If the version number were 4.0.2 instead of 5.0 Enterprises wouldn't be getting their panties in a bunch over this.
Not if 4.0.2 caused 4.0.0 to have support dropped for it three months after you installed it.
Corporations typically end up deploying this kind of software on a much longer cycle... I'm working on a project now which will be deploying software to the users in several months. There's extensive testing which needs to happen before it can be deployed.
I've seen vendors who seem to release a new version of their software every week or two, and if you have an issue, and aren't running the latest and greatest, they won't listen to you until you upgrade. The problem is, we're talking about production servers with a fair bit of testing and paperwork to have an outage for... it's just not practical to upgrade every week, every month, or often every three months. It takes us longer to promote it through the environments to verify it than it takes them to release a new build with generally pretty minor changes.
Software which is end-of-life after three months is pretty useless from a corporate perspective. It's unusable, and it's agile development gone horribly wrong. On my home machine, sure, I guess I'd be willing up do an upgrade of Firefox every couple of months. But, if I had thousands of desktop users running in a complex environment... a three month cycle before what you just installed is EOL'd isn't nearly long enough.
If this is what Mozilla is doing with Firefox, then I think a lot of organizations will simply need to take a second look at this... because I don't think they'd be able to keep up. In some places, the desktop image is expected to be stable for rather a long time. I think anybody just saying the enterprise is wrong and Mozilla is right likely hasn't worked in industry in a while. Because I can't see how we could keep up with this either.
The idea that Crapcom would actively admit to sabotaging the gamer's play experience and make it so you couldn't restart the game from scratch? Unsurprising. I hear they've poached a couple of suits from EA and Ubisoft who have the same "fuck you" approach to customer service.
Unless they're selling these games really cheaply, I don't know why they think anybody is going to buy a game that can't be re-played unless it costs only a few bucks in the first place.
As you say, this is a big "fuck you" to the customer.
Part of the problem with this is that you might be teaching it to people who don't have the emotional maturity to truly gauge the difference between right and wrong... don't most teenagers test as sociopaths in personality tests?
You're doing a lot more than simply teaching them to think critically and objectively... you're teaching them to do things which range from shady to illegal, and they might not fully grasp that.
I'm not sure a 14 year old needs lock-picking skills. Though, I'm sure some hilarity could ensue.
You're always limiting the rights of other people, including their right to live, by asserting your rights. The problem is where to draw the line.
I disagree with that thesis entirely.
Their right to live does not mean in any way that I'm required to surrender mine. Just because you might need an organ donation, doesn't confer an obligation upon me to give it to you. The same as the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" doesn't actually guarantee you a job or to be happy... merely the right to look for it.
Because, as soon as you start doing the calculus of whose life is more valuable... you start using the poor as spare parts for the rich.
In my opinion, both of your examples are nonsensical and contrived. That isn't about 'offending someone else's sensibilities'.... it's about making your own rights inferior to that of someone else. I don't see any ambiguity in where to draw the line you seem to think is a broad and fuzzy expanse... your rights can't extend past the security of my own person.
This is really is one of those situations that if you aren't doing anything illegal don't worry about it and if you do worry about it find another tool.
This is the most damaging and poorly thought out sentiments that I hear of late...
If you're not doing anything wrong, don't worry, citizen. Only the guilty need privacy. Only criminals use encryption. Upstanding people don't have secrets. We have to know everything to prevent thought crimes. We know what's best. Fuck that.
Deciding that we have no expectation of privacy is a dumb idea. Deciding that only people who are doing something shady try to guard their privacy is completely wrong-headed. You start out with fourth amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. In theory, there is supposed to be warrants and judicial oversight to keep this in check. Lately, the trend has been to side-step all of that stuff.
There are lots of legitimate reasons why someone would expect to keep some things private... and taking those away under is a horrible idea.
Why is everybody so damned willing to live in a surveillance society? This makes no friggin' sense to me whatsoever. And every time I hear someone saying that if I'm not a criminal I shouldn't expect privacy I just want to scream at the sheer madness of that statement.
