That's all it is. MS is trying to convince businesses that they'll make more money by only offering PCs bundled with Windows.
refusing to license the Windows OS to them because of it
To the best of my knowledge, the only companies MS has ever "cut off" were known pirates. I've seen MS gold OEM partners switch upwards of 20% of their products to naked/Linux systems, and MS didn't bat an eye except to offer them tickets to conferences on how to sell Windows in a Linux environment.
To say that a PC sold without an OS will undoubtedly be used to pirate Windows is an absurd stance
This quote seems popular: "We want to urge all system builders -- indeed, all Partners -- not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business"
Now here's the rest of it: "with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services,"
As for the idea that MS might pay you a visit for not buying Windows...it's pure speculation and is not indicated by MS at all.
The FSF Europe is alarmed by the prospect that customers who request a base systems would risk a visit from Microsoft's investigators.
"It looks like a private sniffing service which is supposed to spy on these who do not want to pay the Microsoft tax anymore. It is an incredible piece of impudence which any politician, customer and journalist should recognise carefully," said Jakobs.
When contacted by ZDNet UK, Alexander denied that operatives would be dispatched into the premises of customers who attempted to buy a PC without Windows.
"I can confirm that the... personnel are not participating in customer visits. This is an error in the copy and will be amended in future material on the subject," Alexander claimed.
This describes the situation best:
"Microsoft is clearly concerned about the threat of Linux on the desktop and is trying to protect its base. Naked PCs provide customers with choice and lower the price of commodity PCs," said a Novell spokesman.
Microsoft is trying to convince OEMs to sell more of their product? Those fiends!
I thought so. Actually, I was making a point with it. You (assuming you are the same person, posting as AC for some reason or another) are being ridiculous.
The problem is that you are taking a correlation (video games & violence) that is a very weak one, and trying to prove causation, i.e. that the practice of video games enhances some violent instinct.
So are you saying that violent video games have no effect on young people with a history of violent behavior? That they don't try to emulate what they see/do?
On a broader scope, are you saying that youth are not influenced by the things they see and hear, that all their decisions are made within the vacuum of their own mind, and that we shouldn't care what they are exposed to because it doesn't matter?
However, in order to make this work you have to take a very tiny selective sample of violence. Most murders are committed by adults, generally urban criminals, who are not sitting around playing GTA before they go out and commit it. The murder rate among teenagers is a tiny portion of the total, and has been dropping for decades. A lot of teenagers play video games, so surprise! Most teenage murderers do too.
The question is, do violent video games, when played by certain teenagers, influence their behavior? Apparently you don't think it's at all possible. The APA disagrees.
Again with the "most influential", although you threw in a "probably" which makes your statement meaningless. "You're doing it"? Prove it. How are they doing it? Who dies when I throw a grenade in BF2? Why is it I still can't fly a spaceship despite all these space sims.
Engaging in simulated activities often stimulates the same part of the brain as actually engaging in the activity in real life. Throwing a grenade at someone in BF2 may not actually kill someone, but a small part of your brain registers that killing is enjoyable. In the vast majority of people, we can distinguish between the two realities and not have any desire to kill someone in real life. A handful of disturbed individuals do not.
Note my emphasis on disturbed. We're not talking about your average gamer. I've made it a point to say from the beginning that this is not a problem for most people. But even if it's one out of a thousand or one out of ten thousand gamers, that's too many to put GTA in the hands of every kid who asks for it. Let their parents do their jobs and decide what is right for their kids.
That's because you or your admin have not disabled that ability.
As I said, it's possible to prevent PCs from having any write (or read, for that matter) access to removable drives, which is how your phone would be detected if it doesn't require specialized software.
I don't know about where you work, but at my last corporate admin job only a handful of people had printers on their desks. It's outrageously expensive to maintain those things. Large workgroup printers are much, much cheaper for a company. An added bonus was that we could store images of all the print jobs so that if printing got excessive we could look and see who did the most printing, and what they printed.
