The pinkertons got away with what they did to the unions because many local governments were bought and paid for by monied interests. This is really not any worse than today where cops routinely get away with stuff that is actually worse than what the pinkertons were permitted to do. A pinkerton who broke into the wrong house and shot up a family could be lawfully shot dead by the head of household. Today, you do that to a cop with a warrant based on a false statement and you're going to get it so far up the ass from the local DA that you'd think Vlad Dracula made an appearance in town. Not only is the law not even theoretically on your side today, but the government circles its wagons to protect its people and interests in a way that makes justice night impossible.
There's a word for privatizing law enforcement, that's fascism.
There's a word for people who think Fascism is a catch-all dirty word: morons. No Fascist state in history has ever moved toward privatized law enforcement where the government police and general public have the same arrest powers and liability for "getting it wrong" (enforcing non-existent laws, arresting when no formal arrest power is recognized under law, using excessive force, raiding the wrong house, etc.). Privatizing and leveling the playing field is actually a bulwark against Fascism. When a concealed carry permit holder can arrest a cop "going Rodney King" on someone and drag his sorry ass to the sheriff, that's not Fascism. That's what liberty and equality before the law looks like.
(And when several private citizens can get into a shoot out with said cop's colleagues who attempt to stop that lawful arrest, shoot most of the responding officers dead and be exonerated before the court, that's even more of an example of liberty and equality before the law).
Because the police are the modern rendition of the standing army our founding fathers feared would oppress us. They'll cut the military in a heart beat because it's not useful to them; the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits them from using it in any "interesting" capacity on us. Amending the PCA would also cause a furor among the public and the military. All of that sort of beside the point because many cops today have the same weapons, training and equipment as infantrymen.
Ironically, law enforcement, unlike military service, is precisely the sort of government function that needs to be heavily privatized. It used to be mostly private anyway. When your county hired a sheriff, they were literally just an armed citizen who carried a gun and badge that let the world know "I do full time, what any citizen can do when faced with a crime." Like a private citizen doing risky work, they had to be bonded and insured. Broke in the wrong house and did $10k of damage? Didn't come out of the treasury; it came out of your privately funded insurance and/or bond money.
Our system is broken today because we moved away from the principle of least privilege. That used to be the operating assumption of law enforcement (if I don't know the law, I don't enforce it because getting it wrong means I'm a criminal). We went from a law enforcement system where each officer was a mostly unprivileged user to being damn near like root.
This difference affected their ability to innovate and socialize the way we, modern people (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) do.
It amazes me that comments like this, with so little data to make such a conjecture, can be taken seriously by people who scoff at religion. We know slightly more about these other branches of humanity (their biology aside) than we do about the historicity and culture of Atlantis. Yet we are supposed to take for granted that we can just know, with virtually nothing known about neanderthal society, what caused them to go extinct.
If you are this upset about DRM and bought Sim City you are to gaming what an anti-racism activist who couldn't wait to vacation in apartheid South Africa is to the cause of fighting racism. Sorry, but that's just how it is. The level of DRM was well-known in advance. You chose to buy it anyway. You want the government to force them to make the game you want work they way you want.
Talk about first world problems. I don't think you could come up with a way to make 95% of the human race "see things your way" using arguments that didn't involve a captive audience, guns and sharp bamboo shoots...
News flash to Obama: if you want them to take you seriously act on your 2008 platform. That would be getting federal spending back down below Bush levels and bringing our military back home. A $1.1T deficit and overextended military make us a laughable threat to China. They are merely showing you pity by deigning to talk to you.
A significant amount of the smart, talented women I know despise working for other women because female managers can be awful to women in a way that many men cannot even dream of treating female subordinates. Even in college, I saw some of this as one female professor was known to be utterly ruthless to female students who slacked off to a degree she almost never, ever dished out to her male students.
So I look forward to this trend with amusement because it very well may lay the foundation for an implosion of female involvement in our fields. And then the cycle will repeat itself...
A manager who comes by your cube and notices a pattern of you doing not-work-things when they walk up to you has a clear cut basis to look into what you are actually doing. Many jobs don't lend themselves to metrics that can easily demonstrate productivity. In fact your comment is a good reason why many managers used to believe lines of code was a great way to judge a developer. They didn't know any better, but it is perfectly sensible to most non-developers that a developer who can churn out 500 lines of code by lunch time is "doing more" than one who spends all day churning out 50. Nevermind the fact that most slashdot readers know that the latter very well might actually be substantially superior in quality to the former.
