So your taking advantage of my goodwill in releasing my IP by not paying me for it is mitigated by the fact I'm not really "losing" anything? Defend your moral stance here, please, I'm not certain I see your reasoning clearly. What you're saying is that people should not release IP and reasonably expect to get paid for it or make a living off of it, since it isn't "really" property and you're not "really" hurting me. Would that make it OK to steal the physical possessions of an artist, since they can always go out and create more art, thus bringing in money to re-purchase their stolen property? Oh, sorry, they can't, because it's ok for me to make copies of their art, since it isn't "real" property, it's only intellectual.
Yes, the shooters have indeed been driven by revenge... if people did stop being assholes, we probably would no longer have these shooting sprees. How do you propose to do this? Give people a big red sticker for their foreheads if they're being an asshole? For that matter, your definition of being an asshole may differ from mine; behaviour I find acceptable, you may riot over. How do "we", as a society, agree on what to agree on? The short answer is, "we can't". There is no fix to this problem that isn't rose-coloured glasses. This is what happens when you get one person living with another. You get disagreements. The more people living together, the stronger the disagreements.
Welcome to life in a democracy, people! It sucks! Sorry! At least it sucks less than everything else though, right?
The first part of the statement you quoted is obviously FUD... there's no point in even discussing it. It's like diplomatic meetings - I'd only get worried if MS started praising Linux, or not commenting on it at all, because that means they have something up their sleeves.;) re the latter, most people have been seeing that coming for a while now. As you said, many businesses of any sort will falter and fail soon. However, I think MS means "Linux as a large-scale commercial enterprise" is doomed, and they may not be wrong. They're going to be watching the bigger companies like RedHat, etcetc, to see how they do.
re monopoly statement - if I say my parents will die this year, that doesn't make me an orphan now... nor does it mean I wish to be. You can't prosecute a monopoly case based on "well, you said in a year one of your competitors will likely fail, so therefore you deserve to be punished". Not saying you said that, but no, I don't see anything fishy in that statement. I see some wishful thinking in it tho.;)
I believe that Linux will always have a place in the market - but I also believe that Windows will never lose its dominant position, particularly in the desktop market. I post this from a Windows machine, which is sitting alongside a Linux server. My office had a test last year, to see if switching everybody over entirely to linux was feasible... it failed. There's just too many tools out there developed for MS platforms that aren't available on the Linux platform.
I think such a comment is unfair to the people who work both for government (in general) and for the Patent Office (in particular). Not everybody who works in a place other than a big corporation is clueless. Most of them, I would expect, are as anybody else at a large place of business - relatively honest, reasonably hard-working, and at least somewhat dedicated to their work. Just because they don't know about the intricacies of the 'net doesn't make them clueless morons. As a previous poster says, they can only hire so many people, and they only have so much time to research so many patents. I agree that such patent awards are, at best, ill-thought-out, but face it - if they hired as many people as they needed to research all patents in the timeframe they have, people would be complaining about the amount of tax money "wasted on researching all these stupid patents".
The clueless morons aren't the ones in the patent office - they're the ones who're trying to beat the system by taking advantage of the patent office. It's no different from somebody cheating on their taxes: "everybody does it, and it's only a few hundred bucks anyway", except in this case, it's "everybody does it, and if nobody fights it, I can make lots of money". Welcome to the ugly side of capitalism.
Apparently you're a student of nothing; even the most small-minded psych students I knew at university wouldn't disagree with "it's BOTH nature AND nurture". Few *learned* individuals disagree with this, and you've said nothing to indicate that you're anything but unlearned.
For myself, my best teachers were my grade 9 science teacher, my grade 10 history teacher, and one of my CS profs at UNB. (Mr. Rose at CCJHS in Truro, NS; Mr Brown at CEC in Truro, NS; and Dr. Jane Fritz at UNB Fredericton.) From Mr. Rose I learned a method of teaching of which I highly approve - make the students give you their answers. From Mr. Brown I learned that history, and by extension any subject in school, can be fun. And from Dr. Fritz I learned that students can be people too. (You'd have to have been a student of hers, or somebody with a similar style, to really understand, and nobody will read my explanation anyway.)
