from memory (former WiMAX Forum member), all the revisions to the standard up through current put the target for motion at 70mph. fine for cities and lots of commuter rail, but you'll run into problems on high speed freeways or long distance trains. this was not viewed as a defect; nobody was working on changing it.
the thing that's relevant here, which i think is often missed, is the difference between WiMAX and 802.16. ISO, in 802.16, specifies most of the technical issues, especially at the lower levels, and the WiMAX Forum, in a series of documents, specifies lots of stuff above and beyond that. the two organizations have a very high impedance feedback loop, so the Forum tries hard to just use whatever ISO has already done. wifi and 802.11 have a similar relationship, but wifi layers much less on (because they have less ambitious goals).
...but normal religious are still homophobic, just to a lesser degree.
no. we're not (at least not inherently). and you can bite me for saying so. stupid assumption, a good indication of a lazy or weak mind. if you're not the bigoted moron i now believe you are, just provide some evidence that the UCC, for example, is a homophobic organization. or that all religious people are (you're worse than the grandparent; you lump in all religious folks, like those horrible Taoists). shouldn't be too hard with your impressive command of the scientific method, right?
you also fundamentally misunderstand occam's razor. assuming anything, in the absence of a simpler but equally encompassing theory, is no sort of violation.
just because i drive a car rather than fly a plane doesn't mean i can't tell the difference between a 747, F-177, and a Cessna, or think the differences are minor.
Show me one Christian that's open to believe that I won't be judged because I don't believe, and I'll be open to change my classification.
someone below responded "me", which i think is an entirely valid answer. but i assume you're going to want a denomination or sect. okay, fine. can we grant that "judged" here really means "going to hell", not "factually incorrect"? if so, than check out most of the Orthodox churches, who differentiate in doctrine between the "visible" and "invisible" churches. they believe the "visible" church (the one humans identify) is a subset of the entire church, and that entire church is "saved". even Roman Catholic doctrine doesn't explicitly require believe as a prerequisite for salvation - it's about works (belief is more or less one really awesome "work" in that system). on the protestant/reformed side, most famously there's the United Church of Christ, which while congregational (and thus not really open to blanket statements) tend not to believe non-believers are damned; there's plenty of other lesser-known but similarly inclined churches. and then there's the Quakers, at least many of whom are Christians, who don't make many claims at all about what happens afterwords, the importance of belief in any particular interpretations of Truth, or the beliefs of their members.
anyway, the point is you're just wrong. Christianity is a lot more varied than you're giving it credit for. refusing to understand or acknowledge the differences doesn't mean they're not there.
i'm a Christian, and i have several pagan friends who don't have any difficulty telling the difference between a UCC-type or Quaker-type Christian and a Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Fred Phelps. mind you, i have one or two who have a really hard time with the distinction, but that's usually due to traumatic personal history with the later variety.
i can't believe this didn't make the list. someone above complained about "?SYNTAX ERROR", but that's for wimps who need their momma's hand-holding. from what's commonly refered to as "Ed, man! !man ed":
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
--- Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
really private storage isn't all that hard, it just also isn't usually what people really want. you can't have the system automatically dump incoming mail in your private storage, for example, because it's private.
there's all sorts of interesting things you could do in this area, given a population like a university. token-based authentication becomes at least a lot more reasonable to consider when everyone already has a token issued by the institution. or they're more likely to already own a USB stick, or more inclined to get one.
a related idea i've tossed around a bit, triggered here by the intersection of the "secure storage" discussion with the IP discussion, is a secure third party timestamping service. at least in US IP law (and I assume Canadian), the dates on things are crucial, so inventors (including lab folks) are encouraged (or, in some cases, mandated by their employers) to keep dated lab notebooks. advice from our IP lawyers was that every time we did something we thought might be interesting, at the end of the day we had an uninterested third party date and sign the entry. we're told this has legal significance in the event of a dispute. anyway, as a manager in this group for a while, this was a pain in the butt. most of the folks in the group weren't inclined to keep paper log books on their own, which means the process was error prone right from the start. as an engineer in this group for a while, the process was also a pain in the butt: i more or less didn't do it, and just went and had a conversation with one guy who did so he'd write things down instead. it was stupid. there's lots of ways a digital version of this could work. your group likely qualifies as sufficiently uninterested. the technical work - going from one of the several ways it could work to making one actually work - would be interesting and fun, and it'd be interesting (if your into that sort of thing) to figure out what's needed to make it legally significant. make this a significant feature of an online snapshot system and i think you've got a very useful service.
