I wonder what interpretation you give to the quoted text. Nobody said the word was there, but the threath is clear, the UK is willing to take action. Oh, so maybe they walk onto foreign soil with gun in hands instead of running. That makes all the difference.
You question Ecuador's record on human rights. Well, how about the US and the UK and for that matter Sweden? The US routinely tortures civilians with no right to process or a legal representative. And that is just the most blatant example.
The UK has a very long history of violent repression and total disregard for human rights. The only reason it has improved is because its power to abuse has been greatly reduced.
Sweden has shown itself to be a puppet state in the last ten years.
Nobody claims Ecuador is a saint but in the fight against evil you sometimes have to make strange bed fellows.
And good job quoting a guy working for a rightwing think tank. This was funded by the people who made the atom bomb. I want their opinion on human rights?
Willfull slaves such as you quake in their boots at the idea of anyone daring to rebel. You do not believe in the system that represents the status quo, you just are desperately afraid of any change whatsoever. You rather continue to be raped up the ass then risk any change because it might cause just the tiniest upset and then all hell will break lose.
Wikileaks was the only response possible in a world where western governments from administration to adminstration have sought to keep ever more hidden from fact in the name of national security. That this was a complete and utter lie is simply proven to anyone who isn't a sniffeling coward like the parent poster, NOT A FUCKING THING HAPPENED after the wikileaks. All that happened is that it became clear how much we had been lied to and how many of the rumors were true. People lost faces but no bases were attacked, no wars were lost. Just the powerful ended up with eggs on their faces.
And that frighens little dave shroeder, Wikileaks upset his world view. He believed Bush was protecting little dave and not at in it for himself. Poor dave is upset. Wikileaks must be shutdown so dave can put his head under the blanket again.
Didn't America have a massive blackout in the North East a while back? And have rolling blackouts for years in California? And have massive flooding because of poor water works?
It all depends what the hourly salary is of the people working on it. Maybe the Indians aren't counting the cost of pork projects to have this bill pass?
I am probably extremely racist but all I thought reading this "what a bunch of n******".
This just shows that we should stop all aid to Africa, if the natives can buy 100 dollar iPhone apps, then all the starving need to do is rise up and redistribute the wealth. It also shows that the natives have absolute zero solidarity with their own people, so why should the rest of the world?
Make the world a better place? How about the Nigerians start with themselves.
Argentina has a case to settle with the Brits, who do you think they might support in a conflict?
And England with its economy down the drain certainly doesn't want a boycott against it. Boycotts always benefit someone. Lets say British banks are boycotted from South America. That will benefit South American banks, who will be very appreciative to any South American politicians that initiated such a boycott.
People who think the world always continues just as it was before forgot that the Greeks no longer are the center of civilization and where ever it is now, it sure as hell isn't in Africa. Things change and they always catch the world by surprise.
The Daily Mail is NOT a respectable newspaper, it is a sensationalist rag read by the rednecks, tokkies (dutch rednecks) or whatever the degenerates are called in your area of the world.
Taking any story in the daily whine for fact is like believing anything you read in a celebrity gossip magazine. Many of which do more fact checking.
Oh really? You are talking about the revolution or the recent election. Both changed the heads but the same people remained in power. Just see the stance on copyright. Totally unpopular with the government but except for the pirate parties, every political party is supporting it in practice (not of course in election promises but they aren't worth the paper they are written on).
The threw out the conservatives when the Brits got fed up with Tatcherism and they got Tony Blair. Then they threw labour out and they got the conservatives back with the lib-dems betraying every single election promise. The lib-dems got spanked for that in the next minor election and NOTHING CHANGED.
You are aware that in the normal world (any place that is not Sweden) lying to get sex is not actually a crime? If it was, 99% of men would in jail. The remaining 1% are catholic priests and they would be in jail for raping kids.
Assange played two women. That is what ALL this is about. There is NO way this would stand up in any court expect in Sweden and then only because the Americans told them to do something.
