Bollocks to it.

We just can't let this happen, it's almost a full blown disaster, the one ray of sunshine is the patent deal.

We need to find a way to buy Nokia out before this deal goes through.

Seriously?!

Microsoft gets a free pass for all the damage they did and gets a licence to all the Nokia patents that they know they cannot survive in mobile without?

For the price of the Nokia-Siemens buyout?

So Nokia shareholders are to sell their entire mobile business to the scumbags that ruined it for just enough money to own the rump end of their own business free and clear?

Screw that.

I'll offer the Nokia board $7.5B for 51% of the whole company, less any long term investors that want to assign their proxies to me, and I'll re-organize the whole company, turf out all the losers that have managed the company into the ground and spank the living crap out of the company that did this to them. The company that deliberately did this to them.

If Microsoft thinks those patents are worth so much, stick 'em under a GPL-like licence that lets anybody play in mobile so long as they share and tell Microsoft and Apple to go screw themselves.

I posted the following on Groklaw the day it died, in the desperate hope of getting some reasoned help. I was too late.

Looks like I might be too late again.

Stuff that for a game of soldiers, Slashdot might be full of loonies and Trolls but there are still some sane voices hidden amongst the noise.

Have at it.

----------

I've been working up to posting this for weeks.

I don't really want to post it now but I may never get another chance.

I'm not ready so the link will be to nowhere till at least tomorrow.

Apologies in advance for any offence but I won't take the chance that I miss the opportunity to reach members of the Groklaw community that I may never be in contact with again.

------

I'm hoping you guys will be able to help me out.

I've been silently standing on the sidelines here almost since the very beginning. I, like you, feel very deeply that what we have been watching happen here is an outrage.

Watching monopolies desperately trying to destroy the open-source world like a bunch of petulant toddlers makes me want to bang my fists and smash things with rage. (Yes I do see the irony there.)

I have, for a long time, felt powerless to do anything about it but I have come to a decision to make a stand.

The real problem is that we lack the sort of wealth and influence that the corporate elite possess. We are forced to contend with them on a battlefield of their choosing with little or no resources.

I think it is about time we stopped putting up with that and started fighting fire with fire.

If we want to win this war we need to acquire more money and influence than our opponents and, ludicrous as that idea seems on the surface, I don't think it's something that is beyond the realm of possibility.

You see the thing is that the businesses that we face here are either monopolists or practising outmoded models, they are desperately trying to hang on to a way of doing business that has been out-evolved. They look on the surface like the 800lb Gorillas but in reality they are more like Giant Pandas. They are tottering on the edge of extinction because they are too myopic to realize that their ecological niche has gone or that they are in the process of destroying it with their own stupid greed.

So here's what I plan to do and what I think I can achieve given a bit of help.

I plan to buy Nokia.

I think Nokia could easily be re-organized into a vastly profitable enterprise and its enormous collection of patents could be used to beat the snot out of the trolls and proprietary monopolists. I think a licensing scheme similar to the GPL could be created that forced everyone in the mobile space to 'share and share alike' and to compete on merit rather than in litigation.

I want to create something that is inherently, by its very nature, what Google promised to be but does not seem to be able to execute on.

I don't want to go on and on here, so I have laid out my ideas in a blog (http://thedarienproject.blogspot.com/) that I have created for the purpose and I'm inviting anyone who is interested to go over there, read what I have to say and to give me a good kicking.

This forum represents some of the most insightful and best qualified people in the world to understand what is really going on in our economy here and therefore some of the best motivated to do something about it. I can't think of anyone else I would rather have criticizing and critiquing my plans and hopefully together we can find a way to build a better future, free of the sort of destructive corporate cancer that seems to be sucking the life out of our economies.

Thanks in advance for any help that any of you are willing to give. Hopefully one day we will all be able to look back on the 'patent-wars' and laugh at just how easy it was to deal with the bullies once we stood up to them.

Yours gratefully, in perpetuity
Chris Hanlon
Founder
The Darien Project

Foreign multi-nationals that pay taxes on their earnings?

