn't changed at any point. But I guess when you argument your "doesn't like being wrong", you're really just forgetting to look in the mirror. I don't know if you misread something at some point, but the entire point of discussion was that suggested solution would be loved by those big companies, and completely crush the small inventor. This was the topic from my reply to the post #3 of the thread, which you apparently mistook as a reply to you.
And btw, to answer your question in #2, the reason for patent extensions is typically in that they are granted in exchange for information. For example, in medical field single patent can cover many implementations of which only one is found working. Information of which implementation is the one that is found to be working and how it works is what grants you the extension. Essentially you're meant to exchange accurate (and in some cases difficult to get such as medicine) information in exchange for extra protection from society. It's a fairly well thought-out part of the system, which serves both rewarding the inventor and incentivizing the inventor to share exact details of the invention with society.
We had a story on slashdot recently where pfizer tried to game this by asking for extension and not revealing enough detailed information in Canada. They were taken to court and lost fight and the patent extension.
All in all, you make several big assumptions such that is US is the only place where system is stacked against the little guy, or that little guy apparently doesn't matter because legal system is stacked against him regardless, elevated these assumptions to factual status and started to look down on everyone arguing against your "facts".
It's something you commonly see on cheap talk shows that cater to lowest denominator of the society.
And yet, even the king of mobile usage, browsing and email is still about 10% of total usage.
ARM is dominant in mobile, and can't even touch desktop and server at the moment. x86/x64 rules that roost.
Ubuntu is about as much of a distro for a normal person as linux on desktop is for a normal person. That is, not at all. It certainly is one for the least informed, with all the mess with advertisements where they clearly expected their target audience to be as ignorant as average windows user. Considering the shitstorm, I guess both them and you were wrong on this one.
And no, gaming isn't leaving "windowze" and moving to linux. At all. Mobile gaming on mobile phones is terrible right now. It's purely casual "five minute fun" with a few exceptions that try to emulate desktop experience and fail. Because the platform is simply not suitable for desktop experience.
Do wake me up when we see games like Deus Ex, Dishonored, Starcraft 2, LoL, WoW, GW2, Mass Effect, XCOM and so on have fully fledged versions on "mobile" and linux. I may agree with you then. But right now, you're trying to join the hype train that isn't even connected to the car with engine yet, and it's pretty unlikely it ever will.