Right click Start Menu -> Computer Management -> Services -> Windows Update -> Stop and Disable
Not exactly black magic of Windows administration, albeit well beyond most users. Just pointing out administrating a computer should enable you to do this.
For the sake of my education, could you explain to me how many people are in your country, how many of those people have high speed internet at home, how many have a phone number of their own (not shared by their household), and how many have an income?
I think you'll find an interesting disparity between the answers to these questions and your assumptions about what is "essential" to "modern life." Often times hype and trends do not equal necessity. Many people don't have a car, long thought to be required for getting a good job, or own a suit, or have a college degree, or any of the other things our silly media outlets proclaim to "know" are necessary from their bubble.
Just two weeks past I met a woman who did not have a debit card. She looked as happy as anyone else working at the company I had to write a check to. Perhaps you should go meet people like them and explain to them why their adult life is missing things essential to the happiness and prosperity you think they don't have.
My sister-in-law does this for her family because the alternative is a 1.5 mbit DSL connection. That's it. She lives in a city of 85,000 surrounded by similar population density level cities, and somehow they just never got any ISPs attention in huge swaths of the city.
This is not even that uncommon a scenario in residential Salt Lake City, just north of me. It's not that American users are poorly evaluating things, it's that American internet sucks.
I'm more a fan of Thorium as a bandwagon than other kinds, but really you can do more with current fuels than we tend to, reducing the waste significantly (though not saving much for weapons). Thorium seems to have less of those issues, just needs to be shown in practice.
Seriously though, I would love to have a tiny thorium reactor in my neighborhood. Power all our electric vehicles and whatever else. Just don't ask me to replace my gas cooking range.
What kind of patent troll does IBM make? Is this a new business model for them? Will they start going after small companies and putting them out of business, or what small token reason would it take for this to become a possibility?
Regardless of the details, the responsibility is more than likely not on the librarians' shoulders. Librarians are there to help you get to information and organize your own. They are not there to babysit your internet surfing or even monitor what it is you're viewing. The ISP (usually city run) should be filtering that sort of thing, and if anyone SHOULD be held responsible with regards to punishment, it should be the user. They know the rules, I'd hope, and even if not, public courtesy is simply not to bring that into the public viewpoint. It's not polite to moon somebody either, and they'd hold you responsible if you did that in a library, not the librarian.
Re:Pokemon Ripoff of Magic
on
Power Up
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You're not differentiating. Pokemon the Video Game and Cartoon series has influential marks on America all over, especially on younger children. Pokemon the CARD game was actually developed BY Wizards of the Coast, the same people that did Magic: The Gathering. It was a move to make money. Businesses tend to do that. So really, Pokemon DID influence America (Yu-Gi-Oh games, anyone?).
This doesn't even take into account that Square was originally a company in Japan that started by making a COLLECTIBLE CARD GAME in the early 20th century. Magic: The Gathering can't really compete with that one. Though honestly, the two don't seem to be related.
UTOPIA is pretty much what you talked about, except it wasn't the government that bought the equipment, it was a private company on bonds. It's community owned, essentially, so nobody controls the hard wire or other equipment.
It's an interesting model. While there are some other small differences, it's still a good idea either way. I can happily say it's been a joy to work with the fiber guys and see them have their bugs they're working out to make this all work. Now if we can apply the same principles to other things, like DRM or Patent controls, we could make some progress against Corporate Bigotry. Hehe, Open Source ISPs are just an awesome concept, no?
No, it's not the same, and there's a problem with your business ideology.
First, if you have a reasonable price, people will pay it, simply because sneaking in the back is a hassle and a risk. It's merely a matter of wether or not the sneaker thinks it's worth it. Have a reasonable price, one that more people are willing to pay, and you have less people sneaking. You will always have the sneakers, ALWAYS, but those would never have paid anyway. If you run your prices up, all you do is increase sneaking.
But this is all different anyway. First of all, the publisher has already made the majority of their money. They sell it to the stores. If you steal a game instead of buying it, you rob the STORE of a sale, if anything. Of course, the profit margin corporate storefronts have on these games is actually quite high, so even walking in and stealing a physical piece of merchandise every day for a month doesn't really hurt them. Do that to an independent shop, and you're REALLY hurting them, as they don't get the price break on the actual game.
