GP was right but incomplete. Companies don't pay taxes because they're just intermediaries. They take money from customers and give it to employees and investors. If you increase taxes on a corporation, it will cause one or more of the following things: They will raise prices on consumers, lay off employees or reduce employee compensation, or the value of your 401K will go down. It isn't General Electric who would pay the tax, it's you, as a customer/employee/pensioner.
I think that most of Buffet's income is in capital gains which are taxed (inexplicably) at a much lower rate than income.
It isn't inexplicable at all. It's because of inflation. If you buy a stock for $100 in 2001 and sell it for $150 in 2011, you have a nominal gain of $50, but in real terms you only made $22 because $100 in 2001 has the same buying power as $128 in 2011 (according to the CPI -- it's probably even worse than that in reality).
We want to tax people on actual gains rather than just inflation, because taxing inflation causes investors to hold existing, poorly-performing investments even where new investments are more attractive (and economically beneficial), in order to put off paying the tax as long as possible.
They could change it so that they actually calculate out the inflation using the Consumer Price Index between the times the asset was bought and sold and then tax on the real gain rather than the nominal gain, but long-term investors would actually end up paying less that way than they are now, which could result in a reduction in government revenue. And short term investors (like high frequency traders) would lobby against it aggressively because they have no inflationary component of their gains to deduct.
Larger outages in an infrastructure like Facebook's are only rarely an accumulation of smaller issues. Think about it: what's a more likely scenario for a major site-wide issue, thousands of web servers whose hard drives die simultaneously, or a flapping route caused by a configuration issue on a router?
Sometimes. But for example, suppose you have a fail-over setup so that if one machine falls over, its work units or clients are automatically transferred to another machine. You're very proud of yourself until you get a damaged work unit or client which is capable of causing the machine processing it to fall over, and then it gets transferred all around to every server and causes a cascade failure until 30 seconds later all of your servers have crashed.
And sometimes you do get simultaneous "independent" failures of both hardware and software because of a common cause. Suppose you have a load spike during a nationwide heatwave and the ambient temperature in most of your data centers gets up to 85 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just within design specifications for your facilities but it had never happened before. You might very well see a rash of disk or power supply failures then.
Nonsense. Basically no one for whom $50,000 is not real money is put in prison for a drug offense as it is, and this doesn't put any poor people in prison who wouldn't be there under the existing laws.
And paying the money doesn't get you out of probation and mandatory drug testing -- Bill Gates can pay his way out of a first offense, but then he's got probation and weekly drug tests and a positive result means he's violated his probation and is going to jail.
I was thinking about something similar to this the other day, but not taxation. A way to actually reduce drug usage: Fines. Huge, monster fines. You take the possession offenses that currently have penalties in the 5 year range, for example, and keep them, but give the defendant the alternative, at their option, to pay a $50,000 fine and get immediate probation. And give the same option to all the nonviolent drug offenders who are already in prison.
Now think about the result of that. The fine is very high, but it isn't so high that it isn't worth paying: Who would choose prison if you can buy your way out of it for $10,000/year? Anybody can make that much in any job, and prison sucks more than any possible employment alternative. So you close half the prisons (and save a pile of money), meanwhile you have a bunch of drug dealers paying you $50,000 each. Win-win. Plus, it gets the drug dealers out of the combination school and social networking facility for criminals that we call prison.
At the same time, none of these drug dealers just has $50,000 in cash sitting around. Not in money they can write a check against without getting arrested for tax evasion. So they have to get it from one of two places: Either their bosses, who have a money laundering apparatus set up, or their parents and families.
If they go to their bosses and the bosses bail them out then you get to play follow the money with the $50,000 and see where it came from, try to get the bosses for tax evasion, etc. Plus, you make the business that much less profitable -- the boss isn't going to have much left for bling if he has to spend his millions keeping all his dealers out of prison. It also changes the dynamic: Previously the convict would be sitting in jail and the boss can't get him out, but can promise rewards after release if he keeps his mouth shut. Now the boss can get him out right away by paying the money, so the convict finds out right away whether the boss is willing to reward his silence. So if the boss doesn't pay he has to risk the convict being resentful enough to roll over, but if he does pay then he spends all his profits paying the fines.
On the other hand, the convict has the option of going to their families to see if they can scrape together the money. And they probably can -- once. But it will cost them. So after they do it, if they catch the guy dealing again, they're going to pressure him into getting out of the life because they will be extremely resentful that they spent all their hard-earned money keeping him out of prison if he's still doing the same things that almost got him sent there in the first place. Family guilt is a powerful motivator.
