The ratings agencies just had to remind us all, starting with the audience of their congressional hearings, that ratings are a guess made by people with no accountability for whether they guessed right. Sort of like a weather forecast, except meteorologists are expected to at least get a certain percentage right. Or like if Arther Andersen's audits were still a basis of financial decision-making even after the Enron scandal.
Now you prefer to argue because, in your mind, they merely give themselves the right to do it?
Since when did being more gullible than a special olympian become a virtue?
There is plenty of additional information out there on this topic, including what various devices do, but it's obvious now you're willfully ignoring it all. I'm done doing your homework for you. You just have a little baby ego. Your little baby ego can't handle the fact that you trusted Apple for no particularly good reason. Show you a packet trace, and you will just argue "show me the proof that they don't discard the data."
No further posts are necessary on my part for you to have made a complete and perfect fool of yourself. Nothing you can say will redeem yourself. If you post again, I promise you I won't even read it. Good bye.
Even most children wouldn't fess to being that Google-illiterate. If the LA times (and half the Internet) is too untrustworthy for you, they point you at the relevant parts of Apple's own privacy policy.
And in case you want to take a shot again that the data is "anonymous" and pretend you didn't see the article I just linked (or was discussed ad nauseum on slashdot), they "anonymize" it by assigning you a new random ID every 24 hours. Once again, nothing is anonymous when the GPS trace probably starts and ends with your home. So, their anonymity attempt is absurdly stupid, or deceptive, you decide.
Your attempt to deceive other readers will only be convincing for those that don't click (or keep up with the news). Why you would expect to fool me - who knows. Of course Apple both stores and transmits the location data (as if splitting that hair looks good for you or them??) - and the anonymizing mechanism is either designed by sub-literate morons or flawed on purpose; Apple's gps data can easily be tied back to the user in most cases - as I pointed out in the original post.
You're not a very interesting conversational partner until you own up. So don't expect any more responses until then.:)
How did Apple try "this trick"? They never store secific locations, and never tied together location data, even from the same device. It really is completely anonymous.
Apple collects this data under the context of i.e. iAds and transmits it back whether you use the GPS or not. As for TomTom... well, you'll find out if you're foolish and self-hating enough to remain a TomTom customer.
To counter-argue, I could say that communication is vital to a democratic society, and as the technology underpinning it changes, you may find that it is enormously to your interest to have a certain minimum of communications ability made available for free to all, the same way it was enormously to your interest to establish the public library system or the public highway system. You could say that's enshrining "a right" to internet service if you want to use a trigger word, but let's be purely practical for a moment. Dogma won't float the dollar or fix my deck. Certain policies are better for the economy than others, and it can be argued that may be one of them.
Communication leads to economic activity. (Yes, even leveling your paladin and watching Iron Man 2, while funny, refers to two separate multibillion dollar industries.) Never mind that it leads to personal improvement, or beneficial political action. If you don't believe me, let's go visit a sunny pacific island together.
The island has an unregulated free market for telephony and internet services, which has naturally and unavoidably resulted in a near-monopoly on wired and wireless phone and internet. The local economy is largely driven by tourists. Both local businesses and visitors pay $3 per minute to use their phones, and internet service is similarly expensive (and non-neutral, i.e. skype-blocked, and terribly slow to boot). Instead of making calls or (heaven forbid) using smartphone apps or internet, a tourist must wander the beach to find a place to rent a boat or a good restaurant and he can't tell if the boats are rented or the tables are full in advance. Not as much money gets spent. Eventually either the tourist or the business may even go to a better country, where phone and internet are at least cheap. Or even better, to somewhere where it's free.
Not to mention there are many non-tourist-economy local businesses that could exist with cheap connectivity that now can't. Oh wait, suddenly one begins to realize why this is way bigger than just this one pocket example about a tourist and a beach economy.