threads needn't be hard, it's just that most of the popular models for working with them suck. check out C. A. R. Hoare's work with CSP and some of the modern languages influenced by, or modeled on, it. my personal favorite's Limbo, but there's a good library for C using the model, and it shows up in places like Occam and Erlang's process model. the right concurrency model just makes a world of difference.
you're still right that they're not magic bullets and they have a host of new issues to consider (although they make a whole host of other ones go away, and can be much friendlier in the right model).
it means that the from the sending terminal initiating the trade message to the database transaction completing is 3ms. the databases are not stored only on disk; if the LSE's is like the NASDAQ/NYSE one i worked on, the volatile versions are stored in RAM and written to disk as a background task. i'd be impressed if this included the actual network latency (rathe than just the server-side work), but most of these systems do require dedicated lines, so it's not entirely crazy.
in this case, "???" is "buy the stock at a much lower price". the trick in the process is that you don't really own the stock you're selling in step one, but you're committing to buy it in step two. so if you've guessed wrong, and the stock goes up, you're out the difference.
WiFi certainly has problems, but it's thought out better than you give it credit for. the issue is just that the objectives of the designers (and many users) are not the same as yours. your complaints are valid, but they aren't an issue of how well thought out the protocol is, they're an issue of making different trade offs. the more options like this you force on the protocol itself, the harder you make it to configure and the more barriers to you (on both client and server side) you impose. just because the designers made different decisions than you might have doesn't mean they didn't spend time on the questions.
Stealing means that the perpetrator takes something away and the victim doesn't have it anymore...
...without their permission. if you come to my house (or, say, pull up to the curb outside my house), i give you a gift, and you drive home, taking it with you, there's no theft. so even in the case where my ISP imposes a usage cap and your use means those bytes are no longer accessible to me, if i've invited you to use them (as happens in the case of unsecured WiFi networks), there is no theft.
My philosophy is if someone is ignorant enough to leave a WiFi connection open...
hi. you're an ass. my access point is open. i'm well aware of all the security implications. there is no ignorance. are you really not able to tell the difference between someone being permissive and someone being ignorant? or do you just have such a low opinion of people that you assume all ambiguity resolves towards ignorance?
not even. the US is made up of tons of smaller jurisdictions; even for fedral issues like this one, every level below the Supreme Court is broken up into jurisdictions that are not guaranteed to interpret the law in the same way. unauthorized access laws have only been tested in regards to WiFi in a very small number of jurisdictions, with inconsistent results, and neither of those were federal cases (meaning the law cited in the summary is inapplicable).
i think we can all agree that since you're using any form of encryption or access restrictions on your WiFi net, someone breaking those to access the net would be stealing (or breaking and entering, or whatever the right term for violating the relevant code is).
the extension you're making, though, that anyone who accesses a WiFi net without permission is "an aresehole", doesn't follow. if you're not using any form of access control, you are issuing explicit invitations in the form of broadcasts from your router. there's absolutely no logical or ethical reason someone shouldn't respond positively to those invitations. if you're foolish enough (or, who knows, generous enough) to issue invitations to use something they only have in limited quantity (as in the case of usage caps from your ISP), that's their own issue/prerogative.
it's even worse (for the prosecution) than this: the conversation between nodes typically starts with the base station advertising that it offers unfettered access. it issues an invitation. when i respond to the invitation, i ask for permission (in the form of a join attempt and subsequent DHCP request), which is then granted and your defense comes into play. the frequent analogy of unlocked front doors just doesn't hold.
that's one Christian view. at least equally common is the view that the Bible is insipired by God, or in some other way transmitted from God to the human authors, but well short of direct dictation. this leaves plenty of room for the content being from God with errors or inconsistencies introduced by human elements.
sure: apple.com. they don't offer anything in the class of the Model M or similar being discussed here, but their current offerings are pretty nice. i'm not as fast or accurate on them, but the bluetooth model is one of the most compact i can find with full-sized keys, and they aren't as loud (i live with a few other folks who i doubt would appreciate the use of a Model M). no windows key, and you get the extra key for meta in whatever system you use.
a little simplistic, but not too bad, actually; a nice first pass. the problem is that it entirely neglects the cost to society of preventing these things: locking ideas away. trademarks do a pretty good job because they have none of that cost.