As for CD burners...they didn't have any way to burn CDs. It required superuser login for a PC to be able to burn a CD or write to any removable drive. We made certain that there was no reason to put anything on disk: they could only save to the network shares, public folders meant it was easier to share between offices by saving to the network, everyone knew backups were centralized.
Anyone who wanted it could get a copy of PC Anywhere so that they could connect to their office PC via VPN and work from home--but they couldn't transfer any files to their home PCs. Management had laptops so that they didn't have to deal with a slow VPN connection, but even they couldn't write to removable disks.
A persistent user could grab screenshots of their PCA session and that sort of thing, but there's only so much you can do without completely crippling morale and productivity. I worked with management to make sure everyone understood that this wasn't because they as individuals weren't trusted, but that it only took out of a hundred office workers to be malicious and do the company harm. We made sure they were aware that it was my job to balance their productivity needs with the company's security needs; if there was a conflict between those I encouraged them to report it so that we could address it.
Tight security is good and all, but if it keeps employees from doing work, it can hurt the company just as much as no security.
Practicing violence? I defy you to go out and try casting spells. Or even shooting a.50 Desert Eagle. I'm confident that virtually all players, despite their "practice" in Counterstrike, Rainbow Six, and Half-Life, really suck at shooting in real life.
I'm using a different definition of "practice" here, as in "the practice of _____".
You're arguing the absurd. Just because a disturbed kid shoots a.50 DE in Counter-Strike doesn't mean he won't get stupid and try to recreate it with his dad's.22 Ruger.
People who are truly violent need a lot more stimulation than some red pixels exploding from other pixels. They go to bars and get in fights, or steal cars, or shoot police.
You're being deliberately dense, aren't you? Please say it's so.
Why do violent people get in fights, steal cars, or shoot police? You think those ideas come out of a vacuum? Prior to the act, there is something influencing them. They surround themselves with violence, from the music they hear to the TV they watch to the friends they associate with to the games they play. All of that--including the games--reenforces their tendency toward violent behavior. Of the media, games are probably the most influential because you aren't watching it, you're doing it.
If people are using their work e-mail for their personal use, the company gets to see exactly what, where, how, and when their employees are spending their own time. If the employee opts to not use their work e-mail for anything personal, the company knows that they now have the other added benefit of possible added productivity.
I don't think that's the case at all. Most companies could really care less what an employee does in their off time so long as it doesn't harm the company. What they do care about is things like trade secrets going out via an anonymous hotmail account or employees wasting hours talking to their significant other and circumventing the phone system monitoring by using Skype.
I'm just glad I can use SSH and tunnel everything over that. If I can't do that, I have GPRS service on my mobile device and I *could* use that for AIM, e-mail, and browsing instead.
I think that's where things should be headed. A cell phone doesn't have easy access to corporate documents (though cameras do facilitate that to an extent) and typing a lengthy e-mail is difficult, so trade secret theft (intentional or otherwise) by employees might be reduced significantly.
Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon had a remarkably good dub. The voices (mostly) fit the characters, and the syncing was amazing. They just need to put the same effort in all dubs.
Was there ever an official AC subtitle release? I know there was a fan-translated version on the web for a long time, but those can be rather unreliable. I watched part of it and I found the subs the be rather annoying (and I watch a lot of subbed foreign films).
You could go even deeper than this, and I think that you'll find that video games don't contribute to the problem.
I don't think it's that simple. Video games don't cause people to become violent. However, it could probably be demonstrated that they are influential in violent behavior, probably moreso than music or video due to the interactive nature. You're not just watching violence, you're practicing it.
For the vast majority of players, that has no bearing on their actions. For a select few, though, it contributes in the same way that watching violent movies or listening to violent lyrics or hanging out with violent people contributes: it's a sort of feedback loop where a person with violent tendencies exposes themselves to more violence (real or fantasy is irrelevant) which causes them to crave more of it. Run the cycle a few thousand times and you get a kid shooting up a school for no apparent reason.