So, when they install tools for our government to spy on us, it's supposed to be a good thing.
And when they do it to help other governments we don't agree with, it's an enemy to democracy and helping to undermine the ability of peaceful protest.
Love the double standard inherent in this. Maybe we can use the stuff the US is working on to stealthily deploy an internet in places to get around 'oppressive regimes' to prevent wholesale, un-tracked monitoring of our communications.
Oh, right, if you call yourselves the good guys, it's all OK. But, make no mistake about it... this will help the 'Bad Guys' as much as it will help the 'Good Guys'... China wants to listen to your VOIP too.
Very true... in my lifetime, the most notable example of this was when Tipper Gore was trying to get a bunch of music banned. This, of course, led to Dee Schneider in the most ball-hugging jeans you could imagine testifying about why what she was proposing was just plain wrong.
Everyone wraps themselves in the flag, and talks about freedom, but often they only mean for people who they agree with. You can't have free speech if you don't support the right of people to say offensive things just because you'd rather not hear it (or because you think it's causing out moral decay).
It's amazing how vocal people can be about making sure that the rights of other people are limited so as not to offend their own sensibilities.
I greatly prefer logging into their website using a mobile browser than using that god awful app.
I actually tried installing a Facebook app over the weekend... it more or less wanted to completely change all of my privacy settings, which I assume is a side effect of the way the platform APIs work.
So, if my choice is to use Safari to access Facebook, or let some app change all of my privacy settings to be much more permissive than I wanted... well, it's not like it's tough to use it in Safari.
I won't attempt to install any applications related to Facebook any more, because apparently they only work if you open everything up. I explicitly set all of those things to be very restrictive in the first place for a reason.
One could even make a combination solar panel and LCD crystal windows, such that the operator can park, turn on the fan, and then whiteout the windows so that even less light makes it inside.
And, just think of the benefit to teenagers and other people who want to go 'parking'... no more finding a dark secluded place. Just pull over somewhere, and blank out the windows for a bit and have a quickie.
Of course, the vigorous rocking of the car might be a give-away, but, it's a small price to pay.:-P
So, the first guy to broadcast something which has either had its copyright expire (or was never copyrighted) now owns it? That's fucking obscene.
Wow, I can see this being a wonderful mechanism by which broadcasters can pretty much steal works just by broadcasting them. Just find something someone else did that is scheduled to become unprotected, sneak in and broadcast, and suddenly you own it for the next 75 years or whatever copyright is at now.
I'm afraid that copyright has gotten completely out of control, and no longer serves the purpose it was created for. This is basically squatting, but made legal through copyright law.
I feel very sad for future generations living in a climate where the corporations control every last thing, and have all of the laws on their side. I think lawmakers voting for this need to be boiled in oil -- more maybe something more evil.
There are literally, only two down sides to python's use of white space. One, some editors do really dumb things.
Oh god, this.
Years ago I got into a bit of a row with a co-worker. He liked two space tabs, and insisted on using emacs, which is fine... except emacs replaced a series of tabs with a single tab (or something) that it interpreted as needing to be indented according to its own rules. But left the file unusable for everyone else because they weren't privy to these fancy rules, they were just text editors.
Basically, every commit he made looked like the entire fscking file had changed. It took days for him to understand that I don't care if he sees tabs as 2, 4, or 8 chars... but if he couldn't make the resulting output something which I could still edit in vi or every other editor we used, I was going to lock him out of CVS. Because once the file had been edited in emacs, it was fucked up for anybody not using emacs. When the display preferences of your editor start to affect other things, it's bad -- you can't break it for the lowest common editor just so you can have syntax highlighting in emacs. He didn't seem to understand that I wasn't complaining about his visual preferences, I was complaining about what it was doing to the actual source files.
