They DO have a right to selectively license MacOS X to a vendor who agrees to use high quality, consistent hardware. They could easily get a company like Dell or Acer to license it for one particular line of netbooks.
You know what happens if someone buys a Dell NetBook with OS X on it in this economy? When they get $1000-$3000 to blow on a real OS X laptop, they'll be more than happy to head to the Apple Store. Apple is in a licensing position to tell any vendor to kiss their shiny, solid aluminum ass if they want OS X for all laptops or nothing instead of just a netbook. Right now, I think Dell wouldn't even hesitate to agree to those terms.
I am not an admirer of Saddam or his yobbish sons, but the story is not as clear cut as you would like to believe.
There is a moral difference between the US killing 5000 civilians who get caught up in the crossfire between US troops and Iraqi insurgents and Saddam killing 50 people because they were "enemies of the state." The "anti-war" movement blurs the distinction between unfortunate facts of war and murder. Plenty of innocent French, Italians and Belgians died as the allies pushed the Germans out of their countries, but there is an extreme difference between those casualties and willfully inflicted murders.
I didn't support the war in Iraq as a matter of principle. I don't believe it's worth American lives, treasure or liberty to get involved in these matters unless either we're going to end up in the aggressors' crosshairs at some point, or the country serves a strategic interest that we cannot ignore. Very, very few conflicts have ever fit those descriptions.
I wonder if he'd take the job if it meant he was on the hook personally for anything potentially illegal that is advertised on the website.
The CEO of craigslist would not be liable under that scenario, the manager who decided to post it would be liable. Why should a whole company be punished for the actions of a single person? If you run an escort service, and you KNOW your girls are having sex for money with your clients AND you never stop it, you are already liable in most jurisdictions.
Frivolous lawsuits can already be handled by laws regulating who has standing, punishing lawyers for taking blatantly frivolous cases, etc. For example, to use the other poster's anti-war example, that could be solved simply by Congress passing a law stating that no private citizen has legal standing in a federal court to sue the President if he prosecutes an armed conflict that has been approved by Congress.
If you want to make the frivolous lawsuit issue so extreme that it becomes the hot reform topic, then this would be a bold step toward making America less litigious.
Make it so that incorporated entities cannot be sued. Why should a company, union or government bear responsibility for what individuals did? If a cop beats you relentlessly, the PD should have full immunity, and the cop none. If a CEO orders subordinates to break the law, sue the CEO, not the company. If a politician uses state power illegally to grandstand, make them liable and not the state (and don't allow them to use state resources to defend themselves).
This AG wouldn't have been nearly so ballsy if he knew he'd go it alone if Craigslist were to sue him personally.
The law already protects databases of public facts. Why would a spontaneously generated list not be copyrightable? Personally, I hope that the courts will see through that argument and call it a violation of the spirit of the law, but I won't hold my breath that they won't say that a list of copyrighted quotes isn't protected if the creator of the list claims that THAT list is protected.
Windows and OS X are the two best OSs for guaranteeing that all of your hardware will be supported, and for allowing you to take a lot of powerful video editing capabilities around the world with you. You may be the IT guy, but you won't be the main person doing everything OS X would be a much safer bet for getting this job done.
But I doubt your state has exhausted its backlog of murders, rapes, armed robberies, child molestation cases, etc. Until you do, here's a polite suggestion: get your fucking priorities straight you worthless politician.
I swear, the fatal flaw of democracy is that it relies on the public to make the highest office holders do their job and not just use the office as a means of personal advancement. At least under a monarchy, the king could bitch slap a guy like this for grandstanding (not saying we should go back to a monarchy).
But there should be penalties for acquiring copyrighted goods without any intent to buy them. Many slashdotters complain about entitlement mentalities, and then defend copyright infringement on the part of people who either can pay for what they are getting or who have no need for it (like people who pirate a lot of software).
So what if the quality is crap? Don't buy it or find a way to sample it legally. If it doesn't work once you buy it, boycott the company that makes it, and let them know that you are doing that. When they get a lot of angry letters, and see their sales actually dropping, they'll either address the quality concerns or go out of business.
Just because copyright infringement doesn't deprive people of their original property, doesn't mean it is rendered ethically neutral or even good. There is no moral right to acquire property without the permission of the people who created it or who now own it.
