The free market fairy simply cannot wave her magic wand over everything. The government cannot avoid playing a role in i.e. wireless communications if you want them at all. Someone has to decide who can use what spectrum. Someone has to enforce the rules. There is a finite supply - meaningful competition is not possible even when this is done efficiently. These are not like newspapers, where anyone can buy a printing press for relatively cheap. This is a multi-billion dollar cost of entry to put up thousands of towers on whatever spectrum you can license.
No amount of ideology can give you a laissez faire market in wireless broadband. Arguing otherwise just makes you sound like one of those old-line Soviet Communists trying to explain how the shortage of bread must be a Capitalist Conspiracy. You can deny reality as much as you want, but it won't fill your stomach, or give you a "free market" cellular internet connection.
Since we inevitably have to have a quasi-governmental broadband industry, I'm all for regulating it better. Fixing this is not rocket science. We did it for generations after our great grandparents got sick of enduring these scams. Set up a commission, give them unlimited fact-finding authority over the ISPs. They examine network load, operating costs, and approve new budgets and prices. Charter them to permit a steady, single-digit profit margin, while ensuring adequate ongoing investment and modernization. You know, how we used to run electric utilities for generations, before we privatized those and the rates jumped and the lights started going out all the time.
Doing anything else is bad for business. Letting ISPs price gouge is the same as letting congress pass a (largely regressive) tax increase. It's just one where the tax money doesn't even have the courtesy to visit the US Treasury on its way to some insider's pocket.
Everyone is someone's kid. There is no crime that wasn't committed by someone's little angel, and if you don't think the courts can handle crime, you have bigger problems.
Only an idiot raises their children without real, proportionate consequences for their actions. This is not teasing another kid on the schoolyard. This is a teenager experimenting with very adult bad actions, and waiting to learn what the consequences will be. Will they be very adult bad consequences? What are the limits, really? And this determines what kind of adult they will grow into.
I hope you never find the opportunity to reflect on how you may not be the only parent with selfish and naive notions about an accountability-free world. Your precious angel may get in harms way of someone else's precious angel someday, who was raised the same way. The results will be predictable.
Loving your kids means raising them right. Not being their friend. Or treating it like they got caught missing curfew too many times when they mail your friend ashes labeled as their relatives who died in the holocaust.
No one ever learns if there are no consequences other than having to cry when you torture someone's entire family for months (in the most vile way imaginable).
You get your second chance when the police and the courts are done with you. They give plenty of ill-advised second chances as it is, especially to kids.
The author of this story typifies everything that is wrong with today's no-accountability culture.
He's weak in the exact way that fosters the troll that tortured him. I honestly find myself disgusted with him. I imagine, though she may not admit it, his wife was not thrilled and consciously or subconsciously thinks less of his approach to "defending" the family.
I don't care if it's a friend's kid or my kid. He needed to fail at manipulating his way out of trouble. He needed to go before the police and the courts.
Now others will suffer because of the author's common, and absolutely awful, "the past is the past, I forgive you" approach to dealing with crime.
Of course offensive patent use has been the norm for centuries. The sky is also blue. Why the non-sequitir? Patent use in general has no relevance to this conversation. We're also not discussing patents on mathematical equations - which SCOTUS have held are actually unpatentable. By the way, all software is a subtype of mathematical equation - proving that they don't teach Turing-Church well enough in school, or at least in law school.:)
You seem to imply there is some sane way to apply patents to software, when there obviously is not. The link I already provided catalogues the various reasons for this. It's quite extensive. You should have a look and start your counter-argument from there, if you like.
Or you can save yourself the trouble. You cannot even show that a majority of software businesses, or even a majority of software patent holders, make offensive use of software patents. Not only because it is not true (only a small minority do), but because no one could produce software otherwise. Paradox.
Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.
It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:
Yes, really. Apple - a bunch of hypocrites that willfully infringe, and build their own patent portfolio to countersue rather than license. It's how the game is played, and the game itself is the problem. You can only really blame Apple for their pretensions to some kind of moral high ground, when they are more than smart enough to know better.
Motorola is just one of their many victims. They happen to have many patented, original ideas on telephony that Apple stole when they came late into the phone business, far beyond the FRAND stuff - as you will see in the trial.
You must be joking. Apple is ripping off Motorola! Motorola has been making phones for years before the iPhone. Apple just waltzed in and stole dozens of their patented ideas about how to make phones. They could never have made the iPhone without stealing Motorola's patented ideas.
Same paradigm, also so says the lawsuits.
Notice how you can tell a crazy idea (i.e. a software patent) by how it goes to nonsense (no one can make a phone in the US) when led to its logical conclusion?
Hi Dave. Just like old times, eh? Still trolling away I see. I notice you haven't said anything the parent post didn't already thoroughly address, but then, you always did prefer debater's tricks or sheer repetition to arguing in good faith - which is why this isn't an argument, really, is it?
