I agree with everything you said except the first sentence. China does not have good IP laws because there is no balance. Some countries have restrictive IP laws like the US, and some have liberal IP laws like China and India. I don't know if there is any particular country with the perfect balance of protecting the interests of the inventor while not encumbering social development. To me that is perfect balance. Big Pharma is a known abuser of that decades long exclusivity which makes people die of tuberculosis

Dude, it's a subsidiary, it's not that big of a deal. I bet you use a lot of hardware and software made by worse companies, which unlike Facebook have a track record of abusing your privacy for your own prejudice. Google, Apple and Microsoft are just some examples. Do you consider the hardware worse because it was made by such companies? Or are you saying that the fact a social media company, like Facebook, controlling a gaming company might have worse consequences than:
- a search company creating a mobile OS, phones, and enforcing guidelines to phone developers (Google);
- a "designer" company limiting your (as described by themselves) high-margin smartphone from being smart because carriers can't handle the bandwidth (Apple);
- an OS company which instills last century software patterns while playing catch with the previous 2 in new platforms for hardware, software and the cloud?

I'll give you 2 examples of weird success stories on companies one would least expect it:
- Blizzard making an MMO out of an RTS
- Amazon making an e-reader out having an online bookstore

Why bring politics to a much more complex topic. This is not about liberalization of this good. It's not a good yet, it hasn't been released. It's not even an essential good. They are issuing developer editions for genuinely interested developers who will make the device popular with new content.

If you get a free market for these controlled sales, you will end up with gaming enthusiasts or knock-off reverse-engineers rather than real contributors getting the item, and companies know better than to buy an overpriced SDK: product won't sell if developers don't get easy access.

And from what I know, America is far from being "a bastion of free enterprise" mate: they sell iPhones through selected carriers, they won't allow companies to sell cars directly to consumers (Tesla), and they are one of the most import-afraid economies around - there's no other country where "Made in this country" is such a strong compelling argument. They don't like free markets, they like controlled markets, for whatever good or bad that may bring

Not selling it directly if price is being uncontrollably inflated is great strategy if they want to keep this product popular, especially in China. It was pretty obvious Chinese public would scourge the earth for these in order to start reverse engineering it in a country with poor IP legislation (especially for foreign IP), but the real problem Oculus would face with this Rift "black market" is marketing itself, as the product would immediately get the exclusive, overpriced label that a developing countries loves to hate. And the Asian market is no small piece of the pie for the paying gaming industry.

I'm betting this has something to do with the amount of money poker moves around and live tournaments' marketing influence on online poker spending. As opposed to online tournaments, which have a fraction of the marketing influence on games profitability.

You rarely see gambling-centered regulation making much waves because winners and losers want to avoid such regulations. One out of greed and the other out of vice. So lobbying is pretty easy for most things gambling.

You mean like they still haven't done with chess?

Wow, that escalated quickly. It's traffic lights. We still got corruption in many public offices, sports, and serious lack of respect for environmental causes and social security concerns. Did I mention high taxes? We are way behind central european countries in all social areas.

Probably enough to pose danger of melting or expanding the materials in the protection suits of those who would have to handle him. Anything above 70C would be dangerous.

So dude doesn't want his name's first search result to be an over-hyped headline. Despite being a very decent publication, BBC is mass media, and as such it has to make news outrageously. Dude just made a pondered decision to save some company's face, or was forced to without having a second chance to fix it, and maybe I'm assuming here) is not even directly at fault for the company's losses. Maybe yes maybe not.

I don't think he has to professionally and personally live under that shadow for the rest of his life, just because an indexing algorithm is inclined to shove it up his popper every single time someone wants to know who he is.

I'm guessing someone who really needs to know that info will know it eventually, not through google. His decision to be forgotten will most likely only seclude the info from wannabe conspiracy theorists and amateur employers, which pretty much deserve to NOT know it :)

In some areas of Portugal we have exactly the opposite - timers applied to traffic lights instead of crosswalks. In some places we also have crosswalk timers together with traffic light timers.

Why is this a solution? Because drivers will stop paying attention to crosswalk timers and use their own traffic light timers instead, which have a security offset of 1-3 seconds. This not only makes standing at a traffic light much more dynamic and time-efficient (drivers will know how long they have to do imprudent things like fixing a rear glass, looking at the mirror, texting or picking something out of a glove box, with a high degree of safety), but it also prevents them from prematurely hitting the gas, as most drivers feel it is unsafe to go before the timer hits 0.

Also, the timer works in both waiting for a green and waiting for a red. Yellow lights could be fully substituted by a red and green light only with a timer which would turn yellow on the last 1-3 seconds before a red. It would also prevent a lot of ambiguity in yellow light ticketing which is very common in urban areas and is reason for dispute between veteran drivers and over zealous traffic authorities.

Low-level flight should be regulated on a municipal level, not through national airspace policies. Such type of drones doesn't need (despite having the ability) to fly higher than you average apartment block. As such, commercial, recreational or even military use of such gear should have never fallen under the FAA's jurisdiction, as the FAA never really had control over what's on a shallow level of the ground (excluding airports or helipads, but even there it's the facility that molds to the FAA regulation and not FAA regulation restricting it to total impossibility).

It's much like saying the FAA should regulate paper-plane throwing or bungee-jumping: "Hey, you can't jump from that bridge wearing an Amazon t-shirt silly. You're going to jail"

Thank you for pointing out something totally trivial criticizing the cancer of slashdot: interesting articles related to important technological and political matters. We really needed a hero to save us from the truth, or we might make more theories than our small intellects can cope with.

But hey, if fallacies like this work in courts, they must also give great comment points here.

And you probably also helped your local fire department and schools by lobbying for a group of people who is socially accepted to be pathologically inclined to scam you. Because, unlike the video says, competition-pricing only works when people have full disclosure of a specific product condition, which is impossible in new and "previously-owned" cars. Not even the dealer knows what went on during the shelf and road life of a car. At least factories are sure to have better information than someone whose only job is to market (read: pitch) an insecure commodity at an inflated AND ____commissioned____ price.

I wouldn'twant my devices to be worked on while at Starbucks anyway

...apparently wasn't enough for some to understand the true politics at work in D.C.

Weapon dealers > [insert essential good here] dealers > paramilitary related jobs.

Medics aren't really a necessity when having enough food for whoever is alive is the main issue. It will be a bonus for oneself to have such skill, but it will only take a medic so far before he faces more serious problems than his health.

Pretty much anyone who has an eye for social manipulation will have a huge head start in any state of social disarray, such as those in an apocalyptic dystopia.
People might argue the question was about usefulness, but well, since we are doing the "what if" possibilities, we might as well speculate on the most successful and/or having the most life-expectancy. Criminal activity will surely boom and kingpins will have a field day (or years).