The free marketeers will tell you that an entrepreneur offering cheaper, competing phone and internet service must be arriving "any minute now." This is because posting nonsense on slashdot has a better rate of return than actually attempting to compete against an entrenched telephony monopoly.
By the way, this is not a hypothetical island. Not even the prices have been made up.
"Anonymous" GPS traces that start and/or end with your home every day are not anonymous. Apple tried that trick - it's an intelligence test for the masses.
For some reason I just pictured you giving a drunken, profanity laden TED speech on how life in Africa really isn't that much different than the US, and there really isn't a 3rd world after all. It concluded with a call for a free market approach to border security.:)
Go to South America. Go to Africa. Try living without American-style democratic government. Then come back and tell me how it is.
Crying for the free market to come and give you phone service is like asking Santa Claus to make you popular with women. My friend, it's never gonna happen, because it's physically impossible.
You can have as much competition as you want for people to sell cars, computers, drugs, you name it. There are just certain things, such as phones, electricity, cops, the military... that the free market fairy cannot leave under your pillow. Pretending just fucks up the economy and makes one or a few lucky winners really really rich. In effect, a private monopoly. Or a trust, as we have with cell phones.
You can whine about every thing that the government does wrong, but the only difference between the government, and a private monopoly (or trust) set up by the government, is that the private monopoly or trust is every bit as as bad as the government, plus it is opaque, unaccountable, and some already-rich people keep all the money, instead of at least some of it going to "support the troops" or occasionally even pay a high school teacher's salary.
You'll be waiting a very long time. Even if you really believe you will get competition in a market with a 10 figure barrier to entry, the spectrum is scarce and the federal government (in the form of the FCC) can't just license new cell phone carriers in your region all day long.
If the government simply ran it, at least there would be more accountability and transparency to the users of the system. Not to mention that the prices could be lowered to have a relationship to the actual costs, and the profits pay for schools and roads, thereby doubly stimulating the economy. But, I know, I know, the government can only run the entire military-industrial complex.:( Far better that we simply allow the owners of the telecom trust to enrich themselves virtually without limit, including, yes, government hand outs to "encourage" them to build their infrastructure, with few meaningful strings attached.
The entire pricing model of the cell carriers in the US is just the outcome of a game to see what tricks will and won't get past the feds. Charging for overages is ludicrous in general. It forces customers into the losing game of predicting their future calling needs and creates the illusion that they are responsible when they inevitably get a $400 bill. Of course, they can pay more every month to avoid that, and if the jump between the first and second pricing tier is inexplicably huge at every single carrier... can you really prove it's price fixing?
The problem with the telecoms is similar to those of the even more transparently criminal "privatized electric utilities" - who can only fail to profit if they somehow manage to build more capacity and alleviate the shortage of their commodity. Don't even get me started on the various funny attempts at market-oriented reform from the 90's.
Caps and per-megabyte charges are obviously rapacious. In a sane, well-regulated system, we could cope with scarcity by letting people pay for priority. Similar to an auction, if you pay more, then when there is contention on the network, your data rates are better than those who paid less. Easy, done.
If you can't understand why we don't already have this, why not call your senator and ask?
Sure, stopping someone from "stealing" "your" ideas is a problem. But I have an even bigger one. How do you prevent it from ever raining? Rain also sucks.
Living in this desert may be hard, but unless you can prevent rain, I don't see how we can move.
In other words, the entire question is moot. We have never lived in a world where someone can be prevented from "stealing" "your" ideas, and fortunately we never can live in such a world. It would be a nightmare. Meanwhile, all progress in the arts and sciences involves communication and learning. That these processes have been equated to "stealing" is one of the most repulsive aspects of the "intellectual property" mindset. You cannot own an idea. Nor have you ever had one that did not involve at least some "stealing" from others (aka learning, communicating). Elvis may be Elvis, but he'd be nothing if he couldn't have "stolen" the blues, or Disney, snow white.
