The trouble is that they're less inclined to pay $30 for that DVD, but now they have that $30 burning a hole in their pocket and there are still a big pile of other DVDs sold by the same studios that they haven't got.
Again, the important figure is the number of dollars you don't give them, not the number of copies you make. Making a thousand copies and giving them to a thousand people who, rather than not buying a movie, simply watch one more movie that year than they would have otherwise, doesn't cost the studios a dime. If you want to cost them money you have to stop giving them money, regardless of how many copies you make.
I'm off to the store to buy a couple of boxes of DVDs and blurays and I'm going to start giving them away to people I know and ask them to pass more forward.
Something to keep in mind: Despite all their wailing like petulant children, people making copies doesn't actually hurt them.
It is far, far more important that you endeavor to never give them money. Paying $30 for a DVD and then making a thousand copies of it still makes them $30 of profit.
Any analogy to the methods used in the war on drugs can only be used if you are trying to show how those methods are illegitimate. The war on drugs is not to be emulated.
As long as the media has enough people thinking this way, the duopoly wins.
The problem is that it doesn't matter what you do, the duopoly wins.
The two largest third parties are the Greens and the Libertarians. You can't go from a situation where in one election either of those parties have zero seats in Congress and in the next they have 50% or more. Even if they won every single election held, only a minority of the seats in the Senate are even on the ballot in any given election. And the idea that they could win all the seats on the ballot is hopelessly, ridiculously optimistic. It would be a miracle if they could get five seats in the House.
Now let's suppose that happens. The Green party puts up a candidate in all the districts that aren't Republican strongholds, makes a miraculously strong showing, and five of them win. But in a large number of districts where they ran and they didn't win, their strong showing caused their Democratic opponent to lose to the Republican, because the Democrats and the Greens split the vote. So you get a new House of Representatives that contains 5 Greens, 150 Democrats and 280 Republicans. Oops.
Naturally, if anything even resembling that should happen, both the Greens and the Democrats do whatever it takes to stop it happening again. Because Greens running candidates in a substantial number of districts, if they make a strong enough showing for even a single one to win, have made a strong enough showing to cause 30 other Democrats to lose to Republicans. And the Greens have the same interest as the Democrats in seeing the Republicans lose. So what happens is that the two parties merge together. Both parties realize that they both lose to the Republicans if they run against each other, so they don't; all the viable Green candidates join the Democratic party and Greens never win another seat. The Green party remains in name only, full of the loons who were left over. And likewise for the Republicans as against the Libertarians.
But here's the secret to breaking it. You have to forget about all the existing parties. What you need is a new third party that takes exactly one half of its positions from the Democrats and one half from the Republicans. That way they "split the vote" with both major party candidates, which allows them to make a strong showing without devastating the major party most like them, because there isn't a major party "most" like them. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to choose which half of the positions of each major party to adopt.)
Simply selling off these stocks would not result in an improvement of the investors situation, in fact it makes it worse as they have even less security or growth in cash.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that investors should sell Microsoft and put the cash in their mattress. But that is not the only alternative to holding Microsoft. You can buy Ford, Walmart, RedHat, US treasures, corporate and municipal bonds, etc. etc.
Those cocksuckers have $76billion in cash and can't pay a dividend. Assholes.
That's because the income tax makes it idiotic for a corporation to pay dividends. It forces the stockholder to pay tax on the money immediately, even if all they wanted it for was to reinvest it in the same corporation. Whereas if the corporation holds the assets themselves then it makes their stock price higher by the amount of the dividend, allowing anyone who wants to put the money somewhere else to just sell a few shares, but allowing the stockholders who want to keep shares in the same company to avoid paying the tax until they sell. You can also offset capital gains by capital losses (i.e. if you sell shares in one company for more than you paid and in another for less than you paid), which you can't do with dividends. And the tax on selling the shares is on the difference between what you paid and what you sold it for, rather than on the entire amount in the case of a dividend.