Only right wing nutcases pretend the case against Assange has any merit whatsoever.
Oh and the two women involved already knew each other. AND the case had already been dismissed before the Americans got involved.
You are saying that in Brazil, lying to get sex is a crime? The entire country would be in jail.
Lets not forget the the rape charge in Sweden would be laughed out of court in the rest of the world. Hell, in most countries, if a woman made the charges made, the police would arrest HER for wasting the police time and slander. Check the charges. They are insane, never mind they were not prosecuted in Sweden until the Swedes needed something to stick Assange with at the behest of their American masters.
The Russian girl group Pussy Riot is in jail for daring to challenge Poetin during a protest.
The Dutch government is protesting. But a Dutch protester who threw a small candle (the kind that go under tea pots) against the golden carriage carrying the queen has been in jail for two years.
And no, minor acts of vandalism are NOT typically sentenced like this. Throw ice-balls causing damage to cars and you don't even get arrested. But dare to do it against the absolute ruler and BAM, in jail for two years.
Democracy, you say you have it, so you don't have to do it.
Small webshops don't story credit card but use a payment processor. You get forwarded to their page for your payment details. I do not know your CC details and do not want to know them.
I am talking a TINY webshop here, they don't store credit cards (And I am from Holland were credit cards are often just plain not accepted) but you have simple plugin to a dedicated payment provider where the developers HAVE to be the volvo driving kind.
I NEVER would write code that even asks for a credit card, not the site I am working on at all.
Not knowing how to pick up women is not the same as meaning you think it is okay to grab them in the crotch. I don't know to fly a 747 but I am fairly certain that it is not okay to play chicken on the runway.
As a geek I am getting fed up with people putting people with bad social behavior in my group, true geeks might be socially awkward an silent but that does NOT mean every asshole who doesn't give a fuck is a geek.
For fuck sake, it is about hacking not about being a 12yr old online kiddie. When it comes to tech, I think and talk tech, not sex. Mind you, I am not PC because I always use the male form when talking about people "he" rather then "he/she" or if I want to be funny (he/she/it) Slashdot: "but that ain't funny" Shut up!
True geeks don't sexually harass or are racist or have issues with other sexual preferences, to be a true geek means to be open minded and realize that normal does not exist, after all, no geek is normal.
Mind you, the word geek has been so mis-used of late. If you are dutch and make the mistake of visiting tweakers you can see that it has come to include anyone who changes their wallpaper and has people in it that are extremely rigid in their thinking.
Nowadays a geek is no longer somebody who wants to take the world apart to see how it works (and maybe, someday put it back together again) but just anyone who knows how to turn on a computer and lacks social skills. True geeks don't have to lack social skills, they are just people that get pre-occupied and sometimes mistake other people for cats and cats for people. Some of the best geeks I met are the old confused proffessor type, perfectly charming and alright to be with, profided they aren't busy with a problem in their head and have temorarily put the world on hold.
A geek is NOT a hatred filled kid who screams obscenities in his xbox headset where the only tweak is that he used xXNICKXx instead of something readable.
It is sad, I do remember the old days when it wasn't at all unusual to see women at maker groups, both as girlfriends and as makers and the girlfriends often were at least interested to help not just sit their to polish their nails as trophies. But it has changed, as geekhood became bigger, it lost its meaning.
A true geek doesn't need to be PC, it would never enter his or her mind to even make sexual remarks like the ones mentioned in the article. At a true geek meetup, the only reason I would stare at a womans breasts is if she had a gadget between them, who has time to be on the prowl when their are gadgets around? Opening the latest up, better then SEX! And if you feel that is not true, you are NOT a geek. Go away! Aol is that way ->
Except that the copyright industry has made sure their terms apply to ALL content. Play ANY music no matter how it is licensed and the copyright industry collects payment for it. You cannot escape it legally and forcing them to return illegal collections or actually paying out illegal collections to copyright owners that are long dead or do not want the money is impossible.