The net result is that you increase costs for the drug dealers. If the money to keep them out of prison comes from the drug profits, you make drugs unprofitable -- all the profits are going to pay fines. If it comes from some other source, whoever is paying it is going to put serious pressure on the person convicted to make sure they haven't wasted their money. And if nobody pays then you create friction between the bosses and the convicts who can give them up for letting them rot in prison when they could have paid the fine.
Do you know what a loss leader is? Stores will sell a popular item slightly below cost so that customers will come to the store for the discount, and while they're there they buy other stuff which the store profits from. The item won't stay on sale below cost for very long. So the competitor can come in, buy your entire supply of them (which will cause your customers to be angry that they came for the discount and it's sold out), then as soon as your sale is over, sell them for the normal retail price.
In theory "you can't patent an idea", but it's basically doublespeak. (They also say that you can't patent an algorithm, but then explain to me the H.264 patents.)
The trouble is software patents (again). If you look at very low level software, like when you're talking about assembly language or codecs or the like, it's basically unadulterated pure math. To the extent that you create abstractions so that you're dealing with objects and representations rather than raw numbers and equations/algorithms, you're then dealing with abstract ideas. Neither mathematics nor abstract ideas are supposed to be patentable, but yet patents on software "inventions" have been issued.
Naturally there is no actual physical 'invention' in the sense of here's a prototype of a cotton gin. It's what most people would think of as an idea. But they don't call it that, because then it wouldn't be patentable.
But on another note, why would a company decide to pay for another connection in another country, presumable going through a shell company they had to create to disassociate the connection from them, instead of simply locking the user's internet access down and create a termination policy for those insistent on getting around it?
It seems like cheap insurance to me. The cost of the connection is of no significance in the operation of a business, and in many situations it may have no cost at all: If you have sites in different countries and one has more rational laws than the other, the cost of routing traffic from one to the other is trivial. And the alternative of becoming the copyright police is fraught with danger and expense: You have to interfere with the productivity of your workers, install and maintain expensive filtering solutions, and if you make a mistake then you're in trouble.
Your premise seems to be that routing around a deranged legal system would somehow be shameful or immoral. But think about it this way: Suppose you route all your traffic through another country, but none of that traffic is actually illegal in your home country. Any problems for your morals or reputation? I sure don't see any. So if you get into trouble it's only when you would have otherwise anyway -- someone has to have pirated something at your site and gotten caught. At that point, I certainly wouldn't mind having the argument available that the internet connection is at the sister company's site in the more rational country.
Obviously you probably wouldn't want to send a letter to the head of the *AAs asking what they think about it, but that's only because they have a stick so far up their ass that it's impacting their brain stem. These are the people who go after you for playing a radio too loud without an ASCAP license. If a disgruntled employee wants to cause them to harass you, they can do it regardless.
How is that easier? Setting up a tunnel to a cloud server and then making it the default gateway on your router only takes a few minutes. (Naturally the business would have to consult a lawyer to see whether this would actually reduce their liability, but that goes for a white list too: Suppose you add something to the white list and the users find some corner of that website where they can get pirated stuff. Is the fact that you explicitly approved it going to make you worse off liability-wise?)
But that's the point. There is no reason to lock down everything to within an inch of killing everyone. If you're worried about unreasonable liability rules, use some kind of tunnel to move your internet exit point to a country with more rational liability rules. If you just want to block The Pirate Bay, black hole the DNS entry in your DNS server and go on your way. Why block millions of useful websites and applications to stop mere thousands of undesired ones?
Actually, using a whitelist proxy and firewall rules (deny all, allow email server, proxy server) you can prevent every possible way of infringing.
No it isn't.
Strip all email attachments except pdf and office docs.
See, you've already lost. The pirate sends an email to his pirate friend, who sends back pirated which is either in text format natively or base64 encoded and pasted into a word document. And the size limits don't save you, because there is plenty of pirated material smaller than the size limit and equally as much legitimate material over it.
I mean sure, you can lock down a computer enough that users can't pirate anything. Just disconnect it from the network -- or the electrical outlet. The problem is that you can't do it simultaneously with users being able to do their jobs.
Any ISP logs, etc. regarding the content accessed would show it to be accessed from the home's internet connection -- not the business's.
If that's the case then it sounds like the solution to the problem: Have the business pay for some rack space in a country with less-draconian laws, then put the entire business behind a VPN that appears from the internet to come from the IP in the country with sensible laws.