Of course, corporations doing this is terrible for the economy for a long list of reasons, but that's the fault of the tax code, not the corporations who just do what is good for their own shareholders.
All of the Apple I bought will be gone long before then because the only way to make money with Apple is by selling the highs.
You must not be very good at math.
If you have a stock that increases in value by 4% every year but never issues a dividend, and you sell 3% of your holdings every year, there will never be a year that you have a lower dollar amount of stock than the year before. You'll have fewer shares, but the number of shares (as opposed to shares times price of a share) is meaningless -- when the share price gets too high they'll have a stock split and you'll get more shares.
Only if by "business practices relating to windows" you mean designing an incompatible JVM, including it with Internet Explorer, making ISVs agree to not include Sun's JVM with their applications, misleading Java developers into thinking that developing for Microsoft's JVM would produce cross-platform applications and threatening Intel that they would support AMD 3DNOW! if Intel wouldn't stop developing a high-performance cross-platform JVM.
But don't take my word for it, read section II(B)(5) here. The heading is "Java" under "II. Monopolization, B. Anticompetitive Conduct."
That's a phone that runs Android. It was manufactured by HTC. It can't have failed in the market prior to Google giving away Android for free, because it runs the same Android they were already giving away for free.
The fact they are buying something that is sufficiently similar to an iPhone allows them to insert themselves into Apple's pricing tiers as an alternative.
That is what's supposed to happen. It's called competition. Just because you popularize something doesn't inherently give you any proprietary rights to it. We don't grant government monopolies for expensive marketing. And that is what Apple wants, which is why they're wrong.
However you nitpick the various claims made in the lawsuit and how laws should apply and if patents should even be granted I think that no one with eyes that can see can honestly look at some of these products side by side and deny that at some point someone at Samsung looked at an iPhone and an iPad and told someone at some department "hey, make me some of these." Personally, I think that's a dick move and they deserve to catch more hell for it than they currently have. It's exactly the kind of thing we used to deride the Chinese, and before them the Japanese, for and now it seems like that's all A-OK.
We used to deride them for making shoddy products and misrepresenting that fact to buyers. Actual trademark infringement, where the buyer was actually deceived into buying a piece of crap with a fake label.
What you're deriding Samsung for is engaging in honest competition. They're making a high-quality product for a lower price. There is nothing untoward about specifically targeting Apple's customers or producing a product they will find familiar, in the absence of any misrepresentations about its origin.
Copying is not inherently wrong. Patents expire for a reason, and not everything is patentable for a reason. All advancement is incremental. Standards and uniform conventions are socially desirable. Monopolies are bad.
And.NET isn't. Which is what a sufficiently large number of business applications are now written in that major companies can't switch from Windows to a competing operating system.
The threat from Java was that everyone would use it, and use its platform-independent standard library instead of the Microsoft lock-in created by a preponderance of applications using the Win32 API. When Java first arrived they tried to kill it by including a non-standard JVM with Windows, so that applications written in Java for the Microsoft JVM wouldn't run on the Sun JVM on other platforms.
That was what got them in the antitrust hot water. When they couldn't do that anymore, instead of including a thing with Windows and calling it Java, they created a new thing to include with Windows and called it.NET. Along with the other moving target that is Direct X, and some others. Their purpose was the same as the proprietary JVM, as it was with creating Win32 instead of using POSIX before that: Give developers a Windows-locked platform to target, so that new third party applications would continue to lock businesses into Windows.
And it has served their aims. Most people still can't switch Windows for another operating system because the software won't run. Too many business applications use.NET, too many games use Direct X, etc. But one has to wonder how it is that they got in trouble for including the JVM while the others are excused.
a rectangular product shape with all four corners uniformly rounded;
the front surface of the product dominated by a screen surface with black borders;
as to the iPhone and iPod touch products, substantial black borders above and below the screen having roughly equal width and narrower black borders on either side of the screen having roughly equal width;
as to the iPad product, substantial black borders on all sides being roughly equal in width;
a metallic surround framing the perimeter of the top surface;
a display of a grid of colorful square icons with uniformly rounded corners; and
a bottom row of square icons (the "Springboard") set off from the other icons and that do not change as the other pages of the user interface are viewed.
