The problem has more to do with livestock and people defecating, urinating, washing, and dumping waste into the water upstream than it does with some intrinsic quality of surface water being undrinkable. There are risks, but most of them are human-created.
The reality is there are many people who would leap at the chance to be the first settlers on Mars - certainly thousands, and possibly many more.
That's fine, but how many of those "certainly thousands" are *actually qualified* - physically, mentally, and psychologically, to be a Mars settler?
I get a strong impression that most people saying "I'd do it" are (choose one or more):
1) Ridiculously naive about the hardships and privations it would involve, and the physical and psychological stress that would place them under; Look at the death rates, disease, and physical hardships endured by colonists in North America when they arrived, and then consider that they had breathable atmosphere, arable land, many sources of water, and natives there before them who were disposed to trade and interaction, and that they arrived primarily as farmers and laborers, which don't require multiple PhD's and an extra 10-20 years of research & training to become an "expert" in.
2) Woefully underprepared physically - a lifetime of reading sci fi novels and hacking open source doesn't necessarily translate to surviving and thriving in a harsh physical environment which demands peak physical conditioning; Not all geeks are out of shape, but a good portion of them are due to an overwhelmingly sedentary lifestyle.
3) Psychologically incapable of understanding the stresses because they view martian colonization as some sort of fun "getaway" from all the "stupid people" back here on earth. Being a "loner" who hates other people is not a plus in cramped quarters where you will have NO privacy, and be unable to survive without relying on MANY other colonists, who in turn must rely on you. There is a difference between being "self sufficient" and being a misanthrope. I suspect a lot of the people chiming in saying "I'd volunteer" fit more closely into the second category, making their psychological state suspect at best for an endeavor of this sort.
Of the thousands that were interested in volunteering, I'd be surprised if more than a handful were able to pass the requisite physical & psychological tests, and had the mental acuity & training to be of much help. Going to colonize the new world, you could take people along as farmhands. Going to Mars, even your "farmhands" need PhDs. And let's not forget that to make this colony "viable" as anything other than a death sentence, you need women, and you need to be able to have (conceive, deliver, care for, and raise) children, too. Otherwise, you'll end up with a rapidly aging population (stress and hardship do harsh things to a body) with nobody to replace them, resulting in a geriatric colony unless you commit to: supplying them constantly with new members, and (hopefully) shipping injured/sick/too-old-to-be-helpful people back to earth - I say hopefully, because the other option would be to implement a death penalty when they become too much of a drain on the colony to support.
There is WAY to much social online networking happening.
Care to revise your revision of what you meant to say? Because that's pretty clearly a condemnation of the *current* state of affairs, as well.
You gave a nod to LinkedIn, because that's "proper social networking that helps you" (do you work for LinkedIn, perhaps?), but everything else Facebook and related, is a pointless waste of time because it distracts from building successful and productive companies.
I can read english, and what you wrote is clearly a condemnation of social networking in general - if that's not what you were going for, perhaps you need to spend more time learning to write English, friend.
If one of your friends turns into a spambot who only exists to "share this on facebook," then unfriend them, or suppress display of all messages from that person in your news feed. It's quite filterable, try it some time.
I still maintain that if you *actually* have friends who are posting dozens of updates a day that amount to nothing but spam, you're doing something wrong. If the concern is that you "could" have that, well, it's ultimately a problem of your own creation: learn to filter those people or apps out, and/or learn to be more selective about who you friend, and whose updates you actually care to see.
what I said was most of what we do thats social isn't productive.
Yes, in the context of a rant titled "Enough with the social networking." Your entire post basically condemns "social" interaction as pointless non-productivity, and argues strongly for a renewed focus on "business" and "engineering".
Why does everything have to be productive? Why can't Facebook be a fun, social, time-waster for the people who enjoy it, just like an Xbox or Playstation or kayak or soccer ball or hockey stick or any other "toy" is a fun, social, time-waster for people who enjoy those activities?
Being social for the sake of being social is useless
Depends on the criteria you use to judge something's usefulness, wouldn't you say?
Chatting with friends, meeting new people, and socializing has never been terribly "useful" when measured in terms of productivity, whether it's done online or face-to-face.
If you insist that every social interaction you engage in be "productive," I suspect you're a very, very lonely person.
Skip the articles with "facebook" in their titles if you're not interested, rather than reading halfway through the dozens of comments posted before you decide that you're too cool for this conversation, and just have to interject to prove that you have absolutely nothing to say.