A better analogy is to have your museum layout for sale, and several museums buy the layout and THEY charge the admission. You have to imagine a price of admission where you can't really have much variance, as the game industry doesn't really allow a price manipulation of more than maybe 5 bucks. (Keep in mind, I'm simplifying the supply chain from developer to retail by quite a bit. There's numerous contracts for product going back and forth.) Now imagine there's one museum that isn't as well kept and is in a shady part of town, and they run a museum for free, letting everyone see their copy of the layout (someone usually has to have a legit copy to steal, so that sale isn't lost to you, the developer).
Again, there's still problems with this analogy, but it's much closer now. And please, anyone who wants to throw in "NO! The stores have very little markup for the price they pay for the games!" just sit and think about that statement for a moment. If there's no markup, how do they make money? How do they pay their employees and their elecric bill and their rent? I'll tell you: because the store "buys" the game from their distribution center. So when you say store price is only a few cents below retail, you're right, but that's not the actual cost to the company. That's why places like Gamestop can afford to give you a discount card for such a nominal fee. They'll make the money back on the volume you purchase, on average. Just think before you pan out excuses from a corporate entity who's SOLE PURPOSE is to make money off of video games.
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
No, not really. You'd have less interested parties in your stolen warez. Of course, this all depends on the price. If the movies are going to be $20 a pop, then yes, it will just continue to get pirated. If they were only $5, most (read: all but the cheap) people would rather own a legit copy than a pirated DVD rip. Think about it this way:
If you could get an entire album of music for $5 that you had full rights to (i.e. able to play it on any device you owned and able to make a backup as well), it has been proven time and time again that people are more willing to pay for something rather than steal it (which nobody can really argue, downloading albums without permission is illegal, whether moral or not).
It should be interesting to see what price structure this thing will have, as that's about the only thing that will make it worth anyone's while. Otherwise, it will just aid piracy. As Eisner said in one of his few moments of wisdom, Price and availability are the only real combatants to piracy. The question here is whether it will be a step in the right direction, not whether it will make piracy easier. Piracy is already far from difficult.
I had a Business Communications course in college about a year ago. It was just a 100 level course, and something I had thought might include references to proper layouts to important communique. I was wrong. It was a grammar nazi fest set out by the professor who had 2 PHDs in ENGLISH!
It was the worst 2 weeks of my life (I dropped the class, quickly). It was someof the most nitpicky rules and regulations to writing that I've ever seen, and I've watched/. for a while now. In the end of the day, though, I learned a powerful lesson:
Despite his 2 PHDs and possibly large paycheck, I tend to get more done in a day with more people than he does by spreading his "knowledge" of the English language. Even though he's on at least 3 committees that decide how things are presented to city councils and what not, I have learned there's a balance between expecting perfection in grammar, and getting things communicated.
Short Version: Grammar matters, but only to a point. If the small problems in your packaging are that important to the person you're communicating to, they probably won't be helping you get much done in the near future anyway.
This totally explains why I haven't been able to find many Athlon64 Mobile based laptops. I hope this gives me some more options other than the Acer Ferrari...
So eventually, the companies off-shoring collapse with the economy (since they're one and the same) and we have another Great Depression. Then without a company to employ them in America, India and other off-shoring countries are left to either remain unemployed, or start ventures of their own in order to keep their economies going.
So this ends up being a bad move for the US, and most likely a bad move for the off-shoring target countries as well. Who wins? Any countries not involved at the end of the day.
I can see why this is so attractive to corporations...
Bush has been quite accurately compared to a monkey in mental capacity many times. You want to trust this man to appoint Supreme Court Judges? Hell, why don't we just hand the appointments to AOL users or something.
There are two problems with your stance. First, you're comparing apples and oranges, as the original poster said. Having your rights squandered and fighting back is not the same as having lives lost and having someone else come in and fight the battle for you. In the DRM world, there is no "wonderful USA super-power" to come in and save use from the oppressive hollywood, so the comparison to Iraq is a moot point.
Second, I can find anyone to justify any cause. If you'd like me to justify murdering babies in their sleep, as extreme as this example may be, I can find a group that will hail to my cause and say "Can you make their pain go away?" It simply has no wait in the facts of the matter. Iraq should fight their own battles or ask us to help. They did not, and they did not (except, of course, those few people who the government paraded as their justifications after the fact). History says that if Iraq was that bad off, the people would have revolted. Social Contract, etc, etc. This is the SAME with Hollywood's "war" on us. They have neglected to fulfill our requirements on the social contract end of things. So we take music and movies and other such things in a medium and price structure that we agree with.
