No solution is perfect, and every change will make winners and losers. That's life. I fail to see why we should prop up a badly malfunctioning IP system just so ARM can keep making money.
Perhaps there should be greater incentivization for companies that are directly involved in making products based on patents, or at least on companies that have a reasonably large interest in companies that do produce products based on patents. Since we've all decided that Intellectual Property is Real Property, we've essentially allowed companies to use patents like they would apartment buildings, if we're not going to redefine what constitutes property, then at least there should, say, tax incentives for companies that patent and then produce products, are take ownership stakes in companies that do produce products based on patents. Or, we could just simply set the tax rate extremely high on licensing income, and then if you can demonstrate that you are in any substantial way responsible for making products based on patents you hold, then you get a break on those taxes. So let's say a company that makes its money purely from acquiring and licensing patents has to pay 95% of said income in taxes, but where they actually are involved in production that uses said patents they get an increasingly greater cut up to what we would currently consider normal corporate rates, so that companies like Apple (though I have my own issues with their using patents to bludgeon, but at least they do actually manufacture products based on their portfolios) are not penalized. I think you could make it very fine-grained, based upon each patent, so that there is no incentive to patent lots of things and then strategically use patents that one has no intention of making products from to attack competitors.
It wouldn't be a perfect solution, and still leaves open questionable patent suits like Apples', but perhaps we might also look at rules to require that licensing fees plus some level of interest be returned to the licensees, thus making it far riskier for a company to use dubious patents slipped past overworked examiners to bludgeon or force licensing fees from competitors. How willing would Microsoft be to go after Android manufacturers if there was a law on the books that would require them to return those fees plus interest if the patents got overturned?
There is a semi-modern example of an Executive trying to run things without the co-operation of the legislative branch. That was good ol' Charles I who for eleven years ran England on the little revenue he had a right to collect directly. It was a catastrophe. The lesson is rather clear from that. The Executive may have very wide powers, but without control of the purse strings, they mean as much as the legislative branch decides they mean.
Most of that authority derives from laws passed by Congress. If you had a president who pissed enough Congressmen off (and I think Paul is just such a man), they'd forget the team jerseys they're wearing and go after the Executive in a big way. Congress controls the money, and there is one universal truth above all others, that he that controls the keys to the treasury controls everything.
A Ron Paul presidency would soon devolve into a deadlock. We wouldn't be dealing with, say, a Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Boama who could still at least negotiate with Congress, you'd be dealing with a man who treats Libertarianism like a religion, who at least plays the part of the unbending ideologue. Simply put, Paul is making promises he cannot hope to keep. Congress won't let him move back to the gold standard. Congress won't let him gut the Federal government. Even if these things were good decisions (which, at least in the way Paul promotes, they're not), these things are not a President's to make. In fact, the very fact that Paul makes these kinds of commitments suggests that his whole constitutionalist approach is just smoke and mirrors.
He's a kook because, while he makes one or two good points, by and large he's a historical and economic ignoramus, or more likely just a snake-oil dealer selling a suite of easy solutions that would neither be easy or solutions.
Imagine for the briefest moment if Ron Paul got elected. It's certainly not going to be the case that Congress is going to be filled with enough like-minded people that would be willing to go along with him, and so he would have at best very limited capacity to make good on any of his promises, and more likely would soon piss off Congress, regardless of party affiliation, and would find himself a very lonely man in the Oval Office as 2/3s majorities killed his vetoes and refused to co-operate with any of his plans.
Remember this, though sometimes it's hard to tell these days, a President is only as strong as Congress allows him to be.
The law is nothing. Everything you thought you knew about human cultural transmission means nothing. We are now living in a world constructed completely of lawyers, by lawyers and for lawyers. What a sad, pathetic, worthless place we've made for ourselves, and for what? So some fucking cunt can harass fellow photographers over a fucking picture most people won't even see?
My goodness, but you do go a long ways to trying to rationalize your bigotry. At the end of the day what counts is what the wider society says, and in the West, the objections to gay marriage are falling away. There are far more important things to worry about than whether same-sex couples get to call their union a marriage or not. America was founded on principles of equality and secularism, and not on maintaining in perpetuity your biases. From the state's perspective, marriage is a civil contract, period. If you don't like gay marriage, don't attend a church that conducts them.