The phone you linked meets everything there except what, that it's white instead of black and the icons are square instead of having rounded corners? You can try to claim that the similarities between Apple's device and Samsung's are more than what's listed, but all that means is that the trade dress claims are overly broad.
The fundamental problem is that all touch screen phones have similar characteristics for purely functional reasons. All the similarities between Apple's device and Samsung's come down to a simple calculus: In any market with similar devices competing, you can always evaluate each of your various competitors' products to determine which one is most like yours, and (absent a tie) there will always be one that is. Naturally, a company intent on doing some lawyer-based chest thumping will choose that one as the target of their aggression. Subsequent comparisons between that competitor's device and other devices on the market will always show that device to be the most similar, because it is, and that's why they picked it as their target.
But none of that proves that Samsung did anything wrong. Having the most similar device and having a device that is too similar are two completely unrelated questions. You can have neither, both, or either one without the other. And pointing out a list of generic similarities doesn't prove anything. Pick any two modern cell phones and I'll be able to give you a list of a hundred characteristics they both share.
Apple is making trademark and trade dress claims. The point of those things is to identify the product to the customer when they're purchasing it. Nobody is buying a Samsung phone thinking it's made by Apple.
The problem is that even together it's nonsense. You're saying that having a big screen, being symmetrical, being square, having icons, etc. each by themselves is nothing but together is infringing. But no, that's still ridiculous. Almost everything has all of those. You might as well claim 'runs on electricity, has a rechargeable battery, has a touch screen, has a wireless data modem and fits in your pocket.' Enumerating a shared set of basic, functional characteristics of common devices does not imply infringement.
No, this is what they cited. This is what's on the table. Yes, there are more, but many may be much more shaky than the ones cited.
But that's the problem. Shaky doesn't really matter; it still costs a million dollars to defend from a shaky patent.
And the real problem is the preliminary injunction. The aggressor goes to court with a packet of patents and asks for the victim to be prevented from selling their product while the court is sorting out the infringement. The victim only has a short period of time to prepare a defense to that motion before the judge rules on it, and the patents are presumed valid unless the victim can provide the invalidating evidence right away. If they can't, their product is off the market for a year or more while case is litigated. Even if they ultimately win, it doesn't matter because by then the product is years old and irrelevant to the marketplace.
In the meantime, if they come up with a new product, they get a new lawsuit with a new set of patents and a new injunction. Until they pay the protection money.
You seem to think that MS trolling is related to Linux, rather than being related to anything better than WP7 and for less money. You can try something e.g. BSD based if you like, but what makes you expect a different result?
Well, Google couldn't compete in the mobile marketplace either, so they decided to give a product away for free, funded by their monopoly search profits, just as Microsoft once did with Internet Explorer when it couldn't compete with Netscape.
When has Google ever tried to sell a product in the "mobile marketplace"? Android has been free as long as Google has had it. And it is free for the same reasons that Ubuntu is free. Pray tell, what monopoly has Canonical used to fund Ubuntu? Perhaps RedHat is a monopolist as well? Or is it possible that zero cost software distribution is part of a well-known business model used by a variety of major industry players that has nothing to do with monopoly abuse?
You don't understand. You see, if people use Android then they aren't using WP7. Which means that Microsoft can't weld Bing into the rafters the way they did with Windows and Internet Explorer. And how is Microsoft supposed to get a monopoly on web search if they can't leverage their operating system monopoly?
Allowing people to have a choice of search engines is clearly anti-competitive because people will choose Google over Bing. I mean how is Microsoft supposed to compete when nobody likes their products?
That was way too many words to say something that should have been much simpler:
A troll is someone infected with the misanthropic attitude that is fostered by the ability to attack without fear of retribution. Therefore, Microsoft is a troll.
