Azure was released in 2010, Amazon EC was released in 2006.
Hotmail was originally not Microsoft. It was run on Unix boxes, and I remember reading an article at the time that MS took it over that stated for every unix box replaced, MS has to provide 5 windows 2000 boxes. Since that time it has floundered. Essentially unchanged, it is the only email provider to still use a paged static interface, where Yahoo and Gmail are now using ajax Gmail is till paged but it shows 100 messages at a time (they prefer you to search) but hotmail is still 25, IIRC. The mobile interface to hotmail is laughable at best.
Um, what? Have you even logged into it in the last two or three years?
(That's actually not a serious question, because you've already shown you haven't.)
41 Megapixels - wow, that will take up an entire 2008 SD card per photo.
Does it actually have a good enough lense to use all 41 Megapixels- or is this a case of the megapixels being greater than it can really accurately capture?
I know megapixel is often not a good indicator of the actual photo quality.
Not really. A moderately high end DSLR with, say, an 18MP sensor saving in RAW (18m 12-bit samples)+JPEG is around 25MB an image. Based on Nokia's numbers, *if* the sensor can save in RAW, *and* its using 12-bit, you're talking in the order of maybe 35-40MB an image, and that's probably a stretch. In JPEG, its probably under 10MB/photo.
That would've filled a cheap card you would've seen in a digital camera ten years ago, but not five years ago. Most of the SmartMedia cards I've got in a box at home from a ten year old 2mp-ish camera are 128MB cards.
I've seen several electric vehicles that have a gasoline-powered "pusher" trailer that provides "emergency power" for long haul trips instead of looking for an outlet for the car. It isn't even that new of an idea for that matter.
Not pushers, just generators in a trailer, plugged into the car. A car would be nearly impossible to drive if you had something behind it, attached at a rotating pivot point, actually pushing the car. The generator is producing the electricity, not the motor in the vehicle. That's why trailers have their own brake systems -- its extremely dangerous to have the load behind a vehicle doing anything more than being pulled by the vehicle.
I'm not sure if that's true -- my account was an internal (non-public) beta account when they first opened to friends and family, and it was on for me.
I don't think its an age thing, I think its just a matter of if you ever turned it on by installing Google Toolbar, etc...
Space elevator : Initial cost is very very high but once built the running costs are negligible
Rockets : Initial cost is high but not that high, running costs are high forever, economy of scale will never kick in to any reasonable degree
Exactly that's also why trains and not planes are such a success in the States.
They are for cargo, by a massive margin. Trains for passenger travel don't work all that well in the US for a simple reason -- the US is huge. The balance of cost vs travel time works out in favor of air travel for most people in the US.
If cross-country plane tickets cost $250k, you'd see a lot of people taking a train, and maybe flying a regional plane from a train station to where they're going.
A predator kills and eats its prey while simultaneously doing everything within its power to make its own predators fail to kill and eat it. This is not hypocrisy.
If Zynga sees the illegality of its own practice of copying other people's games as a calculated risk of doing business, then suing others for doing to it exactly what it does to others is really no different than basic predator behavior (which is natural enough...humans are predators after all).
If you misinterpret Zynga's allegations to be some sort of political or moral statement about what kinds of business models/actions are not appropriate, then yeah I guess they are being hypocritical. But since when do large wealthy corporations bother with principles?
The real irony is not what Zynga is doing -- because they're *not* breaking the law, even if they're being unethical.
The real hypocricy is the whining on Slashdot about it. If Zynga copies a two man developer, people get all up in arms about stealing their idea, or their IP. But when the word patent shows up in an article, or copyright on music or movies, people all of a sudden get up in arms.
I suspect the common denominator is that people are hiding behind a veil of righteousness, but their motivations are entirely selfish. IP is bad when it means its not safe to steal other people's work and ideas for their gain, but its good when it prevents someone else from doing it.
There's lots written up about it, in fact I'd bet Wikipedia has it.