At any rate, what the state recognizes is a civil marriage. If you don't want to have a civil gay marriage, then don't. It's just a word, not a magic spell.
What you really want, as so many homophobes do, is for gays not to irritate you. In that respect, you have a lot in common with fence-sitters about racism fifty years ago. Sure, you don't mind the idea of blacks having equal rights, so long as you don't have to see none of them niggers in your neighborhood.
Not changing the subject at all, but rather inquiring as to why we pick on one group of thieves in the world of entertainment, and yet not going after another. For that matter, why is it that guys who pirate Hollywood movies are hunted down like dogs, but just about every producer in Tinseltown isn't sitting behind bars for the "creative" accounting that would most certainly see accountants and executives in any other industry flung into deep dark pits.
It strikes me that the media conglomerates want it both ways. They want the freedom of robbing artists and smaller investors blind, but suddenly want to stand on principle because some stupid asshole downloaded a rip of a DVD. It's like a crack dealer turning in one of his customers because the guy didn't pay, and the police happily doing so, without consequence to the crack dealer.
Does that include the Universal Musical Group who have broken contracts, put up hundreds of MP3s on download services without consent of the artists and then have gone out of their way to obfuscate the revenue collected?
You could check out the Umayyads that ran Spain. During their time in power, Spain was the most advanced state in Western Europe; and Jews were shown far more tolerance than in almost anywhere in Christendom. As well, check out medieval Baghdad, which was one of the great centers of learning and scholarship in the Medieval world, up until the Mongols burned it to the ground, with the loss of thousands of Classical and High Muslim volumes.
Modern Islamism, by and large, is a response to the failure of the Ottoman Empire and the fallout from that (which, one way or the other, the Middle East is still going through). The first seriously effective hard core conservative Islamist sect was the Wahabis, who were striking out against what was viewed in the Arabian peninsula as the decadent ways of the Ottoman Empire.
I think the Orthodox churches might have a thing or two to say about your claim. Some of the Eastern churches have demonstrable roots as old as the Bishopric of Rome.
This is even worse than a non sequitur. It's assuming a conclusion based on... well, nothing really. The laws of nature may in fact be as prescriptive as you state, but they may in fact not be. You're just spouting gobbley gook here, a word salad. Your own argument still doesn't explain why Dualism would create any different end result.
That there are basic laws of nature does not mean that every end result can be predicted. At a very core level, there is a level of unpredictability and chaos.
The Problem of Evil strikes me as one that has never really been answered. When you boil down even the most sophisticated theological arguments, it either comes out as sophistry or handwaving (ie. that's the way God wants it).
I don't think anyone has settled the issue as to whether free will and a material universe is incompatible. Besides, how does belief in God create free will at all? Sounds suspiciously like non sequitur to me.
The problem is that Islamic civilization was not always as you describe, nor is it even now. At one time, many Islamic societies were far more advanced and open than their Western European counterparts. What you're saying makes about as much sense as condemning Christianity based on what you find wrong in Catholicism.
The debate is simple. Why is it exactly that you want to tell consenting adults what kind of relationship they can possibly have? Why is it that you feel you have the right or wisdom to poke your nose in other peoples' business? It's supposed to be a free country, which means you get to believe what you want to believe, but you don't get an automatic veto on how other people choose to live.
And what exactly is the Canadian government going to do? Fart in Iran's general direction? This is a country that is notorious for not giving a damn what outside countries think; it is capricious to the extreme.
The stupid bugger should never have gone back, period. Frankly, if I got free of a place like Iran, I'd never look back, nor, do I suspect, would my relatives there expect me to.
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No solution is perfect, and every change will make winners and losers. That's life. I fail to see why we should prop up a badly malfunctioning IP system just so ARM can keep making money.
