When ever I see a law that makes no rational sense I always look at the finances and who gains.
In this case:
"His smallish estate pays about $8,000 per month to keep him in this state of perpetual suffering"

$8k a month is a good (corporate/governmental) reason to keep people on life support machines and drag out a miserable existence that bit further.

Shame that $8k a month couldn't be better spent on someone who's got a chance at life rather than keeping alive someone who's got no chance and is suffering.

The world makes no sense with humanity in control but seems to make perfect sense when nature is left alone.

You assume that European's view America as a friend who will always let them use GPS?
Of course friends don't spy on friends or apply pressure to force diplomatic aircraft out of the sky, etc, etc.

There's other reasons.
Like spending European money on European technology projects & creating European jobs - even if they seem unnecessary.
That's a winner for me (speaking as a European).

Depend too much on the technology of another power and you end up belonging to that power entirely.

I'd keep it as it is as I don't want my kids going to school in the dark.
They have to come home in the dark for a month or two but that's unavoidable.

I'm in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Anywhere from the Scottish border north benefits from daylight savings for the purpose of not having to do the morning commute in darkness.
As you get further north (e.g Iceland) it makes no difference (day break at 11am, nightfall 2pm).

So there's a sweet spot between 54 & 60 degrees north where any country in that region would benefit from day light savings.

I believe what we are seeing is a faster technology company life cycle than what we saw with Microsoft.
Microsoft peaked with it's desktop/laptop OS monopoly and then crumbled when the consumer technology paradigm shifted to mobile/tablet.

Like wise Google has enjoyed more than a decade of search monopoly.
(Effectively, you are free to choose other search engines, but internet consumers don't. They are brand locked-in)

My perspective is as a website owner who has become fed up with the page ranking shenanigans of each of Google's search engine updates.
It's fairly obvious to me that Google purposely ranks lower websites who they feel should be paying them to get the audience they once enjoyed organically.
As an ordinary Google search user I see poorer quality search results than I did previously.
It's smacks of desperation.

Luckily I realised the vulnerability of my online business to being dependant on Google for clients more than a year ago.
Also, using analytics, I spotted that the desktop visitors were declining 10% annually in favour of mobile visitors.
So at the beginning of this year I decide to create mobile App versions of my website business.

Choosing to do iOS only Apps was the right decision.
If you are going to dip your toe in then you want to do it in the most lucrative market.
At almost 3x the revenue of Android in addition to lower support and development costs (Android is fragmented over vendors/platforms/OS versions/stores) iOS makes more sense in every way.

I hear the cries for "When are you doing an Android version?", from my website users to which I give the honest reply "When it makes financial sense".

I doubt if I'm alone in this and it makes me wonder how Google can turn around their longer term prospects and make Android as much of a success as iOS.
It may already be too late.

Who's side do you come down on with Zuckerberg & Winklevoss twins?

Patent trolls? Lodsys going after the small developers after already having Apple pay for in-app license?

I did an MBA a couple of years ago.
It included a course on "ethics" which really did nothing other than help you self justify any action you took as being ok and easy on your conscious.
I still write software, independently now. I did the MBA to learn how "they" think.

As a lawyer once told me there's no such thing as "justice", only law which isn't the same thing.

Moral of this story is get a contract signed before you go sharing, especially from MBA types.

At the end of the day it's about execution, not the idea.
I come down on Zuckerberg's side.
I think patents should be abolished.

With the recent PR coup over Obama on Syria I'm now starting to question Snowden's true motives.

Instead of flying from Hawaii directly to a S.American country that, later, offered him asylum he flies to Hong Kong and stays at the Russian Consulate.
Then flies to Moscow, slums it in the transit area for a month, staying in the press headlines (including causing the forced landing of Bolivian president Evo Morales due to a rumor that Snowden was onboard). Finally getting a 1 year visa to stay in Russia.

Now don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the NSA, and allies, illegal activities have been brought to light.

However I'm looking at Putin and the Kremlin and thinking - nice PR work guys, you're playing the West at its own, old, game and beating them at it.

The question this leaves for me is; was Snowden really a Russian spy and rather than being exposed in the old fashioned cold war way they chose instead to make Snowden and paymasters look like the good guys through a well staged PR stunt?

Shouldn't Obama hand over his Nobel Peace Prize to the Russians for having the common sense to say "ok, hand over all the chemical weapons you have" rather than taking the knee jerk "send in the military and bomb the fuck out of the place killing more innocents than the chemicals did" approach.

