While you and I might not see this as an investment, I suspect many people will. Yes, they may not be investing in a piece of the company, however, they are expecting to get something back for their money. (Is it possible to offer a portion of future profits through Kickstarter as a reward?) Kickstarter is a great idea, but I don't have faith that the general public will see it for what it really is, a good faith gamble that your project will come to fruition. How long before the media starts hyping it up and it gets perceived as the next big investment wave? How long before lawyers get involved and starting suing to get that $100 back when the promise isn't delivered? How long before the spammers/scammers/incompetents start loading it up with bogus projects? I may well be wrong, and truly I hope that I am, but I have to side with the overall point of the article and state that I believe this will be a short-lived fad.

What kind of xenophobic rant is that? What the hell is the Chinese military going to do to your Ubuntu distribution running in a virtual machine? I'll bet there is a lot of source code that they see that you aren't privy to. How many of those automotive computer systems are built in China/Taiwan? Plan to do a lot of horseback riding do you? I think its a far stretch to assume that just because they have seen the source code to something they are going to spend the time and manpower to turn it into some world domination thing. It would be more likely that they were given access to the source code to evaluate how secure it was.

That is exactly the sort of drivel that I would expect from Mr. Priest, who makes his living off of selling new passports! He's a business person after all, part of a corporation (International Passport Visas, Inc.) He wants you to believe that any kind of damage renders your passport useless and requires you to purchase a new one, preferably from the corporation he works for. Instead of interviewing someone who profits from peddling passports for a living, maybe the reporter should have interviewed someone from the state department.

Correction "assumption that health INSURANCE CAN be purchased by anyone." (Should have caught that in the initial preview - argghhh!)

I don't need "sound bites" or political mumbo jumbo or statistics pulled out of my arse to make my decisions. The fact of the matter is that I experienced this exact situation in 1996/1997 when I became and independant contractor and tried to buy insurance for my wife, newly adopted daughter, and myself. Because my wife was a smoker and my sister was an epelectic, I was denied time after time. I couldn't even find a solo policy to cover my daughter. In the end, I paid for all of my daughters required doctor visits out of my own pocket without the assistance of insurance and went to work for "the man" immediately after completing the contract. NOTHING in my statement was a political view on the current health care system, it was simply stating the facts in response to the assumption that health care CAN be purchased by anyone.

Um! Have you ever tried to purchase insurance for just you and your family? Cost aside, many insurance companies will NOT insure you. Why? Because the risk is there that you will use those benefits. Insurance companies expect that a certain number of employees will NOT use their benefits and generate enough profit to outweigh the expenses of those that do. And if you have ANY pre-exsisting conditions or you've ever smoked a cigarette in your lifetime, they will just flat out deny you any coverage no matter what the cost, as a matter of policy. If you do find some obscure insurance company that will cover you, you can bet your life (not just figuratively speaking) that it will cost you an amount much much more than an employee and his/her employer's contribution for that policy.

I can't believe you interpreted sarcasm as literal.

I agree with you 100 percent, well almost. Forcing Verizon to do anything that isn't in their corporations best interest is morally wrong. Because we all know that large corporation are only looking out for what is best for the consumer! If you get a "free" phone from Verizon for your aging mother so that she can stay in contact with you more easily, well then you SHOULD have to pay the early termination fee of $350.00 for that $29.99 piece of electronics when she passes away on the 21st month of your contract. And while we are at it, let us remove those other pesky regulations that the goverment has placed upon these large corporations. Let us remove the one where they are required to pay a minimum wage to their employees. We all know that this is just costing us jobs. Hell, my cousin Bruce could be making as much as 50 cents an hour AND have a job if it wasn't for that pesky goverment interference. Shame on you Mr. President (Because we all know that he REALLY makes all the laws, the Congress and Senate are just for show.) Let's remove the regulation that says Verizon must provide access to their lines from other competitors as well. I don't want no stinking Sprint customer to be able to call me. (You and your aging mother are using the SAME provider, aren't you?)

My point is that a truly and totally free market is a farce. There has to be a balancing act performed to keep the market truly competitive and profitable. Unfortunately, one groups idea of fair and balanced differs from another groups idea of fair and balanced. That is why we need regulation. Maybe this particular case isn't one that requires regulation. Maybe this particular case works as it currently is implemented. Obviously not everyone believes that, especially the person who DIDN'T get a DROID and then for whatever reason had to cancel their contract two months early.

Oh and one more thing. Maybe forcing PEOPLE to do something is morally wrong, but corporations are NOT people. People generally have to live with their actions, a corporation can merely disolve itself and start up as a completely different corporation. It is a lot more difficult for a person to simply disolve their identity and reappear under a completely new one free of all legal and moral obligations of their past actions. If the US goverment is going to provide corporations with that type of benefit then they do have a MORAL responsibility to make sure they don't abuse it.

Except Tenenbaum was not making his OWN property available, it belonged to someone else. A closer analogy would be more like...

"Prosecuting people for picking their neighbor's locks and having enabled THEM to be burgled."

I stand corrected. First Sale is not a 'right' although up until recently it was a general expectation of the consumer. I guess my point was that the knowledge contained within the IP could in essence be 'locked' away from the public forever if a legal means of passing that knowledge onto someone else is not made possible. And that 'locking' away of knowledge doesn't have to come from some 'evil or greedy' corporation. It may happen simply because it was no longer profitable to maintain the locks or they were just forgotten. Very few ideas are truly original, most are formed from previous exposure to others. Imagine if we allowed those previous ideas to be locked up and forgotten, never to be recovered again.