Rarer than hens teeth over here.

What we need to do is serve serious crime notices to the Copyright Cartel. Once we have a proper free market in copyrighted content we can take the money we save and spend it on something useful. Like hospitals or a police force that can afford to pursue real crime.

Quite the opposite, I find.

Tabs grow in a Window in an organic manner, spreading out from the threads that spawned them in a way specific to where and when I encountered them. Not only is it easier to find them but the very patterns that they form contain information about them that would be lost if the were bookmarked or otherwise organised.

I suppose it might be possible to categorize everything that interests me in a way that preserved that information but the effort involved would be significant compared to opening them in a new tab and leaving that tab open until it no longer holds my immediate attention.

I periodically weed my tab collection and close stuff or bookmark it if it seems fitting but the core collection of tabs are pretty consistent.

I find this aids my thought processes. It is so easy to get distracted and forget what one was thinking or reading hours/days/weeks ago, it is immensely helpful to have it all still lying open in front of you exactly where you left it when it first caught your attention.

I can only assume you are joking.

Four or five hundred seems to be the upper bound of the point where Firefox becomes unusable. It crashes so often and operates so slowly that it becomes a log jam.

I am using tabs the way I want to use them.

Seems to me that is exactly what they were designed for, to avoid doing all that fiddly nonsense you have just described.

I could just use Lynx. I don't because it sucks for the way I desire to browse the Web.

I'm telling you that this is how I, and presumably many others, want to use our browsers.

I even suggested that I might even be willing to pay money to see this functionality of browsers improved.

'You're doing it wrong' is a ludicrous and unconstructive response.

Looks like I've got about 240 tabs open at the moment.

That's pretty conservative for me, it's often much worse. I like having my train of thought where I can see it and access it instantly.

It annoys me that it causes so much instability in Firefox, I seem to recall sometime about 4.0 it was supposed to stop hogging memory with inactive tabs, never worked properly unfortunately. Is it really beyond the ken of man to suspend an inactive tab to disk and release the memory?

Mind you, at least they don't do what Chrome does with tab size....

What's interesting is that memory use seems to gradually sky-rocket even if you don't open any extra tabs. I usually have about 3 crashes a day.

I can't be the only one in the world with this use case. Perhaps we should start a Kickstarter to fund sorting it out...

That was a bold statement.

Evidence?

Much as I love Three I should like to point out that their service is filtered, they blacklist 'adult' content. You can 'opt-in' to their 'adult' sandbox but that does not remove the block from anything else.

Also, as I have just learned, only The One Plan allows unlimited tethering. You can buy tethering as an add-on but it has a 2Gb cap.

Nonetheless they would appear to be the best Carrier on Earth...

[Still room for improvement though]

What is it going to take for Google to get its finger out and buy Nokia already.

If they can't afford it I'm sure Samsung, HTC et al will chip in. With Nokia's patent portfolio they could bitchslap Apple/M$ but good.

Presumably the cost of the sub-contractor is deductible?

We've got an iPad 3 and every pdf app is intolerably slow at rendering to the extent that I have almost entirely written it off as a computing device.

It will clearly be several generations before tablets are a practical replacement for a laptop.

Fat chance.

I've got all sorts of older Nvidia hardware that works great with the Nvidia blob and that has never worked with Nouveau.

It's a particular pain in the arse because it's loaded automatically as if it really were a real stable driver during installation these days and it is used to drive the console. Combined with the current trend for 'live-install' discs many modern distro's are nearly impossible to install on older hardware. Ubuntu, I'm looking at you.

Sure there are ways around it but they are far from beginner friendly, at which point why the hell are you bothering with a distro like Ubuntu, you might as well be installing Gentoo.

It's frustrating to watch old, dull stuff that works being deprecated for new flashy shit that doesn't.

Imagine a Judge whose dictionary has the same definition of 'obvious' as the rest of us.

Satan is skating to work this morning.

So am I.

They can send me as many unsolicited messages as they like if I get paid 50c for every one.

That's only fair, I think.