How do you legislate fairly on this? It's a question I've been pondering.

I can't see software patents or any other type being abolished due to the loss of perceived wealth that would cause within an economy.

Instead I think a solution has to be found in the handling of patent cases.
A fast track legal process which takes a "Tax" on all claims to fund itself.
Removing the lawyers and courts fees thus removing the fear factor.
Patent owners should be limited to a percentage of all profits made by the product the patent has a valid claim on.
If multiple patents apply then they must share this percentage among them.

So lets say I'm an Apple developer and Apple takes 30%, leaving me 70%.
How much is fair for (using Lodsys as an example) the use of in-app purchase technology?
That 70% isn't all profit. (marketing, further development, business & admin costs etc)
10%? 20%? 30%?

I'd feel a lot keener to -innovate- and create new stuff if I felt that it wasn't going to be ripped from my hands by legal thieves.
If I knew there was a ceiling on what I'd have to pay out when the trolls came knocking on my door I could get on with doing what I do.

What the patent trolls forget is that we all stand on the shoulders of others.
Their "intellectual property" couldn't exist without the publicly domain intellectual property that existed before it.

I wonder how good it is at improving spelling, grammar and sentence construction? I'd be willing try it out for a laugh.
Of course the real money is always in sleaze so I can see women buying this keyboard to keep their husbands, and sons, off porn.

I know an individual iOS developer who has a relatively successful App for personal finance (top 3 position in App store).
He was approached by MS recently asking him to port his iOS App to Windows Phone App.
The best bit was that MS offered to code the App for him!

You'd think it would be easier for MS just to write a cross compiler that took an XCode project and compiled it for their platform.

I agree with what you are saying but I think it has more to do with the nature of what Cisco does and it's unique technology that helps it retain acquired employees.
If you work in R&D of networking equipment you have a very very limited job market place.
So the options to move on somewhere new, once Cisco has acquired you, are very limited.
Unless you move into another technology area, which isn't imbedded software and networking devices, that can be a big leap
I know as I made that leap and it wasn't easy (former Cisco employee 1994-2006).

The problem Cisco has is that the router has gone from being the building block of an industrial revolution to a mass produce product.
The router is now a commodity.
Given the Snowdon revelations about the NSA would you buy USA made networking equipment to carry your data if you were Asian or European?
That's why Huawei was born.
The US national security initiatives (or paranoia's) are doing most of the harm to US technology companies global growth.

I worked in Cisco System R&D on IOS for 12 years (1994-2006).
I have patents on network monitoring specific to NetFlow (or Flexible NetFlow) which came from being on the team that redesigned Cisco's netflow on IOS.

That's how I spotted what Skype was doing, and so did my colleague.
We had Cisco routers at home, running our own dev code, watching our own home network traffic.

He thought the skype traffic looked like something a Trojan would do, but since neither of us worked in Anti-virus software or hacking, what would we know?
I, being less paranoid, stuck with Skype as I figure it was just being clever in avoiding network filtering.
After all why would the telco's, who provide our networks, let some hackers from Sweden steal all their long distance voice calls...? :)

When you try to eradicate anything and fail you only succeed in make it stronger and more menacing.
It's true in medicine with antibiotics and bacteria, it's true in nature with mosquitoes and the various failed attempts to defeat their spread of malaria.

Skype was born from the technology to evade detection and network filtering (Kazaa).
First time I fire up Skype I couldn't believe the complexity of the networking it got into.
A close friend, who worked in networking with me, un-installed it immediately as it looked like a trojan at the network layer.

TPB people have learned some very hard lessons about evasion, law and staying alive online under extreme hostilities.

It'll be interesting to see what the next "Skype" will be and this could be either it, or one more step towards it.

Why didn't Snowden just flee to S.America?
Why Hong Kong and then Russia?

He's making a point and he's keeping himself in the news at the risk of being caught and treated the same as B.Manning.
Who leaked the rumour of him being on the Bolivian Presidential Jet? Why?

I notice the BBC dropped that story off their front page PDQ.

As long as Snowden appears in the headlines shall we question the role of the USA (& UK puppet) globally.
It's clear, brave and risky media manipulation to get a point across...

What is Independence?
What are you celebrating?
The end of one empire and the beginning of another?

  - daylight
  - any noise other than that produced by earphones
  - women
  - building power failures
  - enforced OS change
  - ....

I think we need a Slashdot Poll for this one!