Yeah, I guess you're right. Your examples seem worse than forgetting to update the SSL certificates for Azure, or permitting a complete failure of the London Stock Exchange for 8 hours the day after the Fed announces the bailout of AIG. For an interesting analysis of Microsoft network security that was presented at DEFCON 18, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXFoS8HTI6E

If after watching that, you still feel that Google is doing such a poor job with reliability and security, good luck with Microsoft.

Wow. What a showstopper.

Given that Microsoft isn't alert enough to keep their SSL certificates up to date with Azure (one, among many other high profile failures), I trust Google more than Microsoft. In the end, I can only hope that my trust is well founded.

Microsoft will never let lawsuits go to trial if they can help it. They surely love those NDAs that help seal the deal. Barnes and Noble made a pretty big stink about it, and with it, offered good reasons to believe that Microsoft was one of the biggest offenders.

Bessen and Meurer are in agreement. They found that patents tend to substitute for R&D. I think they tend to substitute for customer service, too.

Those damn open standards keep getting in the way.

So lets see if your claims of progress are born out by the facts in the paper:

"Simply eyeballing the big trends shows that patenting has exploded over the
last decades. In 1983 in the United States, 59,715 patents were issued; by 2003,
189,597 patents were issued; and in 2010, 244,341 new patents were approved. In
less than 30 years, the flow of patents more than quadrupled. By contrast, neither
innovation nor research and development expenditure nor factor productivity
have exhibited any particular upward trend. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, annual growth in total factor productivity in the decade 1970 –1979 was
about 1.2 percent, while in the decades 1990 –1999 and 2000 –2009 it has been a bit
below 1 percent. Meanwhile, US research and development expenditure has been
oscillating for more than three decades in a narrow band around 2.5 percent of
GDP. The recent explosion of patents, in other words, has not brought about any
additional surge in useful innovations and aggregate productivity. In new industries
such as biotechnology and software —where innovation was already thriving in their
absence —patents have been introduced without any positive impact on the rate
of innovation. The software industry is an important case in point. In a dramatic
example of judge-made law, software patents became possible for the first time in
the early 1990s. Bessen and Meurer, in a large body of empirical work culminating
in Patent Failure (2008), have studied the consequences of this experiment and have
concluded that it damaged social welfare."

That is from page 4 in the report. So for *30 years*, R&D as a percentage of GDP has stagnated despite a quadrupling of patents issued. is that progress? The authors state that there is *NO* empirical evidence to suggest that patent actually increase innovation or productivity. None. I agree with the author and you're free to disagree. But the facts even from the introduction seem pretty plain to me.

If you didn't make your invention by now, someone else would have done it just for the first mover advantage.

Do the same people who stridently assert that labels for GMOs are not required think the same after this?

This is probably the tip of the iceberg.

It only has to start in one state.

We're going to get labeling and that's the end of it. Political will is mounting. It's going to happen. Get over it.

Clearly, caveat emptor is your place. Who needs a disinterested third party to ensure that transactions are fair?

Your statement suggests that you believe that it's ok for the seller to pick and choose the ingredients he wants to disclose.

I think you make an interesting argument here. But the problem for me is always the resistance to labeling in the first place, regardless of the facts surrounding them. Whether they are completely safe or not, I want the label so that I can at least investigate before I buy. I don't like being duped into buying something I don't want to eat.

So if I want processed food that contains no sugar, or a certain type of sugar, I can find that out. But if I want to know if there is GMO products in box of food, I'm not allowed to know without spending a lot of time researching everything I might want to buy?

Doesn't that seem like a double standard?

So where are the human trials for GMO safety? Monsanto doesn't seem to think we need them. So on the one hand, the food created by their seeds is essentially the same as the other food, and deemed safe. On the other hand, the food created by their seeds is different enough to be a claimed invention, yet no testing is needed.

If developed countries are demanding safety tests, they probably aren't doing them here.

It's pretty obvious when someone is using a wheel or fire. Their benefits are obvious. So, no, I wouldn't. The use of GMOs is not so obvious, so I want a better marker with better regulation, including liability for when something goes wrong with them.