Fair point on "dug up" - I certainly wasn't ever going to click on your homepage, and I haven't been following your posts - I just hadn't seen anyone else mention it before now. I'm richly amused that you're getting your back up about it. I hope you can forgive Slashdot, since your public website that you link to from every post makes you a self-described Information Warfare Officer, and when one looks up what that is, oh, say, here:
Information warfare may involve collection of tactical information, assurance(s) that one's own information is valid, spreading of propaganda or disinformation to demoralize or manipulate[1] the enemy and the public, undermining the quality of opposing force information and denial of information-collection opportunities to opposing forces. Information warfare is closely linked to psychological warfare.[emph added]
Oh don't get me wrong, I couldn't articulate some elaborate conspiracy for you. I just think you're hilarious, whatever the reason. You're like a slaughterhouse employee who can't believe the ad hominem attacks against his person while trolling vegans on the ASPCA forums.
Hmm. I'm usually the first one to point out mistaken beliefs about US superiority in general, or certainly in terms of privacy protection or civil rights.
I can't speak for Mexico. However, I don't believe i.e. India offers any privacy protection that the US does not. In fact, in most outsourcing hotspots around South or Central America or the Pac Rim, you not only have even fewer stated protections, but you are dealing with governments that are even less, shall we say, predictable. You also have to be concerned about how safe and easy it is to do business (with i.e. an outsourcing firm, hosting company) in places where the quality of the civil courts is not so great. And, let's be real - in many nations where IT outsourcing once boomed, the court system is more a theater for bribery than a forum for the practice of law. And then there's the well-documented danger of collusion between the state and large domestic companies, or even organized crime, to a degree that even the US still blushes at (and the US does not blush at much, especially these days)...
I did once investigate whether it was possible for an American to go to India in reverse of what normally happens in IT - to study there, or take an IT job there, either for several years or perhaps to emigrate. I came away with the impression that it would be harder as an American citizen to go there, than as an Indian citizen, to come here.
I think our trade and immigration policies are often ridiculous, but especially so when, in our era of "free movement of goods," the US doesn't even extract bilateral agreements on the free movement of people, after speaking with the relevant lobbyists to determine what the visa quotas should be.:)
Are we so inured to this that we can't even speak the words, let alone call our congresspeople? Will we not even push people to ask whether the next president will be calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of the people responsible for creating a billion dollar, 18 year "army logistics" software development project?
Don't give me that "mistaking malice for incompetence" bullshit. That's exactly what's wrong with this country. Just because it's computers, don't tell me you can't tell a $100 toilet seat when you see one. A couple years late may be incompetence, but you should have the FBI given all necessary clearances and set them crawling all over it. At 8 years into a 4 year project, you fire the buy-side project managers and cancel the project, whether you uncovered fraud or not. Fail to maintain even these basic standards, and no estimate in time or money is ever real, and every contract becomes open season for treasury looters. Oh wait, like it is today.
There is no way on earth or heaven that a logistics system can cost this much or take this long to build. And I would say those so corrupt or negligent as the ones running implementation at the vendor or running procurement within the military should be behind bars. This is not a joke, people - this is keeping American troops in a decaying and ancient logistics system so that some weasel can steal your tax money.
We could all start the backlash right here, today.
Assuming you're a believer in capitalism and free markets, you should be thrilled to encourage and protect "cheapenators" the world over. God bless them. They're the reason the system works. The more the merrier!
What we have these days, unfortunately, are a bunch of lazy communists who think that their business should get special protections instead of having to compete, which is just so hard for the poor widdle baby CEOs. Their mommy told them they were entitled to fat profit margins on their work ("innovating is so expensive!"), and if some upstart can out-compete them on price, it's just... not... fair!!!!!
So they spend their time coming up with ways to change the rules of the free market so as to make it less free. Never mind that they themselves only got where they are today by using the ideas of others. Now they've got theirs, and they want to make sure no one else can ever take it.
These are the guys whining about how the "cheapenators" stole their precious ideas, and we all need to band together to make sure that precious "intellectual property" can't be "stolen" from the monopoly- I mean, inventor. Instead of competing, they spend their time suing and lobbying, trying to gradually expand the scope of copyright, patents (i.e. creating "software patents"), and other protectionist schemes.
It is anti-capitalist. It's a plot by people who want to change the US to have an institutionalized wealthy upper class, whose status is protected by laws and handed down family lines through generations, like they have in Asia. And they know it's so repugnant they have to do it very gradually. For that matter, deep down they may even know it's economically counterproductive. So there's an element of denial about it thrown in as well. So right now it's just policy ideas (like strengthening "IP") that just so happen to have this effect.
Slashdot, I present to you a case study: the intelligent person arguing in bad-faith.
We've seen them before. But let's study the technique in this case.
Of course, you've not shown any of it to be "outright wrong"
Technique: "the bold summary." The skimmers in the audience may be fooled.
Of course, he could have claimed it gladly, had he explained how any software developer can determine what they infringe upon.
