'State of the art' public domain is not the same as 'viable' public domain.

One of the points of patents is to keep the public domain relatively current - New/current ideas are patented, but ideas a generation or so old are public domain. This is verses the previous system, where either it was open (anyone who could figure out how you did something did) or it was closed forever (anything you couldn't figure out from looking at it) - and occasionally lost.

In a good, healthy patent system the patent is a reward for innovation, and rent-seeking on those patents is difficult or impossible. The debate is about how healthy our current patent system is: There are a a lot of patents that are arguably not innovative, and there is a fair amount of rent-seeking using patents. It's probably impossible to have a system without any of that, but it's also probably possible to have a system with less than we currently have.

Well, I was actually clarifying a question from two posts above me - where the poster specifically said they didn't know enough to answer. I'm in the same boat on the general question actually.

In general, yes a book store gets to choose which books to sell - as does any other store. On the other hand, if the store is the only store in town and there's no easy way to leave town, well that's what the anti-trust laws were originally written for. Market position matters: If you have a small slice of the market you can get away with a lot of things you aren't allowed to do if you totally dominate it. (Oh: And 'sell' isn't the same as 'stock' - the local bookstore will usually happily sell you plenty of books they don't stock - they'll order them from the publisher for you.)

The question I posted above has two parts: Whether the reason for the refusal matters, and whether the market position is strong enough for it to matter. Amazon is probably borderline on both cases, but only just, and which side of the line they are on isn't something I have the knowledge or experience to say.

I don't necessarily see that putting in workarounds that allow a few pageviews a month for a non-paying user as being dishonest - it's advertising. 'If you like these articles, we have more that you would need to pay for' - and they usually tell you exactly that when you hit the free limit.

The market position is 'bookstore' - so the question is 'is refusing to carry one book or one publisher's book out of dislike for the subject abusing it's position as a bookstore'?

Also: There's a degradation in video quality when you stream, according to the notes. Not major, and would still allow the game to play, but it would mean that people would notice if a game is available natively for the steambox.

So it's a two-part system: Valve gets to let people play their games on their TV without having them have to buy new high-end computers, and the manufacturers will get some pushback to make it so the games run natively on the TV game-boxes.

Not sure, it's possible. On the other hand, there are people who want to run Linux games on Mac, or vice versa...

Which leads to my problem with the poll's question - Who do you mean by 'driver'? Is it the human in the front seat, or the computer under the hood?

What OS do you run? If it's Mac, look at Fusion. If it's BSD, look at ZFS. If it's Linux, look at LVM or bcache. If it's Windows, look up Smart Response. Any would automate that decision in a decent way.

Now, if you have the money I'll fully agree that all SSD is ideal, and most of the above have their own drawbacks. (I actually like Apple's idea with Fusion: The HDD is the 'slow cache', instead of the SSD being the 'fast cache'.) I'm just saying that mixing SSDs and HDDs doesn't mean you have to be thinking about it all the time either.

Exactly. All the major OS's (Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD) even have decent ways to combine them automatically into one storage device that allows you to have the best of both worlds most of the time. (Different compromises on different systems, of course - most basically have you loose the space of the SSD, keeping it as a purely caching drive.)

I think a better way to look at this is to back up a bit.

In the 80's, a cellular phone was a high-end device, and only worked with a single carrier. In the USA, you got it from the carrier and the carrier supported it - you paid what was basically a support contract for it.

I'm not sure what the process was in Europe - I suspect it was spotty.

Europe grew in the 90's into a good modern phone system - partly due to regulations. A phone had to be sold to be work on any network. Another likely driver was the fact that Europe is a more fragmented market: Different carriers have different coverage in different countries, and people (especially businessmen, the first main market) would have to move between them.

The USA didn't have that requirement, so most phones still worked only on the network of the company that was selling them. Therefore the company that was selling them liked to point out their low cost, to get people hooked on the higher monthly contract. In Europe - where a phone worked on any network - this model didn't work, customers could just switch carriers.

The USA is now starting to standardize, but it's taking time. People are just starting to realize they can take a phone to a different network - and most cell companies don't advertize that fact. The bring-your-own device plans are available, but still harder to find. (Though it sounds like they are being advertized more, a good thing.) The bring-your-own carriers have been around a while, but you have to know about them to find them - you can't just walk into a store and find their stuff. You basically have to buy their service from their website.

So the USA is phasing out an old business plan, and there's a lack of awareness of the alternatives. T-Mobile is betting they can grow by advancing the new business model, but is still hampered by it's position in the market: Cell phones require coverage, and they don't have the coverage of the bigger carriers, who are more tied to the older business model. But T-Mobile is making the public aware of the alternatives, which is driving a change in the market as a whole.

That wasn't even what they were talking about. The 'death panels' was a requirement that coverage included sitting down with your doctor, possibly a counselor, your family, etc. when you had a fatal (or likely fatal) condition to discuss end-of-life care options. So you could make an informed decision about what you wanted.

How that got warped into 'the government's going to kill you', I have no clue.

We're an oligarchy. Us poles voting doesn't matter anyway - if it's going to be symbolic, he might as well be symbolic for what he believes.

Possibly true - but not on this issue, which is a change in FCC rules, which is part of the Executive branch. Congress might dictate rules to the FCC, but it hasn't on this issue so the change in stance is something Obama can do something about on his own.

Probably: BSD license and guaranteed support for BSD unixes. The former occasionally matters to the people working on the BSDs, the latter definitely does. (And is notably lacking in many of the current desktop environments - even if they do work on BSDs, they are often missing features and poorly maintained, with no interest in providing better support.)

No, we weigh the cost of prosecuting a specific crime against the cost of not prosecuting it, and let some crimes slide.

So we spend a lot more time and effort prosecuting a murder than a jaywalker. Because it's worth more to stop the murderer.

(And when this gets out of whack, we have problems. Red light cameras, GPS devices on cars, and such are reducing the cost of prosecuting some crimes, and that is causing social problems as we start to prosecute crimes that we didn't before. A lot of the complaints about the TSA is that they don't care about the cost: They just purse to the hilt. And the NSA has the problem that they only count the direct monetary cost, not the social, diplomatic, or economic costs.)