Many societies have tried to abolish property rights, and massively redistribute property. Think North Korea, USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, Communist Cambodia, etc... essentially, thus far those attempts have been pretty disastrous.
that's (partly) because they weren't, in fact, attempts to abolish property rights, whatever their glossy brochures said (okay, in all honesty i don't know much about what Cambodia's commies did). they consolidated property rights under state control. this is part of why the transition towards capitalism was (relatively) easy in Russia and China: property rights never went away.
i will entirely agree that most modern Communists are economically illiterate dolts. of course, the same is true of most modern Capitalists, so i guess we can call it a wash.
that's a bit simplistic. you gloss over the "living by US laws" bit without noting that doing so includes recognition that your property rights are not absolute. you likely pay property tax in return for the privilege of owning land, and the same document which sets forth your right to bear arms equally holds up the right for the state to seize your property.
1. Ensure that the creator is compensated for his time, and the uncertainty inherent to creating a new products and works of art.
the laws vary between jurisdictions, obviously, but at least in US-style IP systems, this is not the goal. or at least it wasn't when the systems were created, and isn't the stated goal today. you've confused the objective with a mechanism. it's an exceedingly common confusion, and one that's central to all the problems in US-style IP systems today.
read the US Constitution. it's very explicit: IP exists to promote the useful arts and sciences. it's a recognition of the fact that, in most economic systems - agrarian, mercantile, industrial - the open market fail to compensate the "mental laborers" for their portion of the contribution to the economy, and thus we get fewer of them than is best for society. patents and copyright grant special privileges to a select group - that of control over use and reproduction of an idea - to allow them to extract additional compensation. these classes of IP are correctives for market failures. and they did very well at it.
but fast-forward 200 years from the Constitution's creation. the market is increasingly focused on the output of these "mental laborers", and now rewards them pretty well. the market pays for ideas. the corrective required is much, much smaller now than it was 200 years ago (i'd argue it's already essentially zero, but it's certainly heading in that direction). what we should be seeing in that situation is the incentive being reduced - either patents and trademarks being weakened, or their terms being reduced. instead, we see the opposite: terms on copyrights are downright insane, both are being strengthened further (criminal charges for copyright infringement? ridiculous), and patents are being granted in more domains with lower standards. meanwhile, this costs society more and more, even when used as directed, and the abuses double that. we're selling off our cultural heritage to rich corps in locked boxes.
so, what to do? well, i have studied this extensively, and have read lots by folks who've studied it more. there are very sound economic answers to this. the specific numbers are up for some debate, of course, but an opening pass would be roll back patent standards about twenty years and cut terms in half, while cutting copyright terms to a decade or less. that's your upper bound of what's economically defensible. the lower bound is zero: there's reasonable (but inconclusive) arguments to say that society would be best served by just scrapping the whole copyright and trademark ideas. especially in an increasingly globalized, increasingly information-based economy.
of course, patents, specifically, had another historical purpose: reduce the reliance on trade secrets. this isn't much of an issue today, but it's a reasonable argument to make that doing away with patents entirely would shift some things back in that direction, which has other costs for society. that, honestly, is the only economic argument i can buy that even makes me consider patents might be worth keeping around (although they should still be cut back significantly).
If I want to write a book about the Adventures of Young Gandalf, should I pay up?
no, you should be locked up.;-)
more seriously, this points out that there's more than just money to consider. authors/artists/whatever frequently want to make sure that the image of their work isn't tarnished by awful knock-offs (no offense; i'm sure your Young Gandlaf story would be pure art!).