In a very brief nutshell, your optic nerve isn't a VGA cable -- you don't have RGB nerves. The cells just signal differently, and its the differences in the signaling that the brain learns to associate with specific colors. (This is unlike your ears, which have a range of nerves stimulated by specific (small) ranges in frequency.)
Even setting aside Apple having been last-to-market with voice search, don't Apple and Microsoft already have patent cross-licensing agreements in place? I'm pretty sure there are a number of Microsoft patents they'd rely on every bit as much as Microsoft might rely on theirs. Android OEMs are an easy target due to Google's lack of indemnification and apparently lax attitude towards patent issues, but I suspect Microsoft would already be in the clear with licensing even if there were valid patent issues there.
Yup, which is why you don't see that happening with MSFT, and why you don't see Android licensing patents between MSFT and the companies that also sell PCs *and* have IP MSFT needs -- because they agreements are already there. Its just the newcomers that needed them. And like any patent licensing agreement, the dollar price is usually directly proportional to the IP imbalance between the two parties. I'd bet AAPL and MSFT very nearly wipe their hands in that arena.
Oh, okay, well it's fine for you to have a different opinion of what "good policy" and "a better country" mean. That's fine. What's not fine is misrepresenting your opposition as a bunch of starry-eyed jergoffs who think telephones are "rights". No. That is a fancy way for you to disparage some of your fellow voters unfairly. We merely think that the preponderance of the parts of the issue of access to telecommunications point toward the policy that the benefit of achieving universal access is worth the cost. It's not an unreasonable or untenable policy preference, so I thank you not to misrepresent it so.
That's your opinion. Mine is that not one iota of my labor goes to subsidize the choices you or anyone else makes. Simple as that.
Yes, there are mainframe emulators. And if you compare processing power they come out quite well, but as others have pointed out mainframes aren't super computers and don't claim to be. If you just want something that can run your mainframe code that's great. What an emulator won't give you is any of the things that people actually want a mainframe for (see other posts for details).
It's a bit disappointing to see so many people on slashdot wondering what the purpose of a mainframe is. It shows so many "geeks" have a very limited knowledge of IT in the real world.
I think its an age and exposure thing. When I was in school (before a lot of/.ers were born, sadly... ugh, old), a particularly powerful example of the difference in how mainframes are thought about was when I was being shown a large VAX cluster. There were probably 2000 active terminal sessions on each of 3-4 VAXen. To make a point about the difference between the mainframe hardware and the Sun servers/workstations we also were running, the sysadmin grabbed the 3-phase power cord going into one of the VAX servers, gave it a little twist and unplugged it.
Without a hiccup, 2000 user sessions were migrated to the other servers mid-keystroke and the users in question never knew anything happened. We'd swap out hardware all the time. CPU being flaky? Pull the board out and replace it.
This is hardware designed for massive throughput, not massive performance. And 5 9's reliability would be considered a failure by any of the people running the systems. Anything less than 100% would be considered a failure.
I hate to harp on the age thing (get off my lawn!) but I think a big part of it is that kids today (and ten years ago!) don't have the opportunity to be exposed to "real" enterprise computing. The sort of computing that can singularly keep a company with 150,000 people running. Today, its all about acceptable downtime, virtualization for high availability, etc. Its okay if you have to restart your outlook because a server glitched. Its okay if connectivity drops -- you're not actively using the corporate systems most of the time. They're just there as resources to your workstation. People don't get fired when e-mail goes down for five minutes.
Its just a very different world now, and the things that made mainframes important are just not seen as important anymore. (And, IMO, that isn't because the environment for corporate IT has changed, but the new-guard running it doesn't prioritize things the same way *and* there's a lot more IT around... a 3000 person company isn't likely to have that kind of infrastructure, even if it was necessary.)
