You're seriously arguing that the foundation of George W. Bush' Iraq war was even remotely related to "establishing the Rule of Law"?

As for your examples: all they show is that governments can (try to) abuse their powers. There's nothing fundamental about social or economic justice in your examples. Or are you going to claim that warrantless wiretapping is also related to social and economic justice?

And of course the world is larger than the US. At least in my country several social and economic justice measures are fully entrenched in the law and compatible with our constitution (including abortion).

Seems like my browser decided to log me out. So, again, logged in this time:

I completely disagree with that statement, although it can be perfectly abused for that purpose of course. Then again, so can "spreading democracy".

From the official speech delivered by the ITU's secretary-general at the first Plenary of World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai last week:

And no, that quote is not taken out of context.

Sure. It still often cited in academic works even today. You may have noticed I also cited other, more recent studies. Here's a couple more I collected during the EU software patents directive process.

Yes, la la la la I can't hear you really works well...

Might also want to read the posting below from someone who was actually there.

Actually, one of the most comprehensive studies on that topic (Fritz Machlup, An Economic Review of the Patent System) concluded more or less the opposite:

Similarly, the FTC Innovation report from 2003 was also far from unequivocally positive about patents, especially in the hardware/software fields. Or Jim Bessen's research, as presented (twice) at an FFII conference in 2004.

That does not exemplify how patents have supposedly been a net benefit for innovation. Additionally, you are wrongly paraphrasing the article you refer to below. It only says that nowadays, per filed patent there are fewer lawsuits than there were in the days of the fixed telephone. From that it concludes that there is no problem with the volume of patent lawsuits.

I would argue that the reason for this is that patents are used in a very different way today compared to how they were used back then (there were much less large companies back then amassing patent war chests just for defensive purposes). Arguably, the standards for patentability were also higher back then, which means that actually going to court rather than only looking for the players you can convince to settle out of course was a much less risky business.

While I appreciate that shooting the messenger by itself is not a very strong argument, that's an opinion piece by "the vice president and head of strategic acquisitions at Intellectual Ventures". That's patent troll central. Suing companies, or threatening to sue them, based on all kinds of patents is their bread and butter.

Moving on to substance, he's most definitely wrong when he claims that "Every major technological and industrial breakthrough in U.S. history [..] has been accompanied by exactly the same surge in patenting, patent trading, and patent litigation that we see today in the smartphone business". Do you remember the massive patent wars from the eighties and nineties that came with the personal computer revolution? No? Me neither. There were a few lawsuits (e.g. Stac vs Microsoft), but there most definitely was no surge like what we see today.

There is absolutely no indication that we need patents and the related dispute settlement overhead at all in the ICT industry. My favourite quote is still the one from Robert Barr before the FTC in 2003, as Vice President and Worldwide Patent Counsel of CISCO:

No, they start selling old mass-market DOS games now also packages with DOSBox for Mac, rather than only with DOSBox for Windows (or with ScummVM for Mac, or with Wine, or in very few cases a native Mac port -- but the last category aren't really old games until now).

In general, the games never ran and never will run directly under any version of Mac OS X (or even "classic" Mac OS), and hence do not have to be updated. The currently released games fall into four categories:

• They are DOS/Windows games, but are supported by ScummVM. The GOG installer will install ScummVM to run them. Before you yell "those are not native Mac ports!", keep in mind that those games were originally basically a lot of sound, graphics and a script, bundled with a DOS-based script interpreter. ScummVM is a modern replacement for those script interpreters (it's also used on the Windows for most of those games).
• They are other DOS games. These are packaged so they run under DOSBox. These are obviously not native Mac ports either, but they're handled exactly the same by GOG on Windows. It's the same principle as using a Super Nintendo emulator to run old SNES games.
• They are Windows games. I'm only aware of The Witcher and King's Bounty being in this situation. The Witcher is based on Wine, I don't know about King's Bounty but I guess it's the same (but it may also be a native Mac port). In this case it's mostly a matter of not being able to play the games at all, or playing them under Wine. Your call.
• They are dual Mac/Windows releases. I'm only aware of The Witcher 2 being in this situation.

That said: ScummVM, DOSBox and Wine all work under 10.8. Since they are emulation layers to some extent, chances are actually higher that they will keep working with future Mac OS X releases (or at least can be fairly easily updated) than with so-called native ports. At least every boxed Mac game I ever bought is gathering dust (from Lemmings for System 7 to Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever for Mac OS X/PowerPC) (*) (**), while I can still play every single DOS/Windows game I ever bought thanks to DOSBox and Wine.

Since The Witcher 2 was only just released, I think it's a good bet that it will run under 10.8. Also, like the other person said, the Interplay promo does not include any of the Mac-ified games. All DOSBox-based ones are trivial to get running though, and the Windows ones generally aren't that hard either (I've been buying and playing gog.com games on my Mac for several years now).

(*) ok, one exception: Space Quest IV for Mac, which is supported by ScummVM...
(**) I know about Sheepshaver, but it wasn't been very stable when I tried it

Actually, it does. For some reason, there's no UI for doing so though.

I hope I'm not the only one that got visions of a /etc/profile spewing out Amazon commercials when reading the above.

It's not as if cars don't already contain software today that affects how it drives, from anti-lock braking to engine control to powered steering to... It's simply the next (admittedly, big) step, not going from complete manual control to complete automatic control.