If you created your own music and played it on your own radio show, you would have to pay for your own music and then have a hell of time trying to collect the money due to you minus a hefty fee if you ever get it.
As a web developer, I am a liberal and find myself at odds with conservatives who often just can't see simple business needs. Conservatism is good for heart monitors but for building the next facebook? But the Conservative amongst you will argue, don't you think that a billion dollar, millions of visitors, holding fast amounts of private data site NEEDS to be extremely secure?
And it shows much you don't get it if you think that. I said the NEXT facebook, which will start out as a small site with a shoestring budget and bankruptcy just a bill away. Then you need to deliver a product BEFORE yesterday and all the fancy stuff can come later when you are rich and can afford to hire the terminally slow.
I have talked with webshop clients who wanted triple redundancy and failover to carry max expect load... YOU HAVEN'T SHIPPED A SINGLE ORDER YET! And PAY MY BILLS FIRST! Part of the reason the tech bubble burst was all these old developers insisting on enterprise grade hardware with oracle licenses coming out of your ears, meaning that even if they would have ever been able to release a product, the operating costs would have been so high, the break even point would have been somewhere after the heat death of the universe.
The big ones that did survive made it on cheap hardware with buggy, hastily written code that was good enough to make it to the next month.
One old school guy I worked with wanted a detailed plan for general debugging when there was a crisis... because he first wanted to fully analyse the problem before bringing the server down if it started coughing up bad orders because that is what you do in a factory, your don't shutdown an entire factory just because a few widgets come out wrong...
The moron never managed to understand that you DO shut the entire factory down if the cost of 1 defective widget is equal to profit of an entire days output of that factory.
For web shops, margins are tiny and customer service is very expensive. It is BETTER to be down for an entire day, then have to spend a week dealing with complaints because of messed up orders. 1 day no-profit == 1 day of low costs (highest cost are sending and goods, both of which are non existent if you don't ship anything) while shipping orders wrong so they have to shipped again gets VERY expensive REALLY fast.
So, you shut things down and dive right in and fix it, just good enough to get up and running again.
But doesn't that prove you should write bug free code? Only if a website has infinite resources for its startup. Most don't. If you got 10 grand to start a website, you need 5k for supplies, 3k for shipping and that leaves 2k for code. When that money is gone, the webshop either needs to have earnings coming in or it is down the tube.
It is different if there is a large established company and you can pull a MS and just throw good money after bad. But 99% of web development ain't like that.
Mind you, I wouldn't like to fly a plane I had written the software for.
It is a console game first of all. Console games do not have depth or replay value, rather they have difficulty levels that are locked forcing replay.
And Diablo has ALWAYS been a repetitive dungeon crawler/hack&slash game. That is what it is. And the only way to increase difficulty without improving AI is to add more monsters with more hit points and more resists and this creates the brick wall then your "skill" level is reached.
My advice for Diablo? Play it once, just like other games. Then STOP.
There are people who play Final Fantasy games to max everything or speed run RPG's and for THOSE people there is Inferno. They don't "play" a game for story or novelty, they play to get REALLY good at doing the exact same thing over and over again. If by some miracle of scripting a game company made every boss unique on every play through, these people would be REALLY upset. It stops them from using skillX at 3904872 HP followed by Y and Z in 2.322334 seconds.
Basically, the above poster is complaining that a porn movie gets a bit repetitive after the 100th play through. DUH!
How many paying customers see other people getting it for free and decide they also no longer want to pay?
Proof of this behavior? Walking through a red light, once one person does it, others follow.
Guarding against theft is not just to stop active thiefs, it is also a way to keep non-thieves from turning to thieving.
Proof with regards to copyright infringement?
Whenever a story runs in the main stream media on thepiratebay or napster or whatever, every geek gets asked by non-geeks how they can get in on the action.
The internal combustion engine is a perfect example. The internal combustion engine COULD NOT have been patented. The diesel engine was. One particular way of making an internal combustion engine. But with the patent for a diesel engine, a skilled craftsman had all he needed to make a fully functional diesel engine.