This would still be happening if there were no video games. There would still be music. There would still be movies. There would still be peer groups.
Unfortunately, this is a frustratingly inaccurate assumption - parents do not monitor a video game as they might a movie or a television program (and many do not even monitor those enough, but that is another topic).
Correction: Bad parents don't. I do. Just because bad parents don't pay attention to what they are buying their children doesn't mean that restricting sales to minors is useless. It still helps the good, concerned parents make conscious decisions for their children.
I was renting a movie one day when a boy--maybe 12--and his parents approached the counter next to me. The boy put a game on the counter, the clerk scanned it, and said "You are aware that this game is rated M for violence and sexual content?" The father turned to his son and asked "is that okay?" then said "fine" when his son nodded. I don't think that guy had a clue what he'd just been asked, I wanted to slap him.
The idea should be to educate your kids on what is and isn't appropriate to do in real life from an early age, but what parent wants to actually take that sort of blame nowadays when they can easily find some big company to sue?
Part of parenting is knowing what is and is not appropriate for your own child. The best person in the world to judge that is a good parent. Not society, not a game company, not Congress, and not some random person on the internet (yes, I've had people tell me what is and is not appropriate for my son, here and elsewhere). Some children have no problem viewing "graphic" content like GTA. I was one of those. However, some--a minority in my opinion--are not emotionally capable of seperating fantasy imagery from real life. It's not that they don't know the difference between GTA and the real world, it's that they think that they can apply what they see in GTA to the real world.
I've seen kids whose parents tried very hard to teach them that TV and video games aren't real continue to attempt to carry out what they saw there...and more than once it resulted in physical injury. Parents are supposed to filter the world for their kids. Getting hit with the full reality of how things are at age 6 is a bit much for most kids.
Thankfully, everyone is not just like you. There are some 14-year-old kids who shouldn't be playing GTA. Kids who will attempt to emulate the violence they perform on-screen in real life. That's why the game carries the M (or A) rating...to tell PARENTS that the game may not be appropriate for their kids.
Retailers are getting a lot better about self-regulating video game sales. I don't think a 14-year-old should be able to buy GTA; however, if his parents want to buy it for him, I'm going to assume they made the decision that he can deal with what he will see (and, virtually, do) and have no objections to the game being in their house.
Let me pick out the one part of that quote that matters:
for most firms
I'm not talking about firms. I'm not talking about corporations. I'm not talking about anyone but Joe Inventor who develops a patentable product in his garage. A patent would protect him from becoming a victim of one of those firms mentioned in your quote who have substantially more resources.
If you eliminate patents, you do two things: 1) You eliminate any incentive for independent inventors to invest capital in their projects, and 2) You force creative minds into large companiess where they can develop new products in the relative security of a corporate environment, and where other people will reap the bulk of the profits of their labors.
You sign a contract, and in the contract it says you must allow Monsanto's police to come on your land for three years and you're not allowed to save your own seed. You've always got to go back and buy your seed each year."
Here's an idea: if they don't want the crop reseeding itself (as does tend to happen) they should make a seedless crop.
We've spent so long talking about global warming that I don't think anyone has stopped to consider some possibilities.
First, is it even our fault? Is global warming really a man-made disaster, or is it part of a climatic or solar cycle? It always seemed to be simply assumed that what we have documented is because of something humanity did...what if it's not? If this is a natural occurence, then wouldn't we be doing even more harm to nature by fighting it?
Second, what happens if there's nothing we can do? Action plans are great and all and we need to do everything in our power to reverse any damage we've done, but we need to get our heads out of the sand and have a Plan B. It's very possible that anything we do now will be too little too late, that we have already hit critical mass and warming will accelerate even if we climbed back up in the trees tomorrow.
People would have a good idea, not see any incentive in investing large amounts of time and money into developing it, and never bring it to fruition because there would be no way to recover the investment.