Think about it. There are hundreds of thousands of such patents in the US. Say you write some software. How do you propose to follow the rules?
Even if the software patent fairy came down tomorrow and magically let you know every one of the thousands of patents you infringe on, and you could even afford an open-ended negotiation with each patent holder, you would still be screwed, because tomorrow, 1,000 new patent applications will be filed.
Every piece of software is thus a ticking patent timebomb. This is why even Microsoft, with carte blanch resources, makes no systematic attempt to determine if they infringe on anything. They merely hope to amass a "war chest" of ridiculous patents of their own, and countersue whoever sues them, since any counterparty will also inevitably be infringing. This strategy was designed to eliminate competitors, who unlike established concerns, cannot start out their lives with hundreds of millions to build a patent war chest and legal department. In other words, its explicit purpose is to destroy the nascent free market in software.
Unfortunately, software patents even fail at that. The problems start when the other party is designed to survive this technique by dint of merely suing other companies for a living, while by strict policy never creating any software of its own. A practice that has grown into a closet industry, by the way.
This entire process dramatically hinders investment and innovation in one of our most important industries, in exchange for only one benefit: enriching lawyers - one of the least economically productive activities imaginable. It costs jobs, hurts our competitiveness abroad, and makes the United States an object of ridicule. The software industry in the US only functions at all because almost all parties ignore the patent system almost all the time, but this is a bit like the kidnapping problem in Columbia. You may not be kidnapped on any given day, but really, there is a multi-billion dollar drag on the economy and, and tomorrow, you could be the unlucky one.
...and I should choose a better term than "advanced" next time. 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 automatic language translation within software programs.[24][not in citation given]
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.
Worse, the patentability of software wasn't even a coherent plan designed by policymakers; it was simply the gradual result of empire building by some of the judges and attorneys handling patent cases. The US Supreme Court has even held that a mathematical formula itself could not be patented (in 1972) - but since most judges aren't as yet well-enough versed on the vanishing distinctions between math, code, ideas, and speech, the reasoning behind refusing to patent mathematical formulas (it's retarded, and if it were even possible to implement - which it is not - it would stop all progress in math, basically) hasn't yet reached its logical conclusion (the exact same reasoning applies to software).
NASA hurts it's own reputation horribly by auctioning software patents rather than holding them for the public trust and acknowledging the obvious: software patents are incompatible with a software industry.
They then compound the insult by taking advantage of some suckers paying cash for something that is legally questionable in light of Bilksi and that may soon have explicitly no value at all.
It's an obvious fact. The sooner we stop denying it and explicitly repudiate software patents as a matter of policy (as most every advanced nation already does), the sooner the damage to our economy stops.
Yes, because when more stores open up in your town, it's not economic growth and development, it's "fragmentation."
The funniest part of this comment is that Amazon is only going to be likely to gain much relevance for their own app store in their dreams. They're going to have reach, of course, but a job of convincing developers to accept their terms and come into their marketplace when they are already in _the_ marketplace used by tens of millions (soon to be hundreds of millions) of Android users. They will have to spend big to get out of the zone of irrelevancy. It sounds like a miscalculation born of arrogance to me.
What about the asshole cops and prosecutor that put this sick joke of a "wiretapping case" on the taxpayers tab?
Anyone losing their jobs? Suspensions?
If this isn't malicious prosecution, what the fuck on earth is?
If we all just walk away from this without going any further, expect another case just like it next week, and another the week after. The point is intimidation, after all. Plus eventually they'll get some idiot judge who agrees with them.
People will draw conclusions about Sun, Oracle and Google, about Android and Java, but this is all missing the point.
This is about software patents, which cannot coexist with a functioning software industry.