Or if he had said, "Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. have a patent compliance process for all their code, and here is where you can read about it..." But he knows that no one can tell the full set of patents they violate, and so no one can avoid violating a large number of patents. He knows these companies and the elite few others who can afford it build their own portfolio to countersue when sued, and all others exist on sufferance. And he even knows about the patent troll problem - even if just from us. He makes no comment on this state of affairs. Perhaps it suits him.
I'd like to call attention to your goalpost moving
Note that we are so awash in bad patents, he chooses the "goalpost moving" argument - "opponent framing" - "trees for forest arguing" - rather than actually finding patents he thinks are defensible. Since the latter would have been such a stronger retort, he undercuts himself rather amusingly.
Here the psychology of the debater becomes apparent. He sees the argument as a theatrical performance for others. When someone will go into hysterical paroxysms of verbal illogic rather than concede any point, they similarly assume that others would feel the same. This is the worldview of an egotist with a contemptible notion of his intelligence versus yours.
Should he even engage the software patent quality issue honestly - which he has seemed reluctant to do, and if the crowd could list 10 terrible patents for every good one he finds... if in fact this goalpost can be moved by an entire football field and not change the central point - that software patents are destructive, ludicrous, utterly indefensible in both design and track record... but no. We have goal post feng shui.
Except that they're not unlimited, by definition. If you only made $1000 infringing the patent, then your damages at most can be $1000. Incidentally, this is why small developers, who may infringe hundreds of patents, usually don't need to worry about getting sued. Who's going to spend $100k in a patent litigation lasting 6 months to earn $1k? Trolls exist to earn money, not waste it.
This technique - authoritative statement of lies (or "incorrect facts" if we're being polite) - is still surprisingly common, despite the fact that the truth can often be had in the first result of a google search:
Damages can be set at a reasonable royalty, which can be anything in your imagination. Courts also have the discretion to award "lost profits" beyond this royalty - so any hypothetical economic damage - and then triple the number.
From 1991 to 1996, there were at least eight cases in which patent damages exceeded $100 million. Since then, the number of damages awards that have reached eight – and even nine – figures have steadily risen. Indeed, patent cases now make up a significant number of the largest jury awards in the United States.
Thank you
This is a particularly clever technique: the out of context quote. In this quote, you can clearly see Theaetetus thanking me, in gratitude for proving him wrong.
Hahaha. In fact, his full quote is:
Thank you for acknowledging your error.
He has played this trick as I point out that the presence of prior art is both incredibly common and of little use to defendants in patent lawsuits, who must engage in incredibly expensive, risky civil litig
I am fascinated by your post - which I contains so much information that is outright wrong as to appear to be a deliberate attempt to advocate by deception.
[Citation needed]
Can you cite a software patent that has merit? I have read close on 50 at this point and seen hundreds of summaries and have yet to see it.
Yes, but the nice part is that you're not going to be responsible for damages until you do get notified that you infringe.
This is part of how software patents kill the economy and destroy jobs, because the "damages" are a legal negotiation of unlimited dimension and cost, that can be held at any time with hundreds or thousands of unknown individuals, some of whom may just be trolls out for a quick mugging, and some may be convicted monopolists like Microsoft who wish to destroy potentially competitive businesses rather than negotiate a "fair" price for, I don't know, their patent on page up and page down. Then their license cannot be had at any cost.
Or you can just not go into business. Which was the point, originally.
Your software that exists today cannot possibly infringe any patent that is filed for tomorrow, by definition.
That was great, it was true.
You'll notice that this didn't mitigate the software patent problem at all, since prior art is virtually ubiquitous among software patents.
You still get to have a multimillion dollar lawsuit proving it. So, discovery, evidentiary quality, motions, debate over applicability, etc etc. All at $500 per hour, on both sides.
But your own AIA instituted First to File, so you are precisely wrong, now, no?
You may have missed Congress passing the AIA
Software and "Business Method" Changes: There has been much debate in recent years in the software community about the propriety of software patents, and the America Invents Act does little to clear that up, except in a few minor niches. One provision, for example, specifically excludes tax preparation software from a rule prohibiting the patenting of tax strategies, and another creates a way to defeat patents related to financial products, with the aim of quashing a certain group of patents for check-imaging software.
There will always be gray areas, as there are in the EU (where patenting software is, if not impossible, very difficult), but the attempt to bring a US-style, "liberal" software patent regime to Europe categorically failed, and the ensuing controversy shed light on the underlying issue: that large companies, especially American ones, had the idea of using patent law as an tool to prevent competition.
The UK is following the EU. India and China do indeed reject them. I'm unaware of Russia or Brazil's policy. But their policies, collectively, matter at least as much as the US and EU.