So Samsung's patents are a toll bridge while Apple's patents are a girl? No, patents are patents. If Apple wants to use Samsung's patents then they had better be willing to let Samsung use Apple's patents. Because the alternative is that they can both go to court and get injunctions against each other, and then neither of them will be able to sell their products.
While you might not agree with software patents, they are in currently part of the legal system. There is an obligation on all corporations to follow the law until such time as the law gets changed.
Then you had better look in a mirror, because if Apple and Microsoft were not currently violating a litany of third party patents then there would be nothing for Google to buy to use as leverage. But there is, because it is not feasible to produce nontrivial software that does not infringe arbitrary third party software patents.
No one follows the law. If you don't like it, change the law.
Go back and look at the history. Nokia and Motorola started the patent wars attacking Apple.
And Apple, rather than finding some quiet resolution, got out their torches and spread the fire all over the place by suing everyone in the market, including the Android phone makers who had never sued Apple to begin with.
The only people currently directly suing Google is Oracle and judging by the Lindholm email they have very good reason to.
The Lindholm email stands for nothing but the proposition that Google at one time considered negotiating a license for Java. It has nothing to do with whether Dalvik infringes the same copyrights or patents or whether the patents are even valid.
Microsoft and Apple both are sitting on many $10Billion's of cash. Paying a couple dollars to them to license technology which has obviously been copied isn't going to give with company and more of an advantage in the market place than they already have.
As the other poster above pointed out, "once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane." It isn't a matter of driving your competitors out of business by depriving them of revenue, it's a matter of preventing them from shaking down your phone manufacturers. And in any event, why reward Apple and Microsoft for their hostile behavior? It would only encourage them.
In fact Microsoft has already offered Google to join syndicates to purchase patents so they don't end up in the hands on non practicing patent trolls. The fact that Google refuses to join in and play nice says a lot about their evil litigious intentions.
Google wants to acquire patents to use as leverage against Microsoft to prevent them shaking down Android phone makers. A patent jointly owned by Microsoft can hardly be used as leverage against Microsoft. And Microsoft forming a coalition to outbid Google on the Nortel patents can hardly be considered an effort to keep them out of the hands of "non practicing patent trolls" -- if that was their only concern then Google buying them by itself would have completely alleviated it and there would be no explanation for Microsoft's actions.
It should further be noted that IBM has actually taken patents for things and allowed totally free use simply to prevent anyone from controlling some fundamental technology. As far as patents go they seem like the good guys.
I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, they seem to be fairly well behaved when it comes to software patents; you don't see IBM going out and trying to put its competitors out of business by threatening them with patent injunctions. (Although there was that one time.)
At the same time, I have to wonder how much of that is just circumstance. IBM is one of the strong proponents of the scourge of software patents outside of the patent lawyers who don't want to lose their jobs. And when you think about it, who would IBM go after that they aren't already? Their direct competitors basically all have their own patents and they therefore almost certainly have cross-licensing agreements with them rather than court battles, which may or may not involve cash payments. And since license agreements are not generally public information, for all we know they are already collecting their tithe from everybody in the industry.
Actually this is more likely to stop the patent wars in this part of the industry then set them off.
The thing with software patents is that their primary effect (other than to allow patent trolls to hold up people who make stuff) is to prevent a new player from entering an existing market. The existing players have a whole arsenal of software patents and anybody who wants to enter the market will be infringing a slew of them no matter what, so the existing players can sue them and enjoin them legally from entering the market. And most of the time the new entrant knows that ahead of time and just doesn't bother.
In this case the new entrant was Google, so what happened is that everybody who had been in the market for a while and had a patent arsenal started to shake them down and demand high royalties or try to keep their products off of the market, because Google has never been in the mobile device market before and so didn't have a relevant patent arsenal with which to ward of the incumbents' attacks.
What Google is doing now is buying their way into the club. (Notice that only large companies sitting on a mountain of cash can do this -- the little guy is fucked.) If they buy these billions of dollars worth of patents then they can threaten the incumbents in the same way that the incumbents are threatening them, and at the end of the day they all just end up cross-licensing and Google becomes one of the incumbents going forward.
At that point companies can go back to competing based on merit, but only those companies that can afford to buy their way into the market. The patent system excludes everyone else.
It isn't "protection" so much as it is "ammunition" -- someone has come to Google pointing a gun and sticking them up. Google must then go out and acquire their own weapons so that they can negotiate peace from a stronger position.
There is no element of "backdating" -- Apple or Microsoft or whoever was always violating the patents that Google now has, it's just that the then-owner had not yet attempted to enforce them. After Google buys the patents, they can threaten to enforce the patents if the initial aggressor does not back down.