Interesting theory. But Verizon got out of the landline business in Vermont and Maine at the same time, because Verizon just didn't want to be in the landline business, coupled with a huge tax advantage they got in transferring debt to Fairpoint, which predictably went through bankruptcy afterwards to shed itself of that debt.
If you are using "theory" in the same sense that there's a theory of natural selection, or a theory that the Earth is round, then yes, it is. If you're suggesting that the statement isn't 100% factual, you're absolutely incorrect, as anyone who was involved with the process at the state level or within Verizon can tell you.
For some strange reason in the US, we believe that you have a right to infrastructure no matter where you live.
Perhaps it's not that we believe people have a "right" to it, merely that helping to provide the infrastructure makes the whole country a better place, and that in a democracy we should pursue policies that make the country a better place. Have you ever considered that? or do you just spout bullshit about "rights" all the time?
Helping? If someone choses to live in farm country in a $75k house, I have absolutely no issue with making them pay $300 a month for their high-speed internet, if they want it that badly. Thats the trade off to not paying $400k for a house where people want to live. And if they're not happy about it, they can choose to go without, they can use a mobile solution, or they can move. But not one penny of anyone else's money should go to support them for the choices they made.
As a monopoly, they should be required to invest some of the windfall into running DSL to rural locations. In fact, they should want to do this anyway, because people who have data, don't need a land line. That's the one ace in the hole they have, to make people keep a land line and pay for a cell phone, otherwise, it's just a cell phone.
But in our culture of greed, the choice between smart investments that will pay off later, vs. HUGE bonuses now....that's a tough call.
Infrastructure run to rural locations *never* pays off later. It never has, and it never will. The only reason rural places even have phone service is because the government taxes everyone else and pays the telcos to provide it. For some strange reason in the US, we believe that you have a right to infrastructure no matter where you live. You can pay 1/10th the cost of living of being in a city, and make the people in the city pay for your subsidized access.
Verizon was smart in New Hampshire when the state pulled that BS on them. The state said "if you run FTTH in any town in NH, you have to run it to EVERY town in NH". The problem with that? Northern NH is very rural and very poor -- a combination that means the cost for running fiber is astronomical and very few people would even buy the service. Verizon told the state to screw, and sold everything to Fairpoint and pulled out entirely. The end result? Not a single new town in the state has fiber service, everyone who had it has dramatically lower quality service, and Verizon avoids a money pit. Everyone loses except Verizon.
I find it strange that you're advocating forcing corporations to subsidize people who don't want to take the responsibility of the choices for where they live, and you've got a Ron Paul sig. Very strange, that.
If you are a software developer, do not take the job. Development is usually considered more skilled.
If you want to try just ask for your current salary and than you will have no problem since they will say no.
In short they are looking at you as a sucker who will accept less pay with more skills.
That depends entirely on the company. Some of the big software companies, like Microsoft as an example, pay equivalent salaries to people who are SDE or SDET at any given level, and its fairly common for people to move back and forth over the course of their career. (Microsoft, to use the example again, has both SDET -- software development engineer/test -- and a very small number of STEs -- software test engineers. The latter are basically click testers, the former are software engineers.)
A lot of it comes down to what testers are doing at a given company. A good engineering firm, the difference is someone who writes code for customers versus writes code for internal quality uses. The skill, education and experience bars are the same between the two. Often times the actual engineering is more complicated, more interesting and less driven by customer BS doing SDET work.
a) have a garage b) have more than one car, including a winter beater c) probably can afford a $90k car because of some intrinsic level of intelligence sufficient to suggest they brush the car off before opening the doors.
Re:Its not just the rich who do that ...
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
It is called loan. Most people takes out a loan, as they need money. The rich people taks out a loan, to avoid tax. Hmm..that's the rule, but we should think about it, at least.
There, you're wrong. The real estate crash didn't happen because of greedy bankers, it happened because of greedy homeowners who spent a decade using their houses as ATMs. Those trillions of dollars lost are *precisely* because of that behavior -- people refinancing, taking home equity loans and using that money to buy vacations, cars, wardrobes, etc... all loans taken out tax-free on the assets they have.