The reason there are so many different types of engine is that they were designed to avoid having to license a patent. This worked very well. It created innovation AND if you wanted to produce an existing engine in your own factory you just paid a relatively low fee.
But Apple wants to patent ideas. No a blue print but a concept. Not even the concept of an internal combustion engine but the concept of an engine. And the patents they submit provide nothing that a skilled craftsman can use to build a device. At most, they can give an engineer an problem to solve where the problem is "how do I actually build the product the patent theorizes".
That is not how patents are supposed to work. The idea for an engine is after all far older then actual engines but all the engineers who made engines would have to pay for the license to use the idea of some long dead guy if Apple had its way.
Go look through Apples patents, every single one of them. I bet less then a single percent contains the plans with which a skilled craftsman in the field can build a working product without having to design something himself.
Imagine if Apple was in medicine, they would patent a cure for cancer. The patent has nothing in it but "It would make us a lot of money if we could cure cancer, now someone else actually invent it and pay us".
Not how it is supposed to go. If you really did discover a cure for cancer, you deserve a patent and people would happily pay you for it. But NOT just for the idea that curing cancer would be nice.
Sadly the amoral Americans have decided the patent office needs to turn a profit and you don't turn a profit by turning customers away. So the patent office and grants every payment and the taxpayers pay for courtsystem to try to sort it all out.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what interpretation you give to the quoted text. Nobody said the word was there, but the threath is clear, the UK is willing to take action. Oh, so maybe they walk onto foreign soil with gun in hands instead of running. That makes all the difference.
You disgust me serf.
You question Ecuador's record on human rights. Well, how about the US and the UK and for that matter Sweden? The US routinely tortures civilians with no right to process or a legal representative. And that is just the most blatant example.
The UK has a very long history of violent repression and total disregard for human rights. The only reason it has improved is because its power to abuse has been greatly reduced.
Sweden has shown itself to be a puppet state in the last ten years.
Nobody claims Ecuador is a saint but in the fight against evil you sometimes have to make strange bed fellows.
And good job quoting a guy working for a rightwing think tank. This was funded by the people who made the atom bomb. I want their opinion on human rights?
Willfull slaves such as you quake in their boots at the idea of anyone daring to rebel. You do not believe in the system that represents the status quo, you just are desperately afraid of any change whatsoever. You rather continue to be raped up the ass then risk any change because it might cause just the tiniest upset and then all hell will break lose.
Wikileaks was the only response possible in a world where western governments from administration to adminstration have sought to keep ever more hidden from fact in the name of national security. That this was a complete and utter lie is simply proven to anyone who isn't a sniffeling coward like the parent poster, NOT A FUCKING THING HAPPENED after the wikileaks. All that happened is that it became clear how much we had been lied to and how many of the rumors were true. People lost faces but no bases were attacked, no wars were lost. Just the powerful ended up with eggs on their faces.
And that frighens little dave shroeder, Wikileaks upset his world view. He believed Bush was protecting little dave and not at in it for himself. Poor dave is upset. Wikileaks must be shutdown so dave can put his head under the blanket again.
Well, fuck that.
Finding holes in a fishing net is a saying, meaning it isn't any kind of challenge. Like finding freckles on a redhead.
Didn't America have a massive blackout in the North East a while back? And have rolling blackouts for years in California? And have massive flooding because of poor water works?
Which one is the third world nation again?
It all depends what the hourly salary is of the people working on it. Maybe the Indians aren't counting the cost of pork projects to have this bill pass?
I am probably extremely racist but all I thought reading this "what a bunch of n******".
This just shows that we should stop all aid to Africa, if the natives can buy 100 dollar iPhone apps, then all the starving need to do is rise up and redistribute the wealth. It also shows that the natives have absolute zero solidarity with their own people, so why should the rest of the world?
Make the world a better place? How about the Nigerians start with themselves.