To put it simply, just like Iraq SHOULD have been working between government and people, the **AA and other such organizations should be WORKING with consumers to rectify the changes in the social contract that need to take place to facilitate the digital age. Price and availability. Price and availability.
Yes, but he's not emphatic enough. This really comes across as a well-laid-out college project, but honestly doesn't make the easy transition to economic application
The difference is that he is getting us excited about the possibilities, and what needs to be done in the business sense (perhaps after his thesis project is done) is to get us, and more importantly, investors, excited about the applications.
For instance, saying "this would be nice to seperate screens for several people" is a thought provoking concept, but doesn't make me think I'd like to buy one. saying that this would allow my computers to share one small monitor instead of several large ones, reducing costs and space, is a valuable application of that concept.
Really my hat's off to the guy. If I was an investor, I'd love to see where it goes. Since I'm not, and he hasn't presented a personal viable solution to any of my own problems, it's just an interesting idea that I never expect to see.
I'd personally like to see projectile weapons mixed into my cell phones. It's annoying to have to carry a cell phone and a hefty hand gun. I'd rather have it all in one, you know? I'm a man of convenience.
Are you serious? Do you even know what you are talking about? Here, let's get back to the basic points at hand that interfere with what you're thinking. (Note that if you read anything about Utopia virtually anywhere it's been marketed, including it's own website, you'd know most of these things.)
- Utopia is owned by the community, not the government, much in the same way that your Chamber of Commerce (in most cases) is funded by the community, not the government.
- Utopia itself is not censoring ANY traffice, whatever kind it may be, regardless of ports, direction, or content. If anyone does, it will be the service providers, but one does, go to a different one. MStar doesn't so far, and hasn't for 5 months it's been doing this.
- Utah already passed a law requiring ISPs to provide a filter for content to customers that want it. They won't go so far as to deny it to all citizens (that would be unconstitutional, you know), but the availability is there to those that believe in that sort of thing. This, again, was covered on/. a while ago.
- Lastly, and more importantly than your FUD may take into consideration, Utopia is already paid for, already being built, and already successfully being used by 100s of people just in Orem alone. I know the support team at MStar, and while Utopia is having it's growing pains, it's well on it's way.
Seriously, go read, do your homework. You'll see it's doing awesome. It's projections have been made by dozens of people, many of whom are still paranoid about financial backlash for this, but still give it a sound blessing as far as an investment goes. The future is here, and the less worriers we have about it, the faster I can start innovating with my Datacenter grade connection in my home.
Ok, this is just silly. Slashdot has covered Utopia on numerous occasions, which aims to do just this across ALL of Utah. I live in Orem and I can attest, it's happening. It's just a matter of waiting for it. 100mbits up and down for cheaper than I'm paying for cable is making me a bit antsy. *sigh*
Or instead of saying, "please ignore this entire post because I don't like it's poster," you could clarify what you think he posted that's so incorrect. Heck, maybe you could sum up some of the pieces of information that are lacking from his post, like what 0.7 is all about (in a nutshell). At the very least, your post is quite opposite the ideals of the Freenet project, being that free speech is absolute, and good, and if you don't want something to be seen/read/heard, then provide something better.
Trend Micro's PC-Cillin has been doing this for about a year now, and has detected spyware (limited) for a couple years. I realize that scanning for spyware and viruses are quite different processes, but honestly, it wasn't that much of a stretch for Symantec to at least keep up with what their competitors are doing.
For those of you keeping tabs on the corporate side of things, Office Scan does spyware as well now and that's something I don't think Symantec even has plans for on their corporate suites.
Kinda makes me wonder why people think Symantec is still so great when they've been falling behind the underdogs for the last several years. Remind you of Intel, anyone?
Actually, I had thought about this a bit when designing my HTPC/PVR. If one person can build their own thing or write their own software that falls under a patent, and be totally legal in doing so, wouldn't it be justifiable to say that using an open source piece of software is much the same? The damages incurred to the company with the patent are the same, as they didn't get a sale, but nobody has "stolen" that sale, from a legal standpoint, because it's simply someone else benefitting from freely available work. For instance, if I build my friend a HTPC/PVR, TiVo can't sue either of us (if it held a patent for such a thing). If I build all of my friends HTPC/PVRs and they all pay me and I profit, I still am in legal standing.