Anybody would tell you, those patents are not for sale, or would be prohibitively expensive to acquire. Their best chance would be to knock the patent down rather than acquire it, but that's no easy matter either.
What are you even talking about? Google doesn't have to buy the patents from Microsoft. They can buy them from anyone in the world. The way the patent system is now, there is no way anyone can make a piece of software as complex as Windows or Office without infringing thousands of third party patents. And such patents would obviously be more valuable to Google, who is actually being attacked by Microsoft, than they would be to a different prospective owner who merely wants them in reserve on the off chance that they are attacked by Microsoft. Which makes it extremely likely that Google could acquire them for a price less than Google values them at. You might notice that they just bought Motorola Mobility.
In addition, Google is not limited to knocking down Microsoft's patents. There is a trade off with patent claims: The ones that are overly broad cover almost everything but are weak and can almost always be invalidated, whereas the ones that are narrow are difficult to knock down but can almost always be worked around. (See gif/png, bzip/bzip2, etc.) The scourge of software patents is not that they are impossible to navigate once they have been identified, it is that they cannot reasonably be identified ahead of time and therefore cause an inordinate amount of resources to be wasted on legal fees and litigation over unknowing infringement which bankrupts small players and removes resources that could otherwise be used for R&D or some other productive purpose by larger players, all with the result that everybody just ends up cross-licensing anyway.
However, once a party tips their hand and shows which patents they want to use against you, they can try to collect for the products you've already shipped, or extort you for money or a cross-license by threatening an immediate injunction that will stop you from selling your shipping product for as long as it takes you to redesign it to avoid the patent, but they can't stop you from avoiding the patents in question in the next version of your product.
Second best would be to go one-on-one with other patents in their portfolio that Microsoft would be infringing, and getting a cross-licensing deal. As that has not happened, I guess it's because Google has no hold over them.
You seem to think that litigation is a fast-paced thing that large organizations do immediately in response to changing circumstances. It hasn't happened yet, but what do you think Google is planning to do with twelve and a half billion dollars worth of Motorola patents?
Just set the rules that if you kill a civilian it will either immediately or eventually negatively impact your game. e.g. some time later in the game when you are found out, your player is executed for murder. But then, the AI would have to figure out whether it was accidental (usually forgivable in the fog of war) or intentional.
The AI getting it wrong would just make the game more realistic. It's not like there are no innocent people in prison or on death row.
Gamers push boundaries. They test things. Give them a sandbox and they (at least some of them) will diligently work to tunnel their way out.
The trouble is that as you make games more and more realistic, you find that sometimes reality is deeply unsatisfying. Sometimes a soldier can intentionally kill civilians and get away with it. Or the consequence is a court marshal that does not come until after the end of the soldier's tour. Or is that the soldier's child is killed fighting the same war 20 years later because the civilian casualties turned the local population against you.
None of that sends an appropriate message or fits with the instant gratification/punishment model of most games. But the more you strive for realism, the more you have to face the trappings of reality.
They've advanced from that, they are now getting $15 a pop from almost every android phone sold. So they don't even have to make anything anymore and they can still make profits just from leeching on others work.
For now, but that's only a consequence of the unconscionable nature of software patents, in that someone who claims you're infringing a patent can hold you up and threaten to have your products removed from the market unless you pay up. It doesn't provide you any time to work around this patent you've never seen before, but by the same token it isn't a permanent situation because they have to tip their hand and list the patents they're holding so that in the next version you can design around them.
On top of that, all it would take to put a stop to it is for Google to buy some patents that Windows is infringing. Or, for that matter, if we would all just come to our senses and recognize that software is not patentable. (And we'll see how quickly the major companies get that pushed through soon enough when some patent troll holding a blocking patent inevitably demands an injunction against e.g. Windows unless Microsoft pays them 50% of their revenues.)
The HTML5/CSS apps will run on everything, so it gives no advantage to Windows over its competitors.
And it takes a lot more than a recompile to go from a keyboard and mouse to a touchscreen interface, to say nothing of the things that contain x86 assembly or assume x86 processors in one way or another, or apps that are extremely poorly optimized for battery life, etc.
More to the point, even if all you have to do is recompile it, that assumes that you can recompile it. We're not exactly talking about open source software here. If the developer no longer exists, no longer supports the software, or is just waiting until Windows-on-ARM has a nontrivial installed base before they put in the budget to do a port, there is little you can do.