Argentina has a case to settle with the Brits, who do you think they might support in a conflict?
And England with its economy down the drain certainly doesn't want a boycott against it. Boycotts always benefit someone. Lets say British banks are boycotted from South America. That will benefit South American banks, who will be very appreciative to any South American politicians that initiated such a boycott.
People who think the world always continues just as it was before forgot that the Greeks no longer are the center of civilization and where ever it is now, it sure as hell isn't in Africa. Things change and they always catch the world by surprise.
The Daily Mail is NOT a respectable newspaper, it is a sensationalist rag read by the rednecks, tokkies (dutch rednecks) or whatever the degenerates are called in your area of the world.
Taking any story in the daily whine for fact is like believing anything you read in a celebrity gossip magazine. Many of which do more fact checking.
Oh really? You are talking about the revolution or the recent election. Both changed the heads but the same people remained in power. Just see the stance on copyright. Totally unpopular with the government but except for the pirate parties, every political party is supporting it in practice (not of course in election promises but they aren't worth the paper they are written on).
The threw out the conservatives when the Brits got fed up with Tatcherism and they got Tony Blair. Then they threw labour out and they got the conservatives back with the lib-dems betraying every single election promise. The lib-dems got spanked for that in the next minor election and NOTHING CHANGED.
There are no parties left.
You are just a right winger. Read the charges, if you can read, there is no mention of sexual assault as it is understood in the rest of the world.
Only right wingers are pretending the "rape" charges have anything to do with rape. Don't pretend to be anything else but a right wing scumbag.
You are aware that in the normal world (any place that is not Sweden) lying to get sex is not actually a crime? If it was, 99% of men would in jail. The remaining 1% are catholic priests and they would be in jail for raping kids.
Assange played two women. That is what ALL this is about. There is NO way this would stand up in any court expect in Sweden and then only because the Americans told them to do something.
Only right wing nutcases pretend the case against Assange has any merit whatsoever.
Oh and the two women involved already knew each other. AND the case had already been dismissed before the Americans got involved.
You are saying that in Brazil, lying to get sex is a crime? The entire country would be in jail.
Lets not forget the the rape charge in Sweden would be laughed out of court in the rest of the world. Hell, in most countries, if a woman made the charges made, the police would arrest HER for wasting the police time and slander. Check the charges. They are insane, never mind they were not prosecuted in Sweden until the Swedes needed something to stick Assange with at the behest of their American masters.
The Russian girl group Pussy Riot is in jail for daring to challenge Poetin during a protest.
The Dutch government is protesting. But a Dutch protester who threw a small candle (the kind that go under tea pots) against the golden carriage carrying the queen has been in jail for two years.
And no, minor acts of vandalism are NOT typically sentenced like this. Throw ice-balls causing damage to cars and you don't even get arrested. But dare to do it against the absolute ruler and BAM, in jail for two years.
Democracy, you say you have it, so you don't have to do it.
Because the majority use for guns is NOT home defence. Bring this to your local NRA meeting. Good luck surviving the hail of gunfire.
Small webshops don't story credit card but use a payment processor. You get forwarded to their page for your payment details. I do not know your CC details and do not want to know them.
I am talking a TINY webshop here, they don't store credit cards (And I am from Holland were credit cards are often just plain not accepted) but you have simple plugin to a dedicated payment provider where the developers HAVE to be the volvo driving kind.
I NEVER would write code that even asks for a credit card, not the site I am working on at all.
Not knowing how to pick up women is not the same as meaning you think it is okay to grab them in the crotch. I don't know to fly a 747 but I am fairly certain that it is not okay to play chicken on the runway.
As a geek I am getting fed up with people putting people with bad social behavior in my group, true geeks might be socially awkward an silent but that does NOT mean every asshole who doesn't give a fuck is a geek.
For fuck sake, it is about hacking not about being a 12yr old online kiddie. When it comes to tech, I think and talk tech, not sex. Mind you, I am not PC because I always use the male form when talking about people "he" rather then "he/she" or if I want to be funny (he/she/it) Slashdot: "but that ain't funny" Shut up!