Microsoft doesn't need the best and brightest for many of its teams. Take Windows, for example. "Good enough" is more than sufficient for most of the user-facing pieces. A non-stupid H1B is suitable for any number of mundane tasks that don't affect the performance of the core of the product.
This is the same problem we have with illegal immigrants. If illegals are able to do 2/3 of the same job for 50% of the pay, that's good enough for many jobs like construction and utility work. The company that hires the cheaper labor is the one that has the cheaper costs most of the time if the work is good enough.
The solution, though, is not to give H1Bs the flexibility to change employers. The solution is the same as with illegal immigration: make companies find other ways to get the job done. We also have plenty of ways to make doing work in the US more competitive that doesn't interfere with worker rights and compensation. For example, abolishing all corporate taxation or making it a 1-2% income tax on revenue, not profits would not only reduce the tax burden but drastically reduce the compliance burden.
We could end this crap in a day if China would pull this on us. They have the leverage and motivation to get US citizens extradited on equally flimsy grounds. It would be hilarious to see several American bigwigs taken to China and sentenced to 20 years of labor in a laogai.
If you fired at least 50% of the civilian employees, you would probably barely notice a dent in military readiness since most of the DoD's work is done by the uniformed services and contractors.
You don't honestly think that most students at a typical public university with a student body that is 10k or larger could be there with the requirements of say the 1950s or earlier, do you? Set aside the bullshit racial and gender grandstanding about requirements "back in the day" which is so often used to discredit anything our forebears did, the average heterosexual white male in college today could not meet the academic requirements of most universities back then.
The very fact that there is a significant overlap between high school and college math course offerings at the lowest levels is proof of this. Algebra I in college? Really? Someone who cannot even solve basic algebra should not even be a candidate for college, but it's shocking how many people who lack even a basic understanding of freshman and sophomore high school math can make it to "respectable colleges." I say this as someone who had damn near a learning disability in math then (somehow I managed to get Bs in all of my high school math classes).
The Republican base is notoriously hostile to the groups represented by the **AA. Most Republicans come from districts where Hollywood and co mean jack to them in terms of jobs and may even be an impediment. They're more likely to hear "what are you doing to rein in the filth from Hollywood" than a MPAA or RIAA-friendly comment from their base.
So really, for someone who was a bit naive it would be a no-brainer to think that a policy proposal along these lines aimed at galvanizing anti-big content voters and tech industry money would be a huge hit with the everyday Republican congresscritter. What he didn't count on was the piece of work from Nashville getting her panties in a knot and the Republican leadership being sufficiently spineless to give her what she wanted instead of telling Nashville to go fuck itself because "this is how we win Silicon Valley, mmmkay?"
The CFAA would be an afterthought in that case. The amount of export and national security felonies he'd have committed would be enough to probably make the CFAA not make the cut on the (IIRC) 15 count limit of charges the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure allow to be brought at once.
This may not necessarily be fraudulent, but should someone be allowed to appropriate your well-known name and use it for purposes that may or may not overlap with your goals? It may not be fraudulent, but it falls within the range of things trademark is meant to restrict and can reasonably restrict under a libertarian regime. For example, it would be one thing to protect "Ford Auto Owners Club" as a non-trademark infringement. However if a bunch of hobbyists got together and created "Ford Custom Kits" under a libertarian regime that would be sufficiently close to the initiation of fraud by virtue of trying to play off someone else's name to win business that Ford would have a legitimate right under a libertarian regime to sue.
It would seem that doctrinaire libertarianism would be against this, but Ron Paul actually has a strong case for it because the two core values of libertarianism are you don't have a right to initiate force against another person not harming you or your property (or someone else) and you have no right to engage in fraud. Trademark exists to provide a way to clarify things in certain market transactions and marketing scenarios to prevent fraud. Unlike patents, there is a very powerful libertarian case for trademarks.
But ssssshhh don't go telling most doctrinaire libertarians such things. Their ideology isn't really any more sophisticated than "don't tell me what to do." They are less interested in creating a sustainable free society than maximizing their liberty right here, right now even if that means they know for a fact it'll crush their children (ex. open borders which is a security, cultural and economic nightmare for maintaining a well-ordered society).
When I got out of college, most of my older coworkers where shocked at how quickly I could type Java code because I learned how to touch type the non-alpha numeric characters pretty well. When you don't have to hunt and peck for those characters, you can actually type out code about as fast as you can think "I'd like to make this change..."