If you're still seeing notifications every time someone plays a game and you don't want to see those, then you seriously need to learn how to use Facebook - and we're talking *remedial* education here.
You can suppress all display of notifications from any app with... 2 clicks? Perhaps a mouseover and a single-click. You can also filter your default "feed" to show only status updates, or other things you might be interested in, instead of the "live stream of every update people have made."
If you're unhappy with the info you're seeing, you're either missing some very basic functionality, or you're terrible at choosing who to accept friend requests from.
Actually your primary communications forums in Facebook aren't "flooded by crap," unless you accept every invite and request sent to you - and in that case, you might as well submit your email address to every web site you visit that asks you to "register", you'll get the same results. If Facebook starts allowing people to message you using "@facebook.com" email addresses, you will rapidly end up receiving spam there. I have no need for a whitelist at present, because my friends on Facebook are only (and actually) the people I care to communicate with, and I ignore any requests from people I don't know. If they were to expose an @facebook.com email address, then any J Random Spambot can message me... and that'd be a problem. Implementing a whitelist is pretty much the only way to prevent that.
Actually, I suspect that the fact that it's integrated right into Facebook will make it far more successful than Wave was. It may still not be a resounding success / 'gmail killer', but I've already seen a lot of my less-technical friends move to Facebook messaging for most of their communications with friends - event invites, messages, chat, wall updates, etc., all going through Facebook. If Facebook continues to grow, it could very well become the "platform of choice" for messaging for a large number of people. Wave honestly wasn't pushed that hard, and it wasn't really marketed as "something to do awesome messaging!" It was, "This thing we built that's kinda neat, see what you think."
Facebook is also MUCH more aggressive than Google about opting-in users for new services.
I'm not saying any of this is necessarily a *good* thing - in fact, for privacy, it will probably be a very bad thing - but I expect this service will be significantly more successful than Wave, simply because Facebook is huge, and they're not above using that size to opt-in every single one of their users for a new service. And while some of their use-cases seem to be a little creepy, they do (for better or worse), seem to think about "what are our users going to *do* with this thing?" Wave was sort of billed as "a cool collaboration thingy that you should totally check out. if you want to. Maybe? Please?" It was a cool piece of tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem.
Yeah, violating someone's privacy is wrong. But does it deserve a year in prison?
Go read the commentary here about Facebook and their privacy practices, and the howls for Zuckerberg's blood, and then consider the question.
If privacy is important enough to warrant safeguarding, it deserves protection from corporate and personal invasion, even if you don't agree with the politics of the person whose privacy is being invaded.
As far as the severity of the crime, sentencing guidelines call for 15-21 months, prosecution asked for 18 months, and the judge sentenced him to a year and a day (making him eligible for parole, which is usually applicable after serving 1/3 the sentence, or 4 months), and recommended it be at a halfway house.
As sentencing goes, that seems fairly light considering the felony charges. He'll probably serve 4 months in a halfway house, and then spend a few years on probation. What would you suggest as a more equitable sentence? (Bearing in mind that what he is guilty of is misdemeanor computer fraud and felony obstruction of justice, of course?) If he hadn't attempted to erase the evidence, he probably would have received a comparative slap on the wrist: the misdemeanor charge would have carried with it a sentence of "up to a year in prison," and would most likely have turned into a fine, community service, and probation - given his age, and the relatively light charge.
Frankly, if this thing was worth a damn, it would be all over the civilian logistics industry by now.
Is this based on the premise that military research is never taking place on the cutting edge of technology, and never generates anything that turns out to have useful civilian applications? Because I could swear that's what you're suggesting.
And if you are, please explain the Internet, the Hummer, and the host of emergency trauma treatment techniques, prosthetics, and other medical developments that have been developed as a result of defense spending?
Drones dropping off supplies won't help you when you need that mortar and ammunition because you're pinned down halfway to your designated supply point by enemy fire, with 3 grenades and a few clips of ammunition because you wanted to "travel light".
Going on foot into hostile territory without carrying adequate supplies is risky-bordering-on-suicidal. What could possibly go wrong in territory you have tenuous or no control of? A whole hell of a lot, actually. Waiting for a supply drone to load, launch, find you, and drop off your supply cache under fire is pretty much guaranteeing that more people will die. Not to mention the fact that a drone or helicopter hovering over your position and lowering supplies sort of screams "SHOOT ROCKET/RPG HERE" to any enemy soldier with 2 brain cells, and not every surface and weather condition is amenable to landing & takeoff, even for a small uav.