There are hundreds of thousands of them. No one can read them all, let alone remember them all. Not even Microsoft, Google and Oracle can do it, so they infringe thousands of patents at the end of each day of work. Even if the baby jesus came came down from heaven and granted them perfect knowledge of all patents today, there will be a thousand new ones filed by tomorrow. The entire thing is a money making scam for attorneys and an alternative to free-market competition for some of the larger, more unscrupulous companies. The scheme was invented in a courtroom rather than in Congress. It's so ridiculous on its face that the entire rest of the world refuses to recognize these types of patents, despite years of fevered bribery- I mean, lobbying, on the part of the scammers abroad.
Trying to keep score between Java and.Net on who's playing the patent game better is like arguing over who's burning brighter in a room where everyone is on fire.
If this stuff bothers you, donate time and/or money to the people doing the hard work of organizing a fix, and we can end this practical joke on the software profession. We have enough problems with our economy as it is.
Even ALL CAPS can't make that vile criminal worthy of any more dignity in death than he was in life.
We have never had the mythical world of respect that you allude to, and we never will. For reference, read the newspapers of 50 years ago. Or 100. Or 150. Or 200. The "uncivil" argument is a canard sometimes thrown around by hypocrites to fool idiots.
I'll take an honest man over a polite one any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
In comparison with you, good sir, who actually tried to paint a critical slashdot poster as a bigger "problem for the country" than one of America's most notoriously corrupt senators.
This is such a breathtaking demonstration of lack of clarity in public discourse that I can actually make a case that it is, in fact, YOU
THAT
ARE
THE
PROBLEM
WITH
THIS
COUNTRY.
(CAPS for demonstration purposes, so the poster can see how silly the textual shouting thing is, and how utterly irrelevant it is to the point being made.)
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, Germany can get loans on Greece's behalf? :D
Ratings?
Ratings?
Please stop. All the laughing, it hurts.
What were all those CDO's rated again?
The ratings agencies just had to remind us all, starting with the audience of their congressional hearings, that ratings are a guess made by people with no accountability for whether they guessed right. Sort of like a weather forecast, except meteorologists are expected to at least get a certain percentage right. Or like if Arther Andersen's audits were still a basis of financial decision-making even after the Enron scandal.
Now you prefer to argue because, in your mind, they merely give themselves the right to do it?
Since when did being more gullible than a special olympian become a virtue?
There is plenty of additional information out there on this topic, including what various devices do, but it's obvious now you're willfully ignoring it all. I'm done doing your homework for you. You just have a little baby ego. Your little baby ego can't handle the fact that you trusted Apple for no particularly good reason. Show you a packet trace, and you will just argue "show me the proof that they don't discard the data."
No further posts are necessary on my part for you to have made a complete and perfect fool of yourself. Nothing you can say will redeem yourself. If you post again, I promise you I won't even read it. Good bye.
Oh give it a rest, troll. You already look like a retard.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=apple+privacy+gps
Web result #1:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/06/apple-location-privacy-iphone-ipad.html
Even most children wouldn't fess to being that Google-illiterate. If the LA times (and half the Internet) is too untrustworthy for you, they point you at the relevant parts of Apple's own privacy policy.
And in case you want to take a shot again that the data is "anonymous" and pretend you didn't see the article I just linked (or was discussed ad nauseum on slashdot), they "anonymize" it by assigning you a new random ID every 24 hours. Once again, nothing is anonymous when the GPS trace probably starts and ends with your home. So, their anonymity attempt is absurdly stupid, or deceptive, you decide.
http://www.toptechreviews.net/tech-news/apple-collects-data-based-on-location-claims-its-anonymous/
http://www.toptechreviews.net/tech-news/apple-collects-data-based-on-location-claims-its-anonymous/
Wrong.
Did you miss all the slashdot articles covering how they ship location home?
Try the search box. If you fail, I will provide the links.
Your attempt to deceive other readers will only be convincing for those that don't click (or keep up with the news). Why you would expect to fool me - who knows. Of course Apple both stores and transmits the location data (as if splitting that hair looks good for you or them??) - and the anonymizing mechanism is either designed by sub-literate morons or flawed on purpose; Apple's gps data can easily be tied back to the user in most cases - as I pointed out in the original post.