Japan, South Korea, and some others do allow software patents as of now. Hence this gem from wikipedia:
In South Korea, software is considered patentable and many patents directed towards "computer programs" have been issued.[23] In 2006, Microsoft was ordered to halt sales of its "Office" suite due to a patent infringement ruling by the Supreme Court of Korea.[24][not in citation given] The company was found to have infringed upon patents directed towards aut
There are hundreds of thousands of them. None of them required any investment to develop. They simply memorialize things that everyone always did - commenting inside of curly braces, using tables for compression, having the "AM" flip to "PM" when you scroll the hours past noon, having plugins in web browsers and "one click purchase buttons" and so forth.
No one can ever know what their work infringes on. Not even Microsoft or Google, who have carte blance budgets for such things. They simply write code and wait to get sued.
Even if the software patent fairy came down and waved her little magic wand, and you could know exactly which hundreds or thousands of patents you infringed, it would be worthless by tomorrow. Thousands of new patents are filed every day.
The only effect that software patents can have is to make every piece of code a ticking patent time bomb.
The scam was supported by a few, like Microsoft, because they saw it as a way to prevent competition and hurt free markets. They need only send part of their multi-million dollar legal team to the patent mines and amass a "war chest" that would enable them to sue others, and countersue when they were, themselves, inevitably brought to court. This would have the effect of making it impossible for anyone to write software without having a multi-million (these days multi-billion) investment in patent lawyers.
The only reason the U.S. has a functioning software industry is that the practice of using these patents is so repugnant and ridiculous that most businesses and all individuals ignore them.
Unfortunately, in their haste, cupidity and basic ignorance of cause an effect, backers like Microsoft neglected to realize that they would create a new kind of company, called a patent troll. These companies would buy patents that Microsoft was violating, and sue them. But Microsoft's patent war chest would be unusable as a defense, because patent trolls are very careful to do absolutely no useful work of any kind. Their entire business is suing the people who do actually do useful work. MS has already had 9-10 figures in judgments come in against them from trolls and they have had a few close calls with actually having to pay out.
If you are wondering who created software patent law, the answer is, not congress. Some lawyers tried it, and it flew, and it's happened all on its own - a little power grab by the patent bar and the USPTO.
This is partly why so few industrialized countries other than the U.S. have a software patent regime the way we do, because it is so prima facie ridiculous. They have been rejected in Europe and Asia. We are an international laughing stock for having such an obviously corrupt practice.
Meanwhile there is very little basis for software patent law to exist even on this basis in the U.S.. The Supreme Court has already famously struck down patents on i.e. math equations, which are vanishingly similar. They came quite close to explicitly striking down software patents already in En Re Bilski. The whole game will be up before long - no one has any choice. The more the practice grows, the faster it chokes itself off.
Good day, sir. Respond if you like, I won't read it.
I think at this point a great many are over it (Google, IBM, and the entire FOSS industry) and if enough of the patent countersuits succeed against Apple and Microsoft (the most prominent non-troll offenders), there will be a time where even they are willing to stop throwing good money after bad.
I suspect many execs who would not publicly admit it are getting sick of the patent lawyers already.
The only thing that's way the hell off base is talking about Windows Mobile in 2012 without a laugh track.
Say it with me: Dead. Letter.
This might be a wonderful phone made by sweet people... though, in fact, it's a mediocre phone made by a convicted monopolist and purveyor of notoriously terrible closed-source platforms and a cell phone maker so many years behind the times they're lucky they have RIM to make them look good. Regardless, it needed to come out 5 years ago. As it happens I have used one. It's a hilarious failure at imitating Android or iOS. The industrial design and UI trim are adequate. But even if it wasn't buggy enough that it had to be given away for free, it offers nothing compelling enough to assail an established, dominant OS - a difficult problem which Microsoft of all companies should be familiar with.:)
Hold it in your hands all you want. For that matter, whine like the WebOS guys after the stores don't have them anymore. That will increase my amusement.
Wait, why is it not a "real" smartphone? It's a really nice peice of tech, really, and as such my guess is that you haven't seen the 900 in action, in person or, for that matter, in a review. A definitive step forward for Nokia.
It's an epic-making disaster. Microsoft...Windows...Smartphone...? Really?
Nokia shareholders, sue your CEO.
The only bright spot is that this is an industry, unlike finance, where awful decisions by management actually can cause a company to go bankrupt.
Slashdot Mirror
+1
The free market fairy simply cannot wave her magic wand over everything. The government cannot avoid playing a role in i.e. wireless communications if you want them at all. Someone has to decide who can use what spectrum. Someone has to enforce the rules. There is a finite supply - meaningful competition is not possible even when this is done efficiently. These are not like newspapers, where anyone can buy a printing press for relatively cheap. This is a multi-billion dollar cost of entry to put up thousands of towers on whatever spectrum you can license.
No amount of ideology can give you a laissez faire market in wireless broadband. Arguing otherwise just makes you sound like one of those old-line Soviet Communists trying to explain how the shortage of bread must be a Capitalist Conspiracy. You can deny reality as much as you want, but it won't fill your stomach, or give you a "free market" cellular internet connection.