The thing is, Microsoft by and large did destroy Java. Certainly it stopped Java from becoming the primary platform for new development during its heyday, which would have made the large majority of third party software platform independent and made Windows irrelevant.
It's a very productive business strategy, other than that whole illegality thing.
A patent troll is someone who has patents, not devices. From this point of view, MS is not a patent troll because it has been in the smart phone business before there were smartphones.
Microsoft is a troll because they don't have any sales volume. The problem with trolls is that everybody who makes something is infringing everybody else's patents, which leaves all the producers on the same footing with respect to one another and lets them negotiate a cross-license, but trolls don't make anything. So they have you over a barrel and they can extort whatever they want out of you. And that's what Microsoft is, because even if you had a genuine legitimate patent that WP7 infringes, the damages are based on sales volume and since nobody is buying WP7 devices Microsoft could just shrug it off. Which makes them a troll.
Judicious coders are now looking for prior art, and they'll probably find it. But each patent fought will be a battle by itself, cost a lot of money, and more cross-complaints will be filed. This is only the beginning, not the beginning of the end.
This is the knock-down argument for why what Microsoft is doing is illegitimate. If it doesn't matter whether the patents are valid because they have a thousand other patents in their back pocket then you're not paying for a patent license, you're paying protection money against ruinous litigation. You either have to pay up or you have to play Russian roulette with a machine gun where every dud costs you a million bucks in legal fees.
That's the problem with mutually assured destruction. It only works when the entities are the same size. Otherwise it's a war of attrition, so the big guy only needs to force an equal dollar amount of each party's cash into a big pile (called "retainer fees") and then set it all on fire and wait for the little guy to either capitulate or go into bankruptcy. And compared to Microsoft, B&N is the little guy.
I don't think the problem is what you think it is.
You say that it's plainly negligent homicide, but if it was then what stops them from being charged with it? I suspect the answer is one of two things. Either what they did isn't considered negligent homicide under the law (perhaps because the mining companies have successfully lobbied for it not to be), and so if an individual did the same thing they would not be charged either, or alternatively it is against the law but there is corruption in the prosecutor's office that prevents them from being charged. But neither of those has anything to do with limited liability.
As Kevin once put it, "If you build it, they will come".
The premise of TFA is that they have built it and no one has come.
People want applications that require faster connections. But only suckers pay extra for a faster connection before the applications have been developed if the ISP gives you the option of letting someone else pay and then reaping the benefit by upgrading only after the applications come through. What that means is you need for everyone to get the faster connection so that the "free riders" who refuse to pay extra don't prevent developers from having a customer base against which to build the new applications.
I disagree. If the government funds campaigns then the government will likely distribute the money unfairly. and that still won't necessarily stop the private funding of campaigns on top of the public funding. Politicians that support corporations will likely now get double the funding.
As for distributing money unfairly, you can pretty well expect both the democrats and the republicans to get funded and for nobody else to. First past the post voting systems make third parties useless anyway, so that isn't any real loss, and it allows the democratic and republican candidates to voice opinions that they otherwise would not because it would lose them donors.
And sensible public financing schemes require the candidate to choose whether they want public or private financing. They can't get both. Of course, that doesn't include the "independent expenditures" corporations make outside the control of the candidate. But even then, ask yourself which is better: To have a corporate candidate who has a million dollars of corporate money against a non-corporate candidate with a thousand dollars of non-corporate money, or to have a corporate candidate with two million dollars and a non-corporate candidate with a million dollars because they each got a million dollars of public financing? The latter is obviously much better for the non-corporate candidate than the former.
I would agree that we ought to delaminate the telecoms though. All you really need to do is create one company that owns and maintains the physical wire that comes into your house and is regulated as a public utility and must lease access to the wire to anyone who wants it for uniform and published prices. Then whatever is left of the rest of them can go off and compete with Skype and Netflix.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is that they're less inclined to pay $30 for that DVD, but now they have that $30 burning a hole in their pocket and there are still a big pile of other DVDs sold by the same studios that they haven't got.