Anyone who is morbidly obese and doesn't have a diagnosed thyroid problem gets no Medicare or Medicaid? How right wing of me! I should be kind and compassionate by paying taxes to support the health care of people who know their habits are destroying them.
DHS is a hodge podge of federal agencies that performs like the Keystone Cops in Gestapo uniforms. Not only is the NSA more qualified to take over federal infosec in a time of crisis, but it is statutorally safer for the general public because as a member of the intelligence community, it is not legally a part of the law enforcement apparatus. In order for information to flow to law enforcement, the NSA would not only have to be willing to cooperate, but have to jump a large number of hoops and hurdles to hand off the information. There are a lot of restrictions on the intelligence community with respect to information about Americans that simply don't exist for law enforcement like DHS.
The real reason why we don't need a Cybersecurity Czar is that 99 times out of 100, the systems that are getting hacked are not sensitive systems. Who cares if the Department of Labor or Interior gets hacked here and there since the intelligence community and military are generally competent at securing their classified networks?
Why isn't the news story here that McDonalds has a program in place to spy on customer's wifi usage, to get customers arrested?
If my phone company were eaves dropping on my conversations to report to the police, I would have a problem with that.
If my ISP were eaves dropping on my internet phone calls or other communications to report to the police, I would have a problem with that.
Well, for one, they have a large number of people hopping on and off their network, and they don't maintain a constant business relationship with them which would help them identify rogue or criminal users. And on top of that, a little self-regulation to catch criminals will help them ward off legislation like this which is a Stasi-like surveillance boot-up-the-ass that has support in both parties.
And here's a question for you. Who the hell do you think you are using someone else's network for free and then complaining that they check up on your behavior from time-to-time? This isn't your ISP. This is a private business which is giving you free access to their wireless for your personal enjoyment.
The point of a cultural melting pot is to take those people in and make them a part of the society, changing it and making it more worldly in the process.
Uhhh no. If you believe that, then you're seriously uninformed about the traditional justifications of the melting pot. The point of a melting pot is that it melts down the incoming materials and makes it part of the mixture. What you're describing is what is derisively called the "beef stew immigration policy" in which immigrants come in, don't really adapt and society becomes a hodge podge of different ethnicities which are ultimately united by economics and prosperity, not common heritage. Nations that go that route usually don't fare well once there is a serious downfall in the economy.
There's a fundamental flaw here, you assume that it would be just a matter of targeting Saudis. All this would do is make a smarter terrorist. Recruit from other countries, forge credentials, smuggle people in, or better yet attack targets outside our borders.
That won't change the fact that their most fertile recruiting grounds are in Saudi Arabia. In addition, forged identities have always been a problem. There isn't much that we could do now if Saudi terrorists went to Jordan and paid off a government office to give them valid Jordanian passports. We have the same problem with illegal immigrants paying off DMV workers in the US. However, making that a requirement of getting terrorist assets into the United States would create a serious barrier for all but the most connected terrorist groups.
A former coworker who is a Syrian expatriate and I were talking about Islamic terrorism, and the conversation turned to Saudi Arabia. If you look at the profile of international Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia is disproportionately represented in terrorist groups around the world. I don't know if it's still true, but at its peak, half of the insurgents we killed in Iraq on any given day were Saudis.
If Western countries simply prohibited Saudi nationals from staying for any length longer than a vacation or business trip, it'd be easier to keep out suspected Islamic terrorists. If Western governments would also start shutting down Saudi-financed mosques and Islamic schools, that'd be even better. The Saudis are funding the radicalization of Islam around the world, and we'd be doing the majority of Muslims a favor by targeting Saudi Arabia and Saudi nationals for very direct, special attention as the majority of Muslims would be left alone to live in peace if that's their desire.
But of course the worst thing a Western government can do is to appear to be discriminating against someone for something, and to possibly even be limiting the expression of a religion, no matter how violently hostile and alien it is to the host society. We think we're taking the moral high ground when all we're doing is importing people who want to tear down our societies, and in the end we're hurting the honest immigrants who really want to flee that bullshit like my former coworker as much as we're hurting our own people.
Here's how it usually goes down with these situations, aside from the case where the person isn't a sociopath:
1) Guy gets marginalized and picked on.
2) School knows about it and does nothing.
3) Guy gets subjected to violence.