If you want to drive this point home, get your son into a Perl class or doing Perl work. He'll go nuts if he doesn't bother to learn how to do this skill well.
The article closes by asking 'Will you [pay up]?' The consensus in the comments is a resounding 'NO,' with frequent mentions of the suitability of OpenOffice for home productivity."
And if Microsoft offers you Office for an annual rate that is the same or less than a typical AV product AND that includes "easy, no hassle updates" that make upgrading as painless as upgrading to the next version of Firefox, 95% of home users won't care. If Microsoft is smart, they'll make billing so easy, so simple, so customer-oriented that installing it on a 2nd PC is just treated as a new silent license, charged at 25-50% the cost of the first one and that's it. Apple's system of authorizing computers in iTunes is a simplistic version of what they could do. They could easily make the admin feature enabled with features like a one-click deactivation of a computer so the key could be repurposed.
What Microsoft should be doing is incremental, yearly updates to Windows priced at the rates Be charged for BeOS. $50/upgrade $100/new install. If they made the OS better and faster like Be did, most users would be like "fuck yeah I'm upgrading!" to the detriment of hardware vendors.
1) Windows 7 is arguably the best desktop OS out there right now for the vast majority of the public. Even many of the Apple fans I know, myself included, have been forced to concede that Windows 7 is better than OS X in many ways. 2) Microsoft has started to really become an advocate for open standards to the point of throwing IE 9 under the bus and repeatedly rolling the bus over it in front of their customers. 3) Microsoft's tools produce standards compliant web output. 4) Microsoft has officially incorporated jQuery into their web process and extended it in an open way to make it really work with Visual Studio. 5) Microsoft has never once threatened Mono or any open source.NET effort even as the Java world was nearly torn apart recently. 6) Microsoft has spent the last decade really ramping up their security efforts in what amounts to a "come to Jesus experience" on security. 7) Microsoft is starting to allow their own products like ASP.NET MVC to go FOSS.
I give them credit as a former Microsoft-hated, Apple-loving Java/JavaScript/Groovy/Ruby developer. This isn't Bill Gates' Microsoft. It's actually a damn shame that it's not Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft because that might have played a truly dangerous stalking horse to Tim Cook's Apple.
And most of the A-student girls I went to school with were dumb as cold shit compared to me on my laziest B-student day.
I had a 2.8 GPA in college and did a presentation on Smalltalk based mainly on the "blue book" for a programming languages class. Our de facto departmental valedictorian, who had pushing on a 4.0, was exactly what you described in terms of the waterworks and charm. She had to get someone to teach her Python because she couldn't learn it in a 1-2 week period well enough to write even basic code in it (same girl who after a whole semester of C++ took several hours to implement the most basic version of "cat" in C).
A constitutional amendment (state and federal as appropriate depending on where the scandal occurs) allowing Qui Tam lawsuits against elected officials whose allocations a reasonable person would say are for private benefit. Let the legislators and governor be personally liable for these costs and suddenly you'll see the entire body militantly opposed to bailouts, "investments," etc.
Heck, it already has precedent in a way at the federal level. If a member of the civil service knowingly tasks a contractor to perform duties outside of their contract, the federal government requires the entire fee from the contractor to be paid by the government employee.
Crony Capitalism is when you use the state to get unfair private advantage. It's not like a builder who gets the state to "smooth things out" when building something for public purposes (ex. police station, highway, etc.). There are times when the government needs to help facilitate the work of private parties. This was not one of them. It was the government doing something with a marginal public purpose (the nebulous "it'll create more jobs" excuse).
Put another way, this is precisely the same sort of crap we saw Bush and Obama do with the banking sector (using public funds to secure private losses that were not incurred due to a public purpose). In either case, the government stepped in to do what the market should have done in an otherwise private transaction with minimal to no public purpose.
But as a conservative this just smacks of central planning and the old adage of picking the winners and losers. I have never seen any explanation of why Samsung should be punished like this instead of everyone because they all infringe on each other. Yet somehow the rules don't seem to be getting applied even remotely fairly...
Really, we need to jettison the entire punishment and start over if we are going to have patents. Keep the products on the market, but require that the company keep an accurate tally of how much it sells and regulaly cut a check for the fees on a quarterly basis. None of this ban the from the market crap unless it is such a clone of the competing product that it is a hair's distance from a trademark violation.