True geeks don't sexually harass or are racist or have issues with other sexual preferences, to be a true geek means to be open minded and realize that normal does not exist, after all, no geek is normal.
Mind you, the word geek has been so mis-used of late. If you are dutch and make the mistake of visiting tweakers you can see that it has come to include anyone who changes their wallpaper and has people in it that are extremely rigid in their thinking.
Nowadays a geek is no longer somebody who wants to take the world apart to see how it works (and maybe, someday put it back together again) but just anyone who knows how to turn on a computer and lacks social skills. True geeks don't have to lack social skills, they are just people that get pre-occupied and sometimes mistake other people for cats and cats for people. Some of the best geeks I met are the old confused proffessor type, perfectly charming and alright to be with, profided they aren't busy with a problem in their head and have temorarily put the world on hold.
A geek is NOT a hatred filled kid who screams obscenities in his xbox headset where the only tweak is that he used xXNICKXx instead of something readable.
It is sad, I do remember the old days when it wasn't at all unusual to see women at maker groups, both as girlfriends and as makers and the girlfriends often were at least interested to help not just sit their to polish their nails as trophies. But it has changed, as geekhood became bigger, it lost its meaning.
A true geek doesn't need to be PC, it would never enter his or her mind to even make sexual remarks like the ones mentioned in the article. At a true geek meetup, the only reason I would stare at a womans breasts is if she had a gadget between them, who has time to be on the prowl when their are gadgets around? Opening the latest up, better then SEX! And if you feel that is not true, you are NOT a geek. Go away! Aol is that way ->
Except that the copyright industry has made sure their terms apply to ALL content. Play ANY music no matter how it is licensed and the copyright industry collects payment for it. You cannot escape it legally and forcing them to return illegal collections or actually paying out illegal collections to copyright owners that are long dead or do not want the money is impossible.
If you created your own music and played it on your own radio show, you would have to pay for your own music and then have a hell of time trying to collect the money due to you minus a hefty fee if you ever get it.
Only a serf would claim copyright is fair.
As a web developer, I am a liberal and find myself at odds with conservatives who often just can't see simple business needs. Conservatism is good for heart monitors but for building the next facebook? But the Conservative amongst you will argue, don't you think that a billion dollar, millions of visitors, holding fast amounts of private data site NEEDS to be extremely secure?
And it shows much you don't get it if you think that. I said the NEXT facebook, which will start out as a small site with a shoestring budget and bankruptcy just a bill away. Then you need to deliver a product BEFORE yesterday and all the fancy stuff can come later when you are rich and can afford to hire the terminally slow.
I have talked with webshop clients who wanted triple redundancy and failover to carry max expect load... YOU HAVEN'T SHIPPED A SINGLE ORDER YET! And PAY MY BILLS FIRST! Part of the reason the tech bubble burst was all these old developers insisting on enterprise grade hardware with oracle licenses coming out of your ears, meaning that even if they would have ever been able to release a product, the operating costs would have been so high, the break even point would have been somewhere after the heat death of the universe.
The big ones that did survive made it on cheap hardware with buggy, hastily written code that was good enough to make it to the next month.
One old school guy I worked with wanted a detailed plan for general debugging when there was a crisis... because he first wanted to fully analyse the problem before bringing the server down if it started coughing up bad orders because that is what you do in a factory, your don't shutdown an entire factory just because a few widgets come out wrong...
The moron never managed to understand that you DO shut the entire factory down if the cost of 1 defective widget is equal to profit of an entire days output of that factory.
For web shops, margins are tiny and customer service is very expensive. It is BETTER to be down for an entire day, then have to spend a week dealing with complaints because of messed up orders. 1 day no-profit == 1 day of low costs (highest cost are sending and goods, both of which are non existent if you don't ship anything) while shipping orders wrong so they have to shipped again gets VERY expensive REALLY fast.