I'm not sure I agree with your arguments in favor of whitespace being syntactically meaningful (I personally think it's stupid)... but, the amount that I code has dwindled over the years, and it is what it is. My exposure to Python a bunch of years ago left me with a very bad impression of it as a language as it seemed to rely on/advocate some really poor coding choices that when carried into a different language made for absolute shit code -- C does not benefit from that kind of layout, in fact, it becomes absolute crap.
(Actually, I vaguely remember letting someone else go who wouldn't adhere to our coding standards... he didn't seem to understand that it wasn't his own personal code base, and that far more than just him was affected by his choices. He seemed to think that I was stifling his creativity, as opposed to protecting the integrity of a huge code base which had been around for some years and represented the product as built by people far smarter. No great loss, he was fairly useless anyway.)
According to Wikipedia it's about 640 light years away
Bah, 640 light years out to be enough for anybody.:-P
And, slightly more on topic, I love some of the verb tenses that arise from contemplating such distances... "In the future, we will know if the star has already died sometime between 640 years ago and now". It really does hurt my head.
sentences are delimited by punctuation, not white space.
Ithinkthatmaybeonlypartiallytrue.
Certainly by the time you're dealing with paragraphs and multiple sentences, whitespace actually does become significant.
I've never been a fan of whitespace being syntactically significant in a language, and my only exposure to Python was almost a decade ago... that was enough to make me cringe. But, that could have been the guy writing it the code that I saw. But, it was complete crap and pretty much soured me on the entire language.
It's a good bit closer when both of those private businesses have government backed monopolies in their respective fields.
And, when they tell the government what laws they need passed to be sure the deck is stacked in their favor.
America is so beholden to the content makers it's not funny... and they've more or less started to make the rest of the world beholden to them with ACTA.
Maybe not for laptops or higher draw items... but I've pretty much used USB charging as a criteria for most of my purchases over the last few years that need to be charged.
If the device has something proprietary, or even something common (but not USB), I'll keep looking for a different product.
My cell phones, iPods, GPS, and quite a few others can all charge from the same basic USB connection. Makes my life a lot simpler when I'm traveling with most of my electronics.
"If you cannot win without cheating, then cheating to win is perfectly okay."
It's not 'cheating' if everyone is playing by those same rules -- in fact, it's the opposite of cheating. So, not only have you NOT 'fixed' my statement, your version of it ignores reality.
If the system is befouled, do you continue to help muddy it, or do you work at cleaning it up? Unfortunately, most companies are only in it for the profit, damned be all else.
Companies who take an idealized stance that they maybe should stop patenting stuff because it's bad will eventually find themselves sued by someone who didn't feel the same way, and patented stuff behind their back. If the system is fouled, their interests are best served by playing according to the shitty rules.
This isn't a game you can win by not playing. Yes, patents suck, they get granted for stupid things, and used for basically strong-arming other companies into paying you money.
But, if Apple suddenly stopped playing, they'd get steam rolled by companies who were engaging in this stuff. Not only isn't there an incentive for Apple to not apply for patents, there is a disincentive against not applying for them -- they'd lose money.
Why is Apple the only company people expect to withdraw from the patent game if their competitors would just turn around and patent the stuff and sue them? Do you seriously expect Microsoft, Oracle or IBM wouldn't do this?
Welcome to capitalism -- it's cut-throat by design.
Touch screens have been in use for a very long** time in military applications.
They didn't patent touch screens... they patented the system which allowed for muti-finger gestures.
Did your military applications basically implement the "button" paradigm, where you click a region on the screen like it was a physical button... or did they truly implement multi-touch with gestures?
I'm not defending the patent... but I am curious to know if what you cite has having been in use actually correspond to this specific patent.
Obviously, the USPTO thinks it's worth a patent, but most of us generally think they'd approve a patent for "method of wiping front to back" if it came across their desk.
You can give up any semblance of a life to raise the equivalent of a 5.5 foot dog, or you can do the humane thing and not.
Wow, I hope you don't ever find yourself in need of on-going care for something.