Perhaps there should be greater incentivization for companies that are directly involved in making products based on patents, or at least on companies that have a reasonably large interest in companies that do produce products based on patents. Since we've all decided that Intellectual Property is Real Property, we've essentially allowed companies to use patents like they would apartment buildings, if we're not going to redefine what constitutes property, then at least there should, say, tax incentives for companies that patent and then produce products, are take ownership stakes in companies that do produce products based on patents. Or, we could just simply set the tax rate extremely high on licensing income, and then if you can demonstrate that you are in any substantial way responsible for making products based on patents you hold, then you get a break on those taxes. So let's say a company that makes its money purely from acquiring and licensing patents has to pay 95% of said income in taxes, but where they actually are involved in production that uses said patents they get an increasingly greater cut up to what we would currently consider normal corporate rates, so that companies like Apple (though I have my own issues with their using patents to bludgeon, but at least they do actually manufacture products based on their portfolios) are not penalized. I think you could make it very fine-grained, based upon each patent, so that there is no incentive to patent lots of things and then strategically use patents that one has no intention of making products from to attack competitors.
It wouldn't be a perfect solution, and still leaves open questionable patent suits like Apples', but perhaps we might also look at rules to require that licensing fees plus some level of interest be returned to the licensees, thus making it far riskier for a company to use dubious patents slipped past overworked examiners to bludgeon or force licensing fees from competitors. How willing would Microsoft be to go after Android manufacturers if there was a law on the books that would require them to return those fees plus interest if the patents got overturned?
No kidding. This is just about the most ludicrous claim ever. Come on /. editors. You can do better than to let such an absurd article through.
There is a semi-modern example of an Executive trying to run things without the co-operation of the legislative branch. That was good ol' Charles I who for eleven years ran England on the little revenue he had a right to collect directly. It was a catastrophe. The lesson is rather clear from that. The Executive may have very wide powers, but without control of the purse strings, they mean as much as the legislative branch decides they mean.
Most of that authority derives from laws passed by Congress. If you had a president who pissed enough Congressmen off (and I think Paul is just such a man), they'd forget the team jerseys they're wearing and go after the Executive in a big way. Congress controls the money, and there is one universal truth above all others, that he that controls the keys to the treasury controls everything.
A Ron Paul presidency would soon devolve into a deadlock. We wouldn't be dealing with, say, a Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Boama who could still at least negotiate with Congress, you'd be dealing with a man who treats Libertarianism like a religion, who at least plays the part of the unbending ideologue. Simply put, Paul is making promises he cannot hope to keep. Congress won't let him move back to the gold standard. Congress won't let him gut the Federal government. Even if these things were good decisions (which, at least in the way Paul promotes, they're not), these things are not a President's to make. In fact, the very fact that Paul makes these kinds of commitments suggests that his whole constitutionalist approach is just smoke and mirrors.
I'll wager they are his nuclear option. If the worst happens and he ends up being hauled off to the US, the documents will be released.
He's a kook because, while he makes one or two good points, by and large he's a historical and economic ignoramus, or more likely just a snake-oil dealer selling a suite of easy solutions that would neither be easy or solutions.
Imagine for the briefest moment if Ron Paul got elected. It's certainly not going to be the case that Congress is going to be filled with enough like-minded people that would be willing to go along with him, and so he would have at best very limited capacity to make good on any of his promises, and more likely would soon piss off Congress, regardless of party affiliation, and would find himself a very lonely man in the Oval Office as 2/3s majorities killed his vetoes and refused to co-operate with any of his plans.
Remember this, though sometimes it's hard to tell these days, a President is only as strong as Congress allows him to be.
The law is nothing. Everything you thought you knew about human cultural transmission means nothing. We are now living in a world constructed completely of lawyers, by lawyers and for lawyers. What a sad, pathetic, worthless place we've made for ourselves, and for what? So some fucking cunt can harass fellow photographers over a fucking picture most people won't even see?
My goodness, but you do go a long ways to trying to rationalize your bigotry. At the end of the day what counts is what the wider society says, and in the West, the objections to gay marriage are falling away. There are far more important things to worry about than whether same-sex couples get to call their union a marriage or not. America was founded on principles of equality and secularism, and not on maintaining in perpetuity your biases. From the state's perspective, marriage is a civil contract, period. If you don't like gay marriage, don't attend a church that conducts them.