Patents are a whole different matter. Scrapping them completely wouldn't really work...
why's that? you say this like it's obvious, and certainly those with a vested interest in them want you to think it's obvious, but it by no means is. i say this as someone with my name on a pending patent.
the fundamental problem is that patents and copyrights exist explicitly to provide enough incentive for people to do interesting things. we've seen patents get stronger and cover more stuff, while copyright gets stronger and insanely longer. this is exactly backwards. the economic value of each - the incentive they provide - continues to rise, in relative terms. once you understand that, it becomes clear that we should be providing less to offer the same incentive. a copyright for ten years today gets you more money - in contemporary dollars - than a copyright for twenty years a decade ago. terms on both of these should be shrinking.
personally, i'd just dump 'em both. yes, there are some people like yourself who might (you might find it different when actually in that position) reduce their artistic output, and yes, that is a real cost to society. but i think that cost is dwarfed, several times over, by the costs of abuse of the patent and copyright systems. most photographers are still going to make about the same money (do you really think there's a big market in resale of wedding photos?), because they make their money on the product, not the reproduction or use rights.
note that this isn't about being anti-IP at all. for one thing, i think trademarks are handled pretty well (sure, there's some abuses, but the system's not bad) and trade secrets get pretty good treatment in law (i think they might be a little forgiving of disclosure, but that's not fundamental). this is strictly economic. copyright and trademark are government-granted artificial monopolies on reproduction and use rights. they exist only to provide enough incentive to motivate people to do interesting things. as the "interesting things" become more and more valuable, the required incentive drops. i believe we're pretty darn close to zero now, if we're not there already. the Constitution gets this right: the legislature should have the power to set the terms appropriately. it's just that the legislature's botching it because they're bought.
this was already posted in the "sibling thread" i mentioned earlier; my response there. in short, it doesn't say what you want it to, and the law the author cites explicitly states that the board is obligated to look after "the interests of the corporation and of the shareholders", but in no way states that those interests need to be only the pursuit of the highest share price (let alone in any particular timeframe). board liability has never been at issue here; what's at issue is whether companies and shareholders can have interests other than just the share price. nobody's shown anything with weight of law that says otherwise.
you've re-stated your position without any further evidence. that doesn't make it more true. board members and executive management are sued all the time, sure; sometimes those suits even get somewhere. but they're never for "not doing everything you can to pump the stock price". they're for specific mismanagement and failure to act in the shareholder's stated interests. which, again, generally include, but need not be limited to, making money. you can see the problem in your reasoning here - relying on the liability under law - by noting that boards and management of non-profits are under the same liability: to act on the shareholder's stated interests. companies can certainly go more than three years without a profit, although they do have to do extra work to retain their incorporated status. it's not nearly as automatic as you think, or there's a lot of tech startups and the like who'd be in big trouble.
please provide a citation to the SEC regulation you're referring to, or any other similar text with legal or regulatory weight. you're asserting that something is illegal and prohibited; i'm asserting that there's no such prohibition. the obligation is on you; i can't prove the absence without just pointing you at the entire SEC rule book and amended IRS code.
see your sibling thread. turns out that it's simply not true that corporations, public or not, must exist solely to make money. they exist to serve the stated interests of their shareholders; interests which often include, but are never (in any case i'm aware of) limited to, making money. there's simply no legal basis for the idea that companies must exist solely to maximize shareholder value.
thankfully you, unlike your sibling, recognize that even if it were true, Apple could still do it as essentially a PR move.
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from memory (former WiMAX Forum member), all the revisions to the standard up through current put the target for motion at 70mph. fine for cities and lots of commuter rail, but you'll run into problems on high speed freeways or long distance trains. this was not viewed as a defect; nobody was working on changing it.
the thing that's relevant here, which i think is often missed, is the difference between WiMAX and 802.16. ISO, in 802.16, specifies most of the technical issues, especially at the lower levels, and the WiMAX Forum, in a series of documents, specifies lots of stuff above and beyond that. the two organizations have a very high impedance feedback loop, so the Forum tries hard to just use whatever ISO has already done. wifi and 802.11 have a similar relationship, but wifi layers much less on (because they have less ambitious goals).
no. we're not (at least not inherently). and you can bite me for saying so. stupid assumption, a good indication of a lazy or weak mind.