Since we inevitably have to have a quasi-governmental broadband industry, I'm all for regulating it better. Fixing this is not rocket science. We did it for generations after our great grandparents got sick of enduring these scams. Set up a commission, give them unlimited fact-finding authority over the ISPs. They examine network load, operating costs, and approve new budgets and prices. Charter them to permit a steady, single-digit profit margin, while ensuring adequate ongoing investment and modernization. You know, how we used to run electric utilities for generations, before we privatized those and the rates jumped and the lights started going out all the time.
Doing anything else is bad for business. Letting ISPs price gouge is the same as letting congress pass a (largely regressive) tax increase. It's just one where the tax money doesn't even have the courtesy to visit the US Treasury on its way to some insider's pocket.
Everyone is someone's kid. There is no crime that wasn't committed by someone's little angel, and if you don't think the courts can handle crime, you have bigger problems.
Only an idiot raises their children without real, proportionate consequences for their actions. This is not teasing another kid on the schoolyard. This is a teenager experimenting with very adult bad actions, and waiting to learn what the consequences will be. Will they be very adult bad consequences? What are the limits, really? And this determines what kind of adult they will grow into.
I hope you never find the opportunity to reflect on how you may not be the only parent with selfish and naive notions about an accountability-free world. Your precious angel may get in harms way of someone else's precious angel someday, who was raised the same way. The results will be predictable.
Loving your kids means raising them right. Not being their friend. Or treating it like they got caught missing curfew too many times when they mail your friend ashes labeled as their relatives who died in the holocaust.
No one ever learns if there are no consequences other than having to cry when you torture someone's entire family for months (in the most vile way imaginable).
You get your second chance when the police and the courts are done with you. They give plenty of ill-advised second chances as it is, especially to kids.
The author of this story typifies everything that is wrong with today's no-accountability culture.
He's weak in the exact way that fosters the troll that tortured him. I honestly find myself disgusted with him. I imagine, though she may not admit it, his wife was not thrilled and consciously or subconsciously thinks less of his approach to "defending" the family.
I don't care if it's a friend's kid or my kid. He needed to fail at manipulating his way out of trouble. He needed to go before the police and the courts.
Now others will suffer because of the author's common, and absolutely awful, "the past is the past, I forgive you" approach to dealing with crime.
Yes.
It's an awful problem.
LTS release that can't reliably suspend (which means, it can't suspend) on Lenovo Thinkpads...
Ubuntu fixes this rapidly, in-stream or they cease to be credible.
Thank you Slashdot, for bringing attention to this.
Gnome 3 and Unity collaborated on it (did some MS/Apple plant steer them into uselessness?). A pox on both of them, anyway.
Yes, a plant did steer them wrong. And his name was Miguel de Icaza.
Hi Miguel! I can't tell you how long I haven't been waiting to hear your employers' PR company spin pronounced by your lips.
Of course offensive patent use has been the norm for centuries. The sky is also blue. Why the non-sequitir? Patent use in general has no relevance to this conversation. We're also not discussing patents on mathematical equations - which SCOTUS have held are actually unpatentable. By the way, all software is a subtype of mathematical equation - proving that they don't teach Turing-Church well enough in school, or at least in law school. :)
You seem to imply there is some sane way to apply patents to software, when there obviously is not. The link I already provided catalogues the various reasons for this. It's quite extensive. You should have a look and start your counter-argument from there, if you like.
Or you can save yourself the trouble. You cannot even show that a majority of software businesses, or even a majority of software patent holders, make offensive use of software patents. Not only because it is not true (only a small minority do), but because no one could produce software otherwise. Paradox.
Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.
It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_abolish_software_patents
Yes, really. Apple - a bunch of hypocrites that willfully infringe, and build their own patent portfolio to countersue rather than license. It's how the game is played, and the game itself is the problem. You can only really blame Apple for their pretensions to some kind of moral high ground, when they are more than smart enough to know better.
Motorola is just one of their many victims. They happen to have many patented, original ideas on telephony that Apple stole when they came late into the phone business, far beyond the FRAND stuff - as you will see in the trial.
You must be joking. Apple is ripping off Motorola! Motorola has been making phones for years before the iPhone. Apple just waltzed in and stole dozens of their patented ideas about how to make phones. They could never have made the iPhone without stealing Motorola's patented ideas.
Same paradigm, also so says the lawsuits.
Notice how you can tell a crazy idea (i.e. a software patent) by how it goes to nonsense (no one can make a phone in the US) when led to its logical conclusion?
Hi Dave. Just like old times, eh? Still trolling away I see. I notice you haven't said anything the parent post didn't already thoroughly address, but then, you always did prefer debater's tricks or sheer repetition to arguing in good faith - which is why this isn't an argument, really, is it?