Since posting that, though, it's occurred to me that this wouldn't be the case; rather, individuals would no longer develop anything for profit. Large companies would be responsible for nearly all the development. Inventors would take salary jobs developing products for large companies that can secure trade secrets long enough to bring something to market en masse without the competition being able to reproduce it immediately.
Exactly my point. Abolishing patents would essentially make it impossible for inventors to operate outside of a corporate environment.
As for the problem with releasing a patented product that immediately gets competition: that can be corrected. Allow confidential patents to be filed which would become public on a set day.
Joe Smith invents this new engine. He works up a prototype and jumps in the media with it, but keeps the workings of the prototype a tight secret. He then files a confidential patent to go public October 1, 2010 (or whenever is a reasonable time for developing a line of vehicles and fine-tuning the engine). That way the patent goes public and a line of cars debuts within a month of each other.
There are better solutions to correcting the existing problems than getting rid of patents entirely.
I've certainly never heard of anyone being sued for violating a patent for personal use. it's when you market a patented product that you get in trouble.
So, you're agreeing that patents aren't an actually acting as an incentive?
Patents allow an individual to justify investing large sums of money into developing their brainchild. Why borrow/invest $100,000 if it's going to be lost, taken over by "all humanity"?
When this hypothetical person can attend to his own birth, school himself and then invent this engine alone, without ever drawing upon the ideas, concepts or help from anyone else in the society around him, alive or dead, sure he can have his engine for himself.
Meanwhile, in the real world, he will receive medical help, schooling and access to any number of tools, methods, ideas and knowledge developed, refined and released by thousands upon thousands of humans that came before him. Why then shall he alone bear the fruits of this vast collaboration if he but receives one single spark of inspiration which in turn was inspired by us all? Riddle me that, Batman.
I'd love to live in the Utopia you must inhabit, where everyone gives freely of themselves to better the whole. Because around here nearly everything is done with a profit motive. Teachers are paid. Scientists and inventors make a career of what they do. Doctors make LOTS of money. Everything this guy would draw from was probably done for the purpose of personal gain in some way. In other words, those people whose work enable him also gained from their own actions.
I look at it this way: Farmer B never asked for it, never ordered it, never agreed to have super-corn in his crop. If Monsanto can't control the corn's reproductive methods, that's their problem.
An analogy would be a record label throwing CDs out of a plane and sending a bill to everyone who got one, or someone painting your house without your permission and then sending you an invoice.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, this is basically just marketing...
That's all it is. MS is trying to convince businesses that they'll make more money by only offering PCs bundled with Windows.
refusing to license the Windows OS to them because of it
To the best of my knowledge, the only companies MS has ever "cut off" were known pirates. I've seen MS gold OEM partners switch upwards of 20% of their products to naked/Linux systems, and MS didn't bat an eye except to offer them tickets to conferences on how to sell Windows in a Linux environment.
To say that a PC sold without an OS will undoubtedly be used to pirate Windows is an absurd stance
It's a good thing MS isn't saying that.
This sounds a lot like a veiled threat to me.
Finish the quote:
"...with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services."
It's a risk to your business because you miss out on opportunities for profit. Not because MS will send goons over to "buy you out".
Now for some serious FUD debunking:
This quote seems popular: "We want to urge all system builders -- indeed, all Partners -- not to supply naked PCs. It is a risk to your customers and a risk to your business"
Now here's the rest of it: "with specifically 5 percent fewer opportunities to market software and services,"
As for the idea that MS might pay you a visit for not buying Windows...it's pure speculation and is not indicated by MS at all.
This describes the situation best:
Microsoft is trying to convince OEMs to sell more of their product? Those fiends!
I thought so. Actually, I was making a point with it. You (assuming you are the same person, posting as AC for some reason or another) are being ridiculous.
So are you saying that violent video games have no effect on young people with a history of violent behavior? That they don't try to emulate what they see/do?