4) The authorities do nothing despite the basic fact that we know from common sense and scientific observation that eventually an organism will lash out in self-defense if not protected.
5) Guy may defend himself, at which rate the authorities will come down hard on him because as we all know "violence never solves anything."
6) The authorities will earnestly pat themselves on the back as guardians of civilization for having stopped a victim from exercising force in self-defense.
7) Guy lashes out with disproportionate force because pent up frustration made his temper 5x more explosive it would have been if causality had been allowed to run its course between the attackers and the victim.
8) The authorities will claim it couldn't have been stopped.
Violence solves things splendidly with bullies. In the early 1960s, victims of bullying were allowed to beat the shit out of the bully, and the authorities didn't even think about taking up for the bully unless it was so extreme as to be a violent crime.
You want less violent shootings? Let teenage boys shoot guns (real guns), play video games and beat the shit out of each other when one attacks the other. When violence usually brings more violence back on the perpetrator, people usually are less inclined to use violence. Violent people who are quick to use force are not wired like normal people, and the best way to restrain them is to create a culture that will respond to them violently when they act out.
Most of the teachers suck at what they do, and in poor places like South Carolina there are many parents who discourage their kids from being successful. Case in point, when we lived there, my mom tutored a kid at my school. You know what happened when he got an A on a test? His piece of shit excuse for human trash mother said to him "you actin' white now?" Technology is no solution for bad schools and students with parents who pull them down because they have ego or race problems (both apply in the case of the black mother who ridiculed the kid my white mother was trying to help succeed).
There is so little incentive now to get an education AND for schools to compete to hire people who have an education in something more than "education." Throwing around millions of dollars to buy laptops for kids who can barely read is more likely to have the state subsidizing the gaming, movie and porn industries than actually teaching these kids anything.
And here's the thing. People will crawl out of the woodwork in most cases to attack comments like mine about how I'm unfairly judging the public schools or am a closet racist for saying such harsh things about that black bitch who tore her poor son down everytime he succeeded. It's easier to make excuses for why the public schools are failing and why parents, especially poor parents, are often roadblocks to their kids' success than to start making hamburger out of the sacred cows and fixing the problem by introducing more competition and making an education more critical to just being able to get by in America.
Most of the economy was agrarian and the creation of new products was a much rarer act. The patent trolls had a much smaller terrain in which to do their hunting.
Today, only 2% of the workforce works in the agriculture sector. The creation of new products and services is how most Americans get into business. The patent system, working with the same unfixed flaws, cannot scale up to control the threat of patent trolls.
I think the simplest solution is to tie ownership of patents to either pure research or production. I have no problem with Qualcomm licensing patents from its research. I have no problem with a manufacturing company patenting the hell out of its products. I have extreme problem with law firms and companies composed of 2 weasels in business suits and a lawyer owning patents.
A tablet that combines a low-end MacBook and the iPhone. That means that instead of widgets, I want a setup which calls up the iPhone interface for rapid application selection.
The US military should comport itself online similar to how it handles the distinction between government and civilian targets in physical battles. That means the US military should regard all Chinese and Russian systems as open, hostile targets of opportunity the way that those governments treat everyone else. However, the US military should refuse to use its resources for the betterment of the US economy, unless that is something like stealing Russian jet designs and handing them quietly over to Lockheed or Northrop Grumman to analyze.
Let's stop kidding ourselves that these countries are only responding to us. There are plenty of people who foolishly believe that the Russians and Chinese are only engaging in an arms race to keep up with us because they're "afraid of us." Bull. Fucking. Shit. Like hell they're scared of us. The reason they're doing this is obvious to anyone who has studied their history. For centuries they've been imperialists and aggressors, and now a young country has finally kicked them to the curb. It's a pride issue, not a national security issue. The moment we accept that is the moment we'll finally come to grips with what we're really dealing with here.
Conflict always been part of our history. War will always be with us. The lunacy that leads people to believe in progress to negate that is the same lunacy that has lead to the economic mismanagement that resulted in the Great Depression, the millennial bubble and our current fiasco. Basic facts about war, foreign policy and economics will always be with us.