I would think that Open Source could be the same thing on a much larger scale, even between companies, because no profit is being made. In instances like MySQL dual licensing, I don't know how well it would work, but for free software, I don't see how it would be an issue.
Specifically:
Right click Start Menu -> Computer Management -> Services -> Windows Update -> Stop and Disable
Not exactly black magic of Windows administration, albeit well beyond most users. Just pointing out administrating a computer should enable you to do this.
For the sake of my education, could you explain to me how many people are in your country, how many of those people have high speed internet at home, how many have a phone number of their own (not shared by their household), and how many have an income?
I think you'll find an interesting disparity between the answers to these questions and your assumptions about what is "essential" to "modern life." Often times hype and trends do not equal necessity. Many people don't have a car, long thought to be required for getting a good job, or own a suit, or have a college degree, or any of the other things our silly media outlets proclaim to "know" are necessary from their bubble.
Just two weeks past I met a woman who did not have a debit card. She looked as happy as anyone else working at the company I had to write a check to. Perhaps you should go meet people like them and explain to them why their adult life is missing things essential to the happiness and prosperity you think they don't have.
My sister-in-law does this for her family because the alternative is a 1.5 mbit DSL connection. That's it. She lives in a city of 85,000 surrounded by similar population density level cities, and somehow they just never got any ISPs attention in huge swaths of the city.
This is not even that uncommon a scenario in residential Salt Lake City, just north of me. It's not that American users are poorly evaluating things, it's that American internet sucks.
I'm more a fan of Thorium as a bandwagon than other kinds, but really you can do more with current fuels than we tend to, reducing the waste significantly (though not saving much for weapons). Thorium seems to have less of those issues, just needs to be shown in practice.
Seriously though, I would love to have a tiny thorium reactor in my neighborhood. Power all our electric vehicles and whatever else. Just don't ask me to replace my gas cooking range.
What kind of patent troll does IBM make? Is this a new business model for them? Will they start going after small companies and putting them out of business, or what small token reason would it take for this to become a possibility?
Regardless of the details, the responsibility is more than likely not on the librarians' shoulders. Librarians are there to help you get to information and organize your own. They are not there to babysit your internet surfing or even monitor what it is you're viewing. The ISP (usually city run) should be filtering that sort of thing, and if anyone SHOULD be held responsible with regards to punishment, it should be the user. They know the rules, I'd hope, and even if not, public courtesy is simply not to bring that into the public viewpoint. It's not polite to moon somebody either, and they'd hold you responsible if you did that in a library, not the librarian.
You're not differentiating. Pokemon the Video Game and Cartoon series has influential marks on America all over, especially on younger children. Pokemon the CARD game was actually developed BY Wizards of the Coast, the same people that did Magic: The Gathering. It was a move to make money. Businesses tend to do that. So really, Pokemon DID influence America (Yu-Gi-Oh games, anyone?).
This doesn't even take into account that Square was originally a company in Japan that started by making a COLLECTIBLE CARD GAME in the early 20th century. Magic: The Gathering can't really compete with that one. Though honestly, the two don't seem to be related.
And if the weren't going for this, /. just handed them a nice strategy that their budget could quite possibly pull off.
Either way, we lose =c(
I guess this is still news....
"Read it again, for the first time"
UTOPIA is pretty much what you talked about, except it wasn't the government that bought the equipment, it was a private company on bonds. It's community owned, essentially, so nobody controls the hard wire or other equipment.
It's an interesting model. While there are some other small differences, it's still a good idea either way. I can happily say it's been a joy to work with the fiber guys and see them have their bugs they're working out to make this all work. Now if we can apply the same principles to other things, like DRM or Patent controls, we could make some progress against Corporate Bigotry. Hehe, Open Source ISPs are just an awesome concept, no?
No, it's not the same, and there's a problem with your business ideology.
First, if you have a reasonable price, people will pay it, simply because sneaking in the back is a hassle and a risk. It's merely a matter of wether or not the sneaker thinks it's worth it. Have a reasonable price, one that more people are willing to pay, and you have less people sneaking. You will always have the sneakers, ALWAYS, but those would never have paid anyway. If you run your prices up, all you do is increase sneaking.