*Exactly* the same behavior this article is talking about.
Its not just the rich who do that ...
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 2
Anyone who takes out a home equity loan (which is equally a loan on assets you've got) takes the money without paying income tax on it. When you sell the house, you don't pay tax on the gains either, in most scenarios.
So the people bitching about it have probably done it themselves before.
The language of a compulsory licensing law would require demonstrating that every licensee is charged a fair and equitable price, which cannot be any higher than the price of their own products minus the material and production costs. And that difference would be distributed among the many patents used in a single product in the proportion the company specifies (for all).
I take it you would vote against such a law and allow big corporations to continue to stifle innovation and drag this country down?
If you actually believe that IP protections are dragging this country down, all you are doing is demonstrating to those who have bothered to educate themselves on history how uneducated you are on it.
So yes, I absolutely would vote for it. I know what happens in economies that don't offer protection to corporations for their investments.
Profit, investment and corporations is why today we're all not living in farm houses with candlelight and no education.
The free market you worship did NOT make us educated. That was 100% a government endeavor. Just like the space program. Were it not for governments, industry would not be in space today.
You might want to study your history of public education in the US, and why it was enacted.
Yes you can, you simply change the law. Patents are not inherent to the organization of the universe, and a compulsory license requirement would be in no way unconstitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
Azure was released in 2010, Amazon EC was released in 2006.
Hotmail was originally not Microsoft. It was run on Unix boxes, and I remember reading an article at the time that MS took it over that stated for every unix box replaced, MS has to provide 5 windows 2000 boxes. Since that time it has floundered. Essentially unchanged, it is the only email provider to still use a paged static interface, where Yahoo and Gmail are now using ajax Gmail is till paged but it shows 100 messages at a time (they prefer you to search) but hotmail is still 25, IIRC. The mobile interface to hotmail is laughable at best.
Um, what? Have you even logged into it in the last two or three years?
(That's actually not a serious question, because you've already shown you haven't.)
Um, Azure was one of the first, if not the first, "service in the cloud" as opposed to "server in the cloud" platforms.
Hotmail substantially predated most of the remaining free e-mail providers. (And is still the largest used.)
we already top that in the UK:(
That's because of taxes -- you pay a lot for gas, and have roads that exceed the quality of a bombed out 3rd world country.
We pay almost no taxes in the US, and our roads have more in common with Baghdad than London.
At least, I assume it does, otherwise why would the DHS be involved in closing down gambling sites?
Either that, or they are just trying to spend money and justify their existance and vast budget somehow.
Also, first.
DHS is the parent organization over all the US federal law enforcement agencies, so any federal crime is handled by the DHS.
iTunes Plus is the DRM-free iTunes music, it has nothing to do with being uncompressed. Its the same music, just without the device restrictions.
41 Megapixels - wow, that will take up an entire 2008 SD card per photo.
Does it actually have a good enough lense to use all 41 Megapixels- or is this a case of the megapixels being greater than it can really accurately capture?
I know megapixel is often not a good indicator of the actual photo quality.
Not really. A moderately high end DSLR with, say, an 18MP sensor saving in RAW (18m 12-bit samples)+JPEG is around 25MB an image. Based on Nokia's numbers, *if* the sensor can save in RAW, *and* its using 12-bit, you're talking in the order of maybe 35-40MB an image, and that's probably a stretch. In JPEG, its probably under 10MB/photo.
That would've filled a cheap card you would've seen in a digital camera ten years ago, but not five years ago. Most of the SmartMedia cards I've got in a box at home from a ten year old 2mp-ish camera are 128MB cards.
I've seen several electric vehicles that have a gasoline-powered "pusher" trailer that provides "emergency power" for long haul trips instead of looking for an outlet for the car. It isn't even that new of an idea for that matter.