Fair point on "dug up" - I certainly wasn't ever going to click on your homepage, and I haven't been following your posts - I just hadn't seen anyone else mention it before now. I'm richly amused that you're getting your back up about it. I hope you can forgive Slashdot, since your public website that you link to from every post makes you a self-described Information Warfare Officer, and when one looks up what that is, oh, say, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_warfare
Information warfare may involve collection of tactical information, assurance(s) that one's own information is valid, spreading of propaganda or disinformation to demoralize or manipulate[1] the enemy and the public, undermining the quality of opposing force information and denial of information-collection opportunities to opposing forces. Information warfare is closely linked to psychological warfare.[emph added]
Oh don't get me wrong, I couldn't articulate some elaborate conspiracy for you. I just think you're hilarious, whatever the reason. You're like a slaughterhouse employee who can't believe the ad hominem attacks against his person while trolling vegans on the ASPCA forums.
Now, back to blocking you. :)
He's amusing, isn't he?
He's a notorious political troll, going back a few years.
Having argued with him before, I can tell you, watching someone dig up that propaganda is actually his day job is priceless.
Suprise factor: 0.
Hmm. I'm usually the first one to point out mistaken beliefs about US superiority in general, or certainly in terms of privacy protection or civil rights.
I can't speak for Mexico. However, I don't believe i.e. India offers any privacy protection that the US does not. In fact, in most outsourcing hotspots around South or Central America or the Pac Rim, you not only have even fewer stated protections, but you are dealing with governments that are even less, shall we say, predictable. You also have to be concerned about how safe and easy it is to do business (with i.e. an outsourcing firm, hosting company) in places where the quality of the civil courts is not so great. And, let's be real - in many nations where IT outsourcing once boomed, the court system is more a theater for bribery than a forum for the practice of law. And then there's the well-documented danger of collusion between the state and large domestic companies, or even organized crime, to a degree that even the US still blushes at (and the US does not blush at much, especially these days)...
I did once investigate whether it was possible for an American to go to India in reverse of what normally happens in IT - to study there, or take an IT job there, either for several years or perhaps to emigrate. I came away with the impression that it would be harder as an American citizen to go there, than as an Indian citizen, to come here.
I think our trade and immigration policies are often ridiculous, but especially so when, in our era of "free movement of goods," the US doesn't even extract bilateral agreements on the free movement of people, after speaking with the relevant lobbyists to determine what the visa quotas should be. :)
Come on people. Say it with me.
Federal. Prison.
FEDERAL. PRISON.
Are we so inured to this that we can't even speak the words, let alone call our congresspeople? Will we not even push people to ask whether the next president will be calling for the prosecution and imprisonment of the people responsible for creating a billion dollar, 18 year "army logistics" software development project?
Don't give me that "mistaking malice for incompetence" bullshit. That's exactly what's wrong with this country. Just because it's computers, don't tell me you can't tell a $100 toilet seat when you see one. A couple years late may be incompetence, but you should have the FBI given all necessary clearances and set them crawling all over it. At 8 years into a 4 year project, you fire the buy-side project managers and cancel the project, whether you uncovered fraud or not. Fail to maintain even these basic standards, and no estimate in time or money is ever real, and every contract becomes open season for treasury looters. Oh wait, like it is today.
There is no way on earth or heaven that a logistics system can cost this much or take this long to build. And I would say those so corrupt or negligent as the ones running implementation at the vendor or running procurement within the military should be behind bars. This is not a joke, people - this is keeping American troops in a decaying and ancient logistics system so that some weasel can steal your tax money.
We could all start the backlash right here, today.
Assuming you're a believer in capitalism and free markets, you should be thrilled to encourage and protect "cheapenators" the world over. God bless them. They're the reason the system works. The more the merrier!
What we have these days, unfortunately, are a bunch of lazy communists who think that their business should get special protections instead of having to compete, which is just so hard for the poor widdle baby CEOs. Their mommy told them they were entitled to fat profit margins on their work ("innovating is so expensive!"), and if some upstart can out-compete them on price, it's just... not... fair!!!!!
So they spend their time coming up with ways to change the rules of the free market so as to make it less free. Never mind that they themselves only got where they are today by using the ideas of others. Now they've got theirs, and they want to make sure no one else can ever take it.
These are the guys whining about how the "cheapenators" stole their precious ideas, and we all need to band together to make sure that precious "intellectual property" can't be "stolen" from the monopoly- I mean, inventor. Instead of competing, they spend their time suing and lobbying, trying to gradually expand the scope of copyright, patents (i.e. creating "software patents"), and other protectionist schemes.
It is anti-capitalist. It's a plot by people who want to change the US to have an institutionalized wealthy upper class, whose status is protected by laws and handed down family lines through generations, like they have in Asia. And they know it's so repugnant they have to do it very gradually. For that matter, deep down they may even know it's economically counterproductive. So there's an element of denial about it thrown in as well. So right now it's just policy ideas (like strengthening "IP") that just so happen to have this effect.
Slashdot, I present to you a case study: the intelligent person arguing in bad-faith.
We've seen them before. But let's study the technique in this case.
Of course, you've not shown any of it to be "outright wrong"
Technique: "the bold summary." The skimmers in the audience may be fooled.