You're not a very interesting conversational partner until you own up. So don't expect any more responses until then. :)
How did Apple try "this trick"? They never store secific locations, and never tied together location data, even from the same device. It really is completely anonymous.
Wrong.
I stopped there. Accepting apologies in this thread anytime.
Apple collects this data under the context of i.e. iAds and transmits it back whether you use the GPS or not. As for TomTom... well, you'll find out if you're foolish and self-hating enough to remain a TomTom customer.
Well said.
To counter-argue, I could say that communication is vital to a democratic society, and as the technology underpinning it changes, you may find that it is enormously to your interest to have a certain minimum of communications ability made available for free to all, the same way it was enormously to your interest to establish the public library system or the public highway system. You could say that's enshrining "a right" to internet service if you want to use a trigger word, but let's be purely practical for a moment. Dogma won't float the dollar or fix my deck. Certain policies are better for the economy than others, and it can be argued that may be one of them.
Communication leads to economic activity. (Yes, even leveling your paladin and watching Iron Man 2, while funny, refers to two separate multibillion dollar industries.) Never mind that it leads to personal improvement, or beneficial political action. If you don't believe me, let's go visit a sunny pacific island together.
The island has an unregulated free market for telephony and internet services, which has naturally and unavoidably resulted in a near-monopoly on wired and wireless phone and internet. The local economy is largely driven by tourists. Both local businesses and visitors pay $3 per minute to use their phones, and internet service is similarly expensive (and non-neutral, i.e. skype-blocked, and terribly slow to boot). Instead of making calls or (heaven forbid) using smartphone apps or internet, a tourist must wander the beach to find a place to rent a boat or a good restaurant and he can't tell if the boats are rented or the tables are full in advance. Not as much money gets spent. Eventually either the tourist or the business may even go to a better country, where phone and internet are at least cheap. Or even better, to somewhere where it's free.
Not to mention there are many non-tourist-economy local businesses that could exist with cheap connectivity that now can't. Oh wait, suddenly one begins to realize why this is way bigger than just this one pocket example about a tourist and a beach economy.
The free marketeers will tell you that an entrepreneur offering cheaper, competing phone and internet service must be arriving "any minute now." This is because posting nonsense on slashdot has a better rate of return than actually attempting to compete against an entrenched telephony monopoly.
By the way, this is not a hypothetical island. Not even the prices have been made up.
Why on earth would you be reassured?
"Anonymous" GPS traces that start and/or end with your home every day are not anonymous. Apple tried that trick - it's an intelligence test for the masses.
LMFAO
For some reason I just pictured you giving a drunken, profanity laden TED speech on how life in Africa really isn't that much different than the US, and there really isn't a 3rd world after all. It concluded with a call for a free market approach to border security. :)
Go to South America. Go to Africa. Try living without American-style democratic government. Then come back and tell me how it is.
Crying for the free market to come and give you phone service is like asking Santa Claus to make you popular with women. My friend, it's never gonna happen, because it's physically impossible.
You can have as much competition as you want for people to sell cars, computers, drugs, you name it. There are just certain things, such as phones, electricity, cops, the military... that the free market fairy cannot leave under your pillow. Pretending just fucks up the economy and makes one or a few lucky winners really really rich. In effect, a private monopoly. Or a trust, as we have with cell phones.
You can whine about every thing that the government does wrong, but the only difference between the government, and a private monopoly (or trust) set up by the government, is that the private monopoly or trust is every bit as as bad as the government, plus it is opaque, unaccountable, and some already-rich people keep all the money, instead of at least some of it going to "support the troops" or occasionally even pay a high school teacher's salary.
You'll be waiting a very long time. Even if you really believe you will get competition in a market with a 10 figure barrier to entry, the spectrum is scarce and the federal government (in the form of the FCC) can't just license new cell phone carriers in your region all day long.
