Read the book (or at least watch the damn video) before dismissing the idea out of hand. He's spent years researching the problem in his capacity as a constitutional law professor and he proposes a very specific solution which has been demonstrated to work well in other western democracies.

I'm not saying that campaign finance reform is the silver bullet that'll fix our all our problems, I'm saying if we don't fix that first, it's going to be either impossible or much harder than it should be to fix the rest of our problems.

Money is a symptom, not the disease

You've got that backwards. Money is the disease. Political corruption is the symptom. Have a look at Republic, Lost by Lawrence Lessig some time. Or just watch this quick overview video: http://blip.tv/lessig/republic-lost-my-favorite-version-5697728

Unlimited donations from large donors erodes the democratic process. Campaign finance reform should be our top priority. Once we fix that, it makes fixing all our other problems so much easier.

It's not going to happen, but a single checkbox in the settings would do:

[ ] Allow installation of apps from unknown sources

The fact that your post got modded funny instead of insightful is pretty sad reflection of our collective lack of faith in Apple's willingness to do the right thing.

Allowing users to opt-out of the walled garden is the single biggest thing iOS has needed since day one.

Imagine the outrage that would ensue if Apple flipped that switch on OSX and required all apps to come from the Mac App Store without a button to turn that restriction off.

iOS has been that way since day one and everyone seems to act like that's okay.

It's as if once a computer can fit into your pocket, it ceases to become a computer and suddenly becomes an "appliance," an oft-toted euphemism which serves no purpose other than to say "this general purpose computer is okay to lock down, but this one over here on my desk is not okay to lock down."

Locked down phones? Why not. Locked down game consoles? Sure. Locked down PCs? Mass outrage. It makes no sense. It's like nobody possess the critical thinking ability to realize that they're all just fucking computers in different form factors.

Yes, of course it would change Monsanto's incentives. In order for their crops to remain proprietary without a patent monopoly they'd have to invent new crops which don't produce seeds and are painstakingly difficult to reverse engineer and reproduce by their competitors. That way they wouldn't need patent protection to protect their proprietary crops. They would possess a natural monopoly until the competition caught up with them, which ideally would give them enough time to recoup the R&D investment and profit in the process.

I don't know if inventing such a thing as hard to copy GM crops is even possible in the GMO field (though generally speaking it is possible in other technology fields), but it seems to me that creating and monopolizing a proprietary crop should require that kind of ingenuity to offset the enormously unfair competitive advantage that possessing such a monopoly gives to the proprietor at the expense of the rest of the economy.

Now assuming for the sake of argument that inventing hard to copy GM crops is too difficult, or too risky, or even simply impossible, that doesn't mean new research on GM crops wouldn't get done in the absence of patent protection, it just means it would no longer be proprietary. There are many possible non-proprietary funding paths. Competing companies could collaborate on open source GM crops as is often done in the software world, governments could subsidize new research, private charities could fund new research, etc.

Such reform would force Monsanto and its competitors to compete on the merits of their manufacturing capabilities rather than their IP monopolies, much to the economy's benefit.

As a side benefit, if R&D of GMOs shifted more towards an open source model, I think the fact that it would be subject to the scrutiny of different contributors with different agendas would effectively end the controversies surrounding these much-maligned companies and probably do much to assuage public panic and ignorance about the science of GMOs.

Notwithstanding the excellent points you made elsewhere in your post, I quibble with this part:

If it became legal to buy GM seeds intended for milling and then plant them, then the price for new seeds would no longer be able to support future developments.

Not necessarily. People would still invent new GMOs without the patent system to protect them. The research would just be done under different economic models.

I believe those alternative economic models would be better for the economy overall than the status quo, but that is of course a matter for debate.

Alas ye olde pinkdot, we barely knew ye. Return unto us hither in a better life, anew.

If can't run your business on anything less than $1000 per user, then you're better off reworking it into an internet service so you can enforceably control access to your software rather than making it a standalone downloadable software package.

Huge upfront prices are rarely a good way to run a business unless you're selling a large tangible asset like a TV, or a car, or a house. Software just isn't one of those kinds of things.

But you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you offer it as a service instead and charge smaller amounts of cash over time (perhaps with discounts for upfront sums) then you're way more likely to get people to think it's a fair deal.