I'm sorry. What did Apple develop that didn't exist before?
Translation: The more money they get to try bully competition with spurious but time-consuming lawsuits.
Not everyone views it as a denigration.
At any rate, what the state recognizes is a civil marriage. If you don't want to have a civil gay marriage, then don't. It's just a word, not a magic spell.
What you really want, as so many homophobes do, is for gays not to irritate you. In that respect, you have a lot in common with fence-sitters about racism fifty years ago. Sure, you don't mind the idea of blacks having equal rights, so long as you don't have to see none of them niggers in your neighborhood.
Not changing the subject at all, but rather inquiring as to why we pick on one group of thieves in the world of entertainment, and yet not going after another. For that matter, why is it that guys who pirate Hollywood movies are hunted down like dogs, but just about every producer in Tinseltown isn't sitting behind bars for the "creative" accounting that would most certainly see accountants and executives in any other industry flung into deep dark pits.
It strikes me that the media conglomerates want it both ways. They want the freedom of robbing artists and smaller investors blind, but suddenly want to stand on principle because some stupid asshole downloaded a rip of a DVD. It's like a crack dealer turning in one of his customers because the guy didn't pay, and the police happily doing so, without consequence to the crack dealer.
Does that include the Universal Musical Group who have broken contracts, put up hundreds of MP3s on download services without consent of the artists and then have gone out of their way to obfuscate the revenue collected?
You could check out the Umayyads that ran Spain. During their time in power, Spain was the most advanced state in Western Europe; and Jews were shown far more tolerance than in almost anywhere in Christendom. As well, check out medieval Baghdad, which was one of the great centers of learning and scholarship in the Medieval world, up until the Mongols burned it to the ground, with the loss of thousands of Classical and High Muslim volumes.
Modern Islamism, by and large, is a response to the failure of the Ottoman Empire and the fallout from that (which, one way or the other, the Middle East is still going through). The first seriously effective hard core conservative Islamist sect was the Wahabis, who were striking out against what was viewed in the Arabian peninsula as the decadent ways of the Ottoman Empire.
I think the Orthodox churches might have a thing or two to say about your claim. Some of the Eastern churches have demonstrable roots as old as the Bishopric of Rome.
This is even worse than a non sequitur. It's assuming a conclusion based on... well, nothing really. The laws of nature may in fact be as prescriptive as you state, but they may in fact not be. You're just spouting gobbley gook here, a word salad. Your own argument still doesn't explain why Dualism would create any different end result.
That there are basic laws of nature does not mean that every end result can be predicted. At a very core level, there is a level of unpredictability and chaos.
In other words, you go for option B, "that's the way God wants it."
The Problem of Evil strikes me as one that has never really been answered. When you boil down even the most sophisticated theological arguments, it either comes out as sophistry or handwaving (ie. that's the way God wants it).
I don't think anyone has settled the issue as to whether free will and a material universe is incompatible. Besides, how does belief in God create free will at all? Sounds suspiciously like non sequitur to me.
An amazing people who are stark raving terrified of a guy saying he doesn't believe in God.
The problem is that Islamic civilization was not always as you describe, nor is it even now. At one time, many Islamic societies were far more advanced and open than their Western European counterparts. What you're saying makes about as much sense as condemning Christianity based on what you find wrong in Catholicism.
The debate is simple. Why is it exactly that you want to tell consenting adults what kind of relationship they can possibly have? Why is it that you feel you have the right or wisdom to poke your nose in other peoples' business? It's supposed to be a free country, which means you get to believe what you want to believe, but you don't get an automatic veto on how other people choose to live.
And what exactly is the Canadian government going to do? Fart in Iran's general direction? This is a country that is notorious for not giving a damn what outside countries think; it is capricious to the extreme.
The stupid bugger should never have gone back, period. Frankly, if I got free of a place like Iran, I'd never look back, nor, do I suspect, would my relatives there expect me to.
As bad as they are, I don't recall that anyone would be put to death because they wrote software to, say, share copyrighted material.
A sense of perspective goes a long way.