if you're not the bigoted moron i now believe you are, just provide some evidence that the UCC, for example, is a homophobic organization. or that all religious people are (you're worse than the grandparent; you lump in all religious folks, like those horrible Taoists). shouldn't be too hard with your impressive command of the scientific method, right?
you also fundamentally misunderstand occam's razor. assuming anything, in the absence of a simpler but equally encompassing theory, is no sort of violation.
someone below responded "me", which i think is an entirely valid answer. but i assume you're going to want a denomination or sect. okay, fine. can we grant that "judged" here really means "going to hell", not "factually incorrect"? if so, than check out most of the Orthodox churches, who differentiate in doctrine between the "visible" and "invisible" churches. they believe the "visible" church (the one humans identify) is a subset of the entire church, and that entire church is "saved". even Roman Catholic doctrine doesn't explicitly require believe as a prerequisite for salvation - it's about works (belief is more or less one really awesome "work" in that system). on the protestant/reformed side, most famously there's the United Church of Christ, which while congregational (and thus not really open to blanket statements) tend not to believe non-believers are damned; there's plenty of other lesser-known but similarly inclined churches. and then there's the Quakers, at least many of whom are Christians, who don't make many claims at all about what happens afterwords, the importance of belief in any particular interpretations of Truth, or the beliefs of their members.
anyway, the point is you're just wrong. Christianity is a lot more varied than you're giving it credit for. refusing to understand or acknowledge the differences doesn't mean they're not there.
i'm a Christian, and i have several pagan friends who don't have any difficulty telling the difference between a UCC-type or Quaker-type Christian and a Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or Fred Phelps. mind you, i have one or two who have a really hard time with the distinction, but that's usually due to traumatic personal history with the later variety.
ken is a genius.
really private storage isn't all that hard, it just also isn't usually what people really want. you can't have the system automatically dump incoming mail in your private storage, for example, because it's private.
there's all sorts of interesting things you could do in this area, given a population like a university. token-based authentication becomes at least a lot more reasonable to consider when everyone already has a token issued by the institution. or they're more likely to already own a USB stick, or more inclined to get one.
a related idea i've tossed around a bit, triggered here by the intersection of the "secure storage" discussion with the IP discussion, is a secure third party timestamping service. at least in US IP law (and I assume Canadian), the dates on things are crucial, so inventors (including lab folks) are encouraged (or, in some cases, mandated by their employers) to keep dated lab notebooks. advice from our IP lawyers was that every time we did something we thought might be interesting, at the end of the day we had an uninterested third party date and sign the entry. we're told this has legal significance in the event of a dispute.
anyway, as a manager in this group for a while, this was a pain in the butt. most of the folks in the group weren't inclined to keep paper log books on their own, which means the process was error prone right from the start. as an engineer in this group for a while, the process was also a pain in the butt: i more or less didn't do it, and just went and had a conversation with one guy who did so he'd write things down instead. it was stupid.
there's lots of ways a digital version of this could work. your group likely qualifies as sufficiently uninterested. the technical work - going from one of the several ways it could work to making one actually work - would be interesting and fun, and it'd be interesting (if your into that sort of thing) to figure out what's needed to make it legally significant. make this a significant feature of an online snapshot system and i think you've got a very useful service.
threads needn't be hard, it's just that most of the popular models for working with them suck. check out C. A. R. Hoare's work with CSP and some of the modern languages influenced by, or modeled on, it. my personal favorite's Limbo, but there's a good library for C using the model, and it shows up in places like Occam and Erlang's process model. the right concurrency model just makes a world of difference.
you're still right that they're not magic bullets and they have a host of new issues to consider (although they make a whole host of other ones go away, and can be much friendlier in the right model).
it means that the from the sending terminal initiating the trade message to the database transaction completing is 3ms. the databases are not stored only on disk; if the LSE's is like the NASDAQ/NYSE one i worked on, the volatile versions are stored in RAM and written to disk as a background task. i'd be impressed if this included the actual network latency (rathe than just the server-side work), but most of these systems do require dedicated lines, so it's not entirely crazy.
sounds like a plan!
in this case, "???" is "buy the stock at a much lower price". the trick in the process is that you don't really own the stock you're selling in step one, but you're committing to buy it in step two. so if you've guessed wrong, and the stock goes up, you're out the difference.