Of course, he could have claimed it gladly, had he explained how any software developer can determine what they infringe upon.
Or if he had said, "Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. have a patent compliance process for all their code, and here is where you can read about it..." But he knows that no one can tell the full set of patents they violate, and so no one can avoid violating a large number of patents. He knows these companies and the elite few others who can afford it build their own portfolio to countersue when sued, and all others exist on sufferance. And he even knows about the patent troll problem - even if just from us. He makes no comment on this state of affairs. Perhaps it suits him.
I'd like to call attention to your goalpost moving
Note that we are so awash in bad patents, he chooses the "goalpost moving" argument - "opponent framing" - "trees for forest arguing" - rather than actually finding patents he thinks are defensible. Since the latter would have been such a stronger retort, he undercuts himself rather amusingly.
Here the psychology of the debater becomes apparent. He sees the argument as a theatrical performance for others. When someone will go into hysterical paroxysms of verbal illogic rather than concede any point, they similarly assume that others would feel the same. This is the worldview of an egotist with a contemptible notion of his intelligence versus yours.
Should he even engage the software patent quality issue honestly - which he has seemed reluctant to do, and if the crowd could list 10 terrible patents for every good one he finds... if in fact this goalpost can be moved by an entire football field and not change the central point - that software patents are destructive, ludicrous, utterly indefensible in both design and track record... but no. We have goal post feng shui.
Except that they're not unlimited, by definition. If you only made $1000 infringing the patent, then your damages at most can be $1000. Incidentally, this is why small developers, who may infringe hundreds of patents, usually don't need to worry about getting sued. Who's going to spend $100k in a patent litigation lasting 6 months to earn $1k? Trolls exist to earn money, not waste it.
This technique - authoritative statement of lies (or "incorrect facts" if we're being polite) - is still surprisingly common, despite the fact that the truth can often be had in the first result of a google search:
http://www.fr.com/patentdamages/
Damages can be set at a reasonable royalty, which can be anything in your imagination. Courts also have the discretion to award "lost profits" beyond this royalty - so any hypothetical economic damage - and then triple the number.
From 1991 to 1996, there were at least eight cases in which patent damages exceeded $100 million. Since then, the number of damages awards that have reached eight – and even nine – figures have steadily risen. Indeed, patent cases now make up a significant number of the largest jury awards in the United States.
Thank you
This is a particularly clever technique: the out of context quote. In this quote, you can clearly see Theaetetus thanking me, in gratitude for proving him wrong.
Hahaha. In fact, his full quote is:
Thank you for acknowledging your error.
He has played this trick as I point out that the presence of prior art is both incredibly common and of little use to defendants in patent lawsuits, who must engage in incredibly expensive, risky civil litig
I am fascinated by your post - which I contains so much information that is outright wrong as to appear to be a deliberate attempt to advocate by deception.
[Citation needed]
Can you cite a software patent that has merit? I have read close on 50 at this point and seen hundreds of summaries and have yet to see it.
For further reference, a post by a different user.
Yes, but the nice part is that you're not going to be responsible for damages until you do get notified that you infringe.
This is part of how software patents kill the economy and destroy jobs, because the "damages" are a legal negotiation of unlimited dimension and cost, that can be held at any time with hundreds or thousands of unknown individuals, some of whom may just be trolls out for a quick mugging, and some may be convicted monopolists like Microsoft who wish to destroy potentially competitive businesses rather than negotiate a "fair" price for, I don't know, their patent on page up and page down. Then their license cannot be had at any cost.
Or you can just not go into business. Which was the point, originally.
Your software that exists today cannot possibly infringe any patent that is filed for tomorrow, by definition.
That was great, it was true.
You'll notice that this didn't mitigate the software patent problem at all, since prior art is virtually ubiquitous among software patents.
You still get to have a multimillion dollar lawsuit proving it. So, discovery, evidentiary quality, motions, debate over applicability, etc etc. All at $500 per hour, on both sides.
But your own AIA instituted First to File, so you are precisely wrong, now, no?
You may have missed Congress passing the AIA
Software and "Business Method" Changes: There has been much debate in recent years in the software community about the propriety of software patents, and the America Invents Act does little to clear that up, except in a few minor niches. One provision, for example, specifically excludes tax preparation software from a rule prohibiting the patenting of tax strategies, and another creates a way to defeat patents related to financial products, with the aim of quashing a certain group of patents for check-imaging software.
--5 Key Facts About Patent Reform Act
Actually, Europe has exactly the same rules as the US on software patents
A categorical and obvious lie. Please see the Proposed Directive on the Patentability of Computer-implemented Inventions of 2002.
There will always be gray areas, as there are in the EU (where patenting software is, if not impossible, very difficult), but the attempt to bring a US-style, "liberal" software patent regime to Europe categorically failed, and the ensuing controversy shed light on the underlying issue: that large companies, especially American ones, had the idea of using patent law as an tool to prevent competition.