Again, the important figure is the number of dollars you don't give them, not the number of copies you make. Making a thousand copies and giving them to a thousand people who, rather than not buying a movie, simply watch one more movie that year than they would have otherwise, doesn't cost the studios a dime. If you want to cost them money you have to stop giving them money, regardless of how many copies you make.
I'm off to the store to buy a couple of boxes of DVDs and blurays and I'm going to start giving them away to people I know and ask them to pass more forward.
Something to keep in mind: Despite all their wailing like petulant children, people making copies doesn't actually hurt them.
It is far, far more important that you endeavor to never give them money. Paying $30 for a DVD and then making a thousand copies of it still makes them $30 of profit.
Any analogy to the methods used in the war on drugs can only be used if you are trying to show how those methods are illegitimate. The war on drugs is not to be emulated.
As long as the media has enough people thinking this way, the duopoly wins.
The problem is that it doesn't matter what you do, the duopoly wins.
The two largest third parties are the Greens and the Libertarians. You can't go from a situation where in one election either of those parties have zero seats in Congress and in the next they have 50% or more. Even if they won every single election held, only a minority of the seats in the Senate are even on the ballot in any given election. And the idea that they could win all the seats on the ballot is hopelessly, ridiculously optimistic. It would be a miracle if they could get five seats in the House.
Now let's suppose that happens. The Green party puts up a candidate in all the districts that aren't Republican strongholds, makes a miraculously strong showing, and five of them win. But in a large number of districts where they ran and they didn't win, their strong showing caused their Democratic opponent to lose to the Republican, because the Democrats and the Greens split the vote. So you get a new House of Representatives that contains 5 Greens, 150 Democrats and 280 Republicans. Oops.
Naturally, if anything even resembling that should happen, both the Greens and the Democrats do whatever it takes to stop it happening again. Because Greens running candidates in a substantial number of districts, if they make a strong enough showing for even a single one to win, have made a strong enough showing to cause 30 other Democrats to lose to Republicans. And the Greens have the same interest as the Democrats in seeing the Republicans lose. So what happens is that the two parties merge together. Both parties realize that they both lose to the Republicans if they run against each other, so they don't; all the viable Green candidates join the Democratic party and Greens never win another seat. The Green party remains in name only, full of the loons who were left over. And likewise for the Republicans as against the Libertarians.
But here's the secret to breaking it. You have to forget about all the existing parties. What you need is a new third party that takes exactly one half of its positions from the Democrats and one half from the Republicans. That way they "split the vote" with both major party candidates, which allows them to make a strong showing without devastating the major party most like them, because there isn't a major party "most" like them. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to choose which half of the positions of each major party to adopt.)
Simply selling off these stocks would not result in an improvement of the investors situation, in fact it makes it worse as they have even less security or growth in cash.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that investors should sell Microsoft and put the cash in their mattress. But that is not the only alternative to holding Microsoft. You can buy Ford, Walmart, RedHat, US treasures, corporate and municipal bonds, etc. etc.
Those cocksuckers have $76billion in cash and can't pay a dividend. Assholes.
That's because the income tax makes it idiotic for a corporation to pay dividends. It forces the stockholder to pay tax on the money immediately, even if all they wanted it for was to reinvest it in the same corporation. Whereas if the corporation holds the assets themselves then it makes their stock price higher by the amount of the dividend, allowing anyone who wants to put the money somewhere else to just sell a few shares, but allowing the stockholders who want to keep shares in the same company to avoid paying the tax until they sell. You can also offset capital gains by capital losses (i.e. if you sell shares in one company for more than you paid and in another for less than you paid), which you can't do with dividends. And the tax on selling the shares is on the difference between what you paid and what you sold it for, rather than on the entire amount in the case of a dividend.
Of course, corporations doing this is terrible for the economy for a long list of reasons, but that's the fault of the tax code, not the corporations who just do what is good for their own shareholders.
All of the Apple I bought will be gone long before then because the only way to make money with Apple is by selling the highs.