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The pinkertons got away with what they did to the unions because many local governments were bought and paid for by monied interests. This is really not any worse than today where cops routinely get away with stuff that is actually worse than what the pinkertons were permitted to do. A pinkerton who broke into the wrong house and shot up a family could be lawfully shot dead by the head of household. Today, you do that to a cop with a warrant based on a false statement and you're going to get it so far up the ass from the local DA that you'd think Vlad Dracula made an appearance in town. Not only is the law not even theoretically on your side today, but the government circles its wagons to protect its people and interests in a way that makes justice night impossible.
There's a word for people who think Fascism is a catch-all dirty word: morons. No Fascist state in history has ever moved toward privatized law enforcement where the government police and general public have the same arrest powers and liability for "getting it wrong" (enforcing non-existent laws, arresting when no formal arrest power is recognized under law, using excessive force, raiding the wrong house, etc.). Privatizing and leveling the playing field is actually a bulwark against Fascism. When a concealed carry permit holder can arrest a cop "going Rodney King" on someone and drag his sorry ass to the sheriff, that's not Fascism. That's what liberty and equality before the law looks like.
(And when several private citizens can get into a shoot out with said cop's colleagues who attempt to stop that lawful arrest, shoot most of the responding officers dead and be exonerated before the court, that's even more of an example of liberty and equality before the law).
Because the police are the modern rendition of the standing army our founding fathers feared would oppress us. They'll cut the military in a heart beat because it's not useful to them; the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits them from using it in any "interesting" capacity on us. Amending the PCA would also cause a furor among the public and the military. All of that sort of beside the point because many cops today have the same weapons, training and equipment as infantrymen.
Ironically, law enforcement, unlike military service, is precisely the sort of government function that needs to be heavily privatized. It used to be mostly private anyway. When your county hired a sheriff, they were literally just an armed citizen who carried a gun and badge that let the world know "I do full time, what any citizen can do when faced with a crime." Like a private citizen doing risky work, they had to be bonded and insured. Broke in the wrong house and did $10k of damage? Didn't come out of the treasury; it came out of your privately funded insurance and/or bond money.
Our system is broken today because we moved away from the principle of least privilege. That used to be the operating assumption of law enforcement (if I don't know the law, I don't enforce it because getting it wrong means I'm a criminal). We went from a law enforcement system where each officer was a mostly unprivileged user to being damn near like root.
It amazes me that comments like this, with so little data to make such a conjecture, can be taken seriously by people who scoff at religion. We know slightly more about these other branches of humanity (their biology aside) than we do about the historicity and culture of Atlantis. Yet we are supposed to take for granted that we can just know, with virtually nothing known about neanderthal society, what caused them to go extinct.
Unbelievable.
If you are this upset about DRM and bought Sim City you are to gaming what an anti-racism activist who couldn't wait to vacation in apartheid South Africa is to the cause of fighting racism. Sorry, but that's just how it is. The level of DRM was well-known in advance. You chose to buy it anyway. You want the government to force them to make the game you want work they way you want.
Talk about first world problems. I don't think you could come up with a way to make 95% of the human race "see things your way" using arguments that didn't involve a captive audience, guns and sharp bamboo shoots...
News flash to Obama: if you want them to take you seriously act on your 2008 platform. That would be getting federal spending back down below Bush levels and bringing our military back home. A $1.1T deficit and overextended military make us a laughable threat to China. They are merely showing you pity by deigning to talk to you.
A significant amount of the smart, talented women I know despise working for other women because female managers can be awful to women in a way that many men cannot even dream of treating female subordinates. Even in college, I saw some of this as one female professor was known to be utterly ruthless to female students who slacked off to a degree she almost never, ever dished out to her male students.
So I look forward to this trend with amusement because it very well may lay the foundation for an implosion of female involvement in our fields. And then the cycle will repeat itself...
A manager who comes by your cube and notices a pattern of you doing not-work-things when they walk up to you has a clear cut basis to look into what you are actually doing. Many jobs don't lend themselves to metrics that can easily demonstrate productivity. In fact your comment is a good reason why many managers used to believe lines of code was a great way to judge a developer. They didn't know any better, but it is perfectly sensible to most non-developers that a developer who can churn out 500 lines of code by lunch time is "doing more" than one who spends all day churning out 50. Nevermind the fact that most slashdot readers know that the latter very well might actually be substantially superior in quality to the former.