On a broader scope, are you saying that youth are not influenced by the things they see and hear, that all their decisions are made within the vacuum of their own mind, and that we shouldn't care what they are exposed to because it doesn't matter?
http://www.apa.org/releases/media_violence.html
The question is, do violent video games, when played by certain teenagers, influence their behavior? Apparently you don't think it's at all possible. The APA disagrees.
Engaging in simulated activities often stimulates the same part of the brain as actually engaging in the activity in real life. Throwing a grenade at someone in BF2 may not actually kill someone, but a small part of your brain registers that killing is enjoyable. In the vast majority of people, we can distinguish between the two realities and not have any desire to kill someone in real life. A handful of disturbed individuals do not.
Note my emphasis on disturbed. We're not talking about your average gamer. I've made it a point to say from the beginning that this is not a problem for most people. But even if it's one out of a thousand or one out of ten thousand gamers, that's too many to put GTA in the hands of every kid who asks for it. Let their parents do their jobs and decide what is right for their kids.
That's because you or your admin have not disabled that ability.
:)
As I said, it's possible to prevent PCs from having any write (or read, for that matter) access to removable drives, which is how your phone would be detected if it doesn't require specialized software.
Just because you can doesn't mean my users can
I don't know about where you work, but at my last corporate admin job only a handful of people had printers on their desks. It's outrageously expensive to maintain those things. Large workgroup printers are much, much cheaper for a company. An added bonus was that we could store images of all the print jobs so that if printing got excessive we could look and see who did the most printing, and what they printed.
As for CD burners...they didn't have any way to burn CDs. It required superuser login for a PC to be able to burn a CD or write to any removable drive. We made certain that there was no reason to put anything on disk: they could only save to the network shares, public folders meant it was easier to share between offices by saving to the network, everyone knew backups were centralized.
Anyone who wanted it could get a copy of PC Anywhere so that they could connect to their office PC via VPN and work from home--but they couldn't transfer any files to their home PCs. Management had laptops so that they didn't have to deal with a slow VPN connection, but even they couldn't write to removable disks.
A persistent user could grab screenshots of their PCA session and that sort of thing, but there's only so much you can do without completely crippling morale and productivity. I worked with management to make sure everyone understood that this wasn't because they as individuals weren't trusted, but that it only took out of a hundred office workers to be malicious and do the company harm. We made sure they were aware that it was my job to balance their productivity needs with the company's security needs; if there was a conflict between those I encouraged them to report it so that we could address it.
Tight security is good and all, but if it keeps employees from doing work, it can hurt the company just as much as no security.
I'm using a different definition of "practice" here, as in "the practice of _____".
You're arguing the absurd. Just because a disturbed kid shoots a
You're being deliberately dense, aren't you? Please say it's so.
Why do violent people get in fights, steal cars, or shoot police? You think those ideas come out of a vacuum? Prior to the act, there is something influencing them. They surround themselves with violence, from the music they hear to the TV they watch to the friends they associate with to the games they play. All of that--including the games--reenforces their tendency toward violent behavior. Of the media, games are probably the most influential because you aren't watching it, you're doing it.
In their defense, employees haven't given them a lot of reasons to trust them lately.
If people are using their work e-mail for their personal use, the company gets to see exactly what, where, how, and when their employees are spending their own time. If the employee opts to not use their work e-mail for anything personal, the company knows that they now have the other added benefit of possible added productivity.
I don't think that's the case at all. Most companies could really care less what an employee does in their off time so long as it doesn't harm the company. What they do care about is things like trade secrets going out via an anonymous hotmail account or employees wasting hours talking to their significant other and circumventing the phone system monitoring by using Skype.
I'm just glad I can use SSH and tunnel everything over that. If I can't do that, I have GPRS service on my mobile device and I *could* use that for AIM, e-mail, and browsing instead.
