That penalty is nowhere near enough. It's the tragedy of the commons: each additional car on the roads during rush hour might cost the rest of the area hundreds of dollars in externalities. That's why there's been so many attempts at finding ways to manage congestion pricing. By tailoring the price to discourage use when demand is high and encourage use when demand is low, you can dramatically reduce the amount of congestion at peak use.

So if I understand you correctly, your recommendation is that we let one company innovate and take risks, and let everyone else jump on board once it's been borne out in the market. The fact that Android devices have as big of a slice of the market-share pie indicates that this is exactly the situation that's occurred. Apple invested in R&D, took a risk with a dramatically unique product, and everybody else follows suit when it turns out to be a hit.

That kind of situation is the exact reason patents exist. To encourage risk-taking, encourage innovation, and allow individuals and companies to get a huge return on their investment through an artificial monopoly on the market when they come up with something novel.

How about the fact that the whole fucking thing is driven by a touch UI? That it's a thin "shell" that merely exists to assist you in launching apps, as opposed to a full-blown Windows environment? There's more here than just looks. Again, look at the examples of products before the iPad and after the iPad. You can't tell me the only thing that has been copied is the shape and color.

Flamebait taken.

Now thousands of troops will simply die while trying to hold mirrors providing line of sight back to the original light source.

Ahem...

Regardless of the particular patents Apple has chosen to fight with in these battles...

It's certainly not reasonable for Apple to sue any company that makes a device that merely looks similar. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about Apple suing companies who have essentially copied their products and innovations wholesale.

Apple single-handedly made tablets and smartphones into the products you recognize today. Before Apple, we had products like this and this. Suddenly, post-iPhone, we have this and this.

I'm no fan of patents, but this is the exact sort of innovation the patent system was designed to protect in the first place. Regardless of the particular patents Apple has chosen to fight with in these battles, can't reasonable people agree that Apple ought to have some protection on their R&D investments?

Commuters from suburbs impose significant costs when they drive into the city. For instance, traffic planners have determined that the maginal cost of the average person deciding to drive into the Central Business District of Manhattan costs New York City residents $128.

What's absurd is the concept that people whose crappy, selfish lifestyle decisions impose insane costs upon others shouldn't have those costs brought to bear upon them instead. Rising gas prices have barely encouraged people to stop purchasing millions of miniaturized monster trucks — demand-based tolls to access highly-trafficked areas stands a better chance. And it offsets some of the costs back onto the people who impose them in the first place.

UV light != visible light. Go back to high school.

UV light != visible light. Go back to high school.

Irrelevant. I'm replying to the person who lacks a fifth-grade understanding of the term "radiation".

I hate replying to myself, but "radiation" has become the new "chemical". Chemicals are bad. Radiation is bad. This is what we get for de-funding science education.

-1, Idiot

Visible light is a form of radiation. Heat is a form of radiation. Therefore light bulbs cause cancer, right?

What does GIT have over other version management systems? Easier to use? Easier to install?

Not irreparably broken.

To those who are unfamiliar, each commit in Git has a SHA1 hash which is used as an identifier instead of a revision numbers. Unfortunately, they are very unwieldy to communicate to others.

Oh come on. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V is "unwieldy"?

I have used git exclusively now for over three years, and I completely forgot that incremental version numbers even used to exist. It's a bullshit non-issue..