If the government simply ran it, at least there would be more accountability and transparency to the users of the system. Not to mention that the prices could be lowered to have a relationship to the actual costs, and the profits pay for schools and roads, thereby doubly stimulating the economy. But, I know, I know, the government can only run the entire military-industrial complex. :( Far better that we simply allow the owners of the telecom trust to enrich themselves virtually without limit, including, yes, government hand outs to "encourage" them to build their infrastructure, with few meaningful strings attached.
The entire pricing model of the cell carriers in the US is just the outcome of a game to see what tricks will and won't get past the feds. Charging for overages is ludicrous in general. It forces customers into the losing game of predicting their future calling needs and creates the illusion that they are responsible when they inevitably get a $400 bill. Of course, they can pay more every month to avoid that, and if the jump between the first and second pricing tier is inexplicably huge at every single carrier... can you really prove it's price fixing?
The problem with the telecoms is similar to those of the even more transparently criminal "privatized electric utilities" - who can only fail to profit if they somehow manage to build more capacity and alleviate the shortage of their commodity. Don't even get me started on the various funny attempts at market-oriented reform from the 90's.
Caps and per-megabyte charges are obviously rapacious. In a sane, well-regulated system, we could cope with scarcity by letting people pay for priority. Similar to an auction, if you pay more, then when there is contention on the network, your data rates are better than those who paid less. Easy, done.
If you can't understand why we don't already have this, why not call your senator and ask?
Sure, stopping someone from "stealing" "your" ideas is a problem. But I have an even bigger one. How do you prevent it from ever raining? Rain also sucks.
Living in this desert may be hard, but unless you can prevent rain, I don't see how we can move.
In other words, the entire question is moot. We have never lived in a world where someone can be prevented from "stealing" "your" ideas, and fortunately we never can live in such a world. It would be a nightmare. Meanwhile, all progress in the arts and sciences involves communication and learning. That these processes have been equated to "stealing" is one of the most repulsive aspects of the "intellectual property" mindset. You cannot own an idea. Nor have you ever had one that did not involve at least some "stealing" from others (aka learning, communicating). Elvis may be Elvis, but he'd be nothing if he couldn't have "stolen" the blues, or Disney, snow white.
Think about it. There are hundreds of thousands of such patents in the US. Say you write some software. How do you propose to follow the rules?
Even if the software patent fairy came down tomorrow and magically let you know every one of the thousands of patents you infringe on, and you could even afford an open-ended negotiation with each patent holder, you would still be screwed, because tomorrow, 1,000 new patent applications will be filed.
Every piece of software is thus a ticking patent timebomb. This is why even Microsoft, with carte blanch resources, makes no systematic attempt to determine if they infringe on anything. They merely hope to amass a "war chest" of ridiculous patents of their own, and countersue whoever sues them, since any counterparty will also inevitably be infringing. This strategy was designed to eliminate competitors, who unlike established concerns, cannot start out their lives with hundreds of millions to build a patent war chest and legal department. In other words, its explicit purpose is to destroy the nascent free market in software.
Unfortunately, software patents even fail at that. The problems start when the other party is designed to survive this technique by dint of merely suing other companies for a living, while by strict policy never creating any software of its own. A practice that has grown into a closet industry, by the way.
This entire process dramatically hinders investment and innovation in one of our most important industries, in exchange for only one benefit: enriching lawyers - one of the least economically productive activities imaginable. It costs jobs, hurts our competitiveness abroad, and makes the United States an object of ridicule. The software industry in the US only functions at all because almost all parties ignore the patent system almost all the time, but this is a bit like the kidnapping problem in Columbia. You may not be kidnapped on any given day, but really, there is a multi-billion dollar drag on the economy and, and tomorrow, you could be the unlucky one.