A few thousand rounds of M60 ammunition is pretty heavy. A few days worth of water & food is also pretty heavy. Military doctrine (FM7-8, "Infantry Rifle Platoon & Squad") suggests that a combat load should not exceed ~60 pounds. At least one study shows that they, in reality, average 80-100 pounds of gear, depending on the weather and conditions soldiers are preparing for. Being able to carry equipment and supplies is a necessity, and it is not one which can be handled solely by air support.
Right, just like motor vehicles have proven completely useless to a modern military, because they require the recruiting and training of mechanical specialists who can maintain them, and the necessity of keeping spare parts and supplies for repairing them on hand.
It may take three people to operate and support the thing - but those three people will be operating and supporting several dozen suits, with each suit allowing your division to function with one or two fewer cargo handlers. And if the suit also reduces medical incidents resulting from people trying to lift / carry too much weight, that increases cargo handling efficiency and also reduces medical costs. Metal & plastic parts in an exoskeleton can be replaced pretty quickly. Broken limbs, hernias, and back problems all take a lot longer to repair or heal.
Probably not, unless the covenants, etc. Were part of the terms of sale.
But even if they weren't, the purchaser couldn't sue mono users for PAST activities conducted under microsoft's agreements. They could go after "new" versions of mono, and withdraw their support from future versions, but the impact of that would hardly be something that would taint or break "open source" in general, as the "poison the well" expression suggests.
Oh, so you're hedging. "Nothing will replace Facebook, but something might replace Facebook." Way to step out on a limb there.
No, I'm stating the conditions in the market right as they appear right now. And that is, that nobody is currently in a position to take over Facebook's cut of the market. I never claimed I was stepping out on a limb, I asked RapMaster to identify which services he felt were a legitimate threat to Facebook. So far, nobody's identified any.
Google and Microsoft are threats today.
Based on...? Because they're "big companies"? What exactly does a media cartel know about social networking?
Going from open source to closed source is a change in license, which you then say might induce a fork. Of course, since Microsoft does not own Mono, there's no need to fork the GPL version, as Microsoft cannot close what they don't own.
Except for the parts that they wrote, which presumably, they would still own the rights to license, unless they've assigned the rights to the Mono project, or the FSF, or someone else. If they still retain those rights, they could close the source for future versions, which would certainly affect the Mono project.
And none of that is more than a distraction from the point that Microsoft *certainly* cannot sue somebody for copyright infringement of GPL'ed code. Which leaves us with the patent claims.
Laches & other forms of estoppel would almost certainly come into effect, or at least drastically reduce the damages available to Microsoft, given the fact that they have been: a) aware of; b) supportive of; c) contributors to; d) collaborators with; the Mono project. Your argument about patent trolls does NOT apply here - those are companies that sit around, waiting for somebody to make money off the ideas they claim to hold patents for, and then sue them.
If they went out, and *ACTUALLY HELPED* people implement their patents, and then tried to sue them, you would see a significantly different court scene play out. The principle of laches is even more applicable when the delay in enforcing a claim puts the defendant *in a worse* position.
Microsoft cannot truthfully claim they were unaware of the Mono project; a patent troll can;
Microsoft cannot truthfully claim they notified the Mono project it was infringing; they have not, and in fact they have encouraged the Mono project to continue development of new features; A patent troll can certainly do this;
Microsoft has also issued public statements & documents indicating it won't sue over patent infringement in "certain parts" of Mono. It is not blanket coverage, but again, it sets up conditions under which Mono was inclined to proceed as a project - once again, estoppel becomes an issue here. You cannot "entrap" people into infringing - encouraging them, claiming you won't sue, and then sitting back to bide your time while those people wrote more and more infringing code would all be supporting factors for any defendant's motion for dismissal.
Nobody has been able to cite any legal grounds which would allow Microsoft to sidestep the estoppel & laches defenses, other than "of course they could, if they decided to just ignore the law and buy the court." There are HUGE differences between "patent trolls" and Microsoft's behavior in the case of Mono. The parallels and precedent are simply not there to support your claims that Microsoft would do the same thing all the patent trolls do.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem has more to do with livestock and people defecating, urinating, washing, and dumping waste into the water upstream than it does with some intrinsic quality of surface water being undrinkable. There are risks, but most of them are human-created.
That's fine, but how many of those "certainly thousands" are *actually qualified* - physically, mentally, and psychologically, to be a Mars settler?