WiFi certainly has problems, but it's thought out better than you give it credit for. the issue is just that the objectives of the designers (and many users) are not the same as yours. your complaints are valid, but they aren't an issue of how well thought out the protocol is, they're an issue of making different trade offs. the more options like this you force on the protocol itself, the harder you make it to configure and the more barriers to you (on both client and server side) you impose. just because the designers made different decisions than you might have doesn't mean they didn't spend time on the questions.
my access point is open. i'm well aware of all the security implications. there is no ignorance. are you really not able to tell the difference between someone being permissive and someone being ignorant? or do you just have such a low opinion of people that you assume all ambiguity resolves towards ignorance?
i think we can all agree that since you're using any form of encryption or access restrictions on your WiFi net, someone breaking those to access the net would be stealing (or breaking and entering, or whatever the right term for violating the relevant code is).
the extension you're making, though, that anyone who accesses a WiFi net without permission is "an aresehole", doesn't follow. if you're not using any form of access control, you are issuing explicit invitations in the form of broadcasts from your router. there's absolutely no logical or ethical reason someone shouldn't respond positively to those invitations. if you're foolish enough (or, who knows, generous enough) to issue invitations to use something they only have in limited quantity (as in the case of usage caps from your ISP), that's their own issue/prerogative.
it's even worse (for the prosecution) than this: the conversation between nodes typically starts with the base station advertising that it offers unfettered access. it issues an invitation. when i respond to the invitation, i ask for permission (in the form of a join attempt and subsequent DHCP request), which is then granted and your defense comes into play. the frequent analogy of unlocked front doors just doesn't hold.
that's one Christian view. at least equally common is the view that the Bible is insipired by God, or in some other way transmitted from God to the human authors, but well short of direct dictation. this leaves plenty of room for the content being from God with errors or inconsistencies introduced by human elements.
sure: apple.com. they don't offer anything in the class of the Model M or similar being discussed here, but their current offerings are pretty nice. i'm not as fast or accurate on them, but the bluetooth model is one of the most compact i can find with full-sized keys, and they aren't as loud (i live with a few other folks who i doubt would appreciate the use of a Model M). no windows key, and you get the extra key for meta in whatever system you use.
a little simplistic, but not too bad, actually; a nice first pass. the problem is that it entirely neglects the cost to society of preventing these things: locking ideas away. trademarks do a pretty good job because they have none of that cost.
i will entirely agree that most modern Communists are economically illiterate dolts. of course, the same is true of most modern Capitalists, so i guess we can call it a wash.
that's a bit simplistic. you gloss over the "living by US laws" bit without noting that doing so includes recognition that your property rights are not absolute. you likely pay property tax in return for the privilege of owning land, and the same document which sets forth your right to bear arms equally holds up the right for the state to seize your property.
read the US Constitution. it's very explicit: IP exists to promote the useful arts and sciences. it's a recognition of the fact that, in most economic systems - agrarian, mercantile, industrial - the open market fail to compensate the "mental laborers" for their portion of the contribution to the economy, and thus we get fewer of them than is best for society. patents and copyright grant special privileges to a select group - that of control over use and reproduction of an idea - to allow them to extract additional compensation. these classes of IP are correctives for market failures. and they did very well at it.
but fast-forward 200 years from the Constitution's creation. the market is increasingly focused on the output of these "mental laborers", and now rewards them pretty well. the market pays for ideas. the corrective required is much, much smaller now than it was 200 years ago (i'd argue it's already essentially zero, but it's certainly heading in that direction). what we should be seeing in that situation is the incentive being reduced - either patents and trademarks being weakened, or their terms being reduced. instead, we see the opposite: terms on copyrights are downright insane, both are being strengthened further (criminal charges for copyright infringement? ridiculous), and patents are being granted in more domains with lower standards. meanwhile, this costs society more and more, even when used as directed, and the abuses double that. we're selling off our cultural heritage to rich corps in locked boxes.
so, what to do? well, i have studied this extensively, and have read lots by folks who've studied it more. there are very sound economic answers to this. the specific numbers are up for some debate, of course, but an opening pass would be roll back patent standards about twenty years and cut terms in half, while cutting copyright terms to a decade or less. that's your upper bound of what's economically defensible. the lower bound is zero: there's reasonable (but inconclusive) arguments to say that society would be best served by just scrapping the whole copyright and trademark ideas. especially in an increasingly globalized, increasingly information-based economy.