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GP was right but incomplete. Companies don't pay taxes because they're just intermediaries. They take money from customers and give it to employees and investors. If you increase taxes on a corporation, it will cause one or more of the following things: They will raise prices on consumers, lay off employees or reduce employee compensation, or the value of your 401K will go down. It isn't General Electric who would pay the tax, it's you, as a customer/employee/pensioner.
I think that most of Buffet's income is in capital gains which are taxed (inexplicably) at a much lower rate than income.
It isn't inexplicable at all. It's because of inflation. If you buy a stock for $100 in 2001 and sell it for $150 in 2011, you have a nominal gain of $50, but in real terms you only made $22 because $100 in 2001 has the same buying power as $128 in 2011 (according to the CPI -- it's probably even worse than that in reality).
We want to tax people on actual gains rather than just inflation, because taxing inflation causes investors to hold existing, poorly-performing investments even where new investments are more attractive (and economically beneficial), in order to put off paying the tax as long as possible.
They could change it so that they actually calculate out the inflation using the Consumer Price Index between the times the asset was bought and sold and then tax on the real gain rather than the nominal gain, but long-term investors would actually end up paying less that way than they are now, which could result in a reduction in government revenue. And short term investors (like high frequency traders) would lobby against it aggressively because they have no inflationary component of their gains to deduct.
Larger outages in an infrastructure like Facebook's are only rarely an accumulation of smaller issues. Think about it: what's a more likely scenario for a major site-wide issue, thousands of web servers whose hard drives die simultaneously, or a flapping route caused by a configuration issue on a router?
Sometimes. But for example, suppose you have a fail-over setup so that if one machine falls over, its work units or clients are automatically transferred to another machine. You're very proud of yourself until you get a damaged work unit or client which is capable of causing the machine processing it to fall over, and then it gets transferred all around to every server and causes a cascade failure until 30 seconds later all of your servers have crashed.
And sometimes you do get simultaneous "independent" failures of both hardware and software because of a common cause. Suppose you have a load spike during a nationwide heatwave and the ambient temperature in most of your data centers gets up to 85 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just within design specifications for your facilities but it had never happened before. You might very well see a rash of disk or power supply failures then.
Nonsense. Basically no one for whom $50,000 is not real money is put in prison for a drug offense as it is, and this doesn't put any poor people in prison who wouldn't be there under the existing laws.
And paying the money doesn't get you out of probation and mandatory drug testing -- Bill Gates can pay his way out of a first offense, but then he's got probation and weekly drug tests and a positive result means he's violated his probation and is going to jail.
I was thinking about something similar to this the other day, but not taxation. A way to actually reduce drug usage: Fines. Huge, monster fines. You take the possession offenses that currently have penalties in the 5 year range, for example, and keep them, but give the defendant the alternative, at their option, to pay a $50,000 fine and get immediate probation. And give the same option to all the nonviolent drug offenders who are already in prison.
Now think about the result of that. The fine is very high, but it isn't so high that it isn't worth paying: Who would choose prison if you can buy your way out of it for $10,000/year? Anybody can make that much in any job, and prison sucks more than any possible employment alternative. So you close half the prisons (and save a pile of money), meanwhile you have a bunch of drug dealers paying you $50,000 each. Win-win. Plus, it gets the drug dealers out of the combination school and social networking facility for criminals that we call prison.
At the same time, none of these drug dealers just has $50,000 in cash sitting around. Not in money they can write a check against without getting arrested for tax evasion. So they have to get it from one of two places: Either their bosses, who have a money laundering apparatus set up, or their parents and families.
If they go to their bosses and the bosses bail them out then you get to play follow the money with the $50,000 and see where it came from, try to get the bosses for tax evasion, etc. Plus, you make the business that much less profitable -- the boss isn't going to have much left for bling if he has to spend his millions keeping all his dealers out of prison. It also changes the dynamic: Previously the convict would be sitting in jail and the boss can't get him out, but can promise rewards after release if he keeps his mouth shut. Now the boss can get him out right away by paying the money, so the convict finds out right away whether the boss is willing to reward his silence. So if the boss doesn't pay he has to risk the convict being resentful enough to roll over, but if he does pay then he spends all his profits paying the fines.
On the other hand, the convict has the option of going to their families to see if they can scrape together the money. And they probably can -- once. But it will cost them. So after they do it, if they catch the guy dealing again, they're going to pressure him into getting out of the life because they will be extremely resentful that they spent all their hard-earned money keeping him out of prison if he's still doing the same things that almost got him sent there in the first place. Family guilt is a powerful motivator.