Not pushers, just generators in a trailer, plugged into the car. A car would be nearly impossible to drive if you had something behind it, attached at a rotating pivot point, actually pushing the car. The generator is producing the electricity, not the motor in the vehicle. That's why trailers have their own brake systems -- its extremely dangerous to have the load behind a vehicle doing anything more than being pulled by the vehicle.
I'm not sure if that's true -- my account was an internal (non-public) beta account when they first opened to friends and family, and it was on for me.
I don't think its an age thing, I think its just a matter of if you ever turned it on by installing Google Toolbar, etc ...
Space elevator : Initial cost is very very high but once built the running costs are negligible
Rockets : Initial cost is high but not that high, running costs are high forever, economy of scale will never kick in to any reasonable degree
Exactly that's also why trains and not planes are such a success in the States.
They are for cargo, by a massive margin. Trains for passenger travel don't work all that well in the US for a simple reason -- the US is huge. The balance of cost vs travel time works out in favor of air travel for most people in the US.
If cross-country plane tickets cost $250k, you'd see a lot of people taking a train, and maybe flying a regional plane from a train station to where they're going.
A predator kills and eats its prey while simultaneously doing everything within its power to make its own predators fail to kill and eat it. This is not hypocrisy.
If Zynga sees the illegality of its own practice of copying other people's games as a calculated risk of doing business, then suing others for doing to it exactly what it does to others is really no different than basic predator behavior (which is natural enough...humans are predators after all).
If you misinterpret Zynga's allegations to be some sort of political or moral statement about what kinds of business models/actions are not appropriate, then yeah I guess they are being hypocritical. But since when do large wealthy corporations bother with principles?
The real irony is not what Zynga is doing -- because they're *not* breaking the law, even if they're being unethical.
The real hypocricy is the whining on Slashdot about it. If Zynga copies a two man developer, people get all up in arms about stealing their idea, or their IP. But when the word patent shows up in an article, or copyright on music or movies, people all of a sudden get up in arms.
I suspect the common denominator is that people are hiding behind a veil of righteousness, but their motivations are entirely selfish. IP is bad when it means its not safe to steal other people's work and ideas for their gain, but its good when it prevents someone else from doing it.
There's lots written up about it, in fact I'd bet Wikipedia has it.
In a very brief nutshell, your optic nerve isn't a VGA cable -- you don't have RGB nerves. The cells just signal differently, and its the differences in the signaling that the brain learns to associate with specific colors. (This is unlike your ears, which have a range of nerves stimulated by specific (small) ranges in frequency.)
Even setting aside Apple having been last-to-market with voice search, don't Apple and Microsoft already have patent cross-licensing agreements in place? I'm pretty sure there are a number of Microsoft patents they'd rely on every bit as much as Microsoft might rely on theirs. Android OEMs are an easy target due to Google's lack of indemnification and apparently lax attitude towards patent issues, but I suspect Microsoft would already be in the clear with licensing even if there were valid patent issues there.
Yup, which is why you don't see that happening with MSFT, and why you don't see Android licensing patents between MSFT and the companies that also sell PCs *and* have IP MSFT needs -- because they agreements are already there. Its just the newcomers that needed them. And like any patent licensing agreement, the dollar price is usually directly proportional to the IP imbalance between the two parties. I'd bet AAPL and MSFT very nearly wipe their hands in that arena.
Oh, okay, well it's fine for you to have a different opinion of what "good policy" and "a better country" mean. That's fine. What's not fine is misrepresenting your opposition as a bunch of starry-eyed jergoffs who think telephones are "rights". No. That is a fancy way for you to disparage some of your fellow voters unfairly. We merely think that the preponderance of the parts of the issue of access to telecommunications point toward the policy that the benefit of achieving universal access is worth the cost. It's not an unreasonable or untenable policy preference, so I thank you not to misrepresent it so.
