I live in Amsterdam. We have lots and lots of cyclists here. There are traffic jams of just cyclists. We also have lots of tourist pedestrians who tend to clog up bike lanes. And you know what? We are all getting along just fine most of the time and when somebody gets hurt it is usually the cyclist.

500k a month are 2009 numbers, it is now >5m a month: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Gartner-Android-smartphone-sales-surged-8888-in-2010/1297309933

You are right that they are not SCO of course. However lawyers getting more important in a company is always a bad sign as they are not about creating wealth but about getting a bigger part of the pie.

LOL. Occam's razor is not a substitute for evidence dude. Without proof you are just another conspiracy theorist.

They might have killed the male members of the opposing tribe but our historic and genetic records show they had often a different purpose for the females. A good example is Iceland with it's Viking male and Celtic females settlers: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090116073205.htm

The whole racial thing might be the result of contemporary bias and perhaps future historians will present the PRAM II tool as evidence of how our current society is preoccupied with race.

Well, if the point of the analogy was that it breaks down then we are in agreement ;-)

Yes, you are missing the big picture: there is a revolution going on. The paywalls are coming down. All information ever produced will become available at your screen, searchable, extensible and what not. Accessible to even the poorest child on this planet. A new industry will develop around it just like it did around the internet.

This is not about some morally challenged kid stealing your e-book. This will be one of the great achievements of western civilization.

As long as authors are enthusiastically promoting this revolution instead of frustrating it, they have my full support when it comes to fair compensation for their efforts.

Don't claim you understand. Show it by picking good analogies. Yours was a misleading analogy that is made time and time again in this discussion.

You can't claim you understand the issue perfectly and still make that kind of basic mistake. So don't blame me for thinking you were new to this discussion and Alicia Silverstoning you.

Next time you use a big word like 'audacity' make sure you understand at least a little bit of the issue at hand.

The discussion is not about who owns the wedding dress (or book) that your wife made. Your wife owns it forever, no discussion. The discussion is about someone seeing and liking that dress and making a copy of it. Who owns what rights to that second dress, that is what this is about.

And while you're considering this issue remember that practically everything you know and have was copied from someone else.

A correlation is not a law dude. You are setting yourself up for a black swan. Once you find a correlation ('this is what happens') you try to figure out the causal relation ("this is why it happens") if any so that you know how and when you can extrapolate. Don't assume things will stay the same.

The problem is exactly the opposite: math is all over the place in social science. The problem is that the things you want to quantify like maybe 'power' or other concepts close to real human behaviour are very hard to quantify. But since you really, really want to do math or else it wouldn't be 'real science' you settle for 'hard facts', things that are easy to quantify like the GDP the author of the article is using (he really is a pretty typical economist as far as his methods go). There is even a name for this disease, it's called positivism.

So how does the GDP quantify products with a marginal cost of (almost) zero like open source software? How does it quantify work done in a non-commercial setting like the family? These kind of numbers are just indicators which might sometimes be useful but as inputs for a model they are garbage. And so the GIGO principle applies.

You misunderstood. From the linked worldhunger site:

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day (FAO 2002, p.9). The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.

Okay, so what is the problem exactly?

The main problem is that some societies are badly organized which results in them either producing too little or makes them vulnerable to exploitation by insiders (invariably) and sometimes outsiders.

Thanks, that beats any explanation that I had come up with so far.

I'm thinking about implementation because I am talking about the implementation. When I hear 'list' I would prefer to have it refer either to the abstract concept of a list (so the IList interface is ok in my book) or to an implementation that involves a single or double linked list.

ArrayList also has the word 'Array' in it as you might have noticed, so there it is immediately clear that we are dealing with an array implementation of a list.

So it seems that Microsoft named their implementation of a dynamic array a 'List'. They must have known beforehand that this would confuse many people. So why still use that name? It is an implementation and not an interface after all.

Well, trail and error remember. Maybe the interested parties involved like now sometimes happens with patent pools, maybe independent experts, maybe some fixed formula taking several factors in account. Perfect will never happen but doing better than the current fail system should be easy.

LOL. You really don't understand the patent system. Who determines what counts as an "invention"? Exactly, the government you trust so much. And this is just one of the reasons that the current situation is total FAIL.

This is of course the hard part which will involve a lot of trail and error. A good first step would probably be killing the monopoly element in patents and copyrights so that everyone would be able to use the technology as long as they pay a fixed fee. Currently the IP situation is preventing whole industries from developing. We have been lucky that the IP lobby was asleep and/or less developed when the internet developed and that things like linking to other sites and searching the web now don't involve fees.

Anyway the fact that the number of patents granted is exploding at the same time that fundamental R&D is apparently declining is a sure indication that something has to change.