Do you have nothing better to do than be a dick when Aspergers is mentioned?
Who cares that the correct clinical term is "Autistic Psychopathy"... are you special because you know that? Or are people who are affected by this simply not worthy of your consideration? Because, seriously, in normal conversation with people, it's usually best to try to downplay using the word "psychopathy", since it's not a term which is well understood/accepted by most people.
But, hey, keep being a dick. (Or an Autistic Psychopath, whichever applies.)
"It's that the American patent system itself is out of control and stupid" .
Most of these patents do not actually apply to most of the world, but hobble systems anyway because it is too expensive to do a US and Non-US system...
The US of late has been making sure that copyright violations are pursued at a higher level than organized crime, drug trafficking, and pretty much everything else. Other countries were more or less told that if they didn't sign on to this, they would face barriers to trading with the US.
If they haven't done so by now, enforcement of their patents is not far behind. So, you'll forgive me for failing to believe your assertion that this is only affecting the US.
This is why the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are now pursuing enforcement of such things.
Also, you can hate the player. Stop giving excuse to these jackholes.
Fine, hate the player... I don't care.
The could play the game differently. They could push for a more rational system.
Yes, they could push for that, and they quite possibly do.
But when we see stories that say that Oracle figures Google owes them 6.1 billion dollars, then you'd have to be an idiot to think that Apple would be able to simply not patent this stuff and sing kumbaya and pass out flowers. If someone patented this very thing, and suddenly sues Apple for $6 billion... well, they'd be screwed. And, they'd pretty much have nobody to blame but themselves.
Like I said, go ahead, hate the patent system... hate Apple if you think it makes you feel better or bolsters your argument... the reality is, in the current legal climate where the big players sue each other for vast sums of money, not patenting this would be stupid. Expecting Apple or any other company to act like some other company wouldn't fuck them over if they had half a chance is mostly just ignoring the realities of the situation.
But, hey, go ahead, pick something you think we should "fight the power on"... start setting up a booth on the street corner to sell pirated copies of Microsoft windows and hit albums. Tell them it's unjust and that you're just trying to change the system. And, when they drag you off to the big house or seize all of your assets, you can feel all warm and cozy in the knowledge that you took a principled stand.
You seem to expect that Apple should throw themselves onto their own sword to make a dramatic point... companies don't work like that. As long as this is how the patent system works, companies don't have much of a choice than to play by the rules of the game.
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Not if 4.0.2 caused 4.0.0 to have support dropped for it three months after you installed it.
Corporations typically end up deploying this kind of software on a much longer cycle ... I'm working on a project now which will be deploying software to the users in several months. There's extensive testing which needs to happen before it can be deployed.
I've seen vendors who seem to release a new version of their software every week or two, and if you have an issue, and aren't running the latest and greatest, they won't listen to you until you upgrade. The problem is, we're talking about production servers with a fair bit of testing and paperwork to have an outage for ... it's just not practical to upgrade every week, every month, or often every three months. It takes us longer to promote it through the environments to verify it than it takes them to release a new build with generally pretty minor changes.
Software which is end-of-life after three months is pretty useless from a corporate perspective. It's unusable, and it's agile development gone horribly wrong. On my home machine, sure, I guess I'd be willing up do an upgrade of Firefox every couple of months. But, if I had thousands of desktop users running in a complex environment ... a three month cycle before what you just installed is EOL'd isn't nearly long enough.
If this is what Mozilla is doing with Firefox, then I think a lot of organizations will simply need to take a second look at this ... because I don't think they'd be able to keep up. In some places, the desktop image is expected to be stable for rather a long time. I think anybody just saying the enterprise is wrong and Mozilla is right likely hasn't worked in industry in a while. Because I can't see how we could keep up with this either.
Unless they're selling these games really cheaply, I don't know why they think anybody is going to buy a game that can't be re-played unless it costs only a few bucks in the first place.
As you say, this is a big "fuck you" to the customer.