I think that's where things should be headed. A cell phone doesn't have easy access to corporate documents (though cameras do facilitate that to an extent) and typing a lengthy e-mail is difficult, so trade secret theft (intentional or otherwise) by employees might be reduced significantly.
Crouching Tiger: Hidden Dragon had a remarkably good dub. The voices (mostly) fit the characters, and the syncing was amazing. They just need to put the same effort in all dubs.
Was there ever an official AC subtitle release? I know there was a fan-translated version on the web for a long time, but those can be rather unreliable. I watched part of it and I found the subs the be rather annoying (and I watch a lot of subbed foreign films).
You could go even deeper than this, and I think that you'll find that video games don't contribute to the problem.
I don't think it's that simple. Video games don't cause people to become violent. However, it could probably be demonstrated that they are influential in violent behavior, probably moreso than music or video due to the interactive nature. You're not just watching violence, you're practicing it.
For the vast majority of players, that has no bearing on their actions. For a select few, though, it contributes in the same way that watching violent movies or listening to violent lyrics or hanging out with violent people contributes: it's a sort of feedback loop where a person with violent tendencies exposes themselves to more violence (real or fantasy is irrelevant) which causes them to crave more of it. Run the cycle a few thousand times and you get a kid shooting up a school for no apparent reason.
This would still be happening if there were no video games. There would still be music. There would still be movies. There would still be peer groups.
Unfortunately, this is a frustratingly inaccurate assumption - parents do not monitor a video game as they might a movie or a television program (and many do not even monitor those enough, but that is another topic).
Correction: Bad parents don't. I do. Just because bad parents don't pay attention to what they are buying their children doesn't mean that restricting sales to minors is useless. It still helps the good, concerned parents make conscious decisions for their children.
I was renting a movie one day when a boy--maybe 12--and his parents approached the counter next to me. The boy put a game on the counter, the clerk scanned it, and said "You are aware that this game is rated M for violence and sexual content?" The father turned to his son and asked "is that okay?" then said "fine" when his son nodded. I don't think that guy had a clue what he'd just been asked, I wanted to slap him.
Anyone who doesn't realize how violent video games can be hasn't owned a TV in years. That kind of rules out video games for their kids.
The idea should be to educate your kids on what is and isn't appropriate to do in real life from an early age, but what parent wants to actually take that sort of blame nowadays when they can easily find some big company to sue?
Part of parenting is knowing what is and is not appropriate for your own child. The best person in the world to judge that is a good parent. Not society, not a game company, not Congress, and not some random person on the internet (yes, I've had people tell me what is and is not appropriate for my son, here and elsewhere). Some children have no problem viewing "graphic" content like GTA. I was one of those. However, some--a minority in my opinion--are not emotionally capable of seperating fantasy imagery from real life. It's not that they don't know the difference between GTA and the real world, it's that they think that they can apply what they see in GTA to the real world.
I've seen kids whose parents tried very hard to teach them that TV and video games aren't real continue to attempt to carry out what they saw there...and more than once it resulted in physical injury. Parents are supposed to filter the world for their kids. Getting hit with the full reality of how things are at age 6 is a bit much for most kids.
Thankfully, everyone is not just like you. There are some 14-year-old kids who shouldn't be playing GTA. Kids who will attempt to emulate the violence they perform on-screen in real life. That's why the game carries the M (or A) rating...to tell PARENTS that the game may not be appropriate for their kids.
Retailers are getting a lot better about self-regulating video game sales. I don't think a 14-year-old should be able to buy GTA; however, if his parents want to buy it for him, I'm going to assume they made the decision that he can deal with what he will see (and, virtually, do) and have no objections to the game being in their house.
It's called BEING A PSYCHOPATH.
:(
Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Let me pick out the one part of that quote that matters:
for most firms
I'm not talking about firms. I'm not talking about corporations. I'm not talking about anyone but Joe Inventor who develops a patentable product in his garage. A patent would protect him from becoming a victim of one of those firms mentioned in your quote who have substantially more resources.