So, what exactly are they to compete on? My wife's a doctor, and she can't fit any more patients into a day without sacrificing quality of care. She can't compete on price because Medica{re,id} and insurance companies effectively set her prices. All she can do is try to keep her patients happy so that they come back when they need to see someone, and she's apparently doing that pretty well (judging by her appointment schedule). If you doubled the number of practitioners in her specialty in our city, the only long-term effect would be that half of them would go out of business.
How would they compete? Oh, I don't know... maybe by keeping more up to date than the next guy, some would forego insurance altogether in favor of buying all services in cash (works well for many who do that) because those offices are cheaper to run, among other things.
One of the things you haven't accounted for is the fact that doctors can go anywhere in the US. Right now, there are a lot of areas of the country which have so few doctors and specialists that you could probably increase the supply by 300% and still not run into a glut of labor. Florida and Massachusetts are great examples of that, especially considering the former's persecution of pediatricians and pediatric surgeons (among other professions) in the past which has resulted in the vast majority of child health care specialists leaving or retiring.
More doctors. Break the back of the AMA, double the seats in medical school and let the market do more of the talking.
The tired old argument of "fewer, but better doctors" is bullshit. You know what they call the guy who barely got through medical school the day he graduates? "Doctor!"
All of the regulations miss the point entirely. There are not enough doctors, not enough competition. Even the "evidence-based medicine" advocates miss the point about mandating "best practices" when you have people like the orthopedic surgeon who treated my mother. The man was 15-20 years out of date on certain techniques, and did them according to the way he was trained, and screwed the pooch big time. A doctor at UVA medical school had to intervene to get her back to normal.
People like that couldn't exist in other professions that are less regulated and coddled. Imagine someone only knowing C/C++/Ada circa 1995 today and trying to compete in the mainstream software development market for new development work. It's laughable here, but doctors get away with that.
The next time some self-righteous, left-winger from Britain attacks the US as Fascist, this can be thrown in their face. The USA PATRIOT Act was a fucking joke compared to the possibilities that this opens up.
The irony that when Gates was in control, Microsoft was more aggressive on the business side, and since Ballmer took over, they've been working a lot harder on the technology side? Ballmer deserves credit for trying to actually do a good job on the technology side, without resorting to just nasty competitive moves.
You didn't state whether or not you were on a team or not, but if you aren't, then just document the hell out of everything.
If you are become a project manager over a team, here are some helpful hints that someone should have told a boss I know at a different site from mine:
1) Learn the difference between delegation and dereliction.
2) Defend your team against outsiders unless your team is behaving indefensibly.
3) Your biggest job is to remove hurdles from your team's path. These may be helping them on technical decisions, but more commonly will be you marching into someone's office demanding their cooperation with your team when your subordinates cannot get any information or cooperation from them.
4) Don't take on more work than your team can handle unless you are willing to double up on helping them AND your management role.
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They DO have a right to selectively license MacOS X to a vendor who agrees to use high quality, consistent hardware. They could easily get a company like Dell or Acer to license it for one particular line of netbooks.
You know what happens if someone buys a Dell NetBook with OS X on it in this economy? When they get $1000-$3000 to blow on a real OS X laptop, they'll be more than happy to head to the Apple Store. Apple is in a licensing position to tell any vendor to kiss their shiny, solid aluminum ass if they want OS X for all laptops or nothing instead of just a netbook. Right now, I think Dell wouldn't even hesitate to agree to those terms.
There is a moral difference between the US killing 5000 civilians who get caught up in the crossfire between US troops and Iraqi insurgents and Saddam killing 50 people because they were "enemies of the state." The "anti-war" movement blurs the distinction between unfortunate facts of war and murder. Plenty of innocent French, Italians and Belgians died as the allies pushed the Germans out of their countries, but there is an extreme difference between those casualties and willfully inflicted murders.
I didn't support the war in Iraq as a matter of principle. I don't believe it's worth American lives, treasure or liberty to get involved in these matters unless either we're going to end up in the aggressors' crosshairs at some point, or the country serves a strategic interest that we cannot ignore. Very, very few conflicts have ever fit those descriptions.
The CEO of craigslist would not be liable under that scenario, the manager who decided to post it would be liable. Why should a whole company be punished for the actions of a single person? If you run an escort service, and you KNOW your girls are having sex for money with your clients AND you never stop it, you are already liable in most jurisdictions.