You should. I highly recommend a week on a beach with mojitos, palm trees, cigars and exceedingly fresh coffee.
Unplugged can be good ... I read quote the other week about how someone realized they wouldn't look back and wish they'd spent more time in Facebook.
Embrace the horror ... be offline, and outside in the sun. ;-)
No, the goatse ones are real pain in the ass. ;-)
OK, I apologize for that one.
Part of the problem with this is that you might be teaching it to people who don't have the emotional maturity to truly gauge the difference between right and wrong ... don't most teenagers test as sociopaths in personality tests?
You're doing a lot more than simply teaching them to think critically and objectively ... you're teaching them to do things which range from shady to illegal, and they might not fully grasp that.
I'm not sure a 14 year old needs lock-picking skills. Though, I'm sure some hilarity could ensue.
I disagree with that thesis entirely.
Their right to live does not mean in any way that I'm required to surrender mine. Just because you might need an organ donation, doesn't confer an obligation upon me to give it to you. The same as the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" doesn't actually guarantee you a job or to be happy ... merely the right to look for it.
Because, as soon as you start doing the calculus of whose life is more valuable ... you start using the poor as spare parts for the rich.
In my opinion, both of your examples are nonsensical and contrived. That isn't about 'offending someone else's sensibilities' .... it's about making your own rights inferior to that of someone else. I don't see any ambiguity in where to draw the line you seem to think is a broad and fuzzy expanse ... your rights can't extend past the security of my own person.
This is the most damaging and poorly thought out sentiments that I hear of late ...
If you're not doing anything wrong, don't worry, citizen. Only the guilty need privacy. Only criminals use encryption. Upstanding people don't have secrets. We have to know everything to prevent thought crimes. We know what's best. Fuck that.
Deciding that we have no expectation of privacy is a dumb idea. Deciding that only people who are doing something shady try to guard their privacy is completely wrong-headed. You start out with fourth amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. In theory, there is supposed to be warrants and judicial oversight to keep this in check. Lately, the trend has been to side-step all of that stuff.
There are lots of legitimate reasons why someone would expect to keep some things private ... and taking those away under is a horrible idea.
Why is everybody so damned willing to live in a surveillance society? This makes no friggin' sense to me whatsoever. And every time I hear someone saying that if I'm not a criminal I shouldn't expect privacy I just want to scream at the sheer madness of that statement.
So, when they install tools for our government to spy on us, it's supposed to be a good thing.
And when they do it to help other governments we don't agree with, it's an enemy to democracy and helping to undermine the ability of peaceful protest.
Love the double standard inherent in this. Maybe we can use the stuff the US is working on to stealthily deploy an internet in places to get around 'oppressive regimes' to prevent wholesale, un-tracked monitoring of our communications.
Oh, right, if you call yourselves the good guys, it's all OK. But, make no mistake about it ... this will help the 'Bad Guys' as much as it will help the 'Good Guys' ... China wants to listen to your VOIP too.
Very true ... in my lifetime, the most notable example of this was when Tipper Gore was trying to get a bunch of music banned. This, of course, led to Dee Schneider in the most ball-hugging jeans you could imagine testifying about why what she was proposing was just plain wrong.
Everyone wraps themselves in the flag, and talks about freedom, but often they only mean for people who they agree with. You can't have free speech if you don't support the right of people to say offensive things just because you'd rather not hear it (or because you think it's causing out moral decay).
It's amazing how vocal people can be about making sure that the rights of other people are limited so as not to offend their own sensibilities.
I actually tried installing a Facebook app over the weekend ... it more or less wanted to completely change all of my privacy settings, which I assume is a side effect of the way the platform APIs work.
So, if my choice is to use Safari to access Facebook, or let some app change all of my privacy settings to be much more permissive than I wanted ... well, it's not like it's tough to use it in Safari.
I won't attempt to install any applications related to Facebook any more, because apparently they only work if you open everything up. I explicitly set all of those things to be very restrictive in the first place for a reason.
