This robot has been in the worldwide news three times already. Whoever is planning the press campaign is doing a great job.

Adverts are really inefficient, and paywalls just send readers to other sites. What IMO would work better, and fit US culture, is a tip jar that can be easily added to articles, blogs, etc. When you enjoyed someone's work, you leave them a tip. Why is this not a thing already?

Good. The price of computing power falls by 50% every 18 months or so. We should see these devices settle in at a few bucks, and then keep increasing in capability. The last IoT project I did used a $20 OpenWRT router (glar150) and it was already impressive how much that little box could do.

Hang on with your broad generalizations and abuse of language. I'm an author. I sell my books. If people buy them, how is that a "tax"? How is the sale of a book in a free market a "levy"? You are using these words with such woeful ignorance it's hard to know if you are sincere, or a troll. How am I "taking an advance on the proceeds"? What does that even mean?

And my last book, I wrote a few months ago, and I'm expecting to die in a month or two now (terminal cancer), and I really hope my book sales will provide some kind of income for my kids, who are young and will have lost the person who housed and fed them since they were babies.

Are you saying that the act of creating works, and selling them in a free market suddenly become "immoral" if one dies? Do you have a basis for this?

As for the copyright system, it was never a "reasonable compromise" nor was it ever meant to be a monetary incentive for creators. Utter rubbish. It was lobbied and enforced by publishers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne) on behalf of publishers. It was, and still is, all about creating a monopoly on reproduction, to benefit the powerful.

A shame the NRA can't deal with being sliced into like this.

Your mum's so FAT32...

To be fair, there's no conflict of interest here. His interests are very clear. Patent attorneys make their money from patent disputes. The Unitary Patent is fantastic news for such people. It gives them larger clients willing to pay higher prices for pan-EU monopolies.

The whole point of the patent system is to tax the market.

It's that simple. All the rest is smoke and mirrors. We filed our appeal in Belgium because we know, in Flanders, how language can be used as a political tool. Here, the use of French, English, and German, suppresses dissent and appeal. It is already extraordinarily expensive to defend against a patent suit. The larger the court, the more it costs. I showed in 2007 using the EPO's own figures that specialized courts cost 4x more than courts that deal in all matters including patents.

This adds to an extraordinary burden on those trying to make products, and a downhill fight for patent owners. You think the Microsoft tax on Android is exceptional or unique? No, it's the Future According the the Patent System. The cost of production falls to zero, and the cost of licensing fills the gap, and the price to the market remains flat.

Language is a weapon, in this case.

Yes, it's what people are afraid of, since the patent industry has been very clearly fighting for this for decades now. Their apologists will deny it, as usual. The EPO however is not so shy: http://www.epo.org/news-issues... lists software patents above biotech in their topics of interest with respect to the Unitary Patent.

Anyone who claims the Unitary Patent is about reducing costs and somehow "protecting innovation" is a troll, a liar, extraordinarily ignorant, and/or a paid lobbyist. This isn't magic. We've been watching this for more than a decade. I personally spent two years doing nothing else than studying the patent system and learning its motives.

The patent system is sociopathic, corrupt, and built on lies and the capture of politics by vested interests.

The C4.1 contribution protocol I eventually wrote for ZeroMQ solved this problem. You have to develop rules that catch bad actors (yet not learners) and then educate project managers on how to fire people when needed.

Our rules for instance ask that you solve one problem with one patch, that you never break existing stable APIs, that you respect style guidelines, and so on. When people break these rules we give them several chances to improve their behavior. If they persist in doing it wrong, we remove them.

Turns out, when the rules are very explicit and teach people how to make good patches, then it's very rare we have to fire people.

The rules are at http://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:22

The Economist was, ironically, founded as a "free market" newspaper, in a period when that meant specifically, the fight against the patent system. I.e. that was its first purpose, to argue against the re-establishment of the patent system in Britain.

Samsung never intended to release a Tizen phone. They were the ones who leaked the design and photos. The whole point of Tizen was to get a stick against Google, after they bought Motorola. Samsung are/were paranoid that Google would give Motorola preferential treatment, and that Android was becoming a toxic platform for them. Tizen was their insurance. Google got the message and Samsung killed most of their Tizen team and went back to focusing on Android.

Incidentally, it's trivial to know which players to keep. You hire freely, openly. You allow people to self-organize around problems. You reduce the latency of all communications from business through the whole company to development and back. And then you rank people simply by their ability to solve relevant problems, to gain users internally. In a software business, you allow anyone to start a project and you rank people on their value in the supply chain.

I've written loads about this. http://hintjens.com/blog:73#toc1 would be an example. Build asynchronous lock-free self-organizing structures, and you can add and remove people trivially.

Netflix isn't the first business to put all the weight on the players while ignoring the game. It doesn't matter how many A players you hire if your organization has deep structural problems. Microsoft would be a prime example.

In contrast, you can build extremely effective organizations out of ordinary people, if you allow them to organize freely around problems, compete honestly, delegate at will, and so on.