...and I should choose a better term than "advanced" next time. 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 automatic language translation within software programs.[24][not in citation given]
I'm referring to the rejection of 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.
Worse, the patentability of software wasn't even a coherent plan designed by policymakers; it was simply the gradual result of empire building by some of the judges and attorneys handling patent cases. The US Supreme Court has even held that a mathematical formula itself could not be patented (in 1972) - but since most judges aren't as yet well-enough versed on the vanishing distinctions between math, code, ideas, and speech, the reasoning behind refusing to patent mathematical formulas (it's retarded, and if it were even possible to implement - which it is not - it would stop all progress in math, basically) hasn't yet reached its logical conclusion (the exact same reasoning applies to software).
NASA hurts it's own reputation horribly by auctioning software patents rather than holding them for the public trust and acknowledging the obvious: software patents are incompatible with a software industry.
They then compound the insult by taking advantage of some suckers paying cash for something that is legally questionable in light of Bilksi and that may soon have explicitly no value at all.
It's an obvious fact. The sooner we stop denying it and explicitly repudiate software patents as a matter of policy (as most every advanced nation already does), the sooner the damage to our economy stops.
Yes, because when more stores open up in your town, it's not economic growth and development, it's "fragmentation."
The funniest part of this comment is that Amazon is only going to be likely to gain much relevance for their own app store in their dreams. They're going to have reach, of course, but a job of convincing developers to accept their terms and come into their marketplace when they are already in _the_ marketplace used by tens of millions (soon to be hundreds of millions) of Android users. They will have to spend big to get out of the zone of irrelevancy. It sounds like a miscalculation born of arrogance to me.
What about the asshole cops and prosecutor that put this sick joke of a "wiretapping case" on the taxpayers tab?
Anyone losing their jobs? Suspensions?
If this isn't malicious prosecution, what the fuck on earth is?
If we all just walk away from this without going any further, expect another case just like it next week, and another the week after. The point is intimidation, after all. Plus eventually they'll get some idiot judge who agrees with them.
People will draw conclusions about Sun, Oracle and Google, about Android and Java, but this is all missing the point.
This is about software patents, which cannot coexist with a functioning software industry.
There are hundreds of thousands of them. No one can read them all, let alone remember them all. Not even Microsoft, Google and Oracle can do it, so they infringe thousands of patents at the end of each day of work. Even if the baby jesus came came down from heaven and granted them perfect knowledge of all patents today, there will be a thousand new ones filed by tomorrow. The entire thing is a money making scam for attorneys and an alternative to free-market competition for some of the larger, more unscrupulous companies. The scheme was invented in a courtroom rather than in Congress. It's so ridiculous on its face that the entire rest of the world refuses to recognize these types of patents, despite years of fevered bribery- I mean, lobbying, on the part of the scammers abroad.
Trying to keep score between Java and .Net on who's playing the patent game better is like arguing over who's burning brighter in a room where everyone is on fire.
If this stuff bothers you, donate time and/or money to the people doing the hard work of organizing a fix, and we can end this practical joke on the software profession. We have enough problems with our economy as it is.
Even ALL CAPS can't make that vile criminal worthy of any more dignity in death than he was in life.
We have never had the mythical world of respect that you allude to, and we never will. For reference, read the newspapers of 50 years ago. Or 100. Or 150. Or 200. The "uncivil" argument is a canard sometimes thrown around by hypocrites to fool idiots.
I'll take an honest man over a polite one any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
In comparison with you, good sir, who actually tried to paint a critical slashdot poster as a bigger "problem for the country" than one of America's most notoriously corrupt senators.
This is such a breathtaking demonstration of lack of clarity in public discourse that I can actually make a case that it is, in fact, YOU
THAT
ARE
THE
PROBLEM
WITH
THIS
COUNTRY.
(CAPS for demonstration purposes, so the poster can see how silly the textual shouting thing is, and how utterly irrelevant it is to the point being made.)