Sounds more like the Pentagon than the TSA. :-P
And, just think of the benefit to teenagers and other people who want to go 'parking' ... no more finding a dark secluded place. Just pull over somewhere, and blank out the windows for a bit and have a quickie.
Of course, the vigorous rocking of the car might be a give-away, but, it's a small price to pay. :-P
So, the first guy to broadcast something which has either had its copyright expire (or was never copyrighted) now owns it? That's fucking obscene.
Wow, I can see this being a wonderful mechanism by which broadcasters can pretty much steal works just by broadcasting them. Just find something someone else did that is scheduled to become unprotected, sneak in and broadcast, and suddenly you own it for the next 75 years or whatever copyright is at now.
I'm afraid that copyright has gotten completely out of control, and no longer serves the purpose it was created for. This is basically squatting, but made legal through copyright law.
I feel very sad for future generations living in a climate where the corporations control every last thing, and have all of the laws on their side. I think lawmakers voting for this need to be boiled in oil -- more maybe something more evil.
Oh god, this.
Years ago I got into a bit of a row with a co-worker. He liked two space tabs, and insisted on using emacs, which is fine ... except emacs replaced a series of tabs with a single tab (or something) that it interpreted as needing to be indented according to its own rules. But left the file unusable for everyone else because they weren't privy to these fancy rules, they were just text editors.
Basically, every commit he made looked like the entire fscking file had changed. It took days for him to understand that I don't care if he sees tabs as 2, 4, or 8 chars ... but if he couldn't make the resulting output something which I could still edit in vi or every other editor we used, I was going to lock him out of CVS. Because once the file had been edited in emacs, it was fucked up for anybody not using emacs. When the display preferences of your editor start to affect other things, it's bad -- you can't break it for the lowest common editor just so you can have syntax highlighting in emacs. He didn't seem to understand that I wasn't complaining about his visual preferences, I was complaining about what it was doing to the actual source files.
I'm not sure I agree with your arguments in favor of whitespace being syntactically meaningful (I personally think it's stupid) ... but, the amount that I code has dwindled over the years, and it is what it is. My exposure to Python a bunch of years ago left me with a very bad impression of it as a language as it seemed to rely on/advocate some really poor coding choices that when carried into a different language made for absolute shit code -- C does not benefit from that kind of layout, in fact, it becomes absolute crap.
(Actually, I vaguely remember letting someone else go who wouldn't adhere to our coding standards ... he didn't seem to understand that it wasn't his own personal code base, and that far more than just him was affected by his choices. He seemed to think that I was stifling his creativity, as opposed to protecting the integrity of a huge code base which had been around for some years and represented the product as built by people far smarter. No great loss, he was fairly useless anyway.)
Oh, come now ... at that level, they'd be Generals and Admirals.
A mere captain doesn't have the authority to fuck things up on that scale. ;-)
Bah, 640 light years out to be enough for anybody. :-P
And, slightly more on topic, I love some of the verb tenses that arise from contemplating such distances ... "In the future, we will know if the star has already died sometime between 640 years ago and now". It really does hurt my head.
Ithinkthatmaybeonlypartiallytrue.
Certainly by the time you're dealing with paragraphs and multiple sentences, whitespace actually does become significant.
I've never been a fan of whitespace being syntactically significant in a language, and my only exposure to Python was almost a decade ago ... that was enough to make me cringe. But, that could have been the guy writing it the code that I saw. But, it was complete crap and pretty much soured me on the entire language.
And, when they tell the government what laws they need passed to be sure the deck is stacked in their favor.
America is so beholden to the content makers it's not funny ... and they've more or less started to make the rest of the world beholden to them with ACTA.
Maybe not for laptops or higher draw items ... but I've pretty much used USB charging as a criteria for most of my purchases over the last few years that need to be charged.
If the device has something proprietary, or even something common (but not USB), I'll keep looking for a different product.
