Interesting tidbit: The argument that piracy funds terrorism is based on the idea that terrorists sell counterfeit CDs and DVDs to raise money. The thing is, all of those people have pretty much been put out of business by The Pirate Bay and co., because nobody is going to pay actual money for a pirated DVD when it's free on the internet.

In other words, internet piracy fights terrorism.

They're not going to blame piracy any more than they would regardless. You have to remember that they're dishonest, not stupid. They know perfectly well what they're doing, and why they're doing it: Their goal is not to reduce piracy, it's to control the market. Making noises about piracy is just their way of excusing customer-hostile behavior calculated to achieve a dominant market position and exclude competitors from the market. Higher actual piracy rates or lower sales rates are totally irrelevant, because they just fabricate all the numbers anyway.

I declare this meme officially over.

But there is a different problem. The problem is that boycotts don't work unless you're organized, and you're not. You and six of your friends staging a boycott is not going to make anyone care. A year from now when you're discontinuing your unsuccessful boycott having failed to modify their behavior, someone else will be announcing a new boycott that only they and their six friends will be ignored for participating in.

There is, however, an easy way to deal with this: Don't buy games with DRM. Ever. Period.

That isn't a boycott, it's a promise. And it's forever.

It's also a lot easier to hold yourself to, because there are plenty of DRM-free games made by developers who don't disrespect their paying customers by assuming they're criminals. Adopting this policy is actually advantageous to you, regardless of its consequences on game developers, because you then never have to deal with the failures of DRM. And sooner or later, as more and more people discover how easy and satisfying it is to adopt and stick to a policy of never, ever buying games with DRM, the developers who use DRM will either abandon it or go out of business. Problem solved.

I tend to take it as an invitation to claim to be Spartacus. Because, you know, if they think they can get away with this then there need to be more people doing the thing they're trying to prevent.

I think you're talking past each other. Nobody is suggesting that we shouldn't have anti-pollution or health and safety laws just because they can be expensive. (Although let's not ignore that certain laws can cause suboptimal results that we should strive to avoid, e.g. if people are coerced into hiring unqualified applicants on the basis of race.)

I think you're both saying the same thing: That consumers should buy American-made products even if they cost more. The problem is that that doesn't really work: For one thing, if it did, people would already be doing it. But people don't have time or information; there are probably a lot of people who are now avoiding Apple products because they heard they were made in China under harsh conditions, notwithstanding that most of their competitors do the same thing. And that is really the crux of the problem: If there was a choice between an Macbook made in California and a Lenovo made in China, Apple could potentially reap some extra sales if people started demanding American-made goods -- but they alternatively could decide, and have decided, to just make all their stuff in China and because everybody else does the same thing, and they know that, which means you no longer have a choice. You can't get an American-made laptop anymore, at least not from a major manufacturer (as far as I know).

So if you want to change it, some government solution is necessary. The problem is that most of the people who care about this stuff are economics imbeciles. The number one reason things are made in China is that China manipulates their currency valuation in order to make Chinese-made goods cheaper. People running around talking about taxes and employment regulations and all this horseshit are just ignoring the elephant in the room there -- China is running a jobs program out of their treasury by buying US dollar-denominated assets (like US government bonds), which strengthens the dollar and weakens the yuan, making it impossible for US manufacturing to compete with currency-diluted Chinese manufacturing.

On top of that, the programs that would work to counteract this (assuming China can't be convinced to stop) -- like subsidizing research into automated manufacturing, which allows more expensive US workers to nonetheless compete with cheaper foreign labor -- are taken off the table politically because people are too stupid to realize that five $70,000/year American jobs in an automated American factory are better for America than the primary alternative, which is a hundred Chinese jobs paying $14/day on the other side of the world.

This is the thing that concerns me about their decline. IBM has been one of the most prolific software patent filers in the world. If they go down, think fall of the Soviet Union, but with no inclination on the part of anyone who can do anything about it to stop them from selling all the nukes to the highest bidder.

It's more like saying that an iMac would be better if you could also run Linux on it -- which you can. There is no reason whatsoever for phones not to be the same way. And it seems unfathomable that Nokia could possibly be selling more phones by offering solely Microsoft products than they could by offering both, especially since the non-Microsoft alternative is what most of the customers are actually asking for.

So let's eliminate the presumption then, and just have them do the accounting: Don't exempt Xfinity from the bandwidth cap. And if that means Comcast will give you a discount on TV service to compensate for the extra money you're paying for internet service, great. But it also makes them feel the pain they're causing to third parties with their ridiculously low caps, when customers start cancelling their TV service because it uses up too much overpriced data.