of course, patents, specifically, had another historical purpose: reduce the reliance on trade secrets. this isn't much of an issue today, but it's a reasonable argument to make that doing away with patents entirely would shift some things back in that direction, which has other costs for society. that, honestly, is the only economic argument i can buy that even makes me consider patents might be worth keeping around (although they should still be cut back significantly).
more seriously, this points out that there's more than just money to consider. authors/artists/whatever frequently want to make sure that the image of their work isn't tarnished by awful knock-offs (no offense; i'm sure your Young Gandlaf story would be pure art!).why's that? you say this like it's obvious, and certainly those with a vested interest in them want you to think it's obvious, but it by no means is. i say this as someone with my name on a pending patent.
the fundamental problem is that patents and copyrights exist explicitly to provide enough incentive for people to do interesting things. we've seen patents get stronger and cover more stuff, while copyright gets stronger and insanely longer. this is exactly backwards. the economic value of each - the incentive they provide - continues to rise, in relative terms. once you understand that, it becomes clear that we should be providing less to offer the same incentive. a copyright for ten years today gets you more money - in contemporary dollars - than a copyright for twenty years a decade ago. terms on both of these should be shrinking.
personally, i'd just dump 'em both. yes, there are some people like yourself who might (you might find it different when actually in that position) reduce their artistic output, and yes, that is a real cost to society. but i think that cost is dwarfed, several times over, by the costs of abuse of the patent and copyright systems. most photographers are still going to make about the same money (do you really think there's a big market in resale of wedding photos?), because they make their money on the product, not the reproduction or use rights.
note that this isn't about being anti-IP at all. for one thing, i think trademarks are handled pretty well (sure, there's some abuses, but the system's not bad) and trade secrets get pretty good treatment in law (i think they might be a little forgiving of disclosure, but that's not fundamental). this is strictly economic. copyright and trademark are government-granted artificial monopolies on reproduction and use rights. they exist only to provide enough incentive to motivate people to do interesting things. as the "interesting things" become more and more valuable, the required incentive drops. i believe we're pretty darn close to zero now, if we're not there already. the Constitution gets this right: the legislature should have the power to set the terms appropriately. it's just that the legislature's botching it because they're bought.
this was already posted in the "sibling thread" i mentioned earlier; my response there. in short, it doesn't say what you want it to, and the law the author cites explicitly states that the board is obligated to look after "the interests of the corporation and of the shareholders", but in no way states that those interests need to be only the pursuit of the highest share price (let alone in any particular timeframe). board liability has never been at issue here; what's at issue is whether companies and shareholders can have interests other than just the share price. nobody's shown anything with weight of law that says otherwise.
you've re-stated your position without any further evidence. that doesn't make it more true.
board members and executive management are sued all the time, sure; sometimes those suits even get somewhere. but they're never for "not doing everything you can to pump the stock price". they're for specific mismanagement and failure to act in the shareholder's stated interests. which, again, generally include, but need not be limited to, making money.
you can see the problem in your reasoning here - relying on the liability under law - by noting that boards and management of non-profits are under the same liability: to act on the shareholder's stated interests.
companies can certainly go more than three years without a profit, although they do have to do extra work to retain their incorporated status. it's not nearly as automatic as you think, or there's a lot of tech startups and the like who'd be in big trouble.
please provide a citation to the SEC regulation you're referring to, or any other similar text with legal or regulatory weight. you're asserting that something is illegal and prohibited; i'm asserting that there's no such prohibition. the obligation is on you; i can't prove the absence without just pointing you at the entire SEC rule book and amended IRS code.
see your sibling thread. turns out that it's simply not true that corporations, public or not, must exist solely to make money. they exist to serve the stated interests of their shareholders; interests which often include, but are never (in any case i'm aware of) limited to, making money. there's simply no legal basis for the idea that companies must exist solely to maximize shareholder value.
thankfully you, unlike your sibling, recognize that even if it were true, Apple could still do it as essentially a PR move.