My cell phones, iPods, GPS, and quite a few others can all charge from the same basic USB connection. Makes my life a lot simpler when I'm traveling with most of my electronics.
Why, nobody else does? That's a problem with the whole patent system, not Apple.
It's not 'cheating' if everyone is playing by those same rules -- in fact, it's the opposite of cheating. So, not only have you NOT 'fixed' my statement, your version of it ignores reality.
Companies who take an idealized stance that they maybe should stop patenting stuff because it's bad will eventually find themselves sued by someone who didn't feel the same way, and patented stuff behind their back. If the system is fouled, their interests are best served by playing according to the shitty rules.
This isn't a game you can win by not playing. Yes, patents suck, they get granted for stupid things, and used for basically strong-arming other companies into paying you money.
But, if Apple suddenly stopped playing, they'd get steam rolled by companies who were engaging in this stuff. Not only isn't there an incentive for Apple to not apply for patents, there is a disincentive against not applying for them -- they'd lose money.
Why is Apple the only company people expect to withdraw from the patent game if their competitors would just turn around and patent the stuff and sue them? Do you seriously expect Microsoft, Oracle or IBM wouldn't do this?
Welcome to capitalism -- it's cut-throat by design.
They didn't patent touch screens ... they patented the system which allowed for muti-finger gestures.
Did your military applications basically implement the "button" paradigm, where you click a region on the screen like it was a physical button ... or did they truly implement multi-touch with gestures?
I'm not defending the patent ... but I am curious to know if what you cite has having been in use actually correspond to this specific patent.
Obviously, the USPTO thinks it's worth a patent, but most of us generally think they'd approve a patent for "method of wiping front to back" if it came across their desk.
Wow, I hope you don't ever find yourself in need of on-going care for something.
Do you have nothing better to do than be a dick when Aspergers is mentioned?
Who cares that the correct clinical term is "Autistic Psychopathy" ... are you special because you know that? Or are people who are affected by this simply not worthy of your consideration? Because, seriously, in normal conversation with people, it's usually best to try to downplay using the word "psychopathy", since it's not a term which is well understood/accepted by most people.
But, hey, keep being a dick. (Or an Autistic Psychopath, whichever applies.)
Well, the way the US has been exporting the entrenchment of protection of copyright and IP into treaties, so that other countries are more or less responsible for policing this ... I disagree.
The US of late has been making sure that copyright violations are pursued at a higher level than organized crime, drug trafficking, and pretty much everything else. Other countries were more or less told that if they didn't sign on to this, they would face barriers to trading with the US.
If they haven't done so by now, enforcement of their patents is not far behind. So, you'll forgive me for failing to believe your assertion that this is only affecting the US.
This is why the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are now pursuing enforcement of such things.
Fine, hate the player ... I don't care.
Yes, they could push for that, and they quite possibly do.
But when we see stories that say that Oracle figures Google owes them 6.1 billion dollars, then you'd have to be an idiot to think that Apple would be able to simply not patent this stuff and sing kumbaya and pass out flowers. If someone patented this very thing, and suddenly sues Apple for $6 billion ... well, they'd be screwed. And, they'd pretty much have nobody to blame but themselves.
Like I said, go ahead, hate the patent system ... hate Apple if you think it makes you feel better or bolsters your argument ... the reality is, in the current legal climate where the big players sue each other for vast sums of money, not patenting this would be stupid. Expecting Apple or any other company to act like some other company wouldn't fuck them over if they had half a chance is mostly just ignoring the realities of the situation.
But, hey, go ahead, pick something you think we should "fight the power on" ... start setting up a booth on the street corner to sell pirated copies of Microsoft windows and hit albums. Tell them it's unjust and that you're just trying to change the system. And, when they drag you off to the big house or seize all of your assets, you can feel all warm and cozy in the knowledge that you took a principled stand.
You seem to expect that Apple should throw themselves onto their own sword to make a dramatic point ... companies don't work like that. As long as this is how the patent system works, companies don't have much of a choice than to play by the rules of the game.