But this is all different anyway. First of all, the publisher has already made the majority of their money. They sell it to the stores. If you steal a game instead of buying it, you rob the STORE of a sale, if anything. Of course, the profit margin corporate storefronts have on these games is actually quite high, so even walking in and stealing a physical piece of merchandise every day for a month doesn't really hurt them. Do that to an independent shop, and you're REALLY hurting them, as they don't get the price break on the actual game.
A better analogy is to have your museum layout for sale, and several museums buy the layout and THEY charge the admission. You have to imagine a price of admission where you can't really have much variance, as the game industry doesn't really allow a price manipulation of more than maybe 5 bucks. (Keep in mind, I'm simplifying the supply chain from developer to retail by quite a bit. There's numerous contracts for product going back and forth.) Now imagine there's one museum that isn't as well kept and is in a shady part of town, and they run a museum for free, letting everyone see their copy of the layout (someone usually has to have a legit copy to steal, so that sale isn't lost to you, the developer).
Again, there's still problems with this analogy, but it's much closer now. And please, anyone who wants to throw in "NO! The stores have very little markup for the price they pay for the games!" just sit and think about that statement for a moment. If there's no markup, how do they make money? How do they pay their employees and their elecric bill and their rent? I'll tell you: because the store "buys" the game from their distribution center. So when you say store price is only a few cents below retail, you're right, but that's not the actual cost to the company. That's why places like Gamestop can afford to give you a discount card for such a nominal fee. They'll make the money back on the volume you purchase, on average. Just think before you pan out excuses from a corporate entity who's SOLE PURPOSE is to make money off of video games.
HA! Just Interesting. How strange is it that this little off-topic thread has become an instant karma boost for all involved?
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
No, not really. You'd have less interested parties in your stolen warez. Of course, this all depends on the price. If the movies are going to be $20 a pop, then yes, it will just continue to get pirated. If they were only $5, most (read: all but the cheap) people would rather own a legit copy than a pirated DVD rip. Think about it this way:
If you could get an entire album of music for $5 that you had full rights to (i.e. able to play it on any device you owned and able to make a backup as well), it has been proven time and time again that people are more willing to pay for something rather than steal it (which nobody can really argue, downloading albums without permission is illegal, whether moral or not).
It should be interesting to see what price structure this thing will have, as that's about the only thing that will make it worth anyone's while. Otherwise, it will just aid piracy. As Eisner said in one of his few moments of wisdom, Price and availability are the only real combatants to piracy. The question here is whether it will be a step in the right direction, not whether it will make piracy easier. Piracy is already far from difficult.
A bit different. Here's why:
I had a Business Communications course in college about a year ago. It was just a 100 level course, and something I had thought might include references to proper layouts to important communique. I was wrong. It was a grammar nazi fest set out by the professor who had 2 PHDs in ENGLISH!
It was the worst 2 weeks of my life (I dropped the class, quickly). It was someof the most nitpicky rules and regulations to writing that I've ever seen, and I've watched /. for a while now. In the end of the day, though, I learned a powerful lesson:
Despite his 2 PHDs and possibly large paycheck, I tend to get more done in a day with more people than he does by spreading his "knowledge" of the English language. Even though he's on at least 3 committees that decide how things are presented to city councils and what not, I have learned there's a balance between expecting perfection in grammar, and getting things communicated.
Short Version: Grammar matters, but only to a point. If the small problems in your packaging are that important to the person you're communicating to, they probably won't be helping you get much done in the near future anyway.
This totally explains why I haven't been able to find many Athlon64 Mobile based laptops. I hope this gives me some more options other than the Acer Ferrari...
So eventually, the companies off-shoring collapse with the economy (since they're one and the same) and we have another Great Depression. Then without a company to employ them in America, India and other off-shoring countries are left to either remain unemployed, or start ventures of their own in order to keep their economies going.
So this ends up being a bad move for the US, and most likely a bad move for the off-shoring target countries as well. Who wins? Any countries not involved at the end of the day.
I can see why this is so attractive to corporations...
Bush has been quite accurately compared to a monkey in mental capacity many times. You want to trust this man to appoint Supreme Court Judges? Hell, why don't we just hand the appointments to AOL users or something.
There are two problems with your stance. First, you're comparing apples and oranges, as the original poster said. Having your rights squandered and fighting back is not the same as having lives lost and having someone else come in and fight the battle for you. In the DRM world, there is no "wonderful USA super-power" to come in and save use from the oppressive hollywood, so the comparison to Iraq is a moot point.