So, you shut things down and dive right in and fix it, just good enough to get up and running again.
But doesn't that prove you should write bug free code? Only if a website has infinite resources for its startup. Most don't. If you got 10 grand to start a website, you need 5k for supplies, 3k for shipping and that leaves 2k for code. When that money is gone, the webshop either needs to have earnings coming in or it is down the tube.
It is different if there is a large established company and you can pull a MS and just throw good money after bad. But 99% of web development ain't like that.
Mind you, I wouldn't like to fly a plane I had written the software for.
It is a console game first of all. Console games do not have depth or replay value, rather they have difficulty levels that are locked forcing replay.
And Diablo has ALWAYS been a repetitive dungeon crawler/hack&slash game. That is what it is. And the only way to increase difficulty without improving AI is to add more monsters with more hit points and more resists and this creates the brick wall then your "skill" level is reached.
My advice for Diablo? Play it once, just like other games. Then STOP.
There are people who play Final Fantasy games to max everything or speed run RPG's and for THOSE people there is Inferno. They don't "play" a game for story or novelty, they play to get REALLY good at doing the exact same thing over and over again. If by some miracle of scripting a game company made every boss unique on every play through, these people would be REALLY upset. It stops them from using skillX at 3904872 HP followed by Y and Z in 2.322334 seconds.
Basically, the above poster is complaining that a porn movie gets a bit repetitive after the 100th play through. DUH!
How many paying customers see other people getting it for free and decide they also no longer want to pay?
Proof of this behavior? Walking through a red light, once one person does it, others follow.
Guarding against theft is not just to stop active thiefs, it is also a way to keep non-thieves from turning to thieving.
Proof with regards to copyright infringement?
Whenever a story runs in the main stream media on thepiratebay or napster or whatever, every geek gets asked by non-geeks how they can get in on the action.
Voting for Obama means voting to be raped up the ass.
Voting for Romney means voting to be raped up the ass with a sandpaper covered telephone pole while having to pay your raper.
Welcome to American democracy. Your choice between bad and really goddamn awful fucking bad.
Obama bows to his friends in business.
Romney IS business.
Obama at least has to pretend to listen to the voter, Romney openly states that business is not just his first priority but his ONLY priority.
When you are a lamb let to be slaughtered, pick the butcher who least enjoys torturing small furry creatures. That is what I do.
The internal combustion engine is a perfect example. The internal combustion engine COULD NOT have been patented. The diesel engine was. One particular way of making an internal combustion engine. But with the patent for a diesel engine, a skilled craftsman had all he needed to make a fully functional diesel engine.
The reason there are so many different types of engine is that they were designed to avoid having to license a patent. This worked very well. It created innovation AND if you wanted to produce an existing engine in your own factory you just paid a relatively low fee.
But Apple wants to patent ideas. No a blue print but a concept. Not even the concept of an internal combustion engine but the concept of an engine. And the patents they submit provide nothing that a skilled craftsman can use to build a device. At most, they can give an engineer an problem to solve where the problem is "how do I actually build the product the patent theorizes".
That is not how patents are supposed to work. The idea for an engine is after all far older then actual engines but all the engineers who made engines would have to pay for the license to use the idea of some long dead guy if Apple had its way.
Go look through Apples patents, every single one of them. I bet less then a single percent contains the plans with which a skilled craftsman in the field can build a working product without having to design something himself.
Imagine if Apple was in medicine, they would patent a cure for cancer. The patent has nothing in it but "It would make us a lot of money if we could cure cancer, now someone else actually invent it and pay us".
Not how it is supposed to go. If you really did discover a cure for cancer, you deserve a patent and people would happily pay you for it. But NOT just for the idea that curing cancer would be nice.
Sadly the amoral Americans have decided the patent office needs to turn a profit and you don't turn a profit by turning customers away. So the patent office and grants every payment and the taxpayers pay for courtsystem to try to sort it all out.
Conclusion: Americans are a problem.