Otherwise, your software will fall into the trap of people wondering why the hell anyone would pay $1000 for something they could just as easily download from piratebay. You discourage that bias by offering less eye-popping pricing plans.

I agree. Not all free downloaders should be considered freeloaders in the pejorative sense of the term you assumed I meant. I didn't intend to imply that in my original post.

Your fallacy is: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/anecdotal

You can cite anecdotes in which the model I've proposed has failed and I can cite anecdotes in which the model I've proposed has succeeded (such as Amanda Palmer), but neither set of anecdotes are terribly relevant.

What's relevant is piracy cannot be stopped. So trying to stop it is simply a waste of time. If you assume that premise, then it logically follows that all you can do is ask for money, not demand it. To draw any other conclusion is simply delusional.

Trying to deter piracy with DRM is a losing battle. If people don't want to pay you, they won't pay. The trick is to get them to want to pay you.

The first step is to learn the art of asking: http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking.html

Ask for money, don't demand it. Let them pay you whatever they think is reasonable, but communicate how much you want ($5 in this case) as a default.

And for all those freeloaders who decide not to pay you, and there will be plenty, show them some ads to recoup the cost. Better they see your ads than piratebay's.

I'll bite.

The elephant in the room in these discussions for me is that no one ever wants to talk about the idea that might be immoral for a society to ever let a single individual get so wealthy in the first place, irrespective of any responsible use of said wealth.

But that's not Gates' fault. Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

The "one device, multiple contexts" thing I think rises above the tinkerer niche. But only if Canonical does it right.

Here's what I think would need to happen for Canonical to reach mainstream success:

1. They'd have to ship a powerful smartphone that can transform into a tablet or a laptop using a shell peripheral, as well as support a desktop experience using an external keyboard, mouse, and monitor. That way one device can be your smartphone, tablet, laptop, and desktop all at once.

2. It would have to be an awesome user experience in all four contexts. All apps would have to have responsive designs capable of adapting to the context transforming while still dealing with the same user data.

3. OS updates must continue to work as they currently do in Ubuntu. I get them from Canonical. Cell phone carriers should not be allowed to be involved in the process for the same reason my ISP does not decide what updates I install on my desktop or laptop.

4. Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc have to not beat Canonical to it. MS already has the Surface product which is teetering in that direction, but isn't quite there yet. So we know the big players are interested.

What worries me is I think there's a good chance that Apple, Microsoft, or Google will deliver #1 and #2 first, which will kill Canonical's chances. But if miraculously Canonical did it first, I trust them to deliver #3. I don't trust their competitors to deliver #3. Least of all Google, sadly.

Android just isn't there yet for this. Not many existing phones can transform into a mouse/keyboard driven PC experience competently, and even fewer have a laptop dock capability.

And as you mentioned, the dearth of high quality desktop-caliber apps (like LibreOffice) is a huge problem that would need to be resolved as well along with the lack of a true window manager for a mouse-driven desktop experience.

Not to mention the update woes. Unless you buy a Nexus device or are willing to tinker with custom ROMs, the vast majority of Android phones don't get OS updates either 1. at all or 2. in a timely manner.

None of those problems are acceptable for a laptop/desktop OS experience.

Something tells me Ubuntu can be frankensteined into a competent mobile OS more easily than Android can resolve the above problems.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'm cynical.

What benefit is there for an end user to buy it instead of, say, an Android phone?

The key value proposition to users is making your smartphone your primary (perhaps even only) computer by enabling you to to plug a monitor, keyboard, and mouse into it. And if they're really smart, they'll make a kick ass laptop dock for it so it can become a laptop too.

If they do that, then I'll be able to replace my wife's Android phone and her aging MacBook Air at the same time with the same device. She's not interested in faster hardware, but she'd definitely like not having to worry about sync'ing data between her phone and her laptop anymore.

If her phone and her laptop are physically the same device, then she can literally take her work with her at will in an effortless fashion without having to sync it with some clumsy cloud service first.

With the PS4 and the next Xbox coming out this year as well as the various Steam Boxes and the next round of high end GPUs for PC about to drop, the Ouya's brief appeal seems even less relevant.

Since none of those are open platforms, I think Ouya's appeal will remain quite relevant.