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So your taking advantage of my goodwill in releasing my IP by not paying me for it is mitigated by the fact I'm not really "losing" anything? Defend your moral stance here, please, I'm not certain I see your reasoning clearly. What you're saying is that people should not release IP and reasonably expect to get paid for it or make a living off of it, since it isn't "really" property and you're not "really" hurting me. Would that make it OK to steal the physical possessions of an artist, since they can always go out and create more art, thus bringing in money to re-purchase their stolen property? Oh, sorry, they can't, because it's ok for me to make copies of their art, since it isn't "real" property, it's only intellectual.
Yes, the shooters have indeed been driven by revenge... if people did stop being assholes, we probably would no longer have these shooting sprees. How do you propose to do this? Give people a big red sticker for their foreheads if they're being an asshole? For that matter, your definition of being an asshole may differ from mine; behaviour I find acceptable, you may riot over. How do "we", as a society, agree on what to agree on? The short answer is, "we can't". There is no fix to this problem that isn't rose-coloured glasses. This is what happens when you get one person living with another. You get disagreements. The more people living together, the stronger the disagreements.
Welcome to life in a democracy, people! It sucks! Sorry! At least it sucks less than everything else though, right?
The first part of the statement you quoted is obviously FUD... there's no point in even discussing it. It's like diplomatic meetings - I'd only get worried if MS started praising Linux, or not commenting on it at all, because that means they have something up their sleeves. ;) re the latter, most people have been seeing that coming for a while now. As you said, many businesses of any sort will falter and fail soon. However, I think MS means "Linux as a large-scale commercial enterprise" is doomed, and they may not be wrong. They're going to be watching the bigger companies like RedHat, etcetc, to see how they do.
;)
re monopoly statement - if I say my parents will die this year, that doesn't make me an orphan now... nor does it mean I wish to be. You can't prosecute a monopoly case based on "well, you said in a year one of your competitors will likely fail, so therefore you deserve to be punished". Not saying you said that, but no, I don't see anything fishy in that statement. I see some wishful thinking in it tho.
I believe that Linux will always have a place in the market - but I also believe that Windows will never lose its dominant position, particularly in the desktop market. I post this from a Windows machine, which is sitting alongside a Linux server. My office had a test last year, to see if switching everybody over entirely to linux was feasible... it failed. There's just too many tools out there developed for MS platforms that aren't available on the Linux platform.
And that's what I have to say about that.
I think such a comment is unfair to the people who work both for government (in general) and for the Patent Office (in particular). Not everybody who works in a place other than a big corporation is clueless. Most of them, I would expect, are as anybody else at a large place of business - relatively honest, reasonably hard-working, and at least somewhat dedicated to their work. Just because they don't know about the intricacies of the 'net doesn't make them clueless morons. As a previous poster says, they can only hire so many people, and they only have so much time to research so many patents. I agree that such patent awards are, at best, ill-thought-out, but face it - if they hired as many people as they needed to research all patents in the timeframe they have, people would be complaining about the amount of tax money "wasted on researching all these stupid patents".
The clueless morons aren't the ones in the patent office - they're the ones who're trying to beat the system by taking advantage of the patent office. It's no different from somebody cheating on their taxes: "everybody does it, and it's only a few hundred bucks anyway", except in this case, it's "everybody does it, and if nobody fights it, I can make lots of money". Welcome to the ugly side of capitalism.
Apparently you're a student of nothing; even the most small-minded psych students I knew at university wouldn't disagree with "it's BOTH nature AND nurture". Few *learned* individuals disagree with this, and you've said nothing to indicate that you're anything but unlearned.
For myself, my best teachers were my grade 9 science teacher, my grade 10 history teacher, and one of my CS profs at UNB. (Mr. Rose at CCJHS in Truro, NS; Mr Brown at CEC in Truro, NS; and Dr. Jane Fritz at UNB Fredericton.) From Mr. Rose I learned a method of teaching of which I highly approve - make the students give you their answers. From Mr. Brown I learned that history, and by extension any subject in school, can be fun. And from Dr. Fritz I learned that students can be people too. (You'd have to have been a student of hers, or somebody with a similar style, to really understand, and nobody will read my explanation anyway.)