Second, I can find anyone to justify any cause. If you'd like me to justify murdering babies in their sleep, as extreme as this example may be, I can find a group that will hail to my cause and say "Can you make their pain go away?" It simply has no wait in the facts of the matter. Iraq should fight their own battles or ask us to help. They did not, and they did not (except, of course, those few people who the government paraded as their justifications after the fact). History says that if Iraq was that bad off, the people would have revolted. Social Contract, etc, etc. This is the SAME with Hollywood's "war" on us. They have neglected to fulfill our requirements on the social contract end of things. So we take music and movies and other such things in a medium and price structure that we agree with.
To put it simply, just like Iraq SHOULD have been working between government and people, the **AA and other such organizations should be WORKING with consumers to rectify the changes in the social contract that need to take place to facilitate the digital age. Price and availability. Price and availability.
Yes, but he's not emphatic enough. This really comes across as a well-laid-out college project, but honestly doesn't make the easy transition to economic application
The difference is that he is getting us excited about the possibilities, and what needs to be done in the business sense (perhaps after his thesis project is done) is to get us, and more importantly, investors, excited about the applications.
For instance, saying "this would be nice to seperate screens for several people" is a thought provoking concept, but doesn't make me think I'd like to buy one. saying that this would allow my computers to share one small monitor instead of several large ones, reducing costs and space, is a valuable application of that concept.
Really my hat's off to the guy. If I was an investor, I'd love to see where it goes. Since I'm not, and he hasn't presented a personal viable solution to any of my own problems, it's just an interesting idea that I never expect to see.
I'd personally like to see projectile weapons mixed into my cell phones. It's annoying to have to carry a cell phone and a hefty hand gun. I'd rather have it all in one, you know? I'm a man of convenience.
How would that effect my geek cred, though?
Are you serious? Do you even know what you are talking about? Here, let's get back to the basic points at hand that interfere with what you're thinking. (Note that if you read anything about Utopia virtually anywhere it's been marketed, including it's own website, you'd know most of these things.)
Seriously, go read, do your homework. You'll see it's doing awesome. It's projections have been made by dozens of people, many of whom are still paranoid about financial backlash for this, but still give it a sound blessing as far as an investment goes. The future is here, and the less worriers we have about it, the faster I can start innovating with my Datacenter grade connection in my home.
Ok, this is just silly. Slashdot has covered Utopia on numerous occasions, which aims to do just this across ALL of Utah. I live in Orem and I can attest, it's happening. It's just a matter of waiting for it. 100mbits up and down for cheaper than I'm paying for cable is making me a bit antsy. *sigh*
Or instead of saying, "please ignore this entire post because I don't like it's poster," you could clarify what you think he posted that's so incorrect. Heck, maybe you could sum up some of the pieces of information that are lacking from his post, like what 0.7 is all about (in a nutshell). At the very least, your post is quite opposite the ideals of the Freenet project, being that free speech is absolute, and good, and if you don't want something to be seen/read/heard, then provide something better.
Trend Micro's PC-Cillin has been doing this for about a year now, and has detected spyware (limited) for a couple years. I realize that scanning for spyware and viruses are quite different processes, but honestly, it wasn't that much of a stretch for Symantec to at least keep up with what their competitors are doing.
For those of you keeping tabs on the corporate side of things, Office Scan does spyware as well now and that's something I don't think Symantec even has plans for on their corporate suites.
Kinda makes me wonder why people think Symantec is still so great when they've been falling behind the underdogs for the last several years. Remind you of Intel, anyone?
Actually, I had thought about this a bit when designing my HTPC/PVR. If one person can build their own thing or write their own software that falls under a patent, and be totally legal in doing so, wouldn't it be justifiable to say that using an open source piece of software is much the same? The damages incurred to the company with the patent are the same, as they didn't get a sale, but nobody has "stolen" that sale, from a legal standpoint, because it's simply someone else benefitting from freely available work. For instance, if I build my friend a HTPC/PVR, TiVo can't sue either of us (if it held a patent for such a thing). If I build all of my friends HTPC/PVRs and they all pay me and I profit, I still am in legal standing.
I would think that Open Source could be the same thing on a much larger scale, even between companies, because no profit is being made. In instances like MySQL dual licensing, I don't know how well it would work, but for free software, I don't see how it would be an issue.