Frivolous lawsuits can already be handled by laws regulating who has standing, punishing lawyers for taking blatantly frivolous cases, etc. For example, to use the other poster's anti-war example, that could be solved simply by Congress passing a law stating that no private citizen has legal standing in a federal court to sue the President if he prosecutes an armed conflict that has been approved by Congress.
If you want to make the frivolous lawsuit issue so extreme that it becomes the hot reform topic, then this would be a bold step toward making America less litigious.
Make it so that incorporated entities cannot be sued. Why should a company, union or government bear responsibility for what individuals did? If a cop beats you relentlessly, the PD should have full immunity, and the cop none. If a CEO orders subordinates to break the law, sue the CEO, not the company. If a politician uses state power illegally to grandstand, make them liable and not the state (and don't allow them to use state resources to defend themselves).
This AG wouldn't have been nearly so ballsy if he knew he'd go it alone if Craigslist were to sue him personally.
The law already protects databases of public facts. Why would a spontaneously generated list not be copyrightable? Personally, I hope that the courts will see through that argument and call it a violation of the spirit of the law, but I won't hold my breath that they won't say that a list of copyrighted quotes isn't protected if the creator of the list claims that THAT list is protected.
Windows and OS X are the two best OSs for guaranteeing that all of your hardware will be supported, and for allowing you to take a lot of powerful video editing capabilities around the world with you. You may be the IT guy, but you won't be the main person doing everything OS X would be a much safer bet for getting this job done.
But I doubt your state has exhausted its backlog of murders, rapes, armed robberies, child molestation cases, etc. Until you do, here's a polite suggestion: get your fucking priorities straight you worthless politician.
I swear, the fatal flaw of democracy is that it relies on the public to make the highest office holders do their job and not just use the office as a means of personal advancement. At least under a monarchy, the king could bitch slap a guy like this for grandstanding (not saying we should go back to a monarchy).
But there should be penalties for acquiring copyrighted goods without any intent to buy them. Many slashdotters complain about entitlement mentalities, and then defend copyright infringement on the part of people who either can pay for what they are getting or who have no need for it (like people who pirate a lot of software).
So what if the quality is crap? Don't buy it or find a way to sample it legally. If it doesn't work once you buy it, boycott the company that makes it, and let them know that you are doing that. When they get a lot of angry letters, and see their sales actually dropping, they'll either address the quality concerns or go out of business.
Just because copyright infringement doesn't deprive people of their original property, doesn't mean it is rendered ethically neutral or even good. There is no moral right to acquire property without the permission of the people who created it or who now own it.
Clearly the Bush Administration's respect for classified information has continued in the Obama Administration!
(For the sarcasm-impaired, I DO know that the Bush Administration had no more respect for classified information than Biden is demonstrating here.)
Anyone who is morbidly obese and doesn't have a diagnosed thyroid problem gets no Medicare or Medicaid? How right wing of me! I should be kind and compassionate by paying taxes to support the health care of people who know their habits are destroying them.
DHS is a hodge podge of federal agencies that performs like the Keystone Cops in Gestapo uniforms. Not only is the NSA more qualified to take over federal infosec in a time of crisis, but it is statutorally safer for the general public because as a member of the intelligence community, it is not legally a part of the law enforcement apparatus. In order for information to flow to law enforcement, the NSA would not only have to be willing to cooperate, but have to jump a large number of hoops and hurdles to hand off the information. There are a lot of restrictions on the intelligence community with respect to information about Americans that simply don't exist for law enforcement like DHS.
The real reason why we don't need a Cybersecurity Czar is that 99 times out of 100, the systems that are getting hacked are not sensitive systems. Who cares if the Department of Labor or Interior gets hacked here and there since the intelligence community and military are generally competent at securing their classified networks?
Well, for one, they have a large number of people hopping on and off their network, and they don't maintain a constant business relationship with them which would help them identify rogue or criminal users. And on top of that, a little self-regulation to catch criminals will help them ward off legislation like this which is a Stasi-like surveillance boot-up-the-ass that has support in both parties.
And here's a question for you. Who the hell do you think you are using someone else's network for free and then complaining that they check up on your behavior from time-to-time? This isn't your ISP. This is a private business which is giving you free access to their wireless for your personal enjoyment.