I get a strong impression that most people saying "I'd do it" are (choose one or more):
1) Ridiculously naive about the hardships and privations it would involve, and the physical and psychological stress that would place them under; Look at the death rates, disease, and physical hardships endured by colonists in North America when they arrived, and then consider that they had breathable atmosphere, arable land, many sources of water, and natives there before them who were disposed to trade and interaction, and that they arrived primarily as farmers and laborers, which don't require multiple PhD's and an extra 10-20 years of research & training to become an "expert" in.
2) Woefully underprepared physically - a lifetime of reading sci fi novels and hacking open source doesn't necessarily translate to surviving and thriving in a harsh physical environment which demands peak physical conditioning; Not all geeks are out of shape, but a good portion of them are due to an overwhelmingly sedentary lifestyle.
3) Psychologically incapable of understanding the stresses because they view martian colonization as some sort of fun "getaway" from all the "stupid people" back here on earth. Being a "loner" who hates other people is not a plus in cramped quarters where you will have NO privacy, and be unable to survive without relying on MANY other colonists, who in turn must rely on you. There is a difference between being "self sufficient" and being a misanthrope. I suspect a lot of the people chiming in saying "I'd volunteer" fit more closely into the second category, making their psychological state suspect at best for an endeavor of this sort.
Of the thousands that were interested in volunteering, I'd be surprised if more than a handful were able to pass the requisite physical & psychological tests, and had the mental acuity & training to be of much help. Going to colonize the new world, you could take people along as farmhands. Going to Mars, even your "farmhands" need PhDs. And let's not forget that to make this colony "viable" as anything other than a death sentence, you need women, and you need to be able to have (conceive, deliver, care for, and raise) children, too. Otherwise, you'll end up with a rapidly aging population (stress and hardship do harsh things to a body) with nobody to replace them, resulting in a geriatric colony unless you commit to: supplying them constantly with new members, and (hopefully) shipping injured/sick/too-old-to-be-helpful people back to earth - I say hopefully, because the other option would be to implement a death penalty when they become too much of a drain on the colony to support.
Really? Your first sentence was:
Care to revise your revision of what you meant to say? Because that's pretty clearly a condemnation of the *current* state of affairs, as well.
You gave a nod to LinkedIn, because that's "proper social networking that helps you" (do you work for LinkedIn, perhaps?), but everything else Facebook and related, is a pointless waste of time because it distracts from building successful and productive companies.
I can read english, and what you wrote is clearly a condemnation of social networking in general - if that's not what you were going for, perhaps you need to spend more time learning to write English, friend.
If one of your friends turns into a spambot who only exists to "share this on facebook," then unfriend them, or suppress display of all messages from that person in your news feed. It's quite filterable, try it some time.
I still maintain that if you *actually* have friends who are posting dozens of updates a day that amount to nothing but spam, you're doing something wrong. If the concern is that you "could" have that, well, it's ultimately a problem of your own creation: learn to filter those people or apps out, and/or learn to be more selective about who you friend, and whose updates you actually care to see.
Yes, in the context of a rant titled "Enough with the social networking." Your entire post basically condemns "social" interaction as pointless non-productivity, and argues strongly for a renewed focus on "business" and "engineering".
Why does everything have to be productive? Why can't Facebook be a fun, social, time-waster for the people who enjoy it, just like an Xbox or Playstation or kayak or soccer ball or hockey stick or any other "toy" is a fun, social, time-waster for people who enjoy those activities?
Depends on the criteria you use to judge something's usefulness, wouldn't you say?
Chatting with friends, meeting new people, and socializing has never been terribly "useful" when measured in terms of productivity, whether it's done online or face-to-face.
If you insist that every social interaction you engage in be "productive," I suspect you're a very, very lonely person.
Cool story, bro.
Skip the articles with "facebook" in their titles if you're not interested, rather than reading halfway through the dozens of comments posted before you decide that you're too cool for this conversation, and just have to interject to prove that you have absolutely nothing to say.
If you're still seeing notifications every time someone plays a game and you don't want to see those, then you seriously need to learn how to use Facebook - and we're talking *remedial* education here.
You can suppress all display of notifications from any app with... 2 clicks? Perhaps a mouseover and a single-click. You can also filter your default "feed" to show only status updates, or other things you might be interested in, instead of the "live stream of every update people have made."
If you're unhappy with the info you're seeing, you're either missing some very basic functionality, or you're terrible at choosing who to accept friend requests from.