You must not be very good at math.
If you have a stock that increases in value by 4% every year but never issues a dividend, and you sell 3% of your holdings every year, there will never be a year that you have a lower dollar amount of stock than the year before. You'll have fewer shares, but the number of shares (as opposed to shares times price of a share) is meaningless -- when the share price gets too high they'll have a stock split and you'll get more shares.
Only if by "business practices relating to windows" you mean designing an incompatible JVM, including it with Internet Explorer, making ISVs agree to not include Sun's JVM with their applications, misleading Java developers into thinking that developing for Microsoft's JVM would produce cross-platform applications and threatening Intel that they would support AMD 3DNOW! if Intel wouldn't stop developing a high-performance cross-platform JVM.
But don't take my word for it, read section II(B)(5) here. The heading is "Java" under "II. Monopolization, B. Anticompetitive Conduct."
That's a phone that runs Android. It was manufactured by HTC. It can't have failed in the market prior to Google giving away Android for free, because it runs the same Android they were already giving away for free.
The fact they are buying something that is sufficiently similar to an iPhone allows them to insert themselves into Apple's pricing tiers as an alternative.
That is what's supposed to happen. It's called competition. Just because you popularize something doesn't inherently give you any proprietary rights to it. We don't grant government monopolies for expensive marketing. And that is what Apple wants, which is why they're wrong.
However you nitpick the various claims made in the lawsuit and how laws should apply and if patents should even be granted I think that no one with eyes that can see can honestly look at some of these products side by side and deny that at some point someone at Samsung looked at an iPhone and an iPad and told someone at some department "hey, make me some of these." Personally, I think that's a dick move and they deserve to catch more hell for it than they currently have. It's exactly the kind of thing we used to deride the Chinese, and before them the Japanese, for and now it seems like that's all A-OK.
We used to deride them for making shoddy products and misrepresenting that fact to buyers. Actual trademark infringement, where the buyer was actually deceived into buying a piece of crap with a fake label.
What you're deriding Samsung for is engaging in honest competition. They're making a high-quality product for a lower price. There is nothing untoward about specifically targeting Apple's customers or producing a product they will find familiar, in the absence of any misrepresentations about its origin.
Copying is not inherently wrong. Patents expire for a reason, and not everything is patentable for a reason. All advancement is incremental. Standards and uniform conventions are socially desirable. Monopolies are bad.
And .NET isn't. Which is what a sufficiently large number of business applications are now written in that major companies can't switch from Windows to a competing operating system.
The threat from Java was that everyone would use it, and use its platform-independent standard library instead of the Microsoft lock-in created by a preponderance of applications using the Win32 API. When Java first arrived they tried to kill it by including a non-standard JVM with Windows, so that applications written in Java for the Microsoft JVM wouldn't run on the Sun JVM on other platforms.
That was what got them in the antitrust hot water. When they couldn't do that anymore, instead of including a thing with Windows and calling it Java, they created a new thing to include with Windows and called it .NET. Along with the other moving target that is Direct X, and some others. Their purpose was the same as the proprietary JVM, as it was with creating Win32 instead of using POSIX before that: Give developers a Windows-locked platform to target, so that new third party applications would continue to lock businesses into Windows.
And it has served their aims. Most people still can't switch Windows for another operating system because the software won't run. Too many business applications use .NET, too many games use Direct X, etc. But one has to wonder how it is that they got in trouble for including the JVM while the others are excused.
If the phone companies had separate plans that were $20/month less but you bring your own phone, I would pick those plans.
The problem is that the phone companies want to subsidize your phone. It lets them fill it with spamware and require you to sign a two year contract.
OK, let's look at the claims Apple is making:
a rectangular product shape with all four corners uniformly rounded;
the front surface of the product dominated by a screen surface with black borders;
as to the iPhone and iPod touch products, substantial black borders above and below the screen having roughly equal width and narrower black borders on either side of the screen having roughly equal width;
as to the iPad product, substantial black borders on all sides being roughly equal in width;
a metallic surround framing the perimeter of the top surface;
a display of a grid of colorful square icons with uniformly rounded corners; and
a bottom row of square icons (the "Springboard") set off from the other icons and that do not change as the other pages of the user interface are viewed.