That's your opinion. Mine is that not one iota of my labor goes to subsidize the choices you or anyone else makes. Simple as that.
Yes, there are mainframe emulators. And if you compare processing power they come out quite well, but as others have pointed out mainframes aren't super computers and don't claim to be. If you just want something that can run your mainframe code that's great. What an emulator won't give you is any of the things that people actually want a mainframe for (see other posts for details).
It's a bit disappointing to see so many people on slashdot wondering what the purpose of a mainframe is. It shows so many "geeks" have a very limited knowledge of IT in the real world.
I think its an age and exposure thing. When I was in school (before a lot of /.ers were born, sadly... ugh, old), a particularly powerful example of the difference in how mainframes are thought about was when I was being shown a large VAX cluster. There were probably 2000 active terminal sessions on each of 3-4 VAXen. To make a point about the difference between the mainframe hardware and the Sun servers/workstations we also were running, the sysadmin grabbed the 3-phase power cord going into one of the VAX servers, gave it a little twist and unplugged it.
Without a hiccup, 2000 user sessions were migrated to the other servers mid-keystroke and the users in question never knew anything happened. We'd swap out hardware all the time. CPU being flaky? Pull the board out and replace it.
This is hardware designed for massive throughput, not massive performance. And 5 9's reliability would be considered a failure by any of the people running the systems. Anything less than 100% would be considered a failure.
I hate to harp on the age thing (get off my lawn!) but I think a big part of it is that kids today (and ten years ago!) don't have the opportunity to be exposed to "real" enterprise computing. The sort of computing that can singularly keep a company with 150,000 people running. Today, its all about acceptable downtime, virtualization for high availability, etc. Its okay if you have to restart your outlook because a server glitched. Its okay if connectivity drops -- you're not actively using the corporate systems most of the time. They're just there as resources to your workstation. People don't get fired when e-mail goes down for five minutes.
Its just a very different world now, and the things that made mainframes important are just not seen as important anymore. (And, IMO, that isn't because the environment for corporate IT has changed, but the new-guard running it doesn't prioritize things the same way *and* there's a lot more IT around... a 3000 person company isn't likely to have that kind of infrastructure, even if it was necessary.)
Interesting theory. But Verizon got out of the landline business in Vermont and Maine at the same time, because Verizon just didn't want to be in the landline business, coupled with a huge tax advantage they got in transferring debt to Fairpoint, which predictably went through bankruptcy afterwards to shed itself of that debt.
If you are using "theory" in the same sense that there's a theory of natural selection, or a theory that the Earth is round, then yes, it is. If you're suggesting that the statement isn't 100% factual, you're absolutely incorrect, as anyone who was involved with the process at the state level or within Verizon can tell you.
For some strange reason in the US, we believe that you have a right to infrastructure no matter where you live.
Perhaps it's not that we believe people have a "right" to it, merely that helping to provide the infrastructure makes the whole country a better place, and that in a democracy we should pursue policies that make the country a better place. Have you ever considered that? or do you just spout bullshit about "rights" all the time?
Helping? If someone choses to live in farm country in a $75k house, I have absolutely no issue with making them pay $300 a month for their high-speed internet, if they want it that badly. Thats the trade off to not paying $400k for a house where people want to live. And if they're not happy about it, they can choose to go without, they can use a mobile solution, or they can move. But not one penny of anyone else's money should go to support them for the choices they made.
As a monopoly, they should be required to invest some of the windfall into running DSL to rural locations. In fact, they should want to do this anyway, because people who have data, don't need a land line. That's the one ace in the hole they have, to make people keep a land line and pay for a cell phone, otherwise, it's just a cell phone.
But in our culture of greed, the choice between smart investments that will pay off later, vs. HUGE bonuses now....that's a tough call.