Uhhh no. If you believe that, then you're seriously uninformed about the traditional justifications of the melting pot. The point of a melting pot is that it melts down the incoming materials and makes it part of the mixture. What you're describing is what is derisively called the "beef stew immigration policy" in which immigrants come in, don't really adapt and society becomes a hodge podge of different ethnicities which are ultimately united by economics and prosperity, not common heritage. Nations that go that route usually don't fare well once there is a serious downfall in the economy.
That won't change the fact that their most fertile recruiting grounds are in Saudi Arabia. In addition, forged identities have always been a problem. There isn't much that we could do now if Saudi terrorists went to Jordan and paid off a government office to give them valid Jordanian passports. We have the same problem with illegal immigrants paying off DMV workers in the US. However, making that a requirement of getting terrorist assets into the United States would create a serious barrier for all but the most connected terrorist groups.
A former coworker who is a Syrian expatriate and I were talking about Islamic terrorism, and the conversation turned to Saudi Arabia. If you look at the profile of international Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia is disproportionately represented in terrorist groups around the world. I don't know if it's still true, but at its peak, half of the insurgents we killed in Iraq on any given day were Saudis.
If Western countries simply prohibited Saudi nationals from staying for any length longer than a vacation or business trip, it'd be easier to keep out suspected Islamic terrorists. If Western governments would also start shutting down Saudi-financed mosques and Islamic schools, that'd be even better. The Saudis are funding the radicalization of Islam around the world, and we'd be doing the majority of Muslims a favor by targeting Saudi Arabia and Saudi nationals for very direct, special attention as the majority of Muslims would be left alone to live in peace if that's their desire.
But of course the worst thing a Western government can do is to appear to be discriminating against someone for something, and to possibly even be limiting the expression of a religion, no matter how violently hostile and alien it is to the host society. We think we're taking the moral high ground when all we're doing is importing people who want to tear down our societies, and in the end we're hurting the honest immigrants who really want to flee that bullshit like my former coworker as much as we're hurting our own people.
Here's how it usually goes down with these situations, aside from the case where the person isn't a sociopath:
1) Guy gets marginalized and picked on.
2) School knows about it and does nothing.
3) Guy gets subjected to violence.
4) The authorities do nothing despite the basic fact that we know from common sense and scientific observation that eventually an organism will lash out in self-defense if not protected.
5) Guy may defend himself, at which rate the authorities will come down hard on him because as we all know "violence never solves anything."
6) The authorities will earnestly pat themselves on the back as guardians of civilization for having stopped a victim from exercising force in self-defense.
7) Guy lashes out with disproportionate force because pent up frustration made his temper 5x more explosive it would have been if causality had been allowed to run its course between the attackers and the victim.
8) The authorities will claim it couldn't have been stopped.
Violence solves things splendidly with bullies. In the early 1960s, victims of bullying were allowed to beat the shit out of the bully, and the authorities didn't even think about taking up for the bully unless it was so extreme as to be a violent crime.
You want less violent shootings? Let teenage boys shoot guns (real guns), play video games and beat the shit out of each other when one attacks the other. When violence usually brings more violence back on the perpetrator, people usually are less inclined to use violence. Violent people who are quick to use force are not wired like normal people, and the best way to restrain them is to create a culture that will respond to them violently when they act out.
Most of the teachers suck at what they do, and in poor places like South Carolina there are many parents who discourage their kids from being successful. Case in point, when we lived there, my mom tutored a kid at my school. You know what happened when he got an A on a test? His piece of shit excuse for human trash mother said to him "you actin' white now?" Technology is no solution for bad schools and students with parents who pull them down because they have ego or race problems (both apply in the case of the black mother who ridiculed the kid my white mother was trying to help succeed).
There is so little incentive now to get an education AND for schools to compete to hire people who have an education in something more than "education." Throwing around millions of dollars to buy laptops for kids who can barely read is more likely to have the state subsidizing the gaming, movie and porn industries than actually teaching these kids anything.
And here's the thing. People will crawl out of the woodwork in most cases to attack comments like mine about how I'm unfairly judging the public schools or am a closet racist for saying such harsh things about that black bitch who tore her poor son down everytime he succeeded. It's easier to make excuses for why the public schools are failing and why parents, especially poor parents, are often roadblocks to their kids' success than to start making hamburger out of the sacred cows and fixing the problem by introducing more competition and making an education more critical to just being able to get by in America.