The phone you linked meets everything there except what, that it's white instead of black and the icons are square instead of having rounded corners? You can try to claim that the similarities between Apple's device and Samsung's are more than what's listed, but all that means is that the trade dress claims are overly broad.
The fundamental problem is that all touch screen phones have similar characteristics for purely functional reasons. All the similarities between Apple's device and Samsung's come down to a simple calculus: In any market with similar devices competing, you can always evaluate each of your various competitors' products to determine which one is most like yours, and (absent a tie) there will always be one that is. Naturally, a company intent on doing some lawyer-based chest thumping will choose that one as the target of their aggression. Subsequent comparisons between that competitor's device and other devices on the market will always show that device to be the most similar, because it is, and that's why they picked it as their target.
But none of that proves that Samsung did anything wrong. Having the most similar device and having a device that is too similar are two completely unrelated questions. You can have neither, both, or either one without the other. And pointing out a list of generic similarities doesn't prove anything. Pick any two modern cell phones and I'll be able to give you a list of a hundred characteristics they both share.
Apple is making trademark and trade dress claims. The point of those things is to identify the product to the customer when they're purchasing it. Nobody is buying a Samsung phone thinking it's made by Apple.
The problem is that even together it's nonsense. You're saying that having a big screen, being symmetrical, being square, having icons, etc. each by themselves is nothing but together is infringing. But no, that's still ridiculous. Almost everything has all of those. You might as well claim 'runs on electricity, has a rechargeable battery, has a touch screen, has a wireless data modem and fits in your pocket.' Enumerating a shared set of basic, functional characteristics of common devices does not imply infringement.
No, this is what they cited. This is what's on the table. Yes, there are more, but many may be much more shaky than the ones cited.
But that's the problem. Shaky doesn't really matter; it still costs a million dollars to defend from a shaky patent.
And the real problem is the preliminary injunction. The aggressor goes to court with a packet of patents and asks for the victim to be prevented from selling their product while the court is sorting out the infringement. The victim only has a short period of time to prepare a defense to that motion before the judge rules on it, and the patents are presumed valid unless the victim can provide the invalidating evidence right away. If they can't, their product is off the market for a year or more while case is litigated. Even if they ultimately win, it doesn't matter because by then the product is years old and irrelevant to the marketplace.
In the meantime, if they come up with a new product, they get a new lawsuit with a new set of patents and a new injunction. Until they pay the protection money.
You seem to think that MS trolling is related to Linux, rather than being related to anything better than WP7 and for less money. You can try something e.g. BSD based if you like, but what makes you expect a different result?
Well, Google couldn't compete in the mobile marketplace either, so they decided to give a product away for free, funded by their monopoly search profits, just as Microsoft once did with Internet Explorer when it couldn't compete with Netscape.
When has Google ever tried to sell a product in the "mobile marketplace"? Android has been free as long as Google has had it. And it is free for the same reasons that Ubuntu is free. Pray tell, what monopoly has Canonical used to fund Ubuntu? Perhaps RedHat is a monopolist as well? Or is it possible that zero cost software distribution is part of a well-known business model used by a variety of major industry players that has nothing to do with monopoly abuse?
You don't understand. You see, if people use Android then they aren't using WP7. Which means that Microsoft can't weld Bing into the rafters the way they did with Windows and Internet Explorer. And how is Microsoft supposed to get a monopoly on web search if they can't leverage their operating system monopoly?
Allowing people to have a choice of search engines is clearly anti-competitive because people will choose Google over Bing. I mean how is Microsoft supposed to compete when nobody likes their products?
That was way too many words to say something that should have been much simpler:
A troll is someone infected with the misanthropic attitude that is fostered by the ability to attack without fear of retribution. Therefore, Microsoft is a troll.