Infrastructure run to rural locations *never* pays off later. It never has, and it never will. The only reason rural places even have phone service is because the government taxes everyone else and pays the telcos to provide it. For some strange reason in the US, we believe that you have a right to infrastructure no matter where you live. You can pay 1/10th the cost of living of being in a city, and make the people in the city pay for your subsidized access.
Verizon was smart in New Hampshire when the state pulled that BS on them. The state said "if you run FTTH in any town in NH, you have to run it to EVERY town in NH". The problem with that? Northern NH is very rural and very poor -- a combination that means the cost for running fiber is astronomical and very few people would even buy the service. Verizon told the state to screw, and sold everything to Fairpoint and pulled out entirely. The end result? Not a single new town in the state has fiber service, everyone who had it has dramatically lower quality service, and Verizon avoids a money pit. Everyone loses except Verizon.
I find it strange that you're advocating forcing corporations to subsidize people who don't want to take the responsibility of the choices for where they live, and you've got a Ron Paul sig. Very strange, that.
If you are a software developer, do not take the job. Development is usually considered more skilled.
If you want to try just ask for your current salary and than you will have no problem since they will say no.
In short they are looking at you as a sucker who will accept less pay with more skills.
That depends entirely on the company. Some of the big software companies, like Microsoft as an example, pay equivalent salaries to people who are SDE or SDET at any given level, and its fairly common for people to move back and forth over the course of their career. (Microsoft, to use the example again, has both SDET -- software development engineer/test -- and a very small number of STEs -- software test engineers. The latter are basically click testers, the former are software engineers.)
A lot of it comes down to what testers are doing at a given company. A good engineering firm, the difference is someone who writes code for customers versus writes code for internal quality uses. The skill, education and experience bars are the same between the two. Often times the actual engineering is more complicated, more interesting and less driven by customer BS doing SDET work.
Most people who can afford a $90k car:
a) have a garage
b) have more than one car, including a winter beater
c) probably can afford a $90k car because of some intrinsic level of intelligence sufficient to suggest they brush the car off before opening the doors.
It is called loan. Most people takes out a loan, as they need money. The rich people taks out a loan, to avoid tax. Hmm..that's the rule, but we should think about it, at least.
There, you're wrong. The real estate crash didn't happen because of greedy bankers, it happened because of greedy homeowners who spent a decade using their houses as ATMs. Those trillions of dollars lost are *precisely* because of that behavior -- people refinancing, taking home equity loans and using that money to buy vacations, cars, wardrobes, etc ... all loans taken out tax-free on the assets they have.
*Exactly* the same behavior this article is talking about.
Anyone who takes out a home equity loan (which is equally a loan on assets you've got) takes the money without paying income tax on it. When you sell the house, you don't pay tax on the gains either, in most scenarios.
So the people bitching about it have probably done it themselves before.
The language of a compulsory licensing law would require demonstrating that every licensee is charged a fair and equitable price, which cannot be any higher than the price of their own products minus the material and production costs. And that difference would be distributed among the many patents used in a single product in the proportion the company specifies (for all).
I take it you would vote against such a law and allow big corporations to continue to stifle innovation and drag this country down?
If you actually believe that IP protections are dragging this country down, all you are doing is demonstrating to those who have bothered to educate themselves on history how uneducated you are on it.
So yes, I absolutely would vote for it. I know what happens in economies that don't offer protection to corporations for their investments.
Profit, investment and corporations is why today we're all not living in farm houses with candlelight and no education.
The free market you worship did NOT make us educated. That was 100% a government endeavor. Just like the space program. Were it not for governments, industry would not be in space today.
You might want to study your history of public education in the US, and why it was enacted.
Yes you can, you simply change the law. Patents are not inherent to the organization of the universe, and a compulsory license requirement would be in no way unconstitutional.
$1 billion dollars, per usage.
Compulsory license requirement met.
Until you hear directly from the authorities that it was, in fact, a sting, its probably safer to assume it wasn't.
Of course they'll SAY it was a sting... Symantec just had the whole world learn that extortion works with them.