Most of the economy was agrarian and the creation of new products was a much rarer act. The patent trolls had a much smaller terrain in which to do their hunting.
Today, only 2% of the workforce works in the agriculture sector. The creation of new products and services is how most Americans get into business. The patent system, working with the same unfixed flaws, cannot scale up to control the threat of patent trolls.
I think the simplest solution is to tie ownership of patents to either pure research or production. I have no problem with Qualcomm licensing patents from its research. I have no problem with a manufacturing company patenting the hell out of its products. I have extreme problem with law firms and companies composed of 2 weasels in business suits and a lawyer owning patents.
A tablet that combines a low-end MacBook and the iPhone. That means that instead of widgets, I want a setup which calls up the iPhone interface for rapid application selection.
The US military should comport itself online similar to how it handles the distinction between government and civilian targets in physical battles. That means the US military should regard all Chinese and Russian systems as open, hostile targets of opportunity the way that those governments treat everyone else. However, the US military should refuse to use its resources for the betterment of the US economy, unless that is something like stealing Russian jet designs and handing them quietly over to Lockheed or Northrop Grumman to analyze.
Let's stop kidding ourselves that these countries are only responding to us. There are plenty of people who foolishly believe that the Russians and Chinese are only engaging in an arms race to keep up with us because they're "afraid of us." Bull. Fucking. Shit. Like hell they're scared of us. The reason they're doing this is obvious to anyone who has studied their history. For centuries they've been imperialists and aggressors, and now a young country has finally kicked them to the curb. It's a pride issue, not a national security issue. The moment we accept that is the moment we'll finally come to grips with what we're really dealing with here.
Conflict always been part of our history. War will always be with us. The lunacy that leads people to believe in progress to negate that is the same lunacy that has lead to the economic mismanagement that resulted in the Great Depression, the millennial bubble and our current fiasco. Basic facts about war, foreign policy and economics will always be with us.
How would they compete? Oh, I don't know... maybe by keeping more up to date than the next guy, some would forego insurance altogether in favor of buying all services in cash (works well for many who do that) because those offices are cheaper to run, among other things.
One of the things you haven't accounted for is the fact that doctors can go anywhere in the US. Right now, there are a lot of areas of the country which have so few doctors and specialists that you could probably increase the supply by 300% and still not run into a glut of labor. Florida and Massachusetts are great examples of that, especially considering the former's persecution of pediatricians and pediatric surgeons (among other professions) in the past which has resulted in the vast majority of child health care specialists leaving or retiring.
More doctors. Break the back of the AMA, double the seats in medical school and let the market do more of the talking.
The tired old argument of "fewer, but better doctors" is bullshit. You know what they call the guy who barely got through medical school the day he graduates? "Doctor!"
All of the regulations miss the point entirely. There are not enough doctors, not enough competition. Even the "evidence-based medicine" advocates miss the point about mandating "best practices" when you have people like the orthopedic surgeon who treated my mother. The man was 15-20 years out of date on certain techniques, and did them according to the way he was trained, and screwed the pooch big time. A doctor at UVA medical school had to intervene to get her back to normal.
People like that couldn't exist in other professions that are less regulated and coddled. Imagine someone only knowing C/C++/Ada circa 1995 today and trying to compete in the mainstream software development market for new development work. It's laughable here, but doctors get away with that.
The next time some self-righteous, left-winger from Britain attacks the US as Fascist, this can be thrown in their face. The USA PATRIOT Act was a fucking joke compared to the possibilities that this opens up.
The irony that when Gates was in control, Microsoft was more aggressive on the business side, and since Ballmer took over, they've been working a lot harder on the technology side? Ballmer deserves credit for trying to actually do a good job on the technology side, without resorting to just nasty competitive moves.
You didn't state whether or not you were on a team or not, but if you aren't, then just document the hell out of everything.
If you are become a project manager over a team, here are some helpful hints that someone should have told a boss I know at a different site from mine:
1) Learn the difference between delegation and dereliction.
2) Defend your team against outsiders unless your team is behaving indefensibly.
3) Your biggest job is to remove hurdles from your team's path. These may be helping them on technical decisions, but more commonly will be you marching into someone's office demanding their cooperation with your team when your subordinates cannot get any information or cooperation from them.
4) Don't take on more work than your team can handle unless you are willing to double up on helping them AND your management role.