The thing is, Microsoft by and large did destroy Java. Certainly it stopped Java from becoming the primary platform for new development during its heyday, which would have made the large majority of third party software platform independent and made Windows irrelevant.
It's a very productive business strategy, other than that whole illegality thing.
A patent troll is someone who has patents, not devices. From this point of view, MS is not a patent troll because it has been in the smart phone business before there were smartphones.
Microsoft is a troll because they don't have any sales volume. The problem with trolls is that everybody who makes something is infringing everybody else's patents, which leaves all the producers on the same footing with respect to one another and lets them negotiate a cross-license, but trolls don't make anything. So they have you over a barrel and they can extort whatever they want out of you. And that's what Microsoft is, because even if you had a genuine legitimate patent that WP7 infringes, the damages are based on sales volume and since nobody is buying WP7 devices Microsoft could just shrug it off. Which makes them a troll.
Judicious coders are now looking for prior art, and they'll probably find it. But each patent fought will be a battle by itself, cost a lot of money, and more cross-complaints will be filed. This is only the beginning, not the beginning of the end.
This is the knock-down argument for why what Microsoft is doing is illegitimate. If it doesn't matter whether the patents are valid because they have a thousand other patents in their back pocket then you're not paying for a patent license, you're paying protection money against ruinous litigation. You either have to pay up or you have to play Russian roulette with a machine gun where every dud costs you a million bucks in legal fees.
That's the problem with mutually assured destruction. It only works when the entities are the same size. Otherwise it's a war of attrition, so the big guy only needs to force an equal dollar amount of each party's cash into a big pile (called "retainer fees") and then set it all on fire and wait for the little guy to either capitulate or go into bankruptcy. And compared to Microsoft, B&N is the little guy.
Unsurprisingly they aren't using that patent in the actual litigation. Because if it got invalidated they couldn't keep shaking people down with it.
I don't think the problem is what you think it is.
You say that it's plainly negligent homicide, but if it was then what stops them from being charged with it? I suspect the answer is one of two things. Either what they did isn't considered negligent homicide under the law (perhaps because the mining companies have successfully lobbied for it not to be), and so if an individual did the same thing they would not be charged either, or alternatively it is against the law but there is corruption in the prosecutor's office that prevents them from being charged. But neither of those has anything to do with limited liability.
As Kevin once put it, "If you build it, they will come".
The premise of TFA is that they have built it and no one has come.
People want applications that require faster connections. But only suckers pay extra for a faster connection before the applications have been developed if the ISP gives you the option of letting someone else pay and then reaping the benefit by upgrading only after the applications come through. What that means is you need for everyone to get the faster connection so that the "free riders" who refuse to pay extra don't prevent developers from having a customer base against which to build the new applications.
I disagree. If the government funds campaigns then the government will likely distribute the money unfairly. and that still won't necessarily stop the private funding of campaigns on top of the public funding. Politicians that support corporations will likely now get double the funding.
As for distributing money unfairly, you can pretty well expect both the democrats and the republicans to get funded and for nobody else to. First past the post voting systems make third parties useless anyway, so that isn't any real loss, and it allows the democratic and republican candidates to voice opinions that they otherwise would not because it would lose them donors.
And sensible public financing schemes require the candidate to choose whether they want public or private financing. They can't get both. Of course, that doesn't include the "independent expenditures" corporations make outside the control of the candidate. But even then, ask yourself which is better: To have a corporate candidate who has a million dollars of corporate money against a non-corporate candidate with a thousand dollars of non-corporate money, or to have a corporate candidate with two million dollars and a non-corporate candidate with a million dollars because they each got a million dollars of public financing? The latter is obviously much better for the non-corporate candidate than the former.
I would agree that we ought to delaminate the telecoms though. All you really need to do is create one company that owns and maintains the physical wire that comes into your house and is regulated as a public utility and must lease access to the wire to anyone who wants it for uniform and published prices. Then whatever is left of the rest of them can go off and compete with Skype and Netflix.