Actually your primary communications forums in Facebook aren't "flooded by crap," unless you accept every invite and request sent to you - and in that case, you might as well submit your email address to every web site you visit that asks you to "register", you'll get the same results. If Facebook starts allowing people to message you using "@facebook.com" email addresses, you will rapidly end up receiving spam there. I have no need for a whitelist at present, because my friends on Facebook are only (and actually) the people I care to communicate with, and I ignore any requests from people I don't know. If they were to expose an @facebook.com email address, then any J Random Spambot can message me... and that'd be a problem. Implementing a whitelist is pretty much the only way to prevent that.
Funny, I would've thought a virtual blowjob would read like:
"mmmph mmph mmmmmmph mmmph mmmmmph DAMMIT I SAID NOT IN THE FACE!"
I think the woosh you might be hearing is the humor of the GP post, bypassing your humor receptors.
But we get it, you're too hip for Facebook. Congratulations, and thanks for letting us know.
Actually, I suspect that the fact that it's integrated right into Facebook will make it far more successful than Wave was. It may still not be a resounding success / 'gmail killer', but I've already seen a lot of my less-technical friends move to Facebook messaging for most of their communications with friends - event invites, messages, chat, wall updates, etc., all going through Facebook. If Facebook continues to grow, it could very well become the "platform of choice" for messaging for a large number of people. Wave honestly wasn't pushed that hard, and it wasn't really marketed as "something to do awesome messaging!" It was, "This thing we built that's kinda neat, see what you think."
Facebook is also MUCH more aggressive than Google about opting-in users for new services.
I'm not saying any of this is necessarily a *good* thing - in fact, for privacy, it will probably be a very bad thing - but I expect this service will be significantly more successful than Wave, simply because Facebook is huge, and they're not above using that size to opt-in every single one of their users for a new service. And while some of their use-cases seem to be a little creepy, they do (for better or worse), seem to think about "what are our users going to *do* with this thing?" Wave was sort of billed as "a cool collaboration thingy that you should totally check out. if you want to. Maybe? Please?" It was a cool piece of tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem.
But where do you put your thumbs?!?!
If you touch a clitoris the way you touch the Thinkpad mouse pointer, it's likely you're going to have a very unsatisfied girlfriend.
"What the fuck are you doing? That hurts?!"
"Sorry baby, I can't find the button to right click. Can we adjust the sensitivity somehow?"
You need a phone with more gee bees and the wifi.
Why? Because you don't like the fact that the nature of the world as it is today requires us to keep a standing military?
Hundreds of millions of Asians would like to disagree with that characterization, you ignorant hick.
Lucky for you, they're Buddhists who honor the precept of doing no harm to others, or they'd probably kick your ass.
Go read the commentary here about Facebook and their privacy practices, and the howls for Zuckerberg's blood, and then consider the question.
If privacy is important enough to warrant safeguarding, it deserves protection from corporate and personal invasion, even if you don't agree with the politics of the person whose privacy is being invaded.
As far as the severity of the crime, sentencing guidelines call for 15-21 months, prosecution asked for 18 months, and the judge sentenced him to a year and a day (making him eligible for parole, which is usually applicable after serving 1/3 the sentence, or 4 months), and recommended it be at a halfway house.
As sentencing goes, that seems fairly light considering the felony charges. He'll probably serve 4 months in a halfway house, and then spend a few years on probation. What would you suggest as a more equitable sentence? (Bearing in mind that what he is guilty of is misdemeanor computer fraud and felony obstruction of justice, of course?) If he hadn't attempted to erase the evidence, he probably would have received a comparative slap on the wrist: the misdemeanor charge would have carried with it a sentence of "up to a year in prison," and would most likely have turned into a fine, community service, and probation - given his age, and the relatively light charge.
"That was awesome! And it's message is timeless!"
Is this based on the premise that military research is never taking place on the cutting edge of technology, and never generates anything that turns out to have useful civilian applications? Because I could swear that's what you're suggesting.
And if you are, please explain the Internet, the Hummer, and the host of emergency trauma treatment techniques, prosthetics, and other medical developments that have been developed as a result of defense spending?
Drones dropping off supplies won't help you when you need that mortar and ammunition because you're pinned down halfway to your designated supply point by enemy fire, with 3 grenades and a few clips of ammunition because you wanted to "travel light".