Microsoft doesn't need the best and brightest for many of its teams. Take Windows, for example. "Good enough" is more than sufficient for most of the user-facing pieces. A non-stupid H1B is suitable for any number of mundane tasks that don't affect the performance of the core of the product.
This is the same problem we have with illegal immigrants. If illegals are able to do 2/3 of the same job for 50% of the pay, that's good enough for many jobs like construction and utility work. The company that hires the cheaper labor is the one that has the cheaper costs most of the time if the work is good enough.
The solution, though, is not to give H1Bs the flexibility to change employers. The solution is the same as with illegal immigration: make companies find other ways to get the job done. We also have plenty of ways to make doing work in the US more competitive that doesn't interfere with worker rights and compensation. For example, abolishing all corporate taxation or making it a 1-2% income tax on revenue, not profits would not only reduce the tax burden but drastically reduce the compliance burden.
We could end this crap in a day if China would pull this on us. They have the leverage and motivation to get US citizens extradited on equally flimsy grounds. It would be hilarious to see several American bigwigs taken to China and sentenced to 20 years of labor in a laogai.
If you fired at least 50% of the civilian employees, you would probably barely notice a dent in military readiness since most of the DoD's work is done by the uniformed services and contractors.
You don't honestly think that most students at a typical public university with a student body that is 10k or larger could be there with the requirements of say the 1950s or earlier, do you? Set aside the bullshit racial and gender grandstanding about requirements "back in the day" which is so often used to discredit anything our forebears did, the average heterosexual white male in college today could not meet the academic requirements of most universities back then.
The very fact that there is a significant overlap between high school and college math course offerings at the lowest levels is proof of this. Algebra I in college? Really? Someone who cannot even solve basic algebra should not even be a candidate for college, but it's shocking how many people who lack even a basic understanding of freshman and sophomore high school math can make it to "respectable colleges." I say this as someone who had damn near a learning disability in math then (somehow I managed to get Bs in all of my high school math classes).
The Republican base is notoriously hostile to the groups represented by the **AA. Most Republicans come from districts where Hollywood and co mean jack to them in terms of jobs and may even be an impediment. They're more likely to hear "what are you doing to rein in the filth from Hollywood" than a MPAA or RIAA-friendly comment from their base.
So really, for someone who was a bit naive it would be a no-brainer to think that a policy proposal along these lines aimed at galvanizing anti-big content voters and tech industry money would be a huge hit with the everyday Republican congresscritter. What he didn't count on was the piece of work from Nashville getting her panties in a knot and the Republican leadership being sufficiently spineless to give her what she wanted instead of telling Nashville to go fuck itself because "this is how we win Silicon Valley, mmmkay?"
The CFAA would be an afterthought in that case. The amount of export and national security felonies he'd have committed would be enough to probably make the CFAA not make the cut on the (IIRC) 15 count limit of charges the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure allow to be brought at once.
This may not necessarily be fraudulent, but should someone be allowed to appropriate your well-known name and use it for purposes that may or may not overlap with your goals? It may not be fraudulent, but it falls within the range of things trademark is meant to restrict and can reasonably restrict under a libertarian regime. For example, it would be one thing to protect "Ford Auto Owners Club" as a non-trademark infringement. However if a bunch of hobbyists got together and created "Ford Custom Kits" under a libertarian regime that would be sufficiently close to the initiation of fraud by virtue of trying to play off someone else's name to win business that Ford would have a legitimate right under a libertarian regime to sue.
It would seem that doctrinaire libertarianism would be against this, but Ron Paul actually has a strong case for it because the two core values of libertarianism are you don't have a right to initiate force against another person not harming you or your property (or someone else) and you have no right to engage in fraud. Trademark exists to provide a way to clarify things in certain market transactions and marketing scenarios to prevent fraud. Unlike patents, there is a very powerful libertarian case for trademarks.
But ssssshhh don't go telling most doctrinaire libertarians such things. Their ideology isn't really any more sophisticated than "don't tell me what to do." They are less interested in creating a sustainable free society than maximizing their liberty right here, right now even if that means they know for a fact it'll crush their children (ex. open borders which is a security, cultural and economic nightmare for maintaining a well-ordered society).
When I got out of college, most of my older coworkers where shocked at how quickly I could type Java code because I learned how to touch type the non-alpha numeric characters pretty well. When you don't have to hunt and peck for those characters, you can actually type out code about as fast as you can think "I'd like to make this change..."