If you eliminate patents, you do two things: 1) You eliminate any incentive for independent inventors to invest capital in their projects, and 2) You force creative minds into large companiess where they can develop new products in the relative security of a corporate environment, and where other people will reap the bulk of the profits of their labors.
You sign a contract, and in the contract it says you must allow Monsanto's police to come on your land for three years and you're not allowed to save your own seed. You've always got to go back and buy your seed each year."
Here's an idea: if they don't want the crop reseeding itself (as does tend to happen) they should make a seedless crop.
That didn't sound like a denial to me. Maybe I missed something, but it looked more like he was posing an oft-overlooked question.
We've spent so long talking about global warming that I don't think anyone has stopped to consider some possibilities.
First, is it even our fault? Is global warming really a man-made disaster, or is it part of a climatic or solar cycle? It always seemed to be simply assumed that what we have documented is because of something humanity did...what if it's not? If this is a natural occurence, then wouldn't we be doing even more harm to nature by fighting it?
Second, what happens if there's nothing we can do? Action plans are great and all and we need to do everything in our power to reverse any damage we've done, but we need to get our heads out of the sand and have a Plan B. It's very possible that anything we do now will be too little too late, that we have already hit critical mass and warming will accelerate even if we climbed back up in the trees tomorrow.
People would have a good idea, not see any incentive in investing large amounts of time and money into developing it, and never bring it to fruition because there would be no way to recover the investment.
Since posting that, though, it's occurred to me that this wouldn't be the case; rather, individuals would no longer develop anything for profit. Large companies would be responsible for nearly all the development. Inventors would take salary jobs developing products for large companies that can secure trade secrets long enough to bring something to market en masse without the competition being able to reproduce it immediately.
Exactly my point. Abolishing patents would essentially make it impossible for inventors to operate outside of a corporate environment.
As for the problem with releasing a patented product that immediately gets competition: that can be corrected. Allow confidential patents to be filed which would become public on a set day.
Joe Smith invents this new engine. He works up a prototype and jumps in the media with it, but keeps the workings of the prototype a tight secret. He then files a confidential patent to go public October 1, 2010 (or whenever is a reasonable time for developing a line of vehicles and fine-tuning the engine). That way the patent goes public and a line of cars debuts within a month of each other.
There are better solutions to correcting the existing problems than getting rid of patents entirely.
I've certainly never heard of anyone being sued for violating a patent for personal use. it's when you market a patented product that you get in trouble.
So, you're agreeing that patents aren't an actually acting as an incentive?
Patents allow an individual to justify investing large sums of money into developing their brainchild. Why borrow/invest $100,000 if it's going to be lost, taken over by "all humanity"?
When this hypothetical person can attend to his own birth, school himself and then invent this engine alone, without ever drawing upon the ideas, concepts or help from anyone else in the society around him, alive or dead, sure he can have his engine for himself.
Meanwhile, in the real world, he will receive medical help, schooling and access to any number of tools, methods, ideas and knowledge developed, refined and released by thousands upon thousands of humans that came before him. Why then shall he alone bear the fruits of this vast collaboration if he but receives one single spark of inspiration which in turn was inspired by us all? Riddle me that, Batman.
I'd love to live in the Utopia you must inhabit, where everyone gives freely of themselves to better the whole. Because around here nearly everything is done with a profit motive. Teachers are paid. Scientists and inventors make a career of what they do. Doctors make LOTS of money. Everything this guy would draw from was probably done for the purpose of personal gain in some way. In other words, those people whose work enable him also gained from their own actions.
Gray areas are fun, aren't they?
I look at it this way: Farmer B never asked for it, never ordered it, never agreed to have super-corn in his crop. If Monsanto can't control the corn's reproductive methods, that's their problem.
An analogy would be a record label throwing CDs out of a plane and sending a bill to everyone who got one, or someone painting your house without your permission and then sending you an invoice.