Going on foot into hostile territory without carrying adequate supplies is risky-bordering-on-suicidal. What could possibly go wrong in territory you have tenuous or no control of? A whole hell of a lot, actually. Waiting for a supply drone to load, launch, find you, and drop off your supply cache under fire is pretty much guaranteeing that more people will die. Not to mention the fact that a drone or helicopter hovering over your position and lowering supplies sort of screams "SHOOT ROCKET/RPG HERE" to any enemy soldier with 2 brain cells, and not every surface and weather condition is amenable to landing & takeoff, even for a small uav.
A few thousand rounds of M60 ammunition is pretty heavy. A few days worth of water & food is also pretty heavy. Military doctrine (FM7-8, "Infantry Rifle Platoon & Squad") suggests that a combat load should not exceed ~60 pounds. At least one study shows that they, in reality, average 80-100 pounds of gear, depending on the weather and conditions soldiers are preparing for. Being able to carry equipment and supplies is a necessity, and it is not one which can be handled solely by air support.
You're assuming that the suit will be issued to a single soldier, and not reused by anybody else.
Mechanical suits don't need sleep, or time off - just occasional service and repair.
Right, just like motor vehicles have proven completely useless to a modern military, because they require the recruiting and training of mechanical specialists who can maintain them, and the necessity of keeping spare parts and supplies for repairing them on hand.
It may take three people to operate and support the thing - but those three people will be operating and supporting several dozen suits, with each suit allowing your division to function with one or two fewer cargo handlers. And if the suit also reduces medical incidents resulting from people trying to lift / carry too much weight, that increases cargo handling efficiency and also reduces medical costs. Metal & plastic parts in an exoskeleton can be replaced pretty quickly. Broken limbs, hernias, and back problems all take a lot longer to repair or heal.
Probably not, unless the covenants, etc. Were part of the terms of sale.
But even if they weren't, the purchaser couldn't sue mono users for PAST activities conducted under microsoft's agreements. They could go after "new" versions of mono, and withdraw their support from future versions, but the impact of that would hardly be something that would taint or break "open source" in general, as the "poison the well" expression suggests.
No, I'm stating the conditions in the market right as they appear right now. And that is, that nobody is currently in a position to take over Facebook's cut of the market. I never claimed I was stepping out on a limb, I asked RapMaster to identify which services he felt were a legitimate threat to Facebook. So far, nobody's identified any.
Based on...? Because they're "big companies"? What exactly does a media cartel know about social networking?
Except there are.
Good, because you seem to suck at it.
Except for the parts that they wrote, which presumably, they would still own the rights to license, unless they've assigned the rights to the Mono project, or the FSF, or someone else. If they still retain those rights, they could close the source for future versions, which would certainly affect the Mono project.
And none of that is more than a distraction from the point that Microsoft *certainly* cannot sue somebody for copyright infringement of GPL'ed code. Which leaves us with the patent claims.
Laches & other forms of estoppel would almost certainly come into effect, or at least drastically reduce the damages available to Microsoft, given the fact that they have been:
a) aware of;
b) supportive of;
c) contributors to;
d) collaborators with;
the Mono project. Your argument about patent trolls does NOT apply here - those are companies that sit around, waiting for somebody to make money off the ideas they claim to hold patents for, and then sue them.
If they went out, and *ACTUALLY HELPED* people implement their patents, and then tried to sue them, you would see a significantly different court scene play out. The principle of laches is even more applicable when the delay in enforcing a claim puts the defendant *in a worse* position.
Microsoft cannot truthfully claim they were unaware of the Mono project; a patent troll can;
Microsoft cannot truthfully claim they notified the Mono project it was infringing; they have not, and in fact they have encouraged the Mono project to continue development of new features; A patent troll can certainly do this;
Microsoft has also issued public statements & documents indicating it won't sue over patent infringement in "certain parts" of Mono. It is not blanket coverage, but again, it sets up conditions under which Mono was inclined to proceed as a project - once again, estoppel becomes an issue here. You cannot "entrap" people into infringing - encouraging them, claiming you won't sue, and then sitting back to bide your time while those people wrote more and more infringing code would all be supporting factors for any defendant's motion for dismissal.
Nobody has been able to cite any legal grounds which would allow Microsoft to sidestep the estoppel & laches defenses, other than "of course they could, if they decided to just ignore the law and buy the court." There are HUGE differences between "patent trolls" and Microsoft's behavior in the case of Mono. The parallels and precedent are simply not there to support your claims that Microsoft would do the same thing all the patent trolls do.