If you want to drive this point home, get your son into a Perl class or doing Perl work. He'll go nuts if he doesn't bother to learn how to do this skill well.
by the organization where the majority of internal web apps still have to target IE7 for compatibility.
And if Microsoft offers you Office for an annual rate that is the same or less than a typical AV product AND that includes "easy, no hassle updates" that make upgrading as painless as upgrading to the next version of Firefox, 95% of home users won't care. If Microsoft is smart, they'll make billing so easy, so simple, so customer-oriented that installing it on a 2nd PC is just treated as a new silent license, charged at 25-50% the cost of the first one and that's it. Apple's system of authorizing computers in iTunes is a simplistic version of what they could do. They could easily make the admin feature enabled with features like a one-click deactivation of a computer so the key could be repurposed.
What Microsoft should be doing is incremental, yearly updates to Windows priced at the rates Be charged for BeOS. $50/upgrade $100/new install. If they made the OS better and faster like Be did, most users would be like "fuck yeah I'm upgrading!" to the detriment of hardware vendors.
Gotta love forgetting to escape characters in your comments...
Let's look at the bigger picture...
1) Windows 7 is arguably the best desktop OS out there right now for the vast majority of the public. Even many of the Apple fans I know, myself included, have been forced to concede that Windows 7 is better than OS X in many ways. .NET effort even as the Java world was nearly torn apart recently.
2) Microsoft has started to really become an advocate for open standards to the point of throwing IE 9 under the bus and repeatedly rolling the bus over it in front of their customers.
3) Microsoft's tools produce standards compliant web output.
4) Microsoft has officially incorporated jQuery into their web process and extended it in an open way to make it really work with Visual Studio.
5) Microsoft has never once threatened Mono or any open source
6) Microsoft has spent the last decade really ramping up their security efforts in what amounts to a "come to Jesus experience" on security.
7) Microsoft is starting to allow their own products like ASP.NET MVC to go FOSS.
I give them credit as a former Microsoft-hated, Apple-loving Java/JavaScript/Groovy/Ruby developer. This isn't Bill Gates' Microsoft. It's actually a damn shame that it's not Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft because that might have played a truly dangerous stalking horse to Tim Cook's Apple.
When the companies decide to not collect data on French citizens, the French government will bitch them out for drying up a revenue stream.
I had a 2.8 GPA in college and did a presentation on Smalltalk based mainly on the "blue book" for a programming languages class. Our de facto departmental valedictorian, who had pushing on a 4.0, was exactly what you described in terms of the waterworks and charm. She had to get someone to teach her Python because she couldn't learn it in a 1-2 week period well enough to write even basic code in it (same girl who after a whole semester of C++ took several hours to implement the most basic version of "cat" in C).
A constitutional amendment (state and federal as appropriate depending on where the scandal occurs) allowing Qui Tam lawsuits against elected officials whose allocations a reasonable person would say are for private benefit. Let the legislators and governor be personally liable for these costs and suddenly you'll see the entire body militantly opposed to bailouts, "investments," etc.
Heck, it already has precedent in a way at the federal level. If a member of the civil service knowingly tasks a contractor to perform duties outside of their contract, the federal government requires the entire fee from the contractor to be paid by the government employee.
Crony Capitalism is when you use the state to get unfair private advantage. It's not like a builder who gets the state to "smooth things out" when building something for public purposes (ex. police station, highway, etc.). There are times when the government needs to help facilitate the work of private parties. This was not one of them. It was the government doing something with a marginal public purpose (the nebulous "it'll create more jobs" excuse).
Put another way, this is precisely the same sort of crap we saw Bush and Obama do with the banking sector (using public funds to secure private losses that were not incurred due to a public purpose). In either case, the government stepped in to do what the market should have done in an otherwise private transaction with minimal to no public purpose.
But as a conservative this just smacks of central planning and the old adage of picking the winners and losers. I have never seen any explanation of why Samsung should be punished like this instead of everyone because they all infringe on each other. Yet somehow the rules don't seem to be getting applied even remotely fairly...
Really, we need to jettison the entire punishment and start over if we are going to have patents. Keep the products on the market, but require that the company keep an accurate tally of how much it sells and regulaly cut a check for the fees on a quarterly basis. None of this ban the from the market crap unless it is such a clone of the competing product that it is a hair's distance from a trademark violation.