the point is that inventions are valuable - and profit is an excellent motivator for innovation. The statutory balance (as opposed to market-driven licensing, which is its own balancing mechanism) between the interests of the inventor and the interests of the public happens when the patents are granted a reasonable but not indefinite exclusivity to the work.

Yes, progress happens - but without an impetus to the inventor(s), it is not always inevitable - and certainly not within short timeframes.

give it a week.

wtf, did you even read the post that you're knee-jerking about? I never made an argument about the merits of the ACA, so how can it be "wrong"?

In fact, your explanation of how you think the ACA works is an almost exact representation of my own example on how Apple can be forced to comply. You are in essence making the exact same observation I made, but are somehow blaming me for making an argument I never actually made.

Let me water it down for you to make it simpler for you to understand:

The federal government can levy a tax in one of two ways: First, via a bill passed by Congress and signed by the President, establishing a new tax by law. There is now SCOTUS-settled precedent that individuals can be compelled to act a certain way or they "lose their tax deduction". That's how the ACA works. You get taxed but then are given a reprieve if you take specific action, although it's quite a bit more complicated than that. Since this has now been confirmed by SCOTUS as a legitimate form of taxation, it's plausible to have such a law drafted to compel all radiotelephone manufacturers - including Apple - to comply, and it could happen especially if Congress were to pass a bill without actually reading the bill first (this, incidentally, also has precedence connected to the ACA). Second, by executive order unilaterally signed by the President enacting regulation enacting "fees" on any regulated activity. A phone is a radio, and radios are regulated by the FCC. A simple order requiring "any radiotelephone that utilizes encryption must contain a device or method capable of allowing the government to decrypt any information stored therein" could be enacted without the approval of Congress, with the tax/fee/penalty for noncompliance being anything the President wanted. That could happen tomorrow.

The whole point of my post had nothing to do with the ACA (that was just used as an example of how easy it would be to get support from SCOTUS if it was ever challenged that high), but it had everything to do with how Apple can actually be forced to comply. Apple doesn't have to be explicitly named, either. Hooray for liberty.

I made no argument for or against Obamacare. I made an observation that there is a way for the administration to force Apple's hand outside of the courts. I realize it's going to expose some cognitive dissonance in people who are both pro-Apple and pro-ACA, but if such a tax were to be imposed on Apple, there's going to be one hell of a constitutional showdown, dissonance or not.

Subpoenas are good for compelling the production of evidence that the recipient actually possesses...by any account, Apple does not actually possess the evidence requested. The subpoena, on its face, should fail.

The problem is that we now have SCOTUS precedent where the government can compel individuals to do anything requested or face a punitive tax. All the Administration has to do is create a "make us a back door or pay a $10M per day" tax, and Apple will cave. Unintended consequences of Obamacare.

I think the term you're looking for is "cronyism"

well, that's not at all the message of the book, though, is it?

It's not a book about loss of privacy, it's a book about the evils of State suppression of free will, and government intrusion into privacy is a component of that suppression.

It's very much like saying "the biggest error of the book 1984: it failed to anticipate the role that slang would come into play in the loss of colorful language". While it might be tangentially true, it's not important enough to the message of the book for the author to address, so calling it the "biggest error" is not in any short measure hyperbole.

circuits != processors

notice the "Cash on hand" numbers? If you only look at EPS, I really hope for your sake that you're not in finance.

Comcast is also in a cronyist relationship with the government via their licensed monopolies. So...they don't have to worry about customer centricity like the competitive industries (except to the extent that they are now losing, at a record pace, eyeballs to the likes of streaming services. I daresay the majority of cable provider customers are only there for the internet...I know I am.)

Clearly, the solution then is to only buy Monster cables. ;P

holy crap, what an awesome way to put it...haven't watched that movie in years - it's in my Netflix DVD queue behind about 100 other movies I'll never get around to watching

additionally, there seems to be the assumption that there were contractors involved; while many government operations may and sometimes do employ contractors, not all government IT work is done by contractors, and there wasn't an indication in TFA that a contractor was to blame. I was unable to find a publicly available accounting of NASA's network, so I didn't point it out earlier, but I daresay that in my rather limited experience with government contractors, most of them are eager to do audits for government work, since it means they get paid for the audit and paid to fix anything they find as well, even if it was their fault to begin with.

Who built it? Irrelevant. What products were used? Irrelevant. It was shown to be secured by simply changing the default passwords, and leaving default passwords intact was a failure of management. So what kind of network is it, anyway? Oh, yeah, it's a .gov network. Management is controlled by the .gov entity, even if contractors are used for the keypresses and network cable enplugginations. The .gov entity is responsible for regular security audits on their systems. They failed on that management aspect.

It wasn't the private-sector-built aircraft that was hacked - it was the government network that was hacked.