The net result is that you increase costs for the drug dealers. If the money to keep them out of prison comes from the drug profits, you make drugs unprofitable -- all the profits are going to pay fines. If it comes from some other source, whoever is paying it is going to put serious pressure on the person convicted to make sure they haven't wasted their money. And if nobody pays then you create friction between the bosses and the convicts who can give them up for letting them rot in prison when they could have paid the fine.
Do you know what a loss leader is? Stores will sell a popular item slightly below cost so that customers will come to the store for the discount, and while they're there they buy other stuff which the store profits from. The item won't stay on sale below cost for very long. So the competitor can come in, buy your entire supply of them (which will cause your customers to be angry that they came for the discount and it's sold out), then as soon as your sale is over, sell them for the normal retail price.
In theory "you can't patent an idea", but it's basically doublespeak. (They also say that you can't patent an algorithm, but then explain to me the H.264 patents.)
The trouble is software patents (again). If you look at very low level software, like when you're talking about assembly language or codecs or the like, it's basically unadulterated pure math. To the extent that you create abstractions so that you're dealing with objects and representations rather than raw numbers and equations/algorithms, you're then dealing with abstract ideas. Neither mathematics nor abstract ideas are supposed to be patentable, but yet patents on software "inventions" have been issued.
Naturally there is no actual physical 'invention' in the sense of here's a prototype of a cotton gin. It's what most people would think of as an idea. But they don't call it that, because then it wouldn't be patentable.
But on another note, why would a company decide to pay for another connection in another country, presumable going through a shell company they had to create to disassociate the connection from them, instead of simply locking the user's internet access down and create a termination policy for those insistent on getting around it?
It seems like cheap insurance to me. The cost of the connection is of no significance in the operation of a business, and in many situations it may have no cost at all: If you have sites in different countries and one has more rational laws than the other, the cost of routing traffic from one to the other is trivial. And the alternative of becoming the copyright police is fraught with danger and expense: You have to interfere with the productivity of your workers, install and maintain expensive filtering solutions, and if you make a mistake then you're in trouble.
Your premise seems to be that routing around a deranged legal system would somehow be shameful or immoral. But think about it this way: Suppose you route all your traffic through another country, but none of that traffic is actually illegal in your home country. Any problems for your morals or reputation? I sure don't see any. So if you get into trouble it's only when you would have otherwise anyway -- someone has to have pirated something at your site and gotten caught. At that point, I certainly wouldn't mind having the argument available that the internet connection is at the sister company's site in the more rational country.
Obviously you probably wouldn't want to send a letter to the head of the *AAs asking what they think about it, but that's only because they have a stick so far up their ass that it's impacting their brain stem. These are the people who go after you for playing a radio too loud without an ASCAP license. If a disgruntled employee wants to cause them to harass you, they can do it regardless.
How is that easier? Setting up a tunnel to a cloud server and then making it the default gateway on your router only takes a few minutes. (Naturally the business would have to consult a lawyer to see whether this would actually reduce their liability, but that goes for a white list too: Suppose you add something to the white list and the users find some corner of that website where they can get pirated stuff. Is the fact that you explicitly approved it going to make you worse off liability-wise?)
But that's the point. There is no reason to lock down everything to within an inch of killing everyone. If you're worried about unreasonable liability rules, use some kind of tunnel to move your internet exit point to a country with more rational liability rules. If you just want to block The Pirate Bay, black hole the DNS entry in your DNS server and go on your way. Why block millions of useful websites and applications to stop mere thousands of undesired ones?
Actually, using a whitelist proxy and firewall rules (deny all, allow email server, proxy server) you can prevent every possible way of infringing.
No it isn't.
Strip all email attachments except pdf and office docs.
See, you've already lost. The pirate sends an email to his pirate friend, who sends back pirated which is either in text format natively or base64 encoded and pasted into a word document. And the size limits don't save you, because there is plenty of pirated material smaller than the size limit and equally as much legitimate material over it.
I mean sure, you can lock down a computer enough that users can't pirate anything. Just disconnect it from the network -- or the electrical outlet. The problem is that you can't do it simultaneously with users being able to do their jobs.
Any ISP logs, etc. regarding the content accessed would show it to be accessed from the home's internet connection -- not the business's.
If that's the case then it sounds like the solution to the problem: Have the business pay for some rack space in a country with less-draconian laws, then put the entire business behind a VPN that appears from the internet to come from the IP in the country with sensible laws.
So Samsung's patents are a toll bridge while Apple's patents are a girl? No, patents are patents. If Apple wants to use Samsung's patents then they had better be willing to let Samsung use Apple's patents. Because the alternative is that they can both go to court and get injunctions against each other, and then neither of them will be able to sell their products.