I'm sorry, what? We know exactly how to fix it. Abolish software patents. The fact that you describe this outcome as "hell on earth" provides the impression that you are both a liar and a patent lawyer.

The nuclear weapons analogy is very appropriate: You're not supposed to have to use them. If you actually end up litigating a patent, something has gone terribly wrong.

The problem is this: If you have a valid patent and you want to use it for exclusion like patents are intended (like pharmaceutical companies do), you don't end up in court, because your competitors know you have a valid patent and don't bother infringing it, or stop when you tell them to.

But that isn't what happens in the tech industry. Instead, everyone has a huge pile of overly broad and obvious patents which everyone else is infringing (and only because none of them should ever have been issued), and the cost of litigating that many patents is almost always prohibitive. The consequence is that no one can use them for exclusion, because as soon as you file a lawsuit you get one back and it's mutually assured destruction. At the same time, you still have to have a huge patent arsenal in order to deter all the other companies from going to you for a shake down using a huge pile of questionable patents that would almost always cost more to litigate and invalidate than license. In this case the problem was that Oracle was vastly overvaluing the patents -- they were claiming $6B in damages at the start of all this. Now it looks like if they win it's going to end up being more like something less than $50M. Which is almost certainly less than the amount Oracle is having to spend in legal fees.

I don't know if that's really it. I think part of it is that there are a very large number of old, conservative, high-spending Oracle customers who use Sun hardware, and if Sun dies then those customers are going to be looking for a new vendor, and in the process they could end up being sold an Oracle competitor's database. So Oracle staged a Sun bailout. They just happened to end up with Java in the process.

The thing is, Java means something different to Oracle than it ever did to Sun. The original point of Java was to stop people from writing apps in Visual Basic or against the Win32 API which then wouldn't run on Solaris and SPARC -- Java was "write once, run anywhere" so you could write your app for whatever you have now and then Sun could come in at some point and pitch some hardware to you and it would still run your software.

Oracle is instead looking at it as a licensing opportunity. Lots of people are using Java, Oracle wants money. The problem is that their patents are crap and claiming copyright on an API is ridiculous. It's like claiming a copyright on the bolt pattern in a piece of industrial equipment so that no competitors can make replacement parts. It's purely functional, and copyright only covers expression, not function. Functionality is the domain of patents.

Nothing to lose... you mean other than having most of Oracle's Java patents invalidated and spending an obscene amount of legal fees against the prospect of not recovering anything?

That is a surprisingly good explanation of software patents.

1) The DOJ is saying they're fine if it gets destroyed. That makes any argument that you can't give it to the accused pretty flagrantly specious.
2) If the DOJ did actually want a clean copy as evidence, they can make themselves a copy and then put the original equipment back into service until the verdict comes down.

And when, exactly, is that? It happens about as often as (and is often simultaneous with when) you don't have electricity, which tends to brick just about everything after a few hours when the batteries run down, or immediately for anything without batteries. If you have cellular wireless service in addition to wifi, it happens approximately never, because the only place you don't have one or the other (if not both) is the middle of the woods where you, again, have no electricity (not to mention no corporate offices or employees).

What gives you the impression that "works without internet" is a common business requirement in a world where everyone has internet 99.9% of the time?

You're ignoring how that can be a significant advantage. The alternative is what you want when you're Microsoft: You want your platform to run everything everyone else's can and then a lot more, because the more stuff runs on your platform and not others, the less people are able to switch. But that only works when you're already in the dominant market position -- adding some cool API or whatever is close to useless if the only way you can use it is if all your customers have ChromeOS and nobody does.

Now look at it from the other side: Suppose you make it so Chrome on Windows and OS X does everything Chrome OS can do. OK, now you convince some companies that it would be a good idea to write their custom business application against Chrome -- that way it will run on all major platforms, and for the few users who need only that application, you can buy them a Chrome OS computer which is cheaper and practically immune to viruses. Which provides the thin end of the wedge: Get people using Chrome OS in a limited capacity and the next custom business application that comes around for a refresh gets "works on our existing Chrome OS machines" as a requirement. Five or ten years later, everything businesses do works on Chrome OS and they start wondering what sense it makes paying money for Windows licenses.

As the first reply points out, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- there are plenty of likely reasons for someone who is not an infringer to still not to submit a counter-notice, from fearing the expense of a trial to wanting to retain their anonymity for reasons unrelated to infringement to not knowing how to submit a counter notice to the alleged infringer not knowing whether they actually had a meritorious case for fair use, etc. But I would think more importantly, why isn't that exactly the sort of thing the service provider would be able to specify in the termination policy?