No, wait... Indeed. They already posted financial transparency reports on Wikileaks by the Wau Holland Foundation, in the form of a press release no less.

While that is true in the general sense, there is also the fact that governments describing themselves as democratic (let alone shining examples of that) should be as diplomatic and as open as possible. And at least our Western governments have not been all that great about that lately, ranging from ACTA, to war crimes (Abu Grahib, "Collateral Murder"-the-full-version-and-not-the-Wikileaks-edit), to unsavoury governmental-corporation incest (STRATFOR, News Corp), to ...

Wikileaks (even if it remained as effective as in its heydays) would never be able to get its hands on every piece of confidential information nor be able to publish it. Just like the fact that we beat ACTA doesn't mean that the IP-crazies are suddenly completely stopped in their tracks. Or just like the fact that we get to vote doesn't mean that corruption doesn't exist nor that we live in an ideal representative democracy.

However, society always has been and presumably always will be a melting pot influenced by everything that happens. Wikileaks, beating ACTA and voting are all part of that. In the grand scheme of things, I see them as counteracting forces against wrongfully denied freedom-of-information requests, warrantless wiretapping, trying to get IP-legislation enacted under the guise of free trade agreements without public oversight, ... I don't see that in the sense of fighting fire with fire or an eye for an eye, but as opposite influences that affect society as a whole and how it will continue to evolve.

And the problem appears to be that without actions that "open up" things, the natural reaction of many people in power appears to be to keep much more secret than is warranted or than is a good idea. Reasons could be because that is the way of the least resistance, or because those people at large probably often genuinely believe that they do know best, and that public debate would only slow down things and/or muddy the facts.

That behaviour however has to be counteracted and compensated for in some way to keep a democratic society healthy, and as far as I'm concerned Wikileaks is one expression of that in its own unconventional and loose-cannon way. I don't think Wikileaks is dangerous to a healthy society though. It will obviously cause at least inconveniences and may even lead to deaths or other catastraphies, and there are many more desirable ways to achieve the same goals (such as freedom-of-information requests, and the normally automatic public oversight over creating any kind of legislation). However, I think Wikileaks' wide general public support (or at least sympathy) is mainly a reaction to the failure of exactly these more convention means of openness in democratic governance.

Seriously, it is really awesome.

Shouldn't we have to invent the VISOR before we start creating prosthetic eyes?

Powerful people helping powerful friends is of all times. And e.g. Thomas Jefferson wasn't exactly a big fan of the concept of patents initially. That changed somewhat later on, but even then he never saw it as "little vs big guy" but rather as "help the interest of society".

And every statement can be qualified in a way that makes it potentially true. What people try or not is not the issue, it's what the actual situation is. It's simply not true in the digital economy that in general innovators cannot make money off of their innovation because other people immediately duplicate it. Just like they don't work in a vacuum, and should they have to pay a royalty to every single patent owner whose "innovations" they are "stealing" pretty much no one would be able to sell software at a profit except for the behemoths out there. There have been plenty of surveys and economic studies on these topics, a bunch of which I once summarised.

At the same time, given that pretty much no software developer ever looks at patents (and if they look at them, they're more likely to get a headache than inspiration), their disclosure value is not that great either. Let's not even talk about business method patents, many of which are disclosed by simply putting them into operation (it's hard to keep one click a secret). And then there's the point of network effects, where overall value and efficiency increases exponentially as more people/computers use the same standard to communicate and exchange information. Patents would have to offer really massive benefits to offset all of this overhead.

It adds red tape and leads to a tragedy of the anti-commons (because a patent does not guarantee that you, or anyone else for that matter, can make use of whatever you monopolised; it only allows you to forbid others from making use of that knowledge). Thereby it naturally leads to concentration of power, which in fact is readily acknowledged by and even seen as a positive evolution by certain people in charge of forming IP policy.

Analogy fail. Apartment buildings are scarce goods by their very nature. Nobody owning them or taking responsibility for them almost by definition leads to a tragedy of the commons. On the other hand, making ideas/innovations/inventions scarce goods is an artificial construct. The problems with patent thickets are known. To some extent they have been worked around in the past by the big corporations by means of cross-licensing, and by smaller players by staying under the radar of larger players. Everyone just had to waste a certain amount of their income on patent war chests and mutual assured destruction kept everyone happy (except for the money they had to waste on useless patents, of course, or when small player became a bit too big without possessing a sufficient number of patents to play the game).

With the patent trolls even that strategy doesn't work anymore and everyone just gets sucker punched. One can hope everyone will finally wake up to see that the patent system just doesn't work for today's digital economy, but of course the people making lots of money of it and basically siphoning off lots of money from the real economy will keep vehemently disagreeing with that.

And everybody should paint rainbows and give out happy smiles and the world will be a better place. What you are saying has been said for the last 30 or 40 years already, and many reforms have been implemented. In the mean time, the cost of patent lawsuits keeps going up, the number of granted patents keeps rising and the allowed subject matter keeps expanding.

But let's just keep wasting money and opportunities by the boat load, including public money spent on all that patent reviewing and on those lawsuits. Or alternatively, let's make all patent offices self-sufficient like the European Patent Office, which leads to them granting ever more patents because it increases their income and their hence power (or simply because they don't know better, due to the hammers & nails situation).

Yes, let's all just wait for patent utopia to finally arise and make everybody happy. Amen.