While you might not agree with software patents, they are in currently part of the legal system. There is an obligation on all corporations to follow the law until such time as the law gets changed.
Then you had better look in a mirror, because if Apple and Microsoft were not currently violating a litany of third party patents then there would be nothing for Google to buy to use as leverage. But there is, because it is not feasible to produce nontrivial software that does not infringe arbitrary third party software patents.
No one follows the law. If you don't like it, change the law.
Go back and look at the history. Nokia and Motorola started the patent wars attacking Apple.
And Apple, rather than finding some quiet resolution, got out their torches and spread the fire all over the place by suing everyone in the market, including the Android phone makers who had never sued Apple to begin with.
The only people currently directly suing Google is Oracle and judging by the Lindholm email they have very good reason to.
The Lindholm email stands for nothing but the proposition that Google at one time considered negotiating a license for Java. It has nothing to do with whether Dalvik infringes the same copyrights or patents or whether the patents are even valid.
Microsoft and Apple both are sitting on many $10Billion's of cash. Paying a couple dollars to them to license technology which has obviously been copied isn't going to give with company and more of an advantage in the market place than they already have.
As the other poster above pointed out, "once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane." It isn't a matter of driving your competitors out of business by depriving them of revenue, it's a matter of preventing them from shaking down your phone manufacturers. And in any event, why reward Apple and Microsoft for their hostile behavior? It would only encourage them.
In fact Microsoft has already offered Google to join syndicates to purchase patents so they don't end up in the hands on non practicing patent trolls. The fact that Google refuses to join in and play nice says a lot about their evil litigious intentions.
Google wants to acquire patents to use as leverage against Microsoft to prevent them shaking down Android phone makers. A patent jointly owned by Microsoft can hardly be used as leverage against Microsoft. And Microsoft forming a coalition to outbid Google on the Nortel patents can hardly be considered an effort to keep them out of the hands of "non practicing patent trolls" -- if that was their only concern then Google buying them by itself would have completely alleviated it and there would be no explanation for Microsoft's actions.
Why should they pay their competitors when they can pay similar money to someone who isn't trying to sue them out of the market?
It should further be noted that IBM has actually taken patents for things and allowed totally free use simply to prevent anyone from controlling some fundamental technology. As far as patents go they seem like the good guys.
I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, they seem to be fairly well behaved when it comes to software patents; you don't see IBM going out and trying to put its competitors out of business by threatening them with patent injunctions. (Although there was that one time.)
At the same time, I have to wonder how much of that is just circumstance. IBM is one of the strong proponents of the scourge of software patents outside of the patent lawyers who don't want to lose their jobs. And when you think about it, who would IBM go after that they aren't already? Their direct competitors basically all have their own patents and they therefore almost certainly have cross-licensing agreements with them rather than court battles, which may or may not involve cash payments. And since license agreements are not generally public information, for all we know they are already collecting their tithe from everybody in the industry.
Actually this is more likely to stop the patent wars in this part of the industry then set them off.
The thing with software patents is that their primary effect (other than to allow patent trolls to hold up people who make stuff) is to prevent a new player from entering an existing market. The existing players have a whole arsenal of software patents and anybody who wants to enter the market will be infringing a slew of them no matter what, so the existing players can sue them and enjoin them legally from entering the market. And most of the time the new entrant knows that ahead of time and just doesn't bother.
In this case the new entrant was Google, so what happened is that everybody who had been in the market for a while and had a patent arsenal started to shake them down and demand high royalties or try to keep their products off of the market, because Google has never been in the mobile device market before and so didn't have a relevant patent arsenal with which to ward of the incumbents' attacks.
What Google is doing now is buying their way into the club. (Notice that only large companies sitting on a mountain of cash can do this -- the little guy is fucked.) If they buy these billions of dollars worth of patents then they can threaten the incumbents in the same way that the incumbents are threatening them, and at the end of the day they all just end up cross-licensing and Google becomes one of the incumbents going forward.
At that point companies can go back to competing based on merit, but only those companies that can afford to buy their way into the market. The patent system excludes everyone else.
It isn't "protection" so much as it is "ammunition" -- someone has come to Google pointing a gun and sticking them up. Google must then go out and acquire their own weapons so that they can negotiate peace from a stronger position.
There is no element of "backdating" -- Apple or Microsoft or whoever was always violating the patents that Google now has, it's just that the then-owner had not yet attempted to enforce them. After Google buys the patents, they can threaten to enforce the patents if the initial aggressor does not back down.