The UK is following the EU. India and China do indeed reject them. I'm unaware of Russia or Brazil's policy. But their policies, collectively, matter at least as much as the US and EU.
Japan, South Korea, and some others do allow software patents as of now. Hence this gem from wikipedia:
In South Korea, software is considered patentable and many patents directed towards "computer programs" have been issued.[23] In 2006, Microsoft was ordered to halt sales of its "Office" suite due to a patent infringement ruling by the Supreme Court of Korea.[24][not in citation given] The company was found to have infringed upon patents directed towards aut
OK. Here's how software patents work.
There are hundreds of thousands of them. None of them required any investment to develop. They simply memorialize things that everyone always did - commenting inside of curly braces, using tables for compression, having the "AM" flip to "PM" when you scroll the hours past noon, having plugins in web browsers and "one click purchase buttons" and so forth.
No one can ever know what their work infringes on. Not even Microsoft or Google, who have carte blance budgets for such things. They simply write code and wait to get sued.
Even if the software patent fairy came down and waved her little magic wand, and you could know exactly which hundreds or thousands of patents you infringed, it would be worthless by tomorrow. Thousands of new patents are filed every day.
The only effect that software patents can have is to make every piece of code a ticking patent time bomb.
The scam was supported by a few, like Microsoft, because they saw it as a way to prevent competition and hurt free markets. They need only send part of their multi-million dollar legal team to the patent mines and amass a "war chest" that would enable them to sue others, and countersue when they were, themselves, inevitably brought to court. This would have the effect of making it impossible for anyone to write software without having a multi-million (these days multi-billion) investment in patent lawyers.
The only reason the U.S. has a functioning software industry is that the practice of using these patents is so repugnant and ridiculous that most businesses and all individuals ignore them.
Unfortunately, in their haste, cupidity and basic ignorance of cause an effect, backers like Microsoft neglected to realize that they would create a new kind of company, called a patent troll. These companies would buy patents that Microsoft was violating, and sue them. But Microsoft's patent war chest would be unusable as a defense, because patent trolls are very careful to do absolutely no useful work of any kind. Their entire business is suing the people who do actually do useful work. MS has already had 9-10 figures in judgments come in against them from trolls and they have had a few close calls with actually having to pay out.
If you are wondering who created software patent law, the answer is, not congress. Some lawyers tried it, and it flew, and it's happened all on its own - a little power grab by the patent bar and the USPTO.
This is partly why so few industrialized countries other than the U.S. have a software patent regime the way we do, because it is so prima facie ridiculous. They have been rejected in Europe and Asia. We are an international laughing stock for having such an obviously corrupt practice.
Meanwhile there is very little basis for software patent law to exist even on this basis in the U.S.. The Supreme Court has already famously struck down patents on i.e. math equations, which are vanishingly similar. They came quite close to explicitly striking down software patents already in En Re Bilski. The whole game will be up before long - no one has any choice. The more the practice grows, the faster it chokes itself off.
Good day, sir. Respond if you like, I won't read it.
I think at this point a great many are over it (Google, IBM, and the entire FOSS industry) and if enough of the patent countersuits succeed against Apple and Microsoft (the most prominent non-troll offenders), there will be a time where even they are willing to stop throwing good money after bad.
I suspect many execs who would not publicly admit it are getting sick of the patent lawyers already.
You have a wonderfully deadpan approach to sarcasm. Well played. :)
And by reform, I mean, abolition?
Come on guys. It never works. The only people getting rich off it are the lawyers. The rest of the world is laughing at us over it.
Let's put those dollars towards creating jobs and innovating.
Hello, Obama? Anyone home? There's a campaign donation in it for you from a few big tech luminaries, I'm pretty sure.
The only thing that's way the hell off base is talking about Windows Mobile in 2012 without a laugh track.
Say it with me: Dead. Letter.
This might be a wonderful phone made by sweet people... though, in fact, it's a mediocre phone made by a convicted monopolist and purveyor of notoriously terrible closed-source platforms and a cell phone maker so many years behind the times they're lucky they have RIM to make them look good. Regardless, it needed to come out 5 years ago. As it happens I have used one. It's a hilarious failure at imitating Android or iOS. The industrial design and UI trim are adequate. But even if it wasn't buggy enough that it had to be given away for free, it offers nothing compelling enough to assail an established, dominant OS - a difficult problem which Microsoft of all companies should be familiar with. :)
Hold it in your hands all you want. For that matter, whine like the WebOS guys after the stores don't have them anymore. That will increase my amusement.
Wait, why is it not a "real" smartphone? It's a really nice peice of tech, really, and as such my guess is that you haven't seen the 900 in action, in person or, for that matter, in a review. A definitive step forward for Nokia.
It's an epic-making disaster. Microsoft...Windows...Smartphone...? Really?
Nokia shareholders, sue your CEO.
The only bright spot is that this is an industry, unlike finance, where awful decisions by management actually can cause a company to go bankrupt.