Anybody would tell you, those patents are not for sale, or would be prohibitively expensive to acquire. Their best chance would be to knock the patent down rather than acquire it, but that's no easy matter either.
What are you even talking about? Google doesn't have to buy the patents from Microsoft. They can buy them from anyone in the world. The way the patent system is now, there is no way anyone can make a piece of software as complex as Windows or Office without infringing thousands of third party patents. And such patents would obviously be more valuable to Google, who is actually being attacked by Microsoft, than they would be to a different prospective owner who merely wants them in reserve on the off chance that they are attacked by Microsoft. Which makes it extremely likely that Google could acquire them for a price less than Google values them at. You might notice that they just bought Motorola Mobility.
In addition, Google is not limited to knocking down Microsoft's patents. There is a trade off with patent claims: The ones that are overly broad cover almost everything but are weak and can almost always be invalidated, whereas the ones that are narrow are difficult to knock down but can almost always be worked around. (See gif/png, bzip/bzip2, etc.) The scourge of software patents is not that they are impossible to navigate once they have been identified, it is that they cannot reasonably be identified ahead of time and therefore cause an inordinate amount of resources to be wasted on legal fees and litigation over unknowing infringement which bankrupts small players and removes resources that could otherwise be used for R&D or some other productive purpose by larger players, all with the result that everybody just ends up cross-licensing anyway.
However, once a party tips their hand and shows which patents they want to use against you, they can try to collect for the products you've already shipped, or extort you for money or a cross-license by threatening an immediate injunction that will stop you from selling your shipping product for as long as it takes you to redesign it to avoid the patent, but they can't stop you from avoiding the patents in question in the next version of your product.
Second best would be to go one-on-one with other patents in their portfolio that Microsoft would be infringing, and getting a cross-licensing deal. As that has not happened, I guess it's because Google has no hold over them.
You seem to think that litigation is a fast-paced thing that large organizations do immediately in response to changing circumstances. It hasn't happened yet, but what do you think Google is planning to do with twelve and a half billion dollars worth of Motorola patents?
Just set the rules that if you kill a civilian it will either immediately or eventually negatively impact your game. e.g. some time later in the game when you are found out, your player is executed for murder. But then, the AI would have to figure out whether it was accidental (usually forgivable in the fog of war) or intentional.
The AI getting it wrong would just make the game more realistic. It's not like there are no innocent people in prison or on death row.
Gamers push boundaries. They test things. Give them a sandbox and they (at least some of them) will diligently work to tunnel their way out.
The trouble is that as you make games more and more realistic, you find that sometimes reality is deeply unsatisfying. Sometimes a soldier can intentionally kill civilians and get away with it. Or the consequence is a court marshal that does not come until after the end of the soldier's tour. Or is that the soldier's child is killed fighting the same war 20 years later because the civilian casualties turned the local population against you.
None of that sends an appropriate message or fits with the instant gratification/punishment model of most games. But the more you strive for realism, the more you have to face the trappings of reality.
They've advanced from that, they are now getting $15 a pop from almost every android phone sold. So they don't even have to make anything anymore and they can still make profits just from leeching on others work.
For now, but that's only a consequence of the unconscionable nature of software patents, in that someone who claims you're infringing a patent can hold you up and threaten to have your products removed from the market unless you pay up. It doesn't provide you any time to work around this patent you've never seen before, but by the same token it isn't a permanent situation because they have to tip their hand and list the patents they're holding so that in the next version you can design around them.
On top of that, all it would take to put a stop to it is for Google to buy some patents that Windows is infringing. Or, for that matter, if we would all just come to our senses and recognize that software is not patentable. (And we'll see how quickly the major companies get that pushed through soon enough when some patent troll holding a blocking patent inevitably demands an injunction against e.g. Windows unless Microsoft pays them 50% of their revenues.)
The HTML5/CSS apps will run on everything, so it gives no advantage to Windows over its competitors.
And it takes a lot more than a recompile to go from a keyboard and mouse to a touchscreen interface, to say nothing of the things that contain x86 assembly or assume x86 processors in one way or another, or apps that are extremely poorly optimized for battery life, etc.
More to the point, even if all you have to do is recompile it, that assumes that you can recompile it. We're not exactly talking about open source software here. If the developer no longer exists, no longer supports the software, or is just waiting until Windows-on-ARM has a nontrivial installed base before they put in the budget to do a port, there is little you can do.
Downloading a 2GB game takes ~26 minutes at 10Mbps. It takes